Panda power

In early 2012, an angry dragon on a postage stamp was greeted with serious consternation in Beijing. China Post had released the stamp to coincide with the Year of the Dragon. But users of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, were breathing fire over the fearful creature, which they said harmed their country’s image.

While dragons have been the symbol of imperial power for centuries in the Middle Kingdom, its government prefers to use the cuddly panda as a diplomatic gift to project its softer side. The dragon-to-panda transformation is a carefully thought-out image makeover by China’s top leadership: with their rising global power, they understand the need to reassure the world that they are a force for good, more like the panda than the dragon.

It’s a project that began in earnest at the turn of the decade, with billions of dollars invested to globalise its State-run media companies and Confucian Institutes as amplifiers of Chinese culture across the world. “To some degree, whoever owns the commanding heights of cultural development, and soft power, will enjoy a competitive edge internationally,” declared a communiqué that came out of the Communist Party’s Central Committee plenary in October 2011.

As Narendra Modi wraps up his China visit today, he will undoubtedly be taking notes on the country’s strategic might and impressive economic strides. But he would also do well to learn from the Chinese leadership’s vision on soft power, that crucial third element in the power matrix which India’s leadership seems to have exclusively left to Bollywood.

Joseph S Nye, an American strategic thinker and Harvard professor, coined the term “soft power” in the 1990’s. If power is the ability to influence others to get what you want, Nye said that a country needs three primary tools for achieving that: coercion (military might), payments (economic collaborations) and attraction (soft power). If foreigners are attracted to your culture, it becomes easier for you to influence them strategically.

America is undoubtedly the greatest exponent of global soft power. In Nye’s construct, apart from its battleships and economic heft, what makes the US powerful is the universal appeal of the American dream and its accessories. From Apple to Coke, Hollywood movies and The New York Times , the global elite and decision-makers are voracious consumers of American culture. This gives Americans a unique strategic heft.

In the long term, the top Chinese leadership has the vision for creating its very own Chinese dream with global appeal. Of course there are challenges to this vision: the average American is still about eight times richer than the average Chinese, and till that gap closes the American dream will dominate. But what you see from the Chinese leadership is a 20-year vision and a holistic approach to power, something that is completely missing in Lutyens’ Delhi. Indian politicians, at most, think in five-year election cycles.

In many ways India, being a democracy, had a natural advantage over China in projecting its soft power. But the lack of political vision and bureaucratic will has resulted in China stealing a march over us. A simple example would be the contrast in the quality, ambitions and reach of the respective State-run media companies.

China Radio International (CRI) now broadcasts in more than 60 languages across the world, while All India Radio has almost zero global presence. In Africa, where both China and India have considerable economic interests, CRI has replaced BBC World Service as the go-to source for news, very often delivered in local languages.

The rapid global expansion of CCTV, their Doordarshan, is equally impressive. Apart from stealing the show in Africa, CCTV America hired more than 100 journalists and support staff in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections in the US. They are already competing with CNN, BBC World and Al Jazeera on the global airwaves.

And, Xinhua is now one of the largest news agencies in the world with more than 10,000 employees in 107 bureaus. In the developing world, especially, it is challenging the dominance of The Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters.

India’s “free media”, the public broadcasters or private channels, are nowhere close to achieving the global reach the Chinese have achieved. Through its global reach, the Chinese are slowly transforming the dragon into the panda, while India’s slow-moving elephant remains just that in the international mindspace.

Among Indian politicians and thinkers, Shashi Tharoor has been fighting almost a lone battle to bring soft power at the forefront of India’s foreign policy. “In the information age, Joseph Nye has argued, it is often the side which has the better story that wins,” he wrote in his book The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cellphone . “India must remain the ‘land of the better story.’”

S ambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian some_buddha

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