Interesting article in the New York Times today about the Frankfurt Book Fair, where China was this year’s guest of honor. Apparently the Chinese delegation invested a lot of effort into its display at the fair, seeing this as a chance to celebrate its cultural achievements, and sent several senior officials to represent China at the fair, including Xi Jinping, the Vice President and heir apparent to Hu Jintao.
Conflicts arose when China tried to prevent the fair from allowing dissident writers to participate, and the organizers tried to balance the desires of the guest of honor with the need to respect freedom of speech. In the end, dissident writers were allowed to attend, but it seems the Chinese delegation wasn’t entirely happy that more wasn’t done to control who was there and to allow China to use the fair to project the image of itself it wanted to project, one free from controversial issues.
The Times puts the tensions that the book fair highlighted into the larger context of China’s efforts to build its “soft power”, essentially a huge PR campaign to control its image in the world and increase its cultural and diplomatic power.
Since 2004, China has pursued what it calls its “going out” policy on the cultural front, trying to square its economic influence and new status as a global power, while trying to defuse criticism on issues like Tib-t, Taiw-n and hum-n r-ghts.
There have been yearlong cultural exchanges with many countries; the opening of hundreds of language teaching centers known as Confucius Institutes; new foreign-language services from official media like Xinhua and CCTV; and new interest in foreign platforms like the Kennedy Center and the Europalia festival in Brussels.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article on reform of the country’s media and entertainment industry. The government plans to invest billions and to loosen controls of some of these industries in the hopes of building media empires that will rival the News Corporation and Time Warner.
“There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China,” says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.
Beijing hopes the moves will even improve the nation’s image overseas — part of a longstanding effort to use “soft power,” rather than military might to win friends abroad.
The use of soft power as an alternative (or as a complement) to hard power doesn’t necessarily have to be bad — a media empire seems less scary than an invading army, even though maybe it’s more subversive and something we should in reality be more wary of. Either way, the policies seem very smart. Something interesting to watch in the future.