Ties Dams, Xiaoxue Martin and Vera Kranenburg
An inherent conceptual difficulty in assessing China’s soft power relates to the Asian giant’s growing economic weight, a key feature of its international image. Three examples will help illustrate this methodological dilemma. From the Swedish perspective, the conceptual scope of ‘China’s soft power’ clearly excludes economic appeal, as the current state of Sino–Swedish relations points to growing economic interdependence, while China’s image is deteriorating dramatically. In Greece, China is systematically trying to bolster its economic presence through a culture-focused image-boosting strategy. Last but not least, in many countries young Europeans enrol at Confucius Institutes in the hope that, given China’s economic prowess, command of the Chinese language will improve their career prospects. Nye states that soft power is the ability to affect others to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction and persuasion, rather than coercion or payment, adding that the main sources of a country’s soft power are its culture, political values and foreign policies.8 On the extent to which the notion of soft power applies to the Chinese state, Nye argues that military power and economic prowess often have secondary soft-power effects and that this is important in applying the notion to the Chinese case.
Thus, Chinese investment in a European country may be accompanied by forceful image-boosting policies, or not. Hence, investment can provide an opportunity to increase China’s soft power, but an investment per se is not automatically a sign of soft power. The investment may reflect the ability to affect others to obtain the preferred outcomes through payment, and so in and of itself falls outside the definition of soft power, but a possible PR campaign accompanying that investment would be included, even if stricto sensu it cannot be divorced from the actual payment
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