Category Archives: Strategic Communications

My Power is Softer than Yours 1

Asia, Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communications • Tags: , , , , , , , ,
English: Press room of State Council Informati...

Press room of the State Council Information Office of China (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

China’s Soft Power in East Asia: A Quest for Status and Influence?
Chin-Hao Huang
National Bureau of Asian Research
January 2013
24pp

China has pledged itself to winning the “soft power” game in Asia and worldwide ever since the phrase became a buzzword among international relations literati following the 204 publication of Joseph Nye‘s Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. Beijing has spent billions on this campaign, funding schools of Chinese language and culture, big-budget films, and an expanding global media network of foreign language television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and wire services all controlled by the State Council Information Office.

Beijing has done little to help itself in this campaign, especially with its neighbors. Armed belligerence in the South China Sea and the Senkakus, bolstered by questionable legal claims, has made China look less attractive to its neighbors and more like a teenaged dragon out to test the limits of its growing power.

Chin-Hao Huang of USC tells us not to let ourselves get lulled by this ham-handed behavior. China appearing itself in the foot does not mean that the U.S. and Europe can let up their efforts to build attraction and influence in the region. In fact, it doesn’t mean that it is losing the soft-power war, either. Studies indicate that China’s soft power is rated just below that of Japan and the United States by populations in Asia. So, in fact, the U.S.  needs to get better at playing the game right now, both to exploit the current opportunities and as a hedge against the day that China begins playing the coquette again.

We also have to consider the possibility that the elements that invite soft power may vary from culture to culture. We see that in our own efforts to build soft power among Muslim populations worldwide. It may be that by compartmentalizing the Senkakus and South China Sea disputes that China is able to play divide-and-conquer among its neighbors. Or it may be that some cultures respect the might China has created even as that power is aimed at them, especially if China is able to rise at the cost of Japanese and American prestige in the region. Asia for the Asians Redux, if you will.

Whether you buy Huang’s argument or whether you think he is repeating the obvious, he deserves credit for pointing out that just because China is playing the bully doesn’t mean they’re losing hearts and minds, and we need to figure out how to play that game much better in a region that has stymied us for half a century.

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Radio, Television, and Public Diplomacy Reply

Media, Policy, Strategic Communications
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BBG’s Strategic 5yr Plan: to inform, engage and connect.

In the darkest days of the Cold War, the United States focused considerable effort on bringing to the world what can either be described as “the truth,” or “the truth according to the United States government ” with services like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. We can argue about the value of these broadcasts to the people of Latin America, but it seems clear these broadcasts provided a critical information lifeline to the people of China and the countries locked behind the USSR’s Iron Curtain.

In the years since the opening of China and the end of the Cold War, however, these services have lacked the kind of clear mission they once had, and the rise of the Internet calls into question the value of broadcast services generally. I would argue, though, that America’s global broadcast assets remain a critical part of public diplomacy. Commercial enterprises like CNN and Fox News have their place, but they are not in the business of conducting information activities in support of US foreign policy.

The BBG spells out exactly why it should continue to receive funding over the next four years in its 2012 strategic plan. Admittedly awash in bureaucratese, the concrete steps it outlines take the organization a big step toward regaining the relevance it once had. Even given the glacial speed of governmental organizations, the plan is realistic and doable.

If the plan lacks anything it is a clearer vision of where the organizations need to be in 10 years. More needs to be done than what is outlined here, and both what and why need to be made clearer.

Nonetheless, even die-hard net-heads like myself cannot help but see the value of broadcast in America’s public diplomacy after reading this.

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Replacing Propaganda Reply

International Relations, Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communications
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While the works we discuss at The Peking Review tend to be book-length, we occasionally review shorter works because the pithy writing makes them as effective as books. One such work is Christopher Paul’s Getting Better at Strategic Communication, essentially a transcript of his lengthy but tight testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

I have a lengthening bookshelf of works on various aspects of strategic communication, which Paul defines as “coordinated actions, messages, images, and other forms of signaling or engagement intended to inform, influence or persuade selected audiences in support of national objectives.” What Paul does in the space of twenty double-spaced pages is provide a layman’s summary of the field.

The reason this is important is that governments generally and the US government in particular are vexed by how hard it has become to influence a given population or group. Gone are the golden days of “weapons of mass instruction,” wherein influence over or control of the media and a few persuasively-worded messages were sufficient to change attitudes. The response has not been to shrug shoulders and give up on the effort, but to try and craft new ways to win friends and influence peoples, particularly overseas. Thus “strategic communication.”

But as Paul notes in this work, if you ask ten “strategic communication” experts to define the term, you would wind up with ten different definitions. That is only one of a number of problems plaguing governments in their attempt to bring their communications skills into the 21st Century, the most serious of which is that politicians, bureaucrats, and cadres the world over still think in terms of the mass-media message pump.

By no means is this problem limited to government: enterprises and NGOs are also struggling to figure out how to remake their thinking and their organizations in an age where the internet exposes brand as illusions and messages as spin. All of these groups are groping toward an answer, and Paul provides an illumiating snapshot of where the US government is in the process.

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Hard Power in an Age of Soft Power Reply

National Security, Strategic Communications, Strategy

In Hard Power and Soft Power: The Utility of Military Force as an Instrument of Policy in the 21st Century, Professor Colin S. Gray has written what is perhaps one of the most thoughtful contrasts between the virtues of hard power (read “military force”) and soft power written since Joseph Nye fully outlined the concept of Soft Power nearly two decades ago.

Gray is cynical not so much of Nye’s original proposition, but of the growing buzz around soft power as some form of alternative to armed force. Some of Gray’s major points resonate, and suggest that thinking about soft power in Washington and elsewhere is a little “soft.” Specifically, Gray notes that hard power and soft power are not substitutable for each other, and and that military force is not an anachronism.

At the same time, Professor Gray is no mindless advocate of military power, he openly acknowledges the limits of military power. Even better, he tosses a wide critique at military faddists with a quote I am going to have bronzed. “When adopted uncritically and without noticeably perceptive situational awareness, nearly every idea in the strategist’s conceptual arsenal can be dangerous.”

This is a superb work by a strategist of the first order, and it belongs as a companion volume to Nye’s writings or any discussion of strategic communications.

I have a few quibbles, because I feel that Gray overstates at least two of his conclusions, and misses one point that would fit well in his analysis. First, he suggests that strategic competency is less relevant for soft power. I disagree. I would argue that because the western democracies have never generated the means, doctrines, or methodologies to translate grand strategy into the employment of soft power, we are unable to wield such power in a strategic manner. Nye, in identifying strategic power as an axis, has given us a useful starting point, but we have yet to develop the concepts that would allow us to make “strategic communications” truly strategic.

Second, Gray argues that soft power merely “co-opts the readily co-optable.” I respond that soft power operates on longer timelines than most operational art is prepared to consider. Soft power, unlike an air strike, must be built over time, its targets selected, and action taken sometimes years in advance of the actual start of kinetic operations.

Finally, Gray overlooks the soft power aspects of hard power. Respect for the military capabilities of a nation from other nations are a large – and sometimes significant – contributor to a nation’s soft power. Indeed, it was probably the belief in the prowess of the Red Army and its weaponry more than its ideology that contributed to the influence of the Soviet Union in the three decades after the end of World War II.

But these issues do not detract from the book’s core value in the debate over the changing nature of power in the 21st century. This thin volume belongs on every strategist’s bookshelf.