White Rose East Asia Centre & Foreign and Commonwealth Office workshop

On 17-18 March 2015, Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, participated in the White Rose East Asia Centre and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office workshop on Cultural diplomacy and soft power in East Asia: China, Japan, South Korea organised by the White Rose East Asia Centre at Sheffield University (UK).

He spoke on the topic:

Hymn Sheets Versus Jam Sessions. Can Cultural Diplomacy Promote Plurality? Chinese perceptions of value diplomacy and their implications for policy-making

Abstract

An analysis of the Chinese policy papers on the EU reveals the importance of “culture” in diplomacy for the Chinese government. They always stress the fact that both China and Europe have millennial cultures. The corollary of this affirmation would be that other countries (the US in particular) do not have millennial cultures. This suggests a bemusement on the Chinese side that Europe should not automatically recognize that it has more in common with China than with the US. Presumably, for the Chinese side, were Europe to recognize this element it has in common with China, then Sino-European relations would be smoother. Five thousand years of Chinese culture should represent a powerful patrimony of values but the Chinese government may not be capable of turning this patrimony to its advantage in the form of value diplomacy. The creation of hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world is a clear example of cultural diplomacy, but the CIs are experiencing teething problems that threaten to undermine their efficacy in terms of values-based diplomacy. To some extent these problems may be due to structural problems, to an erroneous vision of the role of the government in the running of the CIs. To some extent they may be due to an erroneous calculation of the proper relationship between an “official” cultural centre and a Higher Education Institution. To some extent they may due to incapacity on the part of the Chinese government to allow for autonomy or to its insistence on exercising government control, even censorship, over the activities of the CIs. This problem of interference is not limited to Chinese value diplomacy. The Japanese government has recently intervened to demand that the publishing house McGraw-Hill modify its history textbooks in the US because they refer to “comfort women” whose existence the Japanese government does not admit. Every year there is controversy because the contents of Japanese history textbooks offend the neighbouring countries in East and Southeast Asia that suffered Japanese imperial aggression. Recently the Spanish Instituto Cervantes has censored public events designed to launch books with a revisionist view of Spanish history. On another level of influence, the unwritten “Beijing Consensus” may have a more powerful effect in the developing world than the written “Washington Consensus”, and Chinese “no strings attached” foreign aid may be displacing the EU’s foreign aid restricted by conditionality. There is a debate about the extent to which the Chinese government understands the way in which soft power works, or whether it is capable of exercising soft power or even whether it even cares about soft power. The debate over “Asian Values” as opposed to Euroamerican “Universal Values” was dimmed by the 1997 Asian financial crisis but Chinese intellectuals and advisers have become increasingly more confident in China’s return to a preeminent role in world affairs, including the definition of “values” and the possibility of renovated Confucian values offering an attractive alternative to the values espoused by formerly imperialist metropoles. The most basic consideration could be the extent to which values emerge from sociocultural practice and the extent to which they can be instrumentalised; in other words, the extent to which officialdom can tolerate diversity, plurality and free-thinking and the extent to which it must promote a specific agenda.