China is using a new tool to boost its influence abroad. Is it the right one?
Dec 17th 2011 | Beijing, Guangrao and Huimin | from the print edition
Huimin county regards itself as the birthplace of Sun Tzu and thus the fountainhead of an ancient wisdom which, officials believe, can help persuade the world of China’s attractiveness. The damp display marks Sun Tzu’s supposed birthday. Organisers try to whip up enthusiasm with fireworks and a massive digital screen flashing images of the bearded sage and his one slim work, the “Art of War”, a 6,000-word booklet. Under an awning, journalists from the Communist Party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, feed live video of the event onto their website. The world gets to see it, even if most locals have stayed at home.
At a local hotel, a Sun Tzu symposium is held. Colonel Liu Chunzhi of China’s National Defence University (also a leader of the China Research Society of Sun Tzu’s Art of War) told this year’s gathering that Sun Tzu was part of “the riches of the people of the world”. Promotion of his work, he said, was “an important step toward the strengthening of China’s soft power”. Sun Tzu may have written about stratagems for warfare, but Huimin’s assembled scholars prefer to tout him as a peacenik. Their evidence is one of the sage’s best-known insights: “The skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting.” What better proof, say his fans in China, that the country has always loved peace?
Chinese leaders, determined to persuade America that they mean no harm, have recruited Sun Tzu to their cause. In 2006 President Hu Jintao gave President George Bush silk copies of the “Art of War” in English and Chinese (not, it seemed, as a way of suggesting better ways of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but of hinting that the wars need not have been fought in the first place). Jia Qinglin, the fourth-ranking member of the party’s supreme body, the Politburo Standing Committee, said in 2009 that Sun Tzu should be used to promote “lasting peace and common prosperity”. In July this year, Beijing’s Renmin University presented an “Art of War” to Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, during a visit to the capital.
China has long been proud of Sun Tzu. Mao Zedong was a great fan, even sending aides into enemy territory during the civil war to find a copy of the “Art of War”. But it is only relatively recently that the party has seized upon the notion of building up soft power, a term coined 20 years ago by an American, Joseph Nye of Harvard University, a former chairman of America’s National Intelligence Council and senior Pentagon official, to describe “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments”. President Hu’s use of it in 2007 signalled a shift in party thinking. Throughout the 1990s and into this century, China had been trumpeting Deng Xiaoping’s slogan of “economic construction as the core”. Over the past decade building soft power has emerged as a new party priority.
Mr Nye himself drew a link between soft power and Sun Tzu in a 2008 book, “The Powers to Lead”. Sun Tzu, he said, had concluded that “the highest excellence is never having to fight because the commencement of battle signifies a political failure”. To be a “smart” warrior, said Mr Nye, one had to understand “the soft power of attraction as well as the hard power of coercion”.
Mr Hu may have been slow to adopt Mr Nye’s term openly, but soon after he took office in 2002 he began trying to make China a more attractive brand. In June 2003 a small group of senior propaganda officials and foreign-policy experts met in Beijing for the first time to discuss the importance of soft power. Later that year officials began touting a new term, “peaceful rise”, to describe China’s development. Their message was that China would be an exception to the pattern of history whereby rising big powers conflict with established ones. Within months of the slogan’s launch, officials decided to amend it. Even the word “rise”, they worried, sounded too menacing. The term was changed to “peaceful development”. Mr Hu also adopted the word “harmonious”, sprinkling speeches with references to China’s pursuit of a “harmonious world” and a “harmonious society”.
From Little Red Books to little red boots This is not how the party sees it. After a meeting in October this year, the party’s Central Committee declared that the soft-power drive had made “conspicuous gains”. But it said further efforts were urgently needed. Many Chinese would agree. The word “harmonise” is now widely used ironically by ordinary Chinese to mean suppressing dissent. Abroad, officials have been trying to win over Western audiences by pouring billions of dollars into the creation of global media giants to rival the soft power of brands such as CNN and the New York Times. A provincial propaganda official complained in January that America, with only 5% of the world’s population, “controlled” about 75% of its television programmes. “Combined with the influence of brands and products such as Hollywood, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, jeans and Coca-Cola, American culture has permeated almost the entire world,” he wrote.
China is hamstrung by a contemporary culture that has little global appeal. Its music has few fans abroad; indeed, China’s own youth tend to prefer musicians from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and America. Its political ideology has few adherents: Mao Zedong and his little red book no longer enjoy the cachet they did in Western counterculture during the 1960s. The goosestep of the Sun Tzu soldiers in Huimin county notwithstanding, officials are now well aware that to market China abroad they must avoid references to authoritarianism. The party and its ideology were barely hinted at in the pageantry of the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Beijing in 2008. Since the present is a hard sell, China is having to lean heavily on the distant past.
The party has not bought into Mr Nye’s view that soft power springs largely from individuals, the private sector and civil society. So the government has taken the lead in promoting ancient cultural icons whom it thinks might have global appeal. Even here it has limited options. Buddhism, which is anyway a foreign import, has been cornered by the Dalai Lama. Both it and Taoism, a native religion, sit uncomfortably with an atheistic party doctrine. This leaves only a handful of figures to choose from.
At the forefront is Confucius. Few Westerners can quote a saying of Confucius. But most at least regard him as a bearded, wise dispenser of aphorisms, far more profound than America’s superficial consumerism. The party is promoting him as a kind of Father Christmas without the undignified jolliness; a sage whose role in the development of centuries of Chinese authoritarianism the party glosses over in favour of his philosophy’s pleasant-sounding mantras: benevolence, righteousness and (of importance to Mr Hu) harmony. So it was that China used Confucius’s name to brand the language-training institutes it began setting up abroad in 2004. There are now more than 300 Confucius Institutes worldwide, about a quarter of them in America.
But Confucius is problematic. Mao and his colleagues regarded Confucius’s philosophy as the ideological glue of the feudal system they destroyed; and so attempts to promote him are vulnerable to the growing split in the Communist Party. In January, with great fanfare, the National History Museum unveiled a bronze statue of him standing 9.5 metres (31 feet) high in front of its entrance by Tiananmen Square. Three months later the statue was quietly removed. The sage’s appearance so close to the most hallowed ground of Chinese communism had outraged hardliners. They saw it as an affront to Mao, whose giant portrait hung diagonally opposite.
Sun Tzu is not so tainted. His is the only big name among China’s ancient thinkers to have survived the communist era with barely a scratch. In the 1970s he was held up as an exemplar in Mao’s struggles against leaders he disliked. The study of Sun Tzu, said a typical tract published in 1975, offered useful guidance for “criticism of the rightist opportunist military line” and the “reactionary views of the Confucianists”. The party still keeps Confucius at the forefront of its soft-power drive, but Sun Tzu is making headway.
That’s partly because the West’s enthusiasm for Sun Tzu makes him an easy sell. The “Art of War” is widely used by after-dinner speakers short of ideas. Take, for example (from the 1910 translation by Lionel Giles, the first authoritative one in English): “The best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good”; “all warfare is based on deception”; and “it is the business of the general to be still and inscrutable, to be upright and impartial”. Sun Tzu beat the Christmas-cracker industry by two –and-a-half millennia.
The sage’s popularity in the West still owes more to Hollywood than China’s own efforts
Rather more seriously, in his recent book, “On China”, Henry Kissinger revealed how impressed he was by the ancient strategic wisdom Chinese officials seemed to draw upon when he visited the country in the 1970s as America’s national security adviser. Mao, he noted, “owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin” in his pursuit of foreign policy. To some historians Mao was a dangerously erratic despot. To Mr Kissinger, he was “enough of a Sun Tzu disciple to pursue seemingly contradictory strategies simultaneously”. Whereas Westerners prized heroism displayed when forces clashed, “the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection and the patient accumulation of relative advantage”, Mr Kissinger enthused in a chapter on “Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War”. Praise indeed, from the West’s pre-eminent practitioner of Realpolitik, whose mastery of the art of ideology-free diplomacy enabled President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.Yet a closer look reveals Sun Tzu’s flaws as a tool of soft power. Chinese attempts to remould him as a man of peace stumble over the fact that his book is a guide to winning wars, avidly studied by America’s armed forces as it was by Mao. Sam Crane of Williams College in Massachusetts says that during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq he delighted in telling students attending his Sun Tzu classes (some of whom were preparing to join the army) that the “Art of War” advised that prisoners be treated kindly. But, he says, “I think the thing that makes [the book] universal in a grim way is war and competition. War is not a Western construct: the Chinese have been really good at war for a long time.”
American strategists often read the “Art of War” to understand China not as an alluring and persuasive wielder of soft power, but as a potential enemy. A psychological operations officer in America’s Army Central Command, Major Richard Davenport, argued in the Armed Forces Journal in 2009 that China was making use of Sun Tzu’s advice to wage cyber warfare against America. The incriminating quotation was “Supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy”.
The sage’s popularity in the West still owes more to Hollywood, source of much American soft power, than China’s own efforts. John Minford, whose translation was published in 2002, says that after Gordon Gekko, a villainous corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the film “Wall Street”, quoted a line from Sun Tzu (“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought”), the book acquired a “mystique” among students of entrepreneurship.
Professor Minford says he is mystified by this. “I had to struggle with the book at the coal face, with the actual Chinese, and it’s a very peculiar and particularly unpleasant little book which is extremely disorganised, made up of a series of probably very corrupt bits of text, which is very repetitive and has extremely little to say.” He calls the work (whose authorship is even disputed) “basically a little fascist handbook on how to use plausible ideas in order to totally destroy your fellow man”.
Some Chinese say openly that using ancient culture to promote soft power is a bad idea. Pang Zhongying of Renmin University says it does not help the country boost its standing abroad. Instead, says Mr Pang, a former diplomat, it highlights what he calls “a poverty of thought” in China today. “There is no Chinese model, [so] people look back to Confucius and look back to Sun Tzu.” Mr Pang argues that democracy is the best source of soft power. President Hu gives short shrift to that notion.
As Mr Nye sees it, soft power stands a better chance of success when a country’s culture includes “universal values” and its policies “promoted interests that others share”. But China’s soft-power push has coincided with an increasingly strong rejection by Chinese leaders of the very notion of universal values. Among China’s leaders, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has come closest to supporting the universalists’ view, but his is a lone voice.
At least in Huimin, Mr Wen appears to enjoy some support. The title last year of the county’s annual Sun Tzu symposium was “Universal values in Sun Tzu’s Art of War and [the work’s] use in non-military realms”. But local officials are more preoccupied with revving up the economy of Huimin, whose dreary main street enjoys a burst of colour from the frontage of a 24-hour McDonald’s. Sun Tzu is seen as a potential new engine of growth; a draw for tourists to the agricultural backwater. In 2003, at a cost of 65m yuan ($7.9m), the county opened Sun Tzu Art of War City, a vast complex of mock-imperial buildings which hosted the rain-soaked birthday celebration. Huimin’s main urban district has been renamed Sun Wu (as Sun Tzu is also called).
But the vast empty car park outside the Art of War City and its near-deserted courtyards suggest the town is struggling. It is not being helped by fierce competition with another county 100km (60 miles) away, Guangrao, which in recent years has been laying a rival claim as Sun Tzu’s birthplace. In June the county, whose tyre, petrochemical and paper-making industries have made it much richer than Huimin, held a foundation-stone ceremony for its own Sun Tzu theme park. Chinese media say this is due to open in 2013 and will cost a prodigious 1.6 billion yuan ($250m).
But Guangrao too will have a hard time turning Sun Tzu into a soft-power icon. In April about 700km (430 miles) to the south, Disney broke ground in Shanghai at the site of an amusement park that it says will feature the world’s largest Disney castle. It is due to cost 24 billion yuan and open in five years. Xinhua, a government news agency, published a commentary on its website calling such theme parks “a big platform for soft-power competition between nations”. One widely reposted blog put it more bleakly. American soft power, it said, had “conquered 5,000 years of magnificent Chinese civilisation”.
Sun Tzu had an aphorism to suit China’s predicament: “Know the enemy, know yourself and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles”. If China wants to influence the world, it needs to think hard about the values it promotes at home.
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