Event Summary
One aspect of the rise of China has been an increase in its soft power in regional and global affairs, which is increasingly observed and debated. China’s soft power refers to its global “influence and attractiveness,” in the words of Joseph Nye, derived from the country’s culture, development models, ideals, and foreign policy. In this CNAPS presentation, Dr. Pang discussed China’s soft power from a Chinese perspective: he examined issues including China’s soft resources and their possible conversion into power; the role of China’s development model in building the nation’s appeal to others; China’s approaches to wielding its soft power; and the challenges and dilemmas created by building this soft power. Dr. Pang also discussed the soft power dimension of China-U.S. relations, and the implications of China’s soft power for cooperation and competition between China and the United States.
Event Information
When
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
Where
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
Contact: Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies
E-mail: cnaps@brookings.edu
Phone: 202.797.6055
Dr. Pang Zhongying is Professor of International Relations at the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations from Peking University and his B.A. from Nankai University in Tianjin. He also studied at the University of Warwick in the U.K. His previous positions include Professor and Director at the Institute of Global Studies at Nankai University, Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University's Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, Senior Fellow at the China Institute of International Studies and Analyst at the Chinese Embassy in Indonesia. He has published extensively on world affairs in leading journals and newspapers, and has appeared on radio and television shows. He is a contributing editor with The National Interest in Washington, DC, and serves on the international editorial board of the journal Globalizations, published by Routledge in London.
Transcript
Pang Zhongying: So this is a very rough presentation about China's soft power. As Richard said, I will try to do my best to describe a Chinese perspective because this is not only an external discourse in the U.S. or in other places in Asia or in Europe, but also an internal discourse, and many scholars in China including the top leaders are now talking about China's soft power and the importance of soft power to China's foreign policy.
So the first question is about the definition. This is a policy-oriented think tank, so the first challenge is the definition. I have no definition in this presentation, but I will say something about soft power. This is a difficult definitional problem, and in American social science, international relations is really American social science. Professor Joseph Nye coined this concept of hard and soft power. Soft power is the power to attract, and if it works, soft power rests primarily on three resources. First is the culture, the second is political values, the third is foreign policy. So I will use this concept made by Professor Nye to describe China's soft power.
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