What is China’s soft power strategy and should we be wary of Chinese apps? These are a few of the questions answered as we discuss the future of China’s international influence and global standing.
China’s economic and military rise are well documented, but their ‘soft power’ strategy, which involves boosting their image as one of the good guys in the global mind, is more complicated. As China emerges from the pandemic relatively well, can they maintain their ‘peaceful rise’ narrative, particularly while the western world, including Australia, casts a skeptical eye on Chinese platforms such as TikTok and WeChat?
In this episode, Tom is joined by Professor Michael Keane to discuss the future of China’s international influence and global standing.
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You can read the full transcript for the episode here https://thefutureof.simplecast.com/episodes/chinas-soft-power-strategy/transcript.
Intro:
This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
Tom Robinson:
Hello again, I'm Tom Robinson. In recent years, China has flexed its economic, military and technological muscles. And now as it emerges from the pandemic in fairly good shape, many are tipping the world's most populous country to become its most powerful. But, as you might well know, economic and military coercion don't always win you many friends. That's where soft power comes in, the ability to attract allies through positive cultural exchange. But, is China making any meaningful inroads in this space?
Tom Robinson:
To discuss this with me today is Professor Michael Keane from Curtin University's Faculty of Humanities. Thanks for coming in today, Michael.
Professor Michael Keane:
No problems. Hi, Tom. How are you?
Tom Robinson:
Good. Very good. So what is soft power exactly? And how important is soft power to China right now?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, soft power is a pretty contentious idea. It's pretty murky. It's become even more murky. It was coined by Joseph Nye in 1989. And it's become used quite a lot. And China has picked it up probably since the early 2000s. But soft power, because it was coined and defined by an American professor of international relations, it's an international relations concept, it refers to the attractiveness of a culture or of a country and its culture, its foreign policy and its values.
Professor Michael Keane:
And over time, it's become more mainstream. Now when you say the term soft power, some people recognize what it is. Others say, "Well, what is soft power?" But you can think of it easily as being the difference between hard power. There's even other variations called sharp power, smart power as well. But China has started to engage with this concept just after the turn of the century, when they realized that they wanted to go global, and going global meant their image.
Professor Michael Keane:
They came up with this idea in the last few years, at least of 'telling our stories well', and the president Xi Jinping has often referred to, we must tell our stories well, so we must change the narrative, the narrative of China as being this kind of country in the global mind. We have to change that. And so that's what soft power has come down to, I think.
Tom Robinson:
What is the narrative China wants to tell? How do they want to be seen around the world?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, China is a rising power, but they don't want to put too much emphasis on the rising and the power. So they had this term called peaceful rise that they used in the early 2000s. And the idea that they want to put forward is something called a community of shared destiny or the community of shared future, which is an idea that comes from a think tank in Beijing, that they are expanding globally, and they're building, helping third world countries and they're genuinely good guys. They're not going to be aggressive, like the Western powers have been in the past. So it's a different kind of narrative. And they're appealing very much to the Asian nations, and a lot of my research is in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It's interesting to see how these ideas have been taken up. My research is more focused on the cultural consumption of these ideas and Chinese products in these countries.
Tom Robinson:
Before we get into that, when we say, and when I say China, are we talking about the everyday Chinese people, or are we talking about the regime, the government?
Professor Michael Keane:
Depends what context you use it in, same as when you say Chinese culture, what do you mean? In the press, people often use the word China. And in international relations speak, they use the word Beijing. So Beijing is a shorthand for Chinese government. But generally when we speak about China, there are many Chinas. There are very many Chinas. There's the China in North China, a clutch to the border of Russia. There's the China in South China next to Hong Kong. There is Hong Kong, which is Chinese. There's Taiwan, which is Chinese. There's the overseas Chinese. There are different dialects everywhere. There are different ways of doing things. There's far out West, you've got Xinjiang Province. You've got Tibet. These are all parts of China, and they are Chinese minorities.
Professor Michael Keane:
But overwhelmingly, the dominant minority, which about 90%, is the Han minority. So it's got a quite different society from a multicultural society like Australia, which has got over 200 nationalities. China has got 56, but they're predominantly Han Chinese.
Tom Robinson:
When we're talking about narratives and China telling its story overseas, what role do apps like WeChat and TikTok play in this?
Professor Michael Keane:
I wouldn't put them in the same ballpark. WeChat's been around since 2011. And there are two versions of WeChat. One's called Wei Xin, which is the Chinese version, which you subscribe to in China with a Chinese phone number. There's the international version, which you use international phone number. And they're different platforms or the same platform, but different users. So what you do on a Chinese Wei Xin can be seen by the government very closely. What you do on the international WeChat does not necessarily be seen or picked up or censored in the same way.
Professor Michael Keane:
TikTok, on the other hand, is owned by a company called ByteDance. They've become a big company very fast. And they've got a Chinese version... Well, Chinese version came first, it's called Douyin. And people in China know it as Douyin. The people internationally know it as TikTok. The people internationally don't recognize it as a Chinese company. It's just a fun app.
Professor Michael Keane:
So it's not seen globally as tainted by association with the Chinese government, like Huawei is internationally. Not everyone associates Huawei with the Chinese government, but increasingly that's the case. WeChat can be associated with the Chinese government as the China threat discourse increases. But I see them as two different kind of apps.
Tom Robinson:
In terms of Beijing telling its story and its narrative overseas, what role do apps like WeChat play in that?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, that's an interesting question. TikTok does not, it's not intended to tell the Chinese story as well. It's a commercial, has a commercial business. They don't really want to get too involved in it, but the Chinese government has found a way to get political messages on TikTok to put the content on there. The same as they've done with Twitter and Facebook. They actually get their messages on there and send them globally.
Professor Michael Keane:
WeChat is quite different. The thing about WeChat, which makes it interesting is that WeChat predominantly serves the Chinese populations, the diaspora. It serves people in the business community. There's a lot of people who do business with China, and you would not use WeChat generally speaking, unless you're doing business with China, you've got a Chinese partner, you've got Chinese friends or you're working in a university and you go to China a lot, you would not see a need to use WeChat.
Professor Michael Keane:
Once you use WeChat, you see how good it is. It's a great app. But the people in our studies, the people in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan are reluctant to use WeChat. They will use WhatsApp. They will use YouTube. They will use Facebook because they associate these with the free world. They will use WeChat because they've got friends in mainland China, and it does carry a lot of Chinese, really interesting Chinese content on it. So they'll probably use it. But when you talk to them, they'll probably say, "No, I don't use WeChat. I use WhatsApp."
Tom Robinson:
Is that reluctance to use it because of a perception that it's not safe to use?
Professor Michael Keane:
Yeah, it is now. It is now in Hong Kong and increasingly in Taiwan. Whether that's paranoia or whether it's true, I probably think it's probably, there is some truth. If you're in Hong Kong, you're increasingly being watched, and if you're in Taiwan also, if you're posting messages that are anti-Chinese. Although a lot of people say they post things on WeChat, and they don't get taken down. But what happens normally on WeChat and Wei Xin, the Chinese version, is that the content is algorithmically moderated. And also messages can get taken down before publication and after publication. So a lot of messages get taken down, they disappear and the government once... says that's national security.
Professor Michael Keane:
So people, as messages start getting taken down, people start getting reluctant. Why was that message taken down? And who's watching me? And so the reluctance has been to not use these actual apps by many people in Hong Kong, Taiwan.
Professor Michael Keane:
In Australia, I don't think the people have become that paranoid as yet, but the China threat discourse has been ramping up, and we'll wait and see.
Tom Robinson:
You just mentioned earlier TikTok as well, and that it's a commercial enterprise. It doesn't want to be associated with any government. The discourse around TikTok, there's an increasing discourse around TikTok potentially being part of the China threat. It's being associated with these things. Just recently, TikTok felt the need to come out and tell Australian MPs that it isn't aligned with the Chinese government. Who's right in this situation? Are we right to be suspicious of these platforms? Or is it just part of a perceived threat that may not be true?
Professor Michael Keane:
I think we're right to be suspicious of any platform at the moment. You know, people are rightly suspicious of Facebook, and that the Facebook has gone to great, taken great strides to try and sort of alleviate these concerns. The Chinese platforms globally are not as restricted as even Facebook or YouTube in terms of what's on it and what's censored.
Professor Michael Keane:
Globally, they actually can roam around free. They can roam a lot more free than they are in China. They can put stuff on there that is problematic. And they do it because it's commercial, like clickbait. They do it more so than the Western platforms do. But they're also under scrutiny. They're under scrutiny, particularly from China. The Chinese government wants these platforms to be successful. They want all their platforms... And there are three main platforms to date. There are more than three, but the three main ones, they're called the BAT, which is Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
Professor Michael Keane:
And these, since 2010, these have really taken off and had international ambitions and aspirations. Alibaba's well known because it's an eCommerce company and it reaches right into Southeast Asia. It doesn't do so well in Australia, but Tencent, through, WeChat, and they've also gone into the movie business, these companies. Alibaba owns Youku, which is a video platform as well, which is very popular.
Professor Michael Keane:
So put it this way, one of the interesting things that I think relates to what we're talking about is who are these platforms reaching and what content is on them. By and large, they're reaching out to people who are Chinese, who are interested in a connection with the mainland.
Professor Michael Keane:
And these Chinese people, be they in Australia or somewhere else, they have no need to actually watch channel Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC, SBS now. They don't. A lot of them don't. They're getting all their news, all their content, all their entertainment via Chinese TV channels, via the internet, via WeChat, through stuff that is curated. The Chinese platforms, not websites in Australia, like China Today, Sydney Today, Melbourne Today, these websites can all moderate content that comes from the Australian press and push it out through WeChat.
Professor Michael Keane:
So if you are a Chinese person living in Australia, you don't even have to look at the news. You're living in a Chinese bubble. Now, this applies to a lot of migrant communities these days, but it's fairly significant for China. You're hearing stories and you're reading stories that are shared by friends who are in China, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, and you're not even bothering to put on your TV.
Tom Robinson:
Are there consequences or ramifications for Chinese Australians with that living in a Chinese bubble? What is the result of it, I suppose?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, that's an interesting question. The Chinese bubble, what is said on WeChat and what is said on Chinese internet platforms is not contentious, because the owners of these hub platform, owners of these websites, these newspapers, these press that are going online don't want to upset each other. Because you've got Taiwanese China, Hong Kong as Chinese, people that have left China through persecution and you've got patriotic Chinese people, they are putting out stuff on these platforms that's purely business, purely information about Australia. They very rarely get engaged in political discussion on these platforms.
Professor Michael Keane:
So from that perspective, the threat issue that's coming through Chinese platforms are not as acute as it's made out to be by some of the vocal critics like Clive Hamilton, a person that wrote a book called Silent Invasion, and has come out with a new book called Hidden Hand. And Clive Hamilton's not a China expert, let's make that quite clear, so he doesn't really understand. He doesn't have that background in Chinese culture, which is an understanding of the history of the culture, of the language. That's very important if you're really going to understand these things.
Tom Robinson:
So books like The Invisible Hand, books like Silent Invasion, often speak about an invasion of Chinese ideas and this China threat. So is there no China threat through these apps that we've been talking about?
Professor Michael Keane:
It's a hard question to answer. No one knows. No one knows if there's... To say there is a threat through an app might be the wrong kind of question to ask or answer. Information is transmitted through communication platforms, through channels. And the apps do speak to patriotic people in Australia and reactivate their sense of loyalty to the mainland. I've seen this happen. I've seen people in Australia who have been here for a while, and they're Australian Chinese or Chinese Australians. And they've been put off or their mind's been changed about the rising China and the negative attitude in Australian media towards China. And this connection has been made through Chinese online media and Chinese news, through Chinese entertainment content that is now enriched. It's now interesting. And they are seeing a rising China. They are listening to the narrative of China, and they are becoming disenfranchised with the Australian way of representing China in the media, and this happens.
Professor Michael Keane:
So you may call that a threat. You may call that a peaceful evolution or whatever you want to call it, but it's happening. So there is something there.
Tom Robinson:
I suppose, that kind of sounds like a tool for propaganda, but as you say, we are right to be suspicious of all platforms, including Western platforms like Twitter and Facebook, for example. We see Chinese platforms trying to expand globally. Are there global or Western platforms trying to expand into China and exert some influence in reverse?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, Western platforms have tried for a long time to get in there. I mean, the most notable one was Google and Facebook. Zuckerberg tried to make friends with the Chinese government and even started learning Mandarin to try and graciate himself. It didn't seem to work.
Professor Michael Keane:
Google set up Google China. And they tried, but they had a slogan called don't be evil. The idea was that they would not censor, but they were forced to actually do some sort of self-censorship, and then they pulled out of China. They tried to find a way to get around this. And all the Western companies have an interest in China. It's purely commercial. It is the biggest market. They would like to be there. But if you go to China, as I do quite often, and you want to use the internet, you'll need a good VPN, or you need a good service provider that can allow you to jump the wall. Because if you're trying to use the Chinese service, you'd get redirected.
Professor Michael Keane:
So the other thing that is important to bring up there is that these platforms, these services are banned in China, but people get around it. Even Chinese people get on Facebook. Even Chinese people use YouTube. The other thing is that the Chinese government does the opposite. It takes advantage of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter to send us messages out. And they're not censored globally because we don't censor. We live in a liberal world, by liberal values. So they are sending out propaganda messages out on Twitter all the time, on YouTube.
Professor Michael Keane:
And people in the Chinese diaspora, for instance, another way of getting that content, but don't have to actually pay for content. They can go to YouTube. YouTube is just full of Chinese content for free in Chinese, without subtitles, or it may have Mandarin subtitles, but it's just loaded up there until it's taken down.
Professor Michael Keane:
So you're a Chinese person. You don't even have to pay for pay TV. You don't have to have a subscription service. You can just watch and watch and watch, and it can keep coming to you algorithmically, and you get your diet of Chinese content, which enables you to maintain your sense of identity in a foreign land.
Tom Robinson:
I think it's important to note as well, I don't know if this is so much a question, but as a thought on my behalf, that as much as, yes, the Chinese government might utilise these platforms to put out their narrative and their propaganda, it's not like our governments in the Western world don't have their own propaganda and don't... I think the way you put it was quite succinct. You need to be suspicious or wary or aware of what all platforms are trying to do, not just some platforms because they're from a certain part of the world.
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, difference there is quite interesting. I mean, there is propaganda that comes from the Australian government. It depends on which media you consume. If you consume The Australian, you get Murdoch's view of the world. If you consume Fairfax, you get a different view of the world. The great thing about it is you get different views of the world. If you subscribe to the China Daily or the People Daily, you get one view of the world. You'll get one view.
Professor Michael Keane:
The good thing that I tell my Chinese friends when they complain about Australian media is there's plenty of different opinions here. You may think it's dominated. You may take offense to some of the criticisms of China, but there are other views. It's a pluralistic society we live in.
Tom Robinson:
Something that I just picked up on that you said earlier, that I want to go back to is, was it Clive Hamilton that wrote those books, Silent Invasion and... What was the other one? Sorry.
Professor Michael Keane:
Hidden Hand.
Tom Robinson:
Hidden Hand. He is not the China expert, doesn't have an understanding of China's culture, Chinese cultural practices. And you said that those were very important when you start to write about and study what we've been talking about today, I'm just... I thought, what did you mean by that? Could you go a bit deeper on that?
Professor Michael Keane:
Well, this is the view. This is not my view. This is the view of anybody that's spent time in China, that's studied Chinese, has done Chinese studies and they often see people come along who kind of, Johnny-come-latelys, I suppose. They think that they understand China, where it takes a long time to really understand... When I say understanding China, you can get a superficial perspective on China. You can talk to a few people in a think tank and get a view. Your view might be like Clive Hamilton, which is purely IR.
Professor Michael Keane:
But to understand the depth of Chinese culture, the classical Chinese literature, the stories, the meanings of Chinese culture, even the religions, the variations in Chinese culture, the language, which is very complex, this is what we call Sinology. And there are many people that do Sinology, and the people who do Sinology understand China, sometimes take a little bit of offense in people who come along and think they understand China in six months.
Professor Michael Keane:
To understand China, the only real way to do it is to live there for a period of time. And I lived there for a year. I'm married with Chinese person and I'm constantly learning about Chinese culture. The important point I want to add there is that it doesn't matter what culture you come from, your cultural DNA goes back to somewhere. If you are a Westerner, your cultural DNA goes back to the ancient Greeks, in some way, the idea of the individual. You may not think it walking down the street that you're thinking about the ancient Greeks, no. If you're a Chinese person, it goes back to Confucius, in some way. But a Chinese person may not even think of Confucius or know what Confucius did, but the idea of harmony is deeply embedded.
Professor Michael Keane:
So when it comes down to what kind of society we have, the Western view of the world's based on this idea of freedom. The government uses the word freedom a lot. Advertising uses freedom. Wherever you go, there's this idea of the freedom. So freedom allows people to do what they want in a Western liberal society and regulate themselves according to the idea of freedom, a pluralistic society.
Professor Michael Keane:
In a Chinese society, the word order is very important. So people regulate themselves under the idea of order. We must live in an ordered, harmonious society. And this goes back to the traditional Confucian ideas.
Tom Robinson:
Could you tell me about the research you've been doing on Australians' understanding of Chinese culture?
Professor Michael Keane:
Just completed a three year research project, which is looking at the impact of China's digital platforms in the Asia Pacific. So we've looked at several places. One of the places is Australia and New Zealand. We looked at Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong as well. But what we did in Australia, we did some focus groups and we asked people... We put up images of Chinese CEOs, entrepreneurs, images of Chinese popular culture and we found that Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic people had virtually no understanding and didn't know who they were.
Professor Michael Keane:
The only one that really, really clicked was Jack Ma, who's the boss of Alibaba or who was the boss of Alibaba. And the people had a vague association of who he was. But generally speaking, in the groups, very few people, when you said, "What do you think of Chinese culture?" They would think of a copy culture or sweatshops or something like... or Xinjiang. They would come up with a negative image. And you put up some of the blockbuster Chinese popular culture things and they wouldn't know what it was.
Professor Michael Keane:
Whereas in the groups where there was a person from Bhutan or a person from somewhere else, like Indonesia, they would recognize, because the culture has sort of... they see a Chinese culture more readily than we would in Australia.
Professor Michael Keane:
The difficulty in Australia is the people don't feel a need to consume anything else apart from Western culture. The younger generation, they've got plenty of it. So why would you consume something that's difficult? So your understanding of a Chinese movie industry or Chinese movies might just be as simple as Kung Fu, Jackie Chan. So Jackie Chan came up quite a lot, but Jackie Chan's not PRC. He's Hong Kong. He's very Western. So it's that.
Professor Michael Keane:
And there are stereotypes like pandas and Tai Chi and all that kind of stuff as well. But no real deep... If you go to China and you go to, for example, to Shenzhen, which is Southern China, you'd be totally blown away if you thought China was about pandas and tea and Tai Chi. It is the most fast-paced modern city. It's the technological frontier of innovation. 30 years ago, it didn't exist. It's just grown from the ground up. It's the home base of Huawei. It's the home base of Tencent, ZTE, all these big companies. People there are buying things on apps. They've got artificial theme parks there. They've got virtual reality. They've got artificial intelligence. It is just that, it's a takeoff. It's it is the new Silicon Valley.
Tom Robinson:
Is that understanding of China or that misunderstanding of China from Australians, is that because the cultural base is so different compared to Indonesia and Bhutan and these kind of countries, or is there another factor at play as to why places like Bhutan and Indonesia can plug into Chinese culture maybe easier?
Professor Michael Keane:
There is something in the narrative style of Chinese storytelling that appeals to people in Asia. It's heavy on melodrama. So Chinese movies, TV series, not just Chinese TV series, but Korean. The Korean wave has washed over these countries. And before the Korean wave, you had the Hong Kong content, the Hong Kong film industry. So they were already acclimatised or used to Asian content, because it tapped into their structures of feeling, how they thought, and the narrative structures.
Professor Michael Keane:
By the same token, people in these countries understand Hollywood. They've got a choice, Hollywood or the East. They can have the best of both worlds. But here, we're probably more Hollywood. It's a one-way street here. Because to try and decode a Chinese story, say for example, by a Chinese director, like Feng Xiaogang, which is a top director over there, his stories are very, very China-focused. They use a lot of idioms that are known to Chinese and have a lot of allusion to them, to history. Even Zhang Yimou. Zhang Yimou's another director that's very famous. He has allusions. And his style is very, almost oriental in many ways.
Professor Michael Keane:
And so much of the stuff in China is based on history. Now, the question there is why are we getting so much history? We're getting history pumped at you in China, because the government's got to remind people about the revolution, got to remind people of a glorious revolution, because that's the key to their legitimacy. There are very few people alive from that generation that went through the revolution. They've got to keep pumping out historical TV dramas, and stories about the great revolution and the heroes to keep the new generation. That's their legitimacy along with their performance.
Professor Michael Keane:
Their performance is the second leg of their legitimacy. As long as the Chinese economy keeps going strong, the Chinese government will last. When the economy falls over, the Chinese government could be in trouble.
Tom Robinson:
In Australia, we've seen, you mentioned Korea, for example. And in Australia, we have seen not huge explosions, but almost flare ups of things like K-pop, Korean music. Gangnam Style was a huge hit all over the world a number of years ago. Could something similar happen with Chinese popular culture, movies, and music, and these kind of things? In Australia, could we see a similar wave of interest?
Professor Michael Keane:
I think it will happen, but we keep waiting and we keep waiting and it hasn't happened. I mean, Zhang Yimou made The Great Wall, which was a flop. The Flowers of War was a flop. The problem with Chinese culture, as it goes out to the world, has to go through the censors. So the Chinese government has a, what they think is approved, an approved version of what the world should know about China. And the filmmakers tend to self-censor. Whereas the South Korea doesn't have that problem or didn't have that problem with Gangnam Style. It was sardonic. It was satirical.
Professor Michael Keane:
There's plenty of that in China as well, plenty of satirical stuff on the internet, but it doesn't break through. It makes a lot of sense to the people in the Chinese diaspora. They can laugh on their WeChat, on their platforms about these satirical videos that are from China. But the translation problem is different because it's culturally... the cultural context is different. You've got to understand a little about the... a lot about Chinese society to decode them. Whereas, Gangnam Style was something that was fairly straightforward. It was fun, but that could happen with China and I'm waiting to see it happen. I don't think it's that far away. And when it does happen, it may open the door. As long as the government on the other hand, allows the door to remain open.
Tom Robinson:
That's all we have time for today. Thank you, Michael, for sharing your knowledge on this topic.
Professor Michael Keane:
Great. I really enjoyed it.
Tom Robinson:
You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about anything that we've raised today, you can get in touch by following the links in the show notes. Bye for now.