I understand dreaming of places you've never been or things you don't have. But I'm genuinely surprised by the amount of Chinamaxxing I've seen too. China does an incredible job curating an image of utopia. But grass isn't always greener on the other side, folks.
It probably helps that much of what the creative class in America produces today is meant to convince you how horrible / racist / imperialist etc. the United States is.
Observing from Europe, the last era when the American intellectual and creative class was generally positive about America itself was the Clinton administration.
Since Dubya, the broadcast switched to "we are the most stupid, most evil, most bigoted, most fascist, most greedy, most fat, most racist and most violent nation on Earth", as if a dedicated choir was reciting "Whitey on the Moon" aloud 24/7 for years and years for the rest of mankind to hear. And given your cultural weight in the rest of the world, this relentless message has been heard and accepted as true. I can say that among Europeans, the perceptions of America differ hugely between *those who actually visited it* and *those whose opinion is solely formed by reception of the above message*. It is as if they were talking about two totally different places.
What strikes me as significant is that this fever didn't particularly abate during Democratic administrations either. It was a bit muted during the first Obama administration, but later into his second term, it raged with full force again.
There is nothing wrong with being self-critical, but this level is already neurotic and we would consider it a major disorder if it happened to an individual. And your comment illustrates the fallacy nicely: as if only two extreme poles were possible, either "rah, rah, America best, and who does not think so, put him in the Alligator Alcatraz" vs. the above.
Nope, there is a lot of space in between and America is still in plenty of aspects truly great, which matters, because that is the difference between "something imperfect that should be repaired and improved" and "something utterly bad which can only be destroyed to cleanse the soil for some other entity to grow". Too many Americans now seem to consider their own country to be the latter, which is ultimately a recipe for great suffering.
If Hasan Piker can make the argument that the Soviet Union (!!!! just ask the survivors thereof !!!!) was a better place than the US and millions are willing to listen to him, that is a consequence of said neurotic drumbeat. After all, if you are really the worst of the lot, everyone else is trivially better.
That’s not what I was trying to get across. I think it’s good that Americans are very inward looking and self-critical. I think we are more than most other countries. And we’re allowed to be!
My point was more that this presents to people who have never lived in (or visited) the US as a much more negative picture than reality.
You certainly couldn’t produce this kind of content from China (as Noah points out).
Much of "authentic" living Chinese culture was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution--but survived intact among the Chinese Diaspora in Taiwan, SE Asia, etc. Gong Fu, Ba Gua, Xing Yi, and many forms of Qigong...simply went extinct, or nearly extinct. In addition to applied Buddhism and Taoism. The only monks and nuns you now find in China are Potemkinesque play-actors.
All because eighty years ago, China's new religion--Dialectical Materialism--ensured there would be only one true faith; and snuffed out cultural forms that had existed in some cases for millenia.
This is why roughly thirty years ago the moving meditation Qigong system of Falun Gong became so insanely popular. Because for two generations, Chinese had been denied access by the CCP to pre-Communist cultural expression; and Falun Gong scratched a deep itch. At least until Falun Gong formally protested against the government, and were crushed.
I wonder how much of this is China does a good job, and how much of it is, we lock the world out of our internet and create barriers from normal Chinese people engaging with the average American. Living in China, I sense a much deeper pessimism in my normal conversations with Chinese people that is much different than the persona's of western educated upper class Chinese people I see online.
I actually feel like Texas is having more of a soft power moment than China. Maybe it’s my X feed bias or something but I see so much content related to Buccees, and that giant grocery store chain they have and how Austin is a cool place. Even Netflix has more content down to things like “Watch these Korean guys wander around Texas and show you how great it is.” Korea and Texas the real soft power couple!
I’m definitely Texas pilled at this point. It feels like one of the places in the U.S. that has real “culture” in that broader sense of a unique identity. Even my friends who are the most progressively anti American love Buccees and HEB. Maybe do a post on what makes Texas the place right now?
Downtown Houston was semi-walkable; but the state seems as into exurban sprawl as, well....California. Far as I can tell. But Chicano culture is considerably stronger in TX; and they've got more rodeos per capita.
Texans manage to get by just fine without doing the urbanist poodle-walk. I love Hoiuston's suburban Chinatown -- but then again, I also love to drive. Fun, Fun, Fun! It's "sprawl" only when you're looking down on it!
Or stuck in a traffic jam. Grueling commutes aren't most people's idea of a good time.
If conservatives--and conservative power blocks like Builders--weren't so extreme in their aversion to Urbanism, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
If you're so concerned about traffic jams, lay off the "road diets" that obliterate passing lanes and reduce driving to a single-file stop-and-go crawl.
If this were truly about "people, not cars," urbanists wouldn't constantly need to be contriving ways to "get PEOPLE out of their cars."
What urbanists hate is car culture. That's a crucial aspect of the ideology called urbanism: "Down with 'Thunder Road'; our kind of people do the poodle-walk."
PS: I'm no conservative; I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) in 2016. (Willie Nelson wasn't running, haha!) I get my politics from the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka!
A(n electric) car in every garage: Now, THAT's abundance!
Does it though? Starting the mid-decade gerrymandering tit-for-tat, the voting roll purges, the abortion ban, the bathroom bill, the Board of Education imposing conservative ideology, etc.
The problem is largely that a lot of the rest of the country feels like Texas distains them, and it's hard to admire someone who sneers at you. Texas pride comes off as 'y'all suck' quite often.
I've found that overwhelmingly that when people speak of soft power in the last few decades, what they are really talking about is television and movies.
With the exception of basically just Jia Zhangke, China sucks at this. It's hard to make a quality product when the world's dullest autocrat has the final say in what gets published.
But what is interesting is that I think there is far less a monoculture around movies and television today than there was even five years ago. What universally watched films or television is the US exporting nowadays? Americans don't even watch the same things in any numbers anymore.
I am curious how that is going to change *every* nation's soft power in the coming decades.
How much soft-power can you project with short-form video in your native language?
Wait until a charismatic Dem like Obama wins the Oval in '28, and ushers in--or reinstates--a raft of popular programs. Which will boost US soft power. But maybe not much, considering how much damage has been done by recent GOP stupidity.
When I lived abroad for eight years, every time a Dem was in the WH, the locals were friendly and pro-American. When it was a Republican, all I'd get were sullen stares...
Over a ten year period--1984 to 1994--I lived abroad for eight years: 4 in Thailand; 2 in Saudi; 17 months in India; the rest mostly in Asia, with a four month stint in the UK. During most of that time I dressed in khakis and blue button-downs--the quintessential Young Republican look, which no doubt influenced how I was perceived.
My then-wife and brother in law are both Brits; and I had a serious German gf (long-distance relationship) before that. So my experience was not EU-centric.
Thanks for the great post! This is one of those myths that my international friends living in the U.S. especially have been suckered into. For them I think China just represents this pseudo utopian communist alternative to what they see as aggressive capitalism in the states. It almost feels like the way American kids became enamored with Hindu religion and culture in the 60s. They didn’t want to live in India once they went there at the time but they wanted an alternative to evil Christianity and there it was!
Chinese report feeling safer walking the streets at night than do Americans, despite having fewer police per capita. But during my time in Hangzhou, there were police at literally every single major intersection.
But distinctly Chinese cultural forms like T'Ai Chi and Qigong are indeed phenomenal. And while they require a lifetime to master, benefits can be experienced immediately. But if you're really serious about going deep, finding elite teachers of said forms are more easily found in Taiwan or Kuala Lumpur.
Are you serious about the boba chain comment? Aren't there tons of Taiwanese boba chains in the US? Chicha Sanchen, Happy Lemon, Gonga Cha, etc are pretty widespread.
That's interesting, are there other chains that you do see more of? Google says there are 200+ Gong Cha locations and 100+ Happy Lemon locations in the US.
I think the only chain I have had in the USA was Kung FU Tea. I have had a lot of boba from small mom and pop type spots in college towns, but I dont think any established chains.
Good piece Noah but I think you are underselling the structural reason. Cultural soft power is fundamentally about freedom of failure and expression, and CCP cannot tolerate that by design. Japan, Korea, US dominate culturally because thousands of small studios and weird auteurs are allowed to fail loudly without asking permission, and that churn IS the product. Any civilization that wants real soft power has to first let its people be free to make bad art, and Beijing will never allow that. My bet is in 10 years when India crosses the per capita threshold you will see a similar boom from there too, for the same structural reason. I already see examples of such cinema around me, but it will take a few more years of ironing out things before it goes truly global. India at the moment, is not as free as a truly Western liberal democracy but it is much freer than the plethora of auth countries around us, and rising per capita will naturally rein in whatever mild auth tendencies exist. In the end a bunch of decentralized free actors will always come out better, all the ingredients are there.
Come to think of it, almost all of China's problems can be attributed to CCP's desire of control. Sure that "control" gave it easy wins in just steamrolling infrastructure and other basic stuff to get easy gains and reach a level but that model has its limits, in the end you have to let go and let markets and people do their things. Control is their ultimate achilles heel
Good coverage of "soft power" on the cultural (film, music, TV, games, tourism) front. But I think you're underselling one point which is that China is doing extremely well on the techno-industrial aesthetic channels. Maybe you already covered that in the past (new reader here). To me those BYD, DJI, Unitree, Xiaomi showcase videos are harkening back to the Japanese 80s tech demos with Walkman, Toyota, and Sony that were popular with the demographic that used to default to admiring Japanese tech and ended up defining an entire generation of tastes. Similar with American companies in the 1990-2010s (Apple). All this cutting-edge hardware (and software) is also a big part of the AI push and likely the focus of the world over the next few decades, China being at the forefront of all this will pay a lot of dividends for them.
I also think that gaming will play a bigger role. Wukong was just the start and notable because there hasn't ever been an AAA Chinese game. Tecent now owns a decent chunk of the video game industry and we are already seeing multiple titles that will likely bring Chinese game studios to the forefront.
Final random thought: Soft power is a bit of a zero-sum game. A relative shift away from American soft power because of "Americaminning" is still a shift away from American hegemony and will result in a shift in geopolitical global alignments. Whether or not China can take advantage of that is question that will be answered in the coming years.
I'm honestly baffled by how many column inches the internet gives to the notion of 'soft power'...i remember distinctly 2 years ago when sleepy joe was making all the right noises to american allies, whilst china was still opening up post-covid, and the US was therefore coming away with far superior 'likeability' scores as a result. Now its flipped on its head 2 years on. Such a durable, accurate, reliable type of 'power' this is!
Equally baffled by the idea that you need to be a democracy to play this game...get the impression this is one of those old 90s maxims / truisms that, like all 90s maxims / truisms, will soon bite the dust. Anyone remember the democratic peace theory? Or the capitalist peace theory ("no 2 countries with a mcdonalds will go to war")? Or the "only democracies can innovate" theory? Or the "privatisation + deregulation = good, industrial policy = bad" theory?
Aware that Noah has this longstanding japan / korea fetish, but frankly, nothing tells me that any (american) obsession with the 2 has a special cultural / social / emotional 'depth' that cant be replicated for china. Far more important than the 'democracy' check box, i get the impression that wealth, fancy buildings, fascinating stories, interesting pop culture etc etc are far more important to attracting overseas fanboys. All of these, at least in the east asian context, correlate positively with economic growth and improving standards of living. After all, nobody was a fan of korean culture in the 1990s...or crowing about sushi in the 1960s
I do not know much about the meaning of soft power. A detailed definition would help. Despite many economic achievements, China is a political hell on Earth. The US is a very unequal society and a now a very flawed democracy. Many other countries are far better choices to live, work, and visit.
meaningless metric dreamt up by an american academic (Nye). Leaderboards shift around every 2-3 years depending on which superpower is proactively throwing its weight around vs which is publicly saying all the right things.
Besides inflated tourism receipts, yet to see any tangible economic / geopolitical benefit any country has gotten from its stores of 'soft power'.
Not just short-time tourism, but long-term attraction of talent from overseas.
That is not just a question of money. Saudi Arabia has a lot of money and no income taxes, but also a reputation of having strict Islamic mores (though that has been weakening lately) and dissolving regime critics in acid. That acts as somewhat of a brake on its ability to attract talented people.
You can even see it in the US today. The harsh treatment meted out by the ICE against not-necessarily-illegal aliens is making students from abroad reconsider whether they should try Harvard or Stanford, or rather Cambridge or Zürich.
The modern success of the US stands on a few pillars, one of which is an absolutely massive brain influx from the rest of the world, which started with the Jewish professors abandoning Europe after Nazi purges. Prior to that, it was Germany who had the most advanced science on Earth, not the US.
Jacobin's take on China is typically blinkered. On inequality, they look at a distribution where the top and middle are closer than in America, but the weaker safety net leaves the bottom worse off. On homelessness, they see clean safe cities but lament that the homeless have been pushed to the margins.
In both cases they miss that this is a very appealing deal for the middle! In both cases, this is a society more oriented toward the attitudes and benefit of the middle, rather than a more American style of a small ruling class dispensing aid to a highly visible and present underclass.
No, I don't think so. As Jacobin correctly points out, the Chinese middle class is burdened by a weak health care system, high education costs, and poor job opportunities. The fact that some rich people in China have recently lost a bunch of their wealth doesn't actually do much to help the middle class.
One additional thing Jacobin doesn't mention is housing costs; even after the recent price decline, a house costs much more relative to income in a Chinese city than in an American one (even San Francisco). Yet despite that high cost, the Chinese middle class have seen their wealth decimated by the housing bust.
Very in character for Jacobin. Progressives are a creature of the upper-middle class almost exclusively. While they love to talk about the "working class", the "inequality" they complain about is exclusively that between them and the super-rich. Never that between them and the working class, which they somehow consider themselves part of, but most certainly are not.
Chinamaxxing still seems super fake to me. I haven't been able to convince anyone I know to visit China. I tried before Covid when I lived here and now, even my very liberal friends would never visit. I will believe it is real when I see normal people posting it online, not just influencers who get a paid trip.
Just a quick remark about the Politico poll. Willingly or not, it is creating some manipulation. I am willing to bet that if there was a "Neither" option in the questionnaire, it would get the greatest share of the vote in all polled countries. But I guess we will never know.
For the record, I don't believe this was deliberate, just not enough competence on the pollster's part.
I understand dreaming of places you've never been or things you don't have. But I'm genuinely surprised by the amount of Chinamaxxing I've seen too. China does an incredible job curating an image of utopia. But grass isn't always greener on the other side, folks.
It probably helps that much of what the creative class in America produces today is meant to convince you how horrible / racist / imperialist etc. the United States is.
here we go....lack of patriotic, flag-waving, good 'ol muricans seem to be the cause of all your country's problems these days
Observing from Europe, the last era when the American intellectual and creative class was generally positive about America itself was the Clinton administration.
Since Dubya, the broadcast switched to "we are the most stupid, most evil, most bigoted, most fascist, most greedy, most fat, most racist and most violent nation on Earth", as if a dedicated choir was reciting "Whitey on the Moon" aloud 24/7 for years and years for the rest of mankind to hear. And given your cultural weight in the rest of the world, this relentless message has been heard and accepted as true. I can say that among Europeans, the perceptions of America differ hugely between *those who actually visited it* and *those whose opinion is solely formed by reception of the above message*. It is as if they were talking about two totally different places.
What strikes me as significant is that this fever didn't particularly abate during Democratic administrations either. It was a bit muted during the first Obama administration, but later into his second term, it raged with full force again.
There is nothing wrong with being self-critical, but this level is already neurotic and we would consider it a major disorder if it happened to an individual. And your comment illustrates the fallacy nicely: as if only two extreme poles were possible, either "rah, rah, America best, and who does not think so, put him in the Alligator Alcatraz" vs. the above.
Nope, there is a lot of space in between and America is still in plenty of aspects truly great, which matters, because that is the difference between "something imperfect that should be repaired and improved" and "something utterly bad which can only be destroyed to cleanse the soil for some other entity to grow". Too many Americans now seem to consider their own country to be the latter, which is ultimately a recipe for great suffering.
If Hasan Piker can make the argument that the Soviet Union (!!!! just ask the survivors thereof !!!!) was a better place than the US and millions are willing to listen to him, that is a consequence of said neurotic drumbeat. After all, if you are really the worst of the lot, everyone else is trivially better.
To be fair, I think Hasan Piker is the liberal version of the people who thought Pro Wrestling was real in the 80's.
He's not a liberal. He's a totalitarian using populist messaging.
That’s not what I was trying to get across. I think it’s good that Americans are very inward looking and self-critical. I think we are more than most other countries. And we’re allowed to be!
My point was more that this presents to people who have never lived in (or visited) the US as a much more negative picture than reality.
You certainly couldn’t produce this kind of content from China (as Noah points out).
Both these things impact the soft power picture.
Much of "authentic" living Chinese culture was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution--but survived intact among the Chinese Diaspora in Taiwan, SE Asia, etc. Gong Fu, Ba Gua, Xing Yi, and many forms of Qigong...simply went extinct, or nearly extinct. In addition to applied Buddhism and Taoism. The only monks and nuns you now find in China are Potemkinesque play-actors.
All because eighty years ago, China's new religion--Dialectical Materialism--ensured there would be only one true faith; and snuffed out cultural forms that had existed in some cases for millenia.
This is why roughly thirty years ago the moving meditation Qigong system of Falun Gong became so insanely popular. Because for two generations, Chinese had been denied access by the CCP to pre-Communist cultural expression; and Falun Gong scratched a deep itch. At least until Falun Gong formally protested against the government, and were crushed.
I wonder how much of this is China does a good job, and how much of it is, we lock the world out of our internet and create barriers from normal Chinese people engaging with the average American. Living in China, I sense a much deeper pessimism in my normal conversations with Chinese people that is much different than the persona's of western educated upper class Chinese people I see online.
I actually feel like Texas is having more of a soft power moment than China. Maybe it’s my X feed bias or something but I see so much content related to Buccees, and that giant grocery store chain they have and how Austin is a cool place. Even Netflix has more content down to things like “Watch these Korean guys wander around Texas and show you how great it is.” Korea and Texas the real soft power couple!
Texas deserves it!
I’m definitely Texas pilled at this point. It feels like one of the places in the U.S. that has real “culture” in that broader sense of a unique identity. Even my friends who are the most progressively anti American love Buccees and HEB. Maybe do a post on what makes Texas the place right now?
Easy answer: A car.
Downtown Houston was semi-walkable; but the state seems as into exurban sprawl as, well....California. Far as I can tell. But Chicano culture is considerably stronger in TX; and they've got more rodeos per capita.
Texans manage to get by just fine without doing the urbanist poodle-walk. I love Hoiuston's suburban Chinatown -- but then again, I also love to drive. Fun, Fun, Fun! It's "sprawl" only when you're looking down on it!
Or stuck in a traffic jam. Grueling commutes aren't most people's idea of a good time.
If conservatives--and conservative power blocks like Builders--weren't so extreme in their aversion to Urbanism, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Most driving isn't "a grueling commute."
If you're so concerned about traffic jams, lay off the "road diets" that obliterate passing lanes and reduce driving to a single-file stop-and-go crawl.
If this were truly about "people, not cars," urbanists wouldn't constantly need to be contriving ways to "get PEOPLE out of their cars."
What urbanists hate is car culture. That's a crucial aspect of the ideology called urbanism: "Down with 'Thunder Road'; our kind of people do the poodle-walk."
PS: I'm no conservative; I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) in 2016. (Willie Nelson wasn't running, haha!) I get my politics from the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka!
A(n electric) car in every garage: Now, THAT's abundance!
Does it though? Starting the mid-decade gerrymandering tit-for-tat, the voting roll purges, the abortion ban, the bathroom bill, the Board of Education imposing conservative ideology, etc.
The problem is largely that a lot of the rest of the country feels like Texas distains them, and it's hard to admire someone who sneers at you. Texas pride comes off as 'y'all suck' quite often.
I've found that overwhelmingly that when people speak of soft power in the last few decades, what they are really talking about is television and movies.
With the exception of basically just Jia Zhangke, China sucks at this. It's hard to make a quality product when the world's dullest autocrat has the final say in what gets published.
But what is interesting is that I think there is far less a monoculture around movies and television today than there was even five years ago. What universally watched films or television is the US exporting nowadays? Americans don't even watch the same things in any numbers anymore.
I am curious how that is going to change *every* nation's soft power in the coming decades.
How much soft-power can you project with short-form video in your native language?
Wait until a charismatic Dem like Obama wins the Oval in '28, and ushers in--or reinstates--a raft of popular programs. Which will boost US soft power. But maybe not much, considering how much damage has been done by recent GOP stupidity.
When I lived abroad for eight years, every time a Dem was in the WH, the locals were friendly and pro-American. When it was a Republican, all I'd get were sullen stares...
Is there some other Europe that maybe I haven't heard of? Because the Europe I have been to just isn't like that at all.
Over a ten year period--1984 to 1994--I lived abroad for eight years: 4 in Thailand; 2 in Saudi; 17 months in India; the rest mostly in Asia, with a four month stint in the UK. During most of that time I dressed in khakis and blue button-downs--the quintessential Young Republican look, which no doubt influenced how I was perceived.
My then-wife and brother in law are both Brits; and I had a serious German gf (long-distance relationship) before that. So my experience was not EU-centric.
Thanks for the great post! This is one of those myths that my international friends living in the U.S. especially have been suckered into. For them I think China just represents this pseudo utopian communist alternative to what they see as aggressive capitalism in the states. It almost feels like the way American kids became enamored with Hindu religion and culture in the 60s. They didn’t want to live in India once they went there at the time but they wanted an alternative to evil Christianity and there it was!
Chinese report feeling safer walking the streets at night than do Americans, despite having fewer police per capita. But during my time in Hangzhou, there were police at literally every single major intersection.
But distinctly Chinese cultural forms like T'Ai Chi and Qigong are indeed phenomenal. And while they require a lifetime to master, benefits can be experienced immediately. But if you're really serious about going deep, finding elite teachers of said forms are more easily found in Taiwan or Kuala Lumpur.
In the PRC, the fewer cops around, the safer you are.
An alternative to aggressive capitalism? Did you see all those videos of Chinese mega-malls accompanying Noah's piece?
Are you serious about the boba chain comment? Aren't there tons of Taiwanese boba chains in the US? Chicha Sanchen, Happy Lemon, Gonga Cha, etc are pretty widespread.
They're not super popular...I expected a lot better!
Idk, I've lived in half a dozen states in the USA and I have never heard of any of these chains. Guess Im just not Cali enough.
That's interesting, are there other chains that you do see more of? Google says there are 200+ Gong Cha locations and 100+ Happy Lemon locations in the US.
I think the only chain I have had in the USA was Kung FU Tea. I have had a lot of boba from small mom and pop type spots in college towns, but I dont think any established chains.
Good piece Noah but I think you are underselling the structural reason. Cultural soft power is fundamentally about freedom of failure and expression, and CCP cannot tolerate that by design. Japan, Korea, US dominate culturally because thousands of small studios and weird auteurs are allowed to fail loudly without asking permission, and that churn IS the product. Any civilization that wants real soft power has to first let its people be free to make bad art, and Beijing will never allow that. My bet is in 10 years when India crosses the per capita threshold you will see a similar boom from there too, for the same structural reason. I already see examples of such cinema around me, but it will take a few more years of ironing out things before it goes truly global. India at the moment, is not as free as a truly Western liberal democracy but it is much freer than the plethora of auth countries around us, and rising per capita will naturally rein in whatever mild auth tendencies exist. In the end a bunch of decentralized free actors will always come out better, all the ingredients are there.
Come to think of it, almost all of China's problems can be attributed to CCP's desire of control. Sure that "control" gave it easy wins in just steamrolling infrastructure and other basic stuff to get easy gains and reach a level but that model has its limits, in the end you have to let go and let markets and people do their things. Control is their ultimate achilles heel
Good coverage of "soft power" on the cultural (film, music, TV, games, tourism) front. But I think you're underselling one point which is that China is doing extremely well on the techno-industrial aesthetic channels. Maybe you already covered that in the past (new reader here). To me those BYD, DJI, Unitree, Xiaomi showcase videos are harkening back to the Japanese 80s tech demos with Walkman, Toyota, and Sony that were popular with the demographic that used to default to admiring Japanese tech and ended up defining an entire generation of tastes. Similar with American companies in the 1990-2010s (Apple). All this cutting-edge hardware (and software) is also a big part of the AI push and likely the focus of the world over the next few decades, China being at the forefront of all this will pay a lot of dividends for them.
I also think that gaming will play a bigger role. Wukong was just the start and notable because there hasn't ever been an AAA Chinese game. Tecent now owns a decent chunk of the video game industry and we are already seeing multiple titles that will likely bring Chinese game studios to the forefront.
Final random thought: Soft power is a bit of a zero-sum game. A relative shift away from American soft power because of "Americaminning" is still a shift away from American hegemony and will result in a shift in geopolitical global alignments. Whether or not China can take advantage of that is question that will be answered in the coming years.
I'm honestly baffled by how many column inches the internet gives to the notion of 'soft power'...i remember distinctly 2 years ago when sleepy joe was making all the right noises to american allies, whilst china was still opening up post-covid, and the US was therefore coming away with far superior 'likeability' scores as a result. Now its flipped on its head 2 years on. Such a durable, accurate, reliable type of 'power' this is!
Equally baffled by the idea that you need to be a democracy to play this game...get the impression this is one of those old 90s maxims / truisms that, like all 90s maxims / truisms, will soon bite the dust. Anyone remember the democratic peace theory? Or the capitalist peace theory ("no 2 countries with a mcdonalds will go to war")? Or the "only democracies can innovate" theory? Or the "privatisation + deregulation = good, industrial policy = bad" theory?
Aware that Noah has this longstanding japan / korea fetish, but frankly, nothing tells me that any (american) obsession with the 2 has a special cultural / social / emotional 'depth' that cant be replicated for china. Far more important than the 'democracy' check box, i get the impression that wealth, fancy buildings, fascinating stories, interesting pop culture etc etc are far more important to attracting overseas fanboys. All of these, at least in the east asian context, correlate positively with economic growth and improving standards of living. After all, nobody was a fan of korean culture in the 1990s...or crowing about sushi in the 1960s
I do not know much about the meaning of soft power. A detailed definition would help. Despite many economic achievements, China is a political hell on Earth. The US is a very unequal society and a now a very flawed democracy. Many other countries are far better choices to live, work, and visit.
It's honestly too multidimensional to have a single definition, which is one reason it's so fun to talk about!
VOA and USAID were considered pillars of American soft power, costing about 1% of our Federal budget.
But our rulers decided they were Woke and Gay, and just had to go...
meaningless metric dreamt up by an american academic (Nye). Leaderboards shift around every 2-3 years depending on which superpower is proactively throwing its weight around vs which is publicly saying all the right things.
Besides inflated tourism receipts, yet to see any tangible economic / geopolitical benefit any country has gotten from its stores of 'soft power'.
Not just short-time tourism, but long-term attraction of talent from overseas.
That is not just a question of money. Saudi Arabia has a lot of money and no income taxes, but also a reputation of having strict Islamic mores (though that has been weakening lately) and dissolving regime critics in acid. That acts as somewhat of a brake on its ability to attract talented people.
You can even see it in the US today. The harsh treatment meted out by the ICE against not-necessarily-illegal aliens is making students from abroad reconsider whether they should try Harvard or Stanford, or rather Cambridge or Zürich.
The modern success of the US stands on a few pillars, one of which is an absolutely massive brain influx from the rest of the world, which started with the Jewish professors abandoning Europe after Nazi purges. Prior to that, it was Germany who had the most advanced science on Earth, not the US.
Jacobin's take on China is typically blinkered. On inequality, they look at a distribution where the top and middle are closer than in America, but the weaker safety net leaves the bottom worse off. On homelessness, they see clean safe cities but lament that the homeless have been pushed to the margins.
In both cases they miss that this is a very appealing deal for the middle! In both cases, this is a society more oriented toward the attitudes and benefit of the middle, rather than a more American style of a small ruling class dispensing aid to a highly visible and present underclass.
Nicer for normies, in short.
No, I don't think so. As Jacobin correctly points out, the Chinese middle class is burdened by a weak health care system, high education costs, and poor job opportunities. The fact that some rich people in China have recently lost a bunch of their wealth doesn't actually do much to help the middle class.
One additional thing Jacobin doesn't mention is housing costs; even after the recent price decline, a house costs much more relative to income in a Chinese city than in an American one (even San Francisco). Yet despite that high cost, the Chinese middle class have seen their wealth decimated by the housing bust.
> The fact that some rich people in China have recently lost a bunch of their wealth doesn't actually do much to help the middle class.
A lesson that the left will never learn
Is the healthcare system that weak for the middle class? I mostly hear good things, though I have only lived in Tier one and Tier two cities.
Very in character for Jacobin. Progressives are a creature of the upper-middle class almost exclusively. While they love to talk about the "working class", the "inequality" they complain about is exclusively that between them and the super-rich. Never that between them and the working class, which they somehow consider themselves part of, but most certainly are not.
Chinamaxxing still seems super fake to me. I haven't been able to convince anyone I know to visit China. I tried before Covid when I lived here and now, even my very liberal friends would never visit. I will believe it is real when I see normal people posting it online, not just influencers who get a paid trip.
Just a quick remark about the Politico poll. Willingly or not, it is creating some manipulation. I am willing to bet that if there was a "Neither" option in the questionnaire, it would get the greatest share of the vote in all polled countries. But I guess we will never know.
For the record, I don't believe this was deliberate, just not enough competence on the pollster's part.
When a Chinese band can sell out a 75,000 seat stadium for three and four nights consecutively then they will have made it into our culture.
my Shenzhen visit chinamaxxed me in a way that was organic and not fake
people engaged in Chinamaxing don't know how the extensive infrastructure, glittering skyscrapers, midnight safety, etc. have been funded...
Can confirm, Shenzhen was not a very exciting place to be last I visited. Very artificial, sterile vibe.