Opinion | China’s soft-power play: what will it take to get it just right and hit the Goldilocks zone?
- Nicholas Ross Smith and Tracey Fallon say after years of trying to win friends and gain influence through its outreach programmes, Beijing has run into a wall
- The reason is twofold: China must improve its art of persuasion, and the West it seeks to impress must be willing to come to the party
Thus, like the bears’ porridge in the children’s story Goldilocks, China’s soft-power efforts have proven either too hot or too cold for some, whereas for others it is “just right”. Finding that “Goldilocks zone” of a “just right” soft-power strategy in the West is arguably one of China’s greatest foreign policy challenges for 2019 and beyond.
The essence of soft power is that one state can get another state to do what it wants through co-option, not coercion. And this is perhaps where China’s soft-power efforts have come unstuck so far in the West: far from relying on persuasion, China’s soft-power strategies have arguably been adopted with something of a hard-power logic, a phenomenon which Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig have termed “sharp power”.
