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.
