Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. reports for The Washington Post that China’s “charm” tactics aren’t doing enough to outweigh their domestic realities:
I was asked to lecture at Beijing University on soft power, the ability to use attraction and persuasion to get what you want without force or payment. This was before the series of revolutions roiling the Middle East, in whose aftermath China is clamping down on the Internet and jailing human rights lawyers, once again torpedoing its soft-power campaign. The auditorium that day was packed, and I had been told that more than a thousand articles have been published in China on this topic. That may have something to do with the fact that in 2007, President Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power.
Over the past decade, China’s economic and military might have grown impressively. But that has frightened its neighbors into looking for allies to balance rising Chinese hard power. The key is that if a country can also increase its power of attraction, its neighbors feel less need to balance its power. Canada and Mexico, for example, do not seek alliances with China to balance American power the way Asian countries seek an American presence to balance China.
