Soft power is not the PRC’s thing

A man makes a picture
A moving picture
Through the light projected
He can see himself up close

– U2

Even Xi Jinping threw China’s football team under the bus.

During a photo-op at San Francisco’s APEC summit, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin congratulated President Xi for the Chinese football team’s win over Thailand.

“I think there was a lot of luck involved,” Xi demurred. “I’m not so sure about their level.”

China’s football team was supposed to be a national project. Significant resources were directed into football academies and professional leagues. Fortunes were spent on international players and coaches to elevate China’s game. There is no compelling reason a decent national team can’t be formed from a 1.4 billion football-mad population. And yet.

The tragedy of China’s football team has become a point of national commiseration. The teams have been so awful for so long that the Chinese now celebrate just how bad they are.

Xi got in on the national lamentation in more than one way. This year, China appears to have put its football project on ice with an anti-corruption sweep of national football organizations.

As China bungles its football ambitions, it has also dropped the ball on its dreams of impacting other global cultural arenas – film, music, the media. After a decade of massive investment and regulatory support, China still has no K-Pop, no Pokemon, no K-dramas, no Super Mario, no CNN and certainly no Marvel Cinematic Universe to export.

Exceptions exist of course – Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, the video game Genshin Impact – but fanboys do not flock to China as they do to Tokyo, Seoul and LA.

As with football, we suspect China will back-burner these soft power ambitions as well. While China may lack a certain je ne sais quoi for football success, its deficiencies in pop culture and media are fairly obvious – language hurdles, preachy propaganda, video games limits, no “sissy boys,” no gratuitous sex, no crass materialism, no fun.

In 2011, before China’s decade-long push to try to break into international cultural markets, nationalist firebrand Wang Xiaodong wrote the essay “Chinese Industrialization will Determine the Fate of China and the World: A study of the ‘Industrial Party and the ‘Sentimental Party,’” which foresaw the failure to come.

China, according to Wang Xiaodong, had become an industrial nation. It should continue as such and, as such, should not place singing and dancing in its wheelhouse.

What is there to admire in the American financial industry, in Hollywood, in the Grammys or in the NBA? We should keep smelting our iron and let the Americans do the singing and dancing.    

Wang Xiaodong was advocating for China’s so-called Industrial Party, an ambitious political identity that dispensed with the tiresome left-right divide and believed that industry, science and technology would determine China’s future.

To adherents of the Industrial Party, nonmaterial production and “discourse power” are hobby horses of the hopelessly ineffectual Sentimental Party, which includes both the traditional left and right.

To the Industrial Party, soft power is a red herring: Boy bands and superhero movies are “decadent playthings” compared with China’s “80,000-ton stamping die.” According to Wang Xiaodong, China’s soft power contributions to the world will be industrialization, science and technology:  

Not only do we want our products to “go global,” we also want our industrialization to go global, and our high-quality talent to go global. We can spread industrialization to every corner of the world. Many of our scientists and technicians will travel around the world to work, bringing with them civilization, a dignified existence, and relief from poverty. This is one thing that Westerners have been unwilling or powerless to accomplish.

Wang Xiaodong wrote the essay in 2011 when China’s industrial output had just surpassed that of the US. Today, China’s industrial output is twice US levels. China has invested heavily in the Global South, from infrastructure in Africa to manufacturing in ASEAN. But China’s export of cultural products remains inconsequential. 

In 1985, public intellectual Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a quaint polemic against the corrupting influence of American commercial television. Postman lamented: 

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Neil Postman wrote this when only half of Americans had cable TV. Though he denied it, Postman was a lifelong Luddite who was aghast at the corrupting influences of entertainment technology:   

People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Postman died in 2003 and never got to experience smartphones, Instagram, Twitter, President Trump, TikTok and PornHub. We can only imagine how he would have endured his prescience on our current house of horrors. 

In 2008, another penetrating American cultural critic, David Foster Wallace, also left us much too soon. The key insight in Wallace’s opus Infinite Jest is that the preferred state of modern man is the state of being entertained. The McGuffin of the novel is a film, Infinite Jest, that taps into primal infant desires and proves so entertaining that viewers lose interest in all else and will watch continuously in a stupor until they die from dehydration.

David Foster Wallace took his own life twelve years after the publication of Infinite Jest and a year after Apple introduced the iPhone. Had he lived, Wallace would have witnessed all the people in the modern world with their own private copies of Infinite Jest in the palms of their hands. He would have seen silent subway carriages where every last person was hunched over Infinite Jest.

We would like to think David Foster Wallace would smirk rather than recoil in Neil Postmanesque horror.  

While China has failed to penetrate global cultural markets, the massive investments may not have been a failure. China is having a banner year at the box office. More importantly, domestic films have far outperformed Hollywood, clinching all top 10 spots in box office receipts.

On its home turf, China’s studios have outcompeted Hollywood. The top grossing film of the year, Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red, is a crime caper set in Song Dynasty China (960-1279) centered on the promulgation of a famous poem. Viewers’ knowledge of General Yue Fei (who is not a character), his heroic loyalty and the injustice of his execution was simply assumed.

Director Zhang Yimou has gotten some international recognition of his work – from “banned in China” arthouse wrist slitters like Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern to kung-fu minstrel shows like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. However, a crime caper based on a poem written by a Song Dynasty general would have zero appeal in the cultural marketplace of Infinite Jest.

The more remarkable Chinese film of 2023, in our humble opinion, is 30,000 Miles from Chang’an. Only in China can one make a three-hour animated film about Tang Dynasty poets. What is shocking about this animated film is that it can only be truly appreciated by seniors. Bring the grandparents – do not bring the kids. There are no cheap Hollywood plot devices, no gratuitous love story, no bone thrown to the kiddies.

The film is Tolstoian in scope – a hymn to friendship, being young, getting old, ambition, loyalty, the choices we make, the joys of alcohol, what we owe talent, the seduction of power and regret … plenty of regret. The story follows the lifelong friendship between Gao Shi, an honorable military man and minor poet, and the incandescent Li Bai, a poet of celestial talent and endless dissipation. Tying the film together are 48 Tang Dynasty poems and “cameos” from Tang poets, generals, musicians and calligraphers.

While Wang Xiaodong and the Industrial Party would probably favor China’s number two top-grossing film of the year, the science fiction film Wandering Earth 2, they would probably celebrate the direction that cultural production in China has taken.

Let the Koreans play the minstrel with androgynous purple-haired boy bands. Let the Japanese have their anime along with their manga, otaku and creepy hentai. Let the Americans have the NBA, Marvel Cinematic Universe and twerking rapper girls. The end result is a not-to-be-celebrated if spectacular global cavalcade of Infinite Jest – as, all the while, China quietly wires up the Global South with 5G, builds high-speed railways in Laos and Indonesia and industrializes ASEAN.    

Luddite though we be, we believe the Industrial Party would appreciate Neil Postman – at least for his cultural insights. The Industrial Party will not lament China’s failure to export cultural products, especially when the cultural marketplace is what it is. We believe Neil Postman would agree and, with that, we give him the last word:

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

‘Han Feizi‘ is a Beijing-based financial industry veteran.