From Soft Power to “wenhua ruan shili”: Theory and Practice in the Chinese Discourse on Soft Power

With the introduction of Joseph S. Nye’s theory of soft power in the 1990s, the analysis of power relations within the field of today’s world politics reveals that their nature is changing and that attraction wielded to generate desired outcomes is becoming increasingly relevant as one of its components. The study establishes this theory as a frame for the investigation of the discourse on China’s use of soft power in its ascendance as a world power, which currently permeates academic and political spheres around the globe. In this dissertation, a specific attempt is made to understand how China views its own soft power, placing particular attention on the cultural aspect of it, and stressing the features that differentiate the Chinese interpretation of soft power from the Western discourse. Through an interdisciplinary examination of Chinese leaders’ official speeches, policy documents, news and media, and academic papers and volumes, it will thus be shown how the original soft power concept has been reinterpreted, modified, and expanded since being incorporated in the Chinese context. The related debate, which started in the early 1990s, when the theory made its first appearance in intellectual circles, being presented at first through translations of Nye’s works and discussed from a theoretical perspective in scholarly articles, has gradually penetrated the policy-making and leadership levels. Since the Hu Jintao era and, even more assuredly, in the current Xi Jinping era, the theory of soft power has been concretely included within China’s national strategy, as signaled by the incorporation into the political jargon of not only the wording “ruan shili