Identity and Security in China: The Negative Soft Power of the China Dream
| Author | William A. Callahan |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9256.12088 |
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Identity and Security in China: The Negative
Soft Power of the China Dream
William A. Callahan
London School of Economics and Political Science
Joseph Nye concentrates on the positive attractive aspects of soft power as a foreign policy tool. This article will
argue that the Chinese discussion of soft power is interesting because it does the opposite: soft power is negative
rather than positive, and is employed as a tool in domestic policy more than in foreign affairs. It will use Chinese
President Xi Jinping’s new ‘China Dream’ discourse to explore China’s ‘negative soft power’ strategy. Rather
than take for granted that we understand what the ‘Chinese values’ are that inform the PRC’s soft power, it
argues that soft power discourse is a useful heuristic device for understanding how Chinese policy makers and
public intellectuals are actively constructing a ‘China’ and a ‘world’ to promote regime legitimacy. The Chinese
case thus suggests that we need a more complex view of power that considers the contingent dynamics of its
hard/soft, positive/negative, foreign/domestic aspects.
Keywords: identity; soft power; China; civilisation; barbarism
Introduction
It has been twenty-five years since Joseph Nye introduced the concept of ‘soft power’.
The shift from thinking of international politics in terms of the security studies calculus
of ‘bombs and bullets’ and institutional liberalism’s networks of economic cooperation
was path-breaking. Soft power’s new attention to issues of culture, values and norms
anticipated what came to be called the ‘cultural turn’ in IR (see Lapid and Kratochwil,
1997).
Even so, discussions of the soft power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), like those of
American soft power, generally treat it as an empirical question: rather than counting bombs
and bullets, analysts measure the expansion of China’s global media platforms, the growing
number of Confucius Institutes and the growth of other soft power ‘resources’. Scholars thus
generally treat culture and power as measurable entities, with many in the PRC lamenting
that China ‘punches below its weight’ in terms of the international influence expected of a
great power.
This article, along with others in this special issue on ‘Soft Power in Hard States’, questions the
empiricist/positivist framing of the analysis of soft power. Rather, it locates ‘soft power
discourse’ in a normative dynamic (Callahan and Barabantseva, 2011). Instead of accepting
that soft power is a material entity that can be measured, it argues that soft power, like
identity and security more generally (Campbell, 1998; Walker, 1993), is a social construction.
Hence it shifts from an empiricist explanation that relies on a truthful representation of the
facts, to a hermeneutic understanding that relies on persuasive interpretation (Bryman, 2012,
pp. 26–32; Shapiro, 2013, pp. 29–30): rather than calculate ‘how much’, it asks ‘what does
soft power mean?’ and ‘does it mean something different in an authoritarian state?’.
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POLITICS: 2015 VOL 35(3-4), 216–229
doi: 10.1111/1467-9256.12088
© 2015 The Author.Politics © 2015 Political Studies Association
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