Soft Power In China

In the 21st century, a country’s success not only depends on the triumph of its army, but also measured by how attractive its story is (Nye, 2005). From this perspective, larger country may not necessarily generate more soft power if the country emphasizes on its hard power and doesn’t take advantage of its potential soft power resources to convince others in a soft way. As the largest country in the world in terms of different aspects, China and India are also similar in some aspects that they worth a comparison under the concept of soft power. Firstly, as two of the most ancient civilizations in human history, China and India possess diverse and rich traditional cultures that can be made good use of to enhance their soft power. Secondly, …show more content…
Different from using coercion (“stick”) and inducement (“carrot”) to get others to change their attitude, soft power gives a country the capacity to shape the preference of others without tangible threat or payoff (Nye, 2004). Nye (Ibid) basically categorized soft power into three components, culture which is attractive to others, political value which should be complied with at home and abroad and foreign policy which is the way to gain legitimacy and moral authority. Then the question is who/what is the best agency to project soft power (Heng, 2009)? Does the soft power projected by the people or the civil society better than that projected by government? These questions will be discussed in the next two sections. When applying soft power to other countries apart from US, Hymans (2009) pointed out that Nye too simply assumes that attractiveness produces soft power at the same time can also produce soft vulnerability which causes others to do reversely. While China has substantially rich cultural resources which can be seen as attractiveness, it may not necessarily produce the same amount of soft power to some extent due to the unbalance attractiveness between the affective soft power and normative soft power such as political institution and ideology. For India on the other hand, soft vulnerability (Ibid) is an especially common fate of key comparison with others where colonized India was no exception as its attractiveness tightened its bondage. As soft power is generated from values expressed in culture, internal practices and policies and the relation it handles with other countries (Nye, 2004), this paper will further discuss in these aspects to see how China and India in their respective political discourses can pursue what they want through their projection of soft