Russia and China Can’t Get Anyone to Like Them

Christopher Walker

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China, Russia, and other countries ruled by repressive regimes have dramatically scaled up their investment in instruments commonly associated with soft power. Despite the vast resources these authoritarian trendsetters have poured into media, education, technology, and entertainment, public opinion surveys suggest that they are largely failing to generate soft power: the ability to get people to view a country positively and obtain preferred outcomes by attraction rather than coercion. Scholarly research and journalistic investigation is struggling to explain this disconnect.

Recently released survey data from the Pew Research Center illustrates the conundrum. As the leadership in Beijing rolls out the red carpet in advance of the 20th Party Congress, it shows in China’s case that negative views predominate, some at “historic highs,” across a diverse set of foreign publics assessed. Among citizens of Sweden and Canada, 83 percent and 74 percent, respectively, view China unfavorably, as do 86 percent of Australians and 80 percent of South Koreans. Analyst Joshua Kurlantzick has recently spotlighted the broader trend: “In the past four years, China’s global image … has deteriorated extensively … and has occurred not only among leading democracies such as the United States and Japan, with whom China already had prickly relations, but also among developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.”

The seeming contradiction between authoritarians’ growing investment in international influence and persistently negative views of these powers abroad is evident in recent research, like the European Think Tank Network on China’s 2021 report “China’s Soft Power in Europe: Falling on Hard Times.” The report examined 17 countries in which China’s soft power was largely assessed to be failing, with title after title repeating the same theme: “China’s Soft Power in the Czech Republic: Almost a Fiasco,” “China’s Dwindling Soft Power in Sweden,” “Limited Appeal: China’s Soft Power in the United Kingdom,” and so on.