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China is spending billions on soft power

economist.com

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Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#11

Post by vtange »

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Smart move, the path is wide open for China. The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed. I might start learning Mandarin, someday.

As opposed to China? They don't say it, but they have basically ran a "China first" agenda for the last decade or two. Does China maintain a friendly policy toward refugees and minorities? Sure, they do enact policy for the environment, but it's heavily sold on cutting their own smog and air pollution. "Let other countries settle things bilaterally without interference" were China's words originally, not Trump's.

One could even say Trump is America's most Chinese president, considering his proposal to build a "Great, great wall" (his words, not mine)[1] and proposal to up America's military by nearly double digits to mimic China's recent years. [2]

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/wild-donald-trump-quotes/14/ [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/04/china-reins-defen...

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#12

Post by [deleted] »

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Smart move, the path is wide open for China. The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed. I might start learning Mandarin, someday.

[deleted]

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#13

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

obstinate wrote: post #2

This is going to sound flippant, but I mean it very seriously. This is a much better way to spend money than spending billions to make the world hate you.

You have your numbers wrong.

The US does spend... Well, hundreds of billions on making the world love US.

The actual problem is two-fold:

1. We spend trillions on making them hate the US.

2. We aren't actually very efficient with the hundreds of billions we spend on making them love the US. It's spent on short-sighted projects that often transparently benefit the US at the cost of the locals. To some degree, this is getting better with leadership from eg, The Gates Foundation, but we could wield our economic power much more efficiently.

These problems stem from a fundamental lack of leadership in the US: the US population are emotional-high junkies who are led by a bunch of spineless, selfish people. This is crippling the US, at home and abroad, because we are unable to do anything but lurch between emotional highs, are unable to have an actual vision for the future (and make reasonable plans to see it through), and are unable to wield our power effectively.

The US is trapped in short-term optimization thinking because of the junky behavior of its population.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#14

Post by alphonsegaston »

ajross wrote: post #7

It's a digression (because honestly the fact that China markets itself is not hugely notable, nor "bad" or "good" no matter how effective or ineffective it might be), but: Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like th…

Japan's conservative party (LDP) retook power following the mishandling of Fukushima, and proceeded with a full court press of their textbook nationalism. This includes constantly vilifying the Chinese and Koreans, although they have little to do with the internal problems plaguing Japan.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#15

Post by david-given »

diego_moita wrote: post #3

Smart move, the path is wide open for China. The most remembered phrase of the orange demagogue inaugural address was "America first, always". As a non-American I'd argue that "me first" are words that a leader should never say, even when it is what he always believed. I might start learning Mandarin, someday.

I've heard it's a pretty straightforward language --- every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ * ]; and that the grammar is supposed to be really straightforward, at least for English speakers, with no inflection, SVO sentence order, limited tenses, and sentences made from gluing words together.

Unfortunately every written tutorial I've found seems heavily focused around ideograms, which I find completely impossible, so I don't know what it's like in practice. Can any beginner learners comment?

(It's also a tonal language, which I am completely unable to pronounce intelligibly. On a trip to Beijing a few years ago I tried to learn a few basic phrases, like 'hello', 'please', 'thankyou', etc. Ha ha fat chance.)

[ * ] It can be interesting to use Google Translate to turn an English word into Mandarin, then insert newlines between each ideogram and reverse translate it to see what it is literally. 'Grammar' is 语法, which is 'language law'...

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#16

Post by vtange »

ajross wrote: post #7

It's a digression (because honestly the fact that China markets itself is not hugely notable, nor "bad" or "good" no matter how effective or ineffective it might be), but: Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like th…

This is a good article on that in a nutshell: http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/09/13/hostile-neighbors-china-...

Lots of things have been happening between the two countries for a while now, not since 2011.

As others have said, there is a territorial dispute that to the best of my knowledge really flared up when Japan actively nationalized the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. China's moves in the South China Sea have not made things better.

Aside from that, China blocked rare earth minerals to Japan in 2010. [1] There have been numerous boycotts by China (to the point of outright vandalism of Japanese cars, business property) over political issues [2] There is always the whole WW2 apology issue (over comfort women, wartime crimes, etc.) In 2015, China made a jab at Japan during their 70th anniversary of WW2 victory. [3]

On the bright side, China did help Japan out during the big earthquake/tsunami of 2011. [4]

[1] http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2013/08/18/did-china-really-ban... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-boycott-hurts-japan-2... [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-boycott-hurts-japan-2... [4] http://www.npr.org/2011/03/15/134567659/china-acts-fast-in-a...

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#17

Post by molikto »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #10
Blahah wrote: post #6

Paywalled article, so hope this is relevant. Here in Kenya, infrastructure investment by the Kenyan government is very poor. Whatever money gets theoretically assigned to things like building and maintenance of roads and the power and water grids usually goes missing at various stages until the final project, if implemented at all, is shoddy. Enter China, who have been directly funding infrastructure here. They are m…

A friend of mine spent a few years working in a few different places in Africa. He said that the impression of the locals was that the Chinese are the new colonizers, full stop. The labor conditions and treatment of African workers on Chinese run projects was really bad, and the out-and-out racism by the Chinese was crazy.

https://www.quora.com/Is-China-colonizing-Asia-and-Africa/an...

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#18

Post by cJ0th »

hasenj wrote: post #5

I wonder how much Japan spends on that front, or if it's even official state policy to make the world love it.

Probably quite a lot. I am subscribed to the Quartz newsletter and they often have a paragraph which is headed

"Sponsor content by The Government of Japan"

which I always find slightly amusing.

Re: China is spending billions on soft power

#19

Post by gommm »

ajross wrote: post #7

It's a digression (because honestly the fact that China markets itself is not hugely notable, nor "bad" or "good" no matter how effective or ineffective it might be), but: Toward the bottom of this article is a favorability chart of China in different nations. And there is a huge crater (like 37% to 5%) in Chinese support among the Japanese between 2011-2013. Other nationalities see a little blip, but nothing like th…

There was also the anti-Japanese riots in China in 2012. I was in Shanghai at the time and a lot of my Japanese friends living there were very worried. Some of them went back to Japan for a few weeks to wait for things to calm down...

And yes the LDP does not help things with their racist nationalist discourse. They tend to use foreigners as a scapegoat responsible for all problems Japan has... (Abe Shinzo might not be as bad as Trump but only just..)

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