China's Soft Power

Fareed Zakaria makes an excellent point here:

But neither Japan nor China has any real vision of what Asia should look like, certainly not a vision other countries will buy into. Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar, explains, "People speak of China's 'soft power.' But this is a misunderstanding of the term, coined by Joseph Nye. Soft power means the appeal of one's culture, ideas and principles. China has no soft power. No one in Asia wants the Chinese dream or pines to live in a Chinese world. Even the Chinese don't really know what that would mean."

China has used soft power only in the sense that it has exercised its power softly.

Actually, the whole article is interesting, in that Asian leaders are starting to think seriously about what they want Asia to look like in the next century.

But the broadest reason for the shift is that Asian countries are beginning to see China's rise as the complex phenomenon that it is. In Japan, India and much of Southeast Asia there is still great hope that China's growth will be an economic boon for them. But there is also a realization that an Asia dominated by China would not be in their interests. "We want a solar system with many suns," says Raslan.

Like Tatooine? Cool!

Sorry.

I would only add that it's a common belief among smaller powers that safety lies in being able to play larger powers against one another. So in theory, Malaysia might think it can guarantee its interests by (say) playing India, China, the US, and Indonesia against each other. It's a nice idea, but the history of Europe doesn't actually lend a lot of support to this idea. If you look at the smaller powers that were caught between major powers, it's the history of Poland, Belgium, Holland, and Yugoslavia. All of these countries have been invaded multiple times in this century alone. They've never really had a whole lot of independence, despite the fact that they've sometimes had some autonomy (see Yugoslavia under Tito.)

If I were Vietnamese, Malaysian, or Singaporean, I wouldn't take a lot of comfort from the idea that my leaders were trying to play the large powers against one another. Indeed, there's a potential disaster in the making here. It was after all the madness in the Balkans that prompted World War I.