China’s $10bn annual spending on soft power has bought little of it

CHINA WANTS the world to love it. In 2007 Hu Jintao, its leader at the time, announced to a congress of the Communist Party that acquiring soft power, or ruan shili, was essential for the country to become a global force. Xi Jinping, who succeeded Mr Hu in 2012, has zealously continued his mission to expand China’s cultural appeal as quickly as its economic heft and military strength. Today the party spends about $10bn a year on soft power.

Its most notable strategy has been to build Confucius Institutes on foreign university campuses. These offer instruction in Mandarin, cooking and dancing, among other cultural pursuits. According to Joshua Nederhood of Development Reimagined, a consultancy based in Beijing, the party has opened more than 500 of these institutes in the past 15 years, along with nearly 1,200 Confucius Classrooms, which offer language courses at schools. This rapid growth means that China, which had almost no foreign cultural outposts in 2000, now has more than any other country.

But despite this gigantic public-relations campaign, the world’s esteem for China—or at the very least, for its Communist Party—has fallen sharply. Since 2006 Gallup, a pollster, has asked people around the globe whether they approve or disapprove of China’s leadership. The Economist has looked at the annual figures for 123 countries and found that, in 2007, the average country gave the Chinese government a net approval rating of +11% (measured as the percentage who approve minus the percentage of those who disapprove). A decade later, that number had dwindled to just +1%. Africans tend to think of China most highly, with a net rating of +34%, and Europeans are most wary, with a tally of -14%. But in every continent Gallup recorded a decline of at least five percentage points between 2007 and 2017.

The Confucius Institutes are unlikely to be the cause of this change in global opinion, since few people outside universities have encountered them. However, they do offer clues as to why China might have gained more foes than friends. Many academics have complained that the institutes spread propaganda and suppress discussion of sensitive topics, such as Taiwanese independence. A few Western universities have shut them down. A clumsy attempt to impress foreigners, it seems, might be worse than none at all. Perhaps some people have also been spooked by claims that China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building project, is really a way to exert political influence.

Mr Xi seems to have realised the need for an even softer touch. He is now intent on building Chinese Cultural Centres. These are not located on campuses and so avoid being seen as interfering with liberal institutions. And Chinese news agencies have turned their sights to Facebook, where they have acquired hundreds of millions of followers who receive fluffy articles about the country. The Communist Party’s net approval rating got its first noticeable boost in 2018, rising from +1% to +4%, although the reason is not clear. It might take China a long time to recover the support that it has lost in the past decade.