China's soft power and public diplomacy

Here is a recording of a talk I gave in Oxford two weeks ago. It was part of the Media & Governance Seminar Series for the Programme in Comparative Media, Law and Policy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlMCF-cldOM&list=PL70E56B646E48F1F3&index=6&feature=plpp_video

The 'Facebook Revolutions,' 2011

At the weekend I participated in a fascinating workshop organised at Leeds University about the Arab Spring and Asia. Colleagues representing Middle East Studies, Politics, Development Studies, Asian Studies and Sociology met to discuss the recent political events in the Arab world (the 'Arab Spring') and their ripple effects across Asia. I was asked to introduce a discussion on New Social Movements, Media and Technology, and we had a lively debate. I thought it appropriate to share some of our thoughts here.

I expressed my unease with the idea that these were the Facebook or Social Media revolutions. Would the unrest have occurred anyway? After all, the European revolutions of 1848 had spread across the continent within two weeks; and the events of 1989 occurred with the help of satellite television and the fax machine. Besides, there is something determinist about claiming that these were social media uprisings, and I am very uncomfortable with that idea. Social media are simply another tool that can expedite events; they facilitate speed, mobilisation and the demonstration effect; but the uprisings were started, fed and endured by people struggling for the human condition.

Nevertheless there are three key things to note about the events of 2011.

First, a new generation of the digitally-literate is comfortable with these technologies, but also with the consequences of these technologies: networks, flat hierarchies, the convergence of platforms, and the ease with which anyone can now be the source, producer and consumer of news, information and opinion. We can see the same thing happening in Burma with the use of camera phones to capture videos of human rights abuses that are then downloaded to The Voice of Burma in Scandanavia before publication and circulation on the web.

Second, we cannot discount the role of television, and especially Al-Jazeera which is considered a credible and authoritative source of news in and about the Middle East. The difference now is that Al-Jazeera was one of the first TV stations to depend on 'citizen journalism' and social media to inform its programming.

Third, the reaction of the old political guard in the Middle East was interesting. They demonstrated that governments are beginning to realise 'if you can't beat them, join them'; and while in both Tunisia and Egypt the government did try to use old-fashioned techniques to control communication (technologies and the sources, and using censorship) they quickly recognised the possible value in trying to control the narrative itself. So the credibility of the political opposition that was tweeting and blogging and Facebooking was routinely discredited and their legitimacy questioned. It reminded me of the so-called 50 cent party in China - groups of young netizens who are paid for posting pro-govermement opinions on the web, thus trying to spin and manage the flow of information.

There was a consensus among the participants that the social media were a tool only in the 2011 uprisings, and that new media were in some senses a distraction from the reality of what was actually happening. There was a claim that by focusing on, and overestimating the importance of the social media we remove agency from the debates (especially when we lose sight of the fact that these were not 'Facebook' revolutions, but Tunisian Revolutions and Egyptian Revolutions). The uprisings (there was some discomfort with the term revolutions since only regimes and not whole social orders had been replaced) would have happened anyway. We need to look at the antecedents of these events and understan the long-term context. Struggles against oppression, corruption, and poverty have a long history in this part of the world - they did not just suddenly erupt in 2011.  For this reason, the term Arab Spring is innaccurate (one participant said 'offensive') because it denies the historical specificities and processes, and suggests these uprisings appeared from nowhere. It also raises questions about news agendas and the way the Facebook Revolution and Arab Spring are simple and sexy tags for these otherwise complex events.
      

Chinese soft power and credibility

I wrote this piece for The China Daily and then I decided to ask them not to publish it. So, I thought I would post it here. I think that current reports coming out of China about increased repression in Tibet and areas of Tibetan residency (for example Sichuan) demonstrate the continued problems China faces in the credibility of its message. See this report from the Guardian newspaper which details some of the hearts and minds techniques China is using in Tibet (including old-fashioned re-education) and also its attempt to control media reporting of events there http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/12/tibets-acts-self-immolation-china

Is this newspaper an example of China’s soft power? It is, after all, published in English and provides news, information and comment about China for an international audience. Does it help attract interest in China? Will it mobilise public opinion and change the way readers think about China? Has it changed your mind? There is no doubt that The China Daily is an important part of what often appears to be titanic soft power push by the Chinese government which spends a reported $9 billion per year on soft power activities (making China the highest soft power spender in Asia). China has certainly embraced the idea that soft power can make a difference with an enthusiasm rarely witnessed elsewhere: Confucius Institutes, promotional videos in New York’s Times Square, pandas arriving at Edinburgh Zoo – China’s soft power strategy explores new and innovative techniques of attracting global attention, while remembering that History and culture can also resonate with international audiences.

The problem with any soft power strategy is finding the answer to the all-important question: Is it working? In designing their international outreach programmes many governments concentrate too much on outputs (how many viewers does CCTV 9 have? How many foreign students are studying in China? How many people have seen the exhibition of the Terracotta Army at the British Museum?) and pay far too little attention to impact. Outputs are an important indicator, but as with any statistic they tell only a partial story. So knowing the box office takings for a Chinese film released in the US allows us to appreciate how many people bought tickets, but tells us nothing about their opinions of the film, or even if they stayed awake during it! Let’s take a look at some evidence:

In a 2005 poll conducted in 22 countries, the BBC World Service found that 48% of respondents had a positive image of China, and 30% a negative image. Of the Asian countries surveyed, 55% of respondents had a positive image.

In a 2011 poll, the number of respondents in 22 countries with a positive image of China fell to 44%, with 38% having a negative image. In Asian countries, the number of positive images fell by 14% to 41%.  Similar data is found in other credible surveys conducted by Gallup, Pew Global Attitudes and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Clearly these are disturbing results for China since they suggest that despite the expansion in soft power activities, both the regional and international profiles of China have gone down.

 Here is a more anecdotal item of evidence: At the opening of the 2011 China Movie Culture Week at New York’s Lincoln Centre, not one single person attended the premier of the movie, Founding of the Republic (建国大业) , financed by the Communist Party’s largest state-owned film company, China Film Corporation. Several other events in China Movie Culture Week were cancelled due to poor attendance.

The problem is what we might call the ‘credibility gap’. In many parts of the world public opinion identifies a very clear discrepancy between China’s soft power message and its domestic and foreign policy behaviour. Moreover, Chinese media struggle to build and maintain credibility among their potential audiences. Because CCTV and Xinhua are located within China’s state system, they lack the kind of credibility that the BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN enjoy. Audiences are naturally suspicious that CCTV is a mere channel for the dissemination of propaganda rather than soft power. Perhaps if China Movie Culture Week had not chosen to show Founding of the Republic with its obvious patriotic themes and its connection to the Communist Party, but had instead shown a film made by an independent director with no political agenda, it may have fared better. It would also have signalled that China is changing and is not using the same kind of blunt propaganda that it did in the past. Films such as Changwei Gu's Love for Life (最爱), which tackles the very sensitive and previously taboo subject of AIDS, have enormous soft power potential because they demonstrate changing attitudes in China. So soft power credibility is not just a condition of autonomy; it is also predicated on (i) a consistency between the message and practice (whenever a story emerges about poisoned milk, repression in Tibet, a Chinese Nobel Prize winner being denied the opportunity to collect his prize, or the arrest of an internationally-famous artist such as Ai Wei Wei, China’s soft power suffers a set-back); and (ii) a capacity to accept criticism as a natural consequence of international engagement without retreating into a fierce nationalist rhetoric that believes anyone who criticises China is by definition anti-Chinese.  Perhaps this is the key to understanding how China’s soft power may have more impact consistent with its expenditure and effort in the soft power domain. Presentation can never be a substitute for policy.

 

 

China's war against Harry Potter

Thanks to my colleague Robin Brown for drawing this excellent article to my attention.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/04/chinas_war_against_harry_potter

I agree with Robin's comments on this piece (http://pdnetworks.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/hu-jintao-and-cultural-construction-in-china/#comment-491). Creativity has always been a problem for China, and there is a wonderful collection of essays addressing this issue - Culture in the Contemporary PRC, edited by Julia Strauss and Michel Hockx (CUP 2005). The contributors address the problems facing China's burgeoning creative industries and offer some interesting perspectives on why the Chinese tend to imitate rather than innovate. Hunan TV's Super Girl (or to give it its full title, Mongolian Cow Yoghurt Super Girl Competition) was a milestone; not only did it bring X-Factor-style reality TV to China, but it also depended on the audience participating and voting to save their favoured singer. It has since been pulled from the airwaves ...

I had some experience of this Chinese penchant for imitation when I lived in Ningbo. At a time when only four or five Harry Potter books had been published, hawkers were selling Harry Potter 7,8,9 and even 10. (The Harry Potter I saw at the cinema was censored - Harry's first kiss was deleted.) Moreover, I saw a Chinese version of Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire, but with contestants playing for prizes instead of cash. Instead of buying formats like other countries (so we have Indonesian Idol, Indian Idol, American Idol etc - all looking exactly the same), China takes the original concept and Sinifies it, something that we should not criticise (after all, this is what Mao did with Marxism-Leninism).

Robin and the author of the article, Stephen Walt, are correct; you can't legislate to make a population more creative. As Walt says: 'Government leaders don't create new and innovative art; it springs up from unfettered human beings, and often from fringe elements in society. And as Hu surely knows, some of the most creative artists are dissidents.' Certainly the most creativity in China is found on the internet and is subversive, satirising the party, its fiats and its way of working - see http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/chinese-bloggers-riff-off-worst-ever-doctored-propaganda-photo/241295/. Such creativity is inspired and inspiring, and is a serious challenge to all those inside and outside China who see only staid, controlled and censored media and communications platforms.

The problem is with a new directive that Chinese television should broadcast fewer 'vulgar' programmes and more news and programmes with virtuous moral content. But who decides which is which? And authoritarian regimes pull popular entertainment programmes from the schedules at their peril. One of the reasons the Romanian people turned against Nicolae Ceausescu at the end of the 1980s was because he pulled from the airwaves a popular British serial from the 1970s, The Onedin Line, and replaced it with North Korean-inspired propaganda. The Romanians turned to Hungarian TV via illegal satellite dishes for entertainment (Hungarian TV was far more liberal and even satirised the Hungarian regime and its Soviet masters). When Romanians saw on Hungarian TV the revolutions sweeping through Eastern Europe, well ....

The Chinese Communist Party needs to be careful. By removing popular entertainment programmes, the regime may actually be driving the people to seek out the kind of foreign programmes that Hu Jintao's new rant against 'cultural imperialism' opposes. Be careful what you wish for ...

Conference in memory of Professor Philip M. Taylor

Philip (Phil) Taylor was an intellectual powerhouse in International Communications. He was the first Chair of the subject in the UK, and helped to create the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. I am proud to have been his PhD student (1991-94) and, since my return to Leeds in 2007, his colleague and friend. His histories of public and cultural diplomacy and propaganda are outstanding and remain the seminal works in the field today. His 1981 book, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939, first published in 1981 and reissued in 2007, is by far his most enduring work. Based on careful archival research, The Projection of Britain is as relevant today as it ever was and should be read by every student of international communications, and should inspire every PhD student wanting to know how to research and write on historical subject matter. Phil later branched into more contemporary scholarship and was in constant demand by militaries around the world who sought his advice on communications and information strategy in the so-called 'war on terror'. His work, always informed by his all-round historical perspective, was devoted to demonstrating how communications can save lives, and he took each death of members of the US or UK psyops teams in Iraq and Afghanistan very personally.

I was honoured to organise a conference in his memory on 16th and 17th December 2011 in the University of Leeds to coincide with the first anniversary of his untimely passing. 'Organised' is used here loosely: in fact the organisation of the conference was really down to one of our star PhD students, Molly Sisson, who writes her own blog on her research on student exchanges and public diplomacy (http://americanstudentsinbritain.blogspot.com/). Many, many thanks to Molly for all her hard work on this conference.

So many of Phil's colleagues, collaborators and former students from all over the world gathered in Leeds to talk about their own research in three key areas - the history of propaganda, contemporary strategic communications, and war journalism - and to reflect on Phil's impact and legacy. The list of participants is too long for this blog, but I was delighted that journalist Paul Moorcraft, Davids Culbert and Ellwood, Nick Cull, Michael Nelson from Reuters, Stephen Badsey, Kate Utting, James Chapman, Jeffrey Richards and Piers Robinson all attended. Junior scholars, always very important to Phil, were represented by many of his former PhD students - Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, Cristina Archetti, Elina Bardach-Yalov, and of course Molly Sisson - and Edward Corse who has just completed his PhD thesis on the British Council between the wars, thus bringing us full circle to Phil's intellectual origins. The highlight of the conference was undoubtedly the talk delivered by the BBC's Kate Adie on her experiences as a war correspondent. Phil always told a story about how Kate had saved his life in Beirut, though we are sure the story got bigger and bigger every time he told it.

Dr Cristina Archetti and Paul Moorcraft

Kate Adie and Gary Rawnsley with some of the current MA students in ICS

Molly Sisson, Professor Nick Cull, Dr Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, Dr Elina Bardach-Yalov

Professors Gary Rawnsley, Nick Cull, David Culbert and David Ellwood

Professor Ed Spiers, Professor David Culbert, Dr Kate Utting, Professor Stephen Badsey

I should take this opportunity to thank Professor David Welch of the University of Kent at Canterbury for providing some much needed funding for the conference. David is editing a festschrift for Phil that will include many of the papers presented at the conference.

Phil helped to design the interior of the Institute's new home on the Leeds University campus. He was particularly proud of the cinema, and so it seemed appropriate to organise a ceremony at the conference to name this room The Philip M. Taylor Cinema. The plaque was unveiled by the Vice Chancellor of Leeds University, Professor Michael Arthur and Phil's widow, Sue Heward.

Professor Michael Arthur, Sue Heward, Professor Gary Rawnsley, and Judith Stamper (Acting Head of ICS) outside the Philip M. Taylor Cinema at the University of Leeds

We will all continue to miss Phil. He was such a commanding presence in many people's lives, but the work goes on. His website - a 'one stop shop' for resources relating to international communciations, propaganda and public diplomacy - is available at http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/index.cfm?outfit=pmt

From the BBC World Service's Facebook page

"The BBC World Service has been based at Bush House in central London since 1941. For over 70 years it has broadcast from this landmark building; through a World War, Cold War, decolonisation throughout Africa, the Iranian Revolution, Perestroika, Tiananmen Square, two Gulf Wars and into the new Millennium. But soon it's leaving Bush House, to join the rest of BBC News in one new building, adjoining a refurbished Broadcasting House."

This is very sad for me. I became interested in shortwave radio and therefore international communications through listening to the BBC World Service in the early morning on FM (after BBC Radio 4 closed down for the night). The strains of Lilliburlero at the top of the hour were a clear identifier, and I always associated it with accurate, interesting global news. Lilliburlero has gone and now the last remaining identifier - Bush House - is likewise set to disappear.

In the comments on the Facebook page many subscribers said that the content of programmes is more important than the building from which they are broadcast; and I agree. Provided the BBC World Service can maintain its high standards in news, and in producing and broadcasting innovative, exciting and informative programmes in a multitude of languages we have nothing to worry about. But as I enter middle age, I still can't help feeling that the BBC's departure from Bush House means the loss of something which, like Lilliburlero, gave the station a very unique identity among audiences.

Above all, the World Service's location in Bush House reminded audiences, the BBC itself and the British government that it was part of the BBC and yet separate from it. It was designed for a very particular purpose and had a very distinct mission - to help nation speak peace unto nation.

Most worrying, however, is that the BBC World Service will no longer be funded by the British Foreign Office but will have to compete with the rest of the BBC's output for finance. This means some very tough decisions will have to be made: From Our Own Correspondent or Strictly Come Dancing? Can the BBC justify the World Service to licence fee payers, the majority of whom have never heard its programmes, and may not even know it exists? At a time when governments around the world are expanding their international broadcasting - China in particular is engaged in an aggressive investment programme to expand its reach across the globe - the British are cutting back, closing language services (closing Mandarin is not just a mistake, it is a crime) and forcing the World Service to become a competitor for funding. Can the UK claim to be serious about public diplomacy and soft power while denying its most treasured instrument of international outreach the funds and independence to do its job?

China's soft power - an interview with China Radio International

Just before Christmas I was interviewed by China Radio International about China's soft power. You can listen to the interview here:

http://english.cri.cn/7146/2011/12/31/1942s674081.htm

I am very pleased that they broadcast most of what I said, even the more critical parts. This is an honour for me as I remember as a young teenager  listening regularly to Radio China International on my Vega Selena 215 shortwave radio.