Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Understanding 'soft power'

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China's 'soft power' would have been a lot less appealing without its GDP growth.

PV Narasimha Rao used to point out during his south-east Asian travels that he bore the name of Vishnu's fourth incarnation and that simha meant lion. It may have impressed Singapore's mainly Chinese audience but irritated Thai listeners whose reaction was, to use a crude colloquialism, that he was teaching his grandmother how to suck an egg.

Yet, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who captured the imagination of idealists with his concept of a new kind of power projection, would surely have hailed the connection Narasimha Rao cited as ideal material for the "soft power" that is regarded as the ultimate in diplomacy. Nye defined "soft power" as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. When you can get others to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Hard power, the ability to coerce, grows out of a country's military and economic might. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals and policies."

Why, then, were the Thais who revere our gods, honour our traditions and even call their monarch King Rama IX, so unresponsive? I cannot but think they would have reacted differently if, like most of south-east Asia, they had not seen India, as Indira Gandhi said in a speech in Vienna in 1971, as a very large but poor nation whose population lived in abject poverty and whose leaders were idealists with a philosophy that bore little relevance to current realities.

That indifference to India's legacy in the Indianised states of south-east Asia (citing the French historian George Coedes) must be contrasted with China's "charm offensive" in wooing and winning the region. Its African initiatives have been reported because they are new. But China's peaceful inroads in south-east Asia have continued and expanded ever since Deng Xiaoping stopped exporting revolution. Major public buildings in Timor Leste, roads in Myanmar, more aid than Japan or the United States gives to the Philippines and Cambodia, language schools in Cambodia, a form of peace corps, scholarships, cultural programmes, trade, a Free Trade Agreement with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a whole and the prospect of a free trade area in another three years time mark China's "soft power" and "charm offensive".

I use quotation marks for both phrases because they are contradictions in terms. Power is never soft, and an offensive cannot ooze charm. "Soft power" is as persuasive globally as the velvet glove that covers the mailed fist; a "charm offensive" is charming only as the advance guard of waiting divisions. The mailed fist need never swing into action; the waiting divisions may wait forever. But that they are there makes all the difference.

That is putting it at its crudest. The United States undoubtedly exerts the greatest "soft power" on earth in terms of Nye's definition because it does not have to spend anything on sticks and carrots in attracting people to its culture. If anything, it has to spend on pushing people away. That is because the American Dream is also the world's most coveted lifestyle. The Chinese would probably call this "soft power" since, according to the journalist Joshua Kurlantzick, the category includes "all power outside of the military sphere, including diplomacy, aid, investment, and economic tools."

But the multi-billion dollar industry that is American culture does not flourish in isolation from the military-industrial complex that is the basis of American power. The American Dream is so alluring precisely because it holds out the promise of a share, howsoever tiny, of the superpower's idyll.

China's "soft power" would have been a lot less appealing if China's industrial output had not gone up by 18 per cent this month, accounting for $80 billion in industrial exports. The other instance of China's very conventional attitude to power is provided by the "creeping assertiveness" that first drove the Vietnamese out of the Paracel Islands. It then did some surreptitious building on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands at the expense of the Filipino claimant, and resulted in Vietnamese fishermen being killed or wounded by Chinese gunboats in the South China Sea in April and July.

This 3.5 million square km expanse of water could be the scene of serious contention in the future. In June Britain's BP stopped seismic surveying some 370 km from Vietnam's coastline because of China's jurisdictional claim. China's "charm offensive" was to announce that it would explore the riches of the South China Sea not only for itself but for the benefit of all 10 ASEAN nations. But the hard line is that China refuses to sign a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea, and is in no way bound by ASEAN's 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea calling for freedom of navigation and overflight, committing members to the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes and to exercising restraint in activities like occupying uninhabited islands that can spark conflict.

The power that underlies China's offensive is neither "soft" nor "charming".

sunanda.dattaray@gmail.com