Okay, so China has billboards in Delhi inviting Indians to Macau, visa free. It has diplomats in Islamabad offering to pick up India?s slack on the gas pipeline from Iran. It has an Urdu radio channel reaching Srinagar that offers Chinese language lessons. It even has a filmmaker who won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain (2006), tender cinema that transcends gender identities in winning empathy for repressed emotions.
But, excuse the bluntness, can anyone in his right mind call China a charmer?
We?re talking about the People?s Republic of China, the country that flattened Tibetan aspirations, ejected its entrepreneurs, played the Himalayan bully, tormented its dissidents, brutalised students at Tianenmen Square, smashed a Statue of Liberty replica installed there, and, only last year, blasted a satellite to smithereens to show off its space-age firepower. In Charm Offensive, Joshua Kurlantzick, who works for The New Republic, recalls getting blank stares in DC when he mentioned this emerging power in the context of charm instead of harm. But China, he contends, has changed. It now sees strategic sense in being cuddly, and is in a hurry to generate soft power, even if it is not exactly what Harvard professor Joseph Nye implies by the term. While Nye?s ideal refers to an ?ability to shape the preferences of others? that excludes the use of angry glares and encoded threats, China appears to have blurred the line. ?For the Chinese,? writes Kurlantzick, ?soft power means anything outside the military realm, including not only pop culture and public diplomacy, but also more coercive economic and diplomatic levers like aid and investment and participation in multilateral organisations.? The creation, that is, of an elaborate incentive system to achieve a future scenario of its own preference.
China?s first act of Asian leverage, by this book, was its gallant resistance to a yuan devaluation in late 1997, a stance that helped its smaller neighbours recover from the Asian Crisis. It retains its currency peg, and the money at its command has grown enormously since. China has invested heavily in Africa, which also has more loans now from its state-owned Export-Import Bank than from the World Bank, even as it lays on the bucks to establish energy equations with Sudan, Venezuela, Iran and others sought to be isolated by the US. This is post-ideology China, only too keen to gain favour in a world alienated by post-9/11 America.
It?s not all opportunism, though, according to Kurlantzick. China has an advantage in the new global receptivity to its advice on state-calibrated market reforms, as opposed to the ?shock therapy? recommended by others.
China, in short, knows what it is doing. So, is the ?fragile superpower? epithet, as coined by former US deputy assistant secretary of state Susan Shirk, about to see a grand global inversion?
Relax. Nothing of the sort has a foreseeable probability that should jolt anyone. This book is not an exercise in alarmism. For one, as the author concedes, China hasn?t entirely given up Deng Xiaoping?s ?low profile? dictum. And while lessons from the ancient Chinese board game Go are certainly not lost on it (ask Lao officials), it cannot get very far on its own. For another, Kurlantzick does not fully accept the thesis that a country can be a charmer by virtue of either default or design sans a proposition of universal appeal. For all his thinly concealed anguish over America?s loss of brand appeal across the globe, he is convinced that it can snap back to form and recover its soft power.
The US has to start living up to its own stated ideals, believes the author. And to his credit, his favourite instance of American soft power is the 1950s? film Twelve Angry Men, which makes an edgy exposition of democracy as a discipline of debate, not numbers. Of wing-singing courage, not convenience. Of ?go figure? as a call to think, not enumerate.