| bibo:abstract |
Ⅰ.Sociocultural Nature of Great-Power Geopolitical Competition
Ⅱ.Values Competition in U.S. Public Diplomacy: Liberal Universalism
Ⅲ.Values Competition in China’s Public Diplomacy: Illiberal Particularism
Ⅳ. Implications for Non-Great Power Countries
Ⅴ.South Korea’s Policy Considerations
""Great-power competition” is back in the lexicon of world politics. Sino-American rivalry is spilling over to the realm of values, taking the form of soft power competition. Public diplomacy, propped up with soft power resources, is increasingly employed as an instrumental toolkit for great powers’ geopolitical contention. The ongoing surge of great-power public diplomacy competition has been deepening global confrontation and conflicts, eroding chances for cooperation on imminent global issues.
In this era of great-power competition, what are, and should be, the roles of non-great power public diplomacy? Is it nothing but an instrument for advancing a country’s parochial national interests, thereby deteriorating global conflict and confrontation? Are there any ways for non-great power public diplomacy to undercut the deepening geopolitical conflict and confrontation? Raising these questions about the role of public diplomacy, this paper points to a sociocultural nature of today’s geopolitics. And against this backdrop, some notable characteristics of recent American and Chinese public diplomacy practices will be identified. Then, we draw comparative implications from their practices and discuss several issues for South Korea’s policy considerations.
Ⅰ.Sociocultural Nature of Great-Power Geopolitical Competition
There are three primary elements constituting the international order that prevails during a particular period of time: the distribution of material capabilities; the distribution of collective beliefs; and a set of observed rules and institutions that reflect not only dominant power(s)’s preferences and interests, but also the distribution of collective beliefs, values, and norms in particular. A set of rules and institutions could be in turn divided into two types. First is behavior rules that refer to those that govern external behavior and relations between units. They often pertain to issues such as the use of force; the legitimate means for system maintenance tasks such as peace-keeping missions; whether certain units are better positioned with special privileges than others; or whether inter-unit relations are characterized by ad hoc or institutionalized interactions. All orders must contain at least some observed rules of behavior. Another type is membership rules which define who or what is seen as an acceptable member of a system and refer to particular international attributes of units. Principles of membership have frequently encompassed issues such as the political structure of the regime; the stability and coercive power of the regime; the nature of domestic economic transactions; and the capacity or willingness of the regime to uphold basic human rights.
Today’s great-power competition demonstrates the existing international order is abruptly shifting in both material and ideational dimensions. Major powers are vying for influence over spaces and places, striving to lead in critical technological fields. The return of great-power competition nods to the reality that the U.S. is no longer as influential as it was at the end of the Cold War when its margin of hard power preeminence was much more significant than now. This clearly demonstrates that the distribution of power in favor of the U.S. is changing now chiefly due to the rise of the non-Western rest including China and India. The world is no longer as homogeneous as before when the Western powers have been dominating the international society. We are now living in an era of diversity and heterogeneity, power transition between major powers, and power diffusion from major powers to non-great powers, from state actors to non-state actors.
At the same time, the intensifying Sino-American rivalry in geographic and functional areas spills over to the realm of an ideational dimension of the international order in the form of values contention, namely, soft power competition. Joseph Nye, the original formulator of the notion of soft power, pinpoints culture, foreign policy, and political values as representative sources of soft power – particularly when a country’s culture is attractive, when a country’s foreign policy is recognized as legitimate in the international society, and when a country’s behavior coincides with the values it advocates. We are witnessing increasingly confrontational bifurcation, or blocization, of values between liberalism anchoring to the U.S. and Western Europe on the one hand, and anti-liberalism to China and Russia on the other. Values contention between great powers again attests to the fact that the current international order, particularly its non-material ideational dimension is in flux now.
Values contention, combined with the changing distribution of material capabilities, is rendering the nature of today’s resurgent geopolitics not simply political and geographical, but also sociocultural and, even civilizational. It is cultural as each party in the values competition, appealing their own values embedded in their traditional culture and national identities to a global audience, is competitively in the quest for winning the hearts and minds of foreign publics and eventually, legitimate authority in an anarchical international society. Today’s geopolitics is also social in that the contending great powers strive to socially construct inter-state relations with like-minded countries based on values to form their own “big tent.”
This makes public diplomacy an important arena of today’s geopolitics when it is understood as communicative and discursive practices toward foreign publics that are revolving around a country’s culture, policies, values, and ideas. It is unmistakable that major powers are indeed capitalizing on public diplomacy as an instrument for conducting their geopolitical statecraft. This implies that public diplomacy could play a critical role in the distribution of collective beliefs, eventually reshaping the international normative order.
Ⅱ.Values Competition in U.S. Public Diplomacy: Liberal Universalism
Advocacy and promotion of liberal values, together with the use of economic leverage in its foreign policy and pluralist democratic politics, have been among the striking continuities throughout the two-and-a-half century American history. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S., as the core state of the West and Western civilization, has institutionalized a series of principles, norms, and institutions reflecting liberal values and political and economic interest of the West, which is often called the “Liberal International Order (LIO).” American values diplomacy in the post-Cold War era, in particular, could be defined as “liberal universalism” with such features as liberal triumphalism, globalism, convergence expectations, and globalization and universalization of the traditional notion of “the West” and American foreign policy.
The American commitment to liberalist values is no exception to its public diplomacy. Liberal values are echoed in the entire, both functional and geographical, areas of American public diplomacy, with the promotion of American liberal values as “universal values,” as well as American foreign policy interests, sitting atop public diplomacy goals and agendas. For example, in such storytelling programs as “One Minute Academy” and “True Africa,” local participants present their positive personal experiences in American values.
It is also noticeable that the U.S. has been conducting public diplomacy and formulating responses recently in the context of great-power competition, especially competition with its belligerents - China and Russia, since the 2017 National Security Strategy of the Trump administration designated it as the most crucial nature of world politics. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, where Chinese influence has been rapidly swelling in the economy and trade fields amidst Russia’s continuing influence, the American Embassy provides information on U.S. food aid programs and relevant information in response to Russia’s propaganda that the U.S. does not operate any food supply programs and is not active in countering COVID-19 and economic recovery in the country. The Embassy also runs a series of public diplomacy programs aimed at preserving Kyrgyz traditional culture including a program that promotes the Kyrgyz language in reaction to the influence of the Russian language and the Confucius Institutes’ activities.
In East Asia and the Pacific, American public diplomacy sets the priority on the promotion of American vision and values with particular emphasis on rules-based order in the region through such programs as the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative and Young Pacific Leaders. In 2020, a focus of regional public diplomacy went on to enhancing press freedom, rules-based order, democratic procedure, and stronger civil society organizations. American public diplomacy in Europe and Eurasia underscores fostering common interests revolving around liberty and democracy, rules-based order, and American values on the one hand, and countering Russia’s anti-Western agendas in the region on the other.
Another notable feature is the ‘Biden doctrine,’ namely, a dichotomous approach to great-power competition. The Biden administration’s liberal universalism underlines alliances and multilateralism, concentrates on curbing the “most serious competitor” China, and underscores “universal values” such as human rights and democracy in the dichotomous framework of democracy versus autocracy. This is because Biden defines the rivalry with China as the “struggle between the efficacy of the 21st-century democracy and dictatorship.” Biden sets as America’s core mission to initiate the competition between world democracies and resurgent authoritarian countries like China and Russia. For this purpose, the Biden administration has endeavored to forge a “Big Tent” with like-minded liberal democracies that would involve the EU, NATO, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and countries joining the Indo-Pacific strategy. Biden’s approach stands in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s engagement approach to China, to George W. Bush’s military interventionism, and to Donald Trump’s unilateral transactional foreign policy. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her contribution to the Washington Post just before the U.S. Congressional delegation’s visit to Taiwan in last August, wrote that the delegation took the trip “at a time when the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy” and argued: “As Russia waged its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine…it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats.”
The U.S. Agency for Global Media makes the importance of the struggle between democracy and autocracy very clear. As fake news and disinformation by authoritarian countries pose threats to democracy by amplifying distrust of democratic institutions, the Agency designates them as a clear and pressing challenge to American national security. To galvanize support for freedom and democracy, the Agency establishes two long-term strategic goals - expanding freedom of information and expression and sharing the American democratic experience and values.
Washington focuses on personnel exchanges as a crucial medium for promoting American values. The 2020 federal budget for public diplomacy including international broadcasting amounted to $2.23 billion, of which USAGM took up around 35%($805.1 million) while Educational and Cultural Affairs another 33% ($735.7 million). The average annual public diplomacy budget since 1980 reaches around $2 billion, peaking at $2.55 billion in 1994 and gradually decreasing ever since before the rebound at the turn of the century. The public diplomacy budget has tended to show a slight increase since 2016 up to now. In terms of the budget expenditure for individual countries, China ranked the 8th with $6,465,438 while South Korea the 20th ($4,659,769) in 2020.
The focus of professional, educational, and cultural exchanges that include the U.S. Speakers Program, the Fulbright Program and other academic exchange programs, and the International Visitor Leadership Program and Young Leaders Initiatives is to promote democracy and American values. The Bureau of Global Public Affairs in the U.S. State Department formulates core narratives of American foreign policy priorities and values to disseminate consistent messages across the globe. For this purpose, the Bureau utilizes mobile applications like Talking Points and develops materials to be uploaded to the ShareAmerica platform (http://share.america.gov).
Last but not least, Washington puts greater emphasis on digital public diplomacy. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. switched existing contact-based public diplomacy programs to hybrid ones combining on-site and virtual programs. In 2020, it is reported that the number of participants in educational and cultural exchanges decreased by 100%, while online participants increased almost by 900%. The pandemic has prodded public diplomacy practitioners to pay keen attention to the importance and expandability of digital public diplomacy. And Washington underlines the significance of investing in safeguarding and promoting American values in this area as well.
The State Department replaced the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications devoted to formulating and disseminating counter-narratives to terrorism with a new Global Engagement Center in 2016. The GEC focuses on analyzing, and devising countermeasures against, fake news and disinformation masterminded and spread by countries like China and Russia, as well as radical terrorist organizations. For this purpose, the Center operates Russia, China, and Iran divisions together with a counter-terrorism division.
This trend is also mirrored in international broadcasting, with the USAGM taking an approach in which it plays the role of “the U.S. Bureau” telling global media outlets American stories. The Agent recently initiated a Persian TV channel and launched Global Mandarin digital programs in Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. It also established a Russian language program Current Time as a source of truth on the U.S., Russia, and world affairs in response to Moscow’s fake news campaigns, and launched Russia-Iran-China Investigative Unit at the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN). The Center also develops digital technologies to detour internet firewalls erected by authoritarian countries.
The State Department runs TechCamps Program, a workshop program, in which civilian technology experts are connected to local journalists, NGOs, and civil society activists with a clear purpose to counter Russian and Chinese fake news and disinformation, enhancing American information presence in the Indo-Pacific, and support democratic movements in countries like Venezuela.
Ⅲ.Values Competition in China’s Public Diplomacy: Illiberal Particularism
China’s public diplomacy under Xi Jinping’s leadership, among others, underlines its particularity up and against American liberal universalism. Its values diplomacy reflects a dire threat perception of Western liberalism, whose promotion is seen as an instrument for the West to sustain its hegemony and as an existential threat to Beijing’s Communist Party regime. While the so-called Document 9 lists seven threats jeopardizing the regime including the penetration of liberalism, Xi’s advocacy for “cultural confidence” celebrates the distinctiveness of China’s cultural and moral values, indirectly discrediting external criticisms of China for not adhering to Western values and practices. Another emphatic notion, “cultural security,” underscores the need for China’s strong defense posture against Western cultural penetration.
In this vein, Beijing’s public diplomacy accentuates its positive achievements and peculiarities, simultaneously focusing on diluting and even wiping out negative images and perceptions of China. Emphatic achievements include the Communist Party’s economic performance and poverty reduction, Chinese governance and development model, and its contribution to the UN PKO on the one hand, and such ambitious notions as a Community of Common Destiny, Chinese worldview, Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics, and Chinese Solutions, on the other, both distinguished from Western ones.
Xi’s China has been explicating a Chinese identity that combines its traditional philosophical and political thoughts with socialism, which is anchored to the civilizational state and tianxia (All under Heaven) discourses. China as a civilizational state underlines that it is a unique state in which “an axial civilization of over five-thousand history” is fused with a nation-state with historical continuity. In contrast, the tianxia theory casts light on Chinese principles of statecraft and worldview and assesses their applicability to today’s world politics. While the civilizational state emphasizes China’s traditional historical and cultural peculiarities, tianxia underlines the universality of Chinese traditional views on the world and world politics.
Another notable point is that Chinese writings advocate fluid and blurred boundaries between the two types of power, treating them as symbiotic and mutually empowering. This stands in contrast to clear distinctions between hard and soft power as in Joseph Nye’s works. As it lacks an alternative ideational vision to American liberalism, Beijing strives to utilize economic and material benefits as a complementary tool to compensate for its relative inferiority in the values contention with Washington.
Accordingly, China recently takes a comprehensive engagement approach to developing countries in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Comprehensive engagement refers to a diplomatic approach in which traditional and public diplomacy measures are combined to constitute a complementary whole package. Until the early 2000s, Beijing perceived developing countries as sources of raw materials and markets for China’s manufactured products. However, under Xi’s leadership, particularly with the the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing has radically switched to a comprehensive engagement approach. Both the hard infrastructure comprising the BRI and the soft norms of cooperation underpinning it reinforce the idea of China’s position at the center of a new regional order stretching from Southeast Asia to Europe. China also employs bilateral investment and development assistance to incentivize states to not only support its goals, including non-recognition of Taiwan, but also adopt Chinese technology standards and accept its narratives around the situation in borderlands like Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
China’s state-run media outlets are expanding their local presence across the globe, utilizing “borrowing boats” and “purchasing boats” strategies, in which Chinese media expand local broadcasting either through borrowing local broadcasting bands or through purchasing local media entities. In the entertainment industry, Beijing’s greatest soft power achievement may lie in its ability to control and censor contents and narratives of foreign entertainment products, leveraging its financial clout to invest in and purchase foreign companies and products, as well as access to huge Chinese markets.
As a corollary, the Chinese notion of culture is eclectic and fluid enough to combine traditional culture and ideology, especially ancient political philosophy including Confucianism, history, morality, and even political and economic governance and capacity. Beijing treats culture as an all-encompassing invisible force responsible for creating a more morally grounded and politically unified Chinese polity. Thus, one of the Chinese public diplomacy’s core tasks is to explain China’s moral values to the world and to offer an attractive alternative to the U.S. Various public diplomacy mediums including the Confucius Institutes, educational and training exchanges, and bilateral and multilateral fora are devoted to promoting Chinese norms and standards, as well as its traditional culture. In 2022, for example, the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party established a new training school in Tanzania and its Chief Song Tao, in his virtual address to the next generation African leaders recruited to the school from six African countries, called upon them to learn from Chinese governance model.
Also notable in Chinese public diplomacy is a combination of domestic and external motivations and orientations of soft power. Beijing’s motivations for soft power are rooted as much domestically as internationally as soft power is perceived as intimately connected with the importance of socialist, traditional values and ideas and the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s rule, and eventually associated with political stability and social cohesion. A series of recent domestic trends, such as the strict censorship and harsh criticism of historical interpretations deviating from the Party’s own as “historical nihilism,” emphasis on patriotic education, and ideational indoctrination, attest to the domestic orientation of Chinese soft power. The “Comprehensive National Security Concept,” promulgated by Xi Jinping in 2014, encompasses extensive areas of regime security that include politics, economy, culture, and society. As the Chinese political elite perceive many of the issues related to regime security as deriving from external intervention, it is quite natural for them to consider soft power as important domestically as externally.
Last but not least, China, harnessing material benefits and practical enticements in conducting public diplomacy, takes a more pragmatic, less value-oriented, approach than the U.S. Whereas Washington continues to deliberately integrate liberal values into its public diplomacy programs, Beijing emphasizes the complementary role of tangible or material opportunities. The Chinese approach appears to be more appealing to foreign publics in the Global South. The suspicions and criticism toward the Confucius Institutes, at least in Western contexts, appear to be in large part fomented by the preexisting conceptions or ideological beliefs about China. Outside of Western contexts, however, the picture is mixed. Whereas negative views of China in major industrialized nations reached historic highs in the summer of 2020, views of China in Africa and Latin America have been more favorable. The 2019/2020 Afrobarometer research report, for instance, shows that the majority of respondents in African countries perceive Chinese influence as “mostly positive.” As for variation across public diplomacy instruments, education and training exchanges appear to be more effective in shifting perceptions about China than the more indirect and politicized channels, like Chinese media that are not trusted by publics across regional contexts.
This testifies to the fact that Chinese soft power and public diplomacy have different impacts when factored into different cultural and political contexts, and to the need that Chinese public diplomacy performance should be assessed in terms of Chinese own conceptions of soft power and public diplomacy, rather than the Western standards and Joseph Nye’s original notion.
Ⅳ. Implications for Non-Great Power Countries
With the contrasting differences, we could also find some commonalities and issues shared between American and Chinese public diplomacy practices. The first is the issue of universalism. While the U.S. presents core values of liberalism as “universal values,” the reality is that many non-Western countries and cultural spheres have their own, different meanings and understandings of such values deeply embedded in Western history and culture. Although China underlines the peculiarity of Chinese values distinctive from Western ones, it is noticeable that Beijing also pursues another version of universalism, imperiously, and unilaterally on many occasions, projecting its own values and worldviews, political and economic governance, and development path to developing countries.
Today’s international society is characterized, among others, by heterogeneity rather than homogeneity primarily due to the rise of the non-Western rest. In this global context, it would be fundamentally crucial to consider how the burgeoning diversity and heterogeneity should be duly incorporated into the international order, rather than maintain homogeneity under the guise of universalism.
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