Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Today our guest is Irene S. Wu. Irene is an expert on international politics, economics, and communications technology. She is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a senior economist in the Office of Economic Analysis at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Her latest book, Measuring Soft Power in International Relations (2024), establishes the Soft Power Rubric, a model based on how foreigners take action showing their interest in a country. The views she expresses in the interview are her own and not the views of the FCC, its members, or staff. Irene, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to have you.

Irene S. Wu: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Eleanor M. Albert: Before we dig into our conversation, I really like to start by asking how you came to study soft power, and then how China fits into your own research.

Irene S. Wu: I come to this research with a background in international relations and also in communications technology. I spent quite a number of years studying telecommunications in China as well, but it is a more technology background and media background that I come to it. But soft power is an area of political science that has had a lot more currency in policymaking discussions.

When you try to look at the research literature, it's a little bit hard to pin down. I thought, "Well, maybe if we could measure soft power, we could bring it more centrally into the formal international relations discussion." And of course, the reason it's a little bit hard to pin down is because when the late Professor [Joseph] Nye first came up with it, really he was responding to a public concern at that time that in the 1980s, Japan's economy got bigger than the American economy.

We don't think of that now; it seems like a long time ago. But at that time there was a little bit of panic among the American elites, if we could put it that way. So Professor Nye was trying to allay people's concerns and saying, "Hey, American power is not just economic power and military power, but it's also this other soft power thing. And just look at how many people love our movies and love our pop music. And so we don't have anything to worry about." Which is an interesting, very American-centric responses.

But the concept itself really took off, and it's taken many different forms, some of which Professor Nye, I think, would wholeheartedly agree with, and some of which he wouldn't recognize.

But my particular take on it was, when I reflect on my own experience growing up, and being interested in international relations, and thinking about the distinction between what I learned organically about other countries versus what I read in books. I grew up in the American South in a small city. I had classmates from South Korea, from Vietnam, from Iran, and I had teachers from Cuba and a teacher from East Germany. This was totally normal for an American child in a small town. I knew where Potsdam was; I knew where Havana was. It came up in our ordinary conversations.

My first contact with Ramadan was from when my Iranian classmate; she’s a teenager [at the time]. So teenager is that time when maybe you go from a child, where you don't have to observe Ramadan, to where you think, "Oh, I'm going to affirm my faith." She was in that period and she talked about it with us. It wasn't until a decade later when I formally studied the history of Islam, that I realized that that's the conversation that we were having at 14, 15 years old.

In my mind, then, I began to understand that possibly we could look at soft power, not through, are we catching up with Japan? Or are we behind China? Or these big great power questions. Maybe we can look at it from the point of view of ordinary people. There's a lot of room for this in Professor Nye's original conceptualization of soft power. He talks about soft power being in civil society, not something that governments create. So where is that civil society? That's ordinary people forming their impressions of foreign countries. And then with soft power, we talk about soft power as a country's ability to attract others to their point of view, to persuade as opposed to coerce.

That's the distinction. It's not necessarily the number of cultural aid programs, or the number of support programs, the number of newspapers and TV channels you have. It's really trying to see if you can persuade other people, not coerce them. So, if you're trying to persuade people, then can you get a sense for what countries do people like? And how do they manifest that interest?

There's some obvious ways, I think. One is that they want a popular culture from that foreign country. That's going back to Nye's original pointing out American movies and pop culture is important. That's actually harder to measure. As a communication scholar, I could tell you it's harder to get a global set for that, but there's a lot of bits of data out there. So very ripe area for case studies.

But in terms of global data sets, you can look at where people go to visit. Where do people go when they're on vacation? Or if they choose to do business abroad, where do they like to go? There's also data sets on where people go when they want to study abroad. You go to a place because you admire it, because you're interested in getting to a deeper, richer understanding. And by going to that place of study, you also hope to meet people there, and to develop friendships, and to cultivate colleagues. That's a very important way also to see which countries are attractive.

Another way to look at it is to see where people immigrate to. That's a more complex decision than going to university, but I think it's also very indicative if there's a country that can attract a lot of immigrants. And also very importantly, if the country is open to immigrants. Then, there's that opportunity to develop these soft power relationships.

I also, I think I depart from many of my colleagues who look at soft power. I really feel like soft power is not a one-way street. It's not a situation where the big power has a lot of news stations and tries to pound everybody with their idea of what the world is. Soft power relationships are two-way streets. When I learned about Cuba from my Cuban teachers, they are influencing me, and then I was also influencing them with my family background and my family history. It goes both ways. Of course, that is precisely why some countries are more closed to foreigners, because they're afraid of that foreign influence. But if you can be open to that foreign influence, and you can be open to these relationships, not only will you know foreign places better, foreigners will know you better, and they will tell their friends and their family. That, I think, is the long-run basis for soft power relationships.

It is a long-term thing. It's not something that switches on and off. Public opinion switches on and off very quickly. Maybe it's easier, where you go on vacation. But where you go to school, that's a big decision. You don't make that decision too many times in your life. And if you decide to immigrate, that's a huge decision. So if we look at these global data sets, I was able in my book—Measuring Soft Power and International Relations—to develop a soft power ranking from 1960 to 2020.

It's a time series look, and you can see definitely China's there once it opens up to the rest of the world. So from 1990 to 2020, China's always in the top 20 countries. That's a very big deal because as of 1970, China was completely closed to the outside world. It was in total domestic turmoil, but also there was an ideological decision that foreigners are bad and we're going to keep them out. They had historical reasons for thinking that, but they really took an extreme view of closing the border. So they went from totally closed to in the top 20 by 1990. That's quite something.

Eleanor M. Albert: You bring up such an important point in trying to contrast the use of public opinion, which is often used as a barometer for trying to triangulate soft power, though that ends up being a snapshot in time. If you do that repeatedly, then you can build some moments in time. How do those compare and contrast? But I like this idea of the long-term project. I was curious about if there are phases? Is this a phasic phenomenon or concept of soft power? Do we see iterations of it? What are some of the inputs? What are the different factors that might shape the way soft power is perceived?

Irene S. Wu: When I look at these numbers of people moving around the world, you can see the history of the world in these numbers. The big change that I mentioned is China opening up to the world. You see it, there's a jump from 1970, 1980, China's way down the list, not even on the list, sometimes not even reporting data. Then in 1990 they cross that top 20 threshold, and it bounces around. I developed a soft power rubric modeled on GDP. And GDP and the soft power rubric has its strength and weaknesses. It gives you an indication of what a situation is and it's good for comparisons over time. So you can see when there are big changes in a region, or a country that shows up.

For example, if you look at the creation of the European Union, it makes it much easier for people to move across borders. Then you see that growth. Soft power, we usually think of as, at least I'm interested, in terms of international relations, but there is this in-between state of, is the EU a domestic unit, or is it an international unit?

In the beginning, it was definitely an international unit because all these national governments were very powerful, and they were coming together and, "We're going to do this thing." And you could really think of them as separate units coming together. But now it's 30 years on, and really there's a lot of integration. When I sometimes look at these visitor numbers, say between Austria and Germany, is that an international border crossing? Or is that people commuting to work and going to school? Which is more characteristic of a domestic crossing, but it is still an international crossing today.

Coming back to China. You can see that if you look at the foreign visitor numbers to China, a huge chunk of them, at least half are from Hong Kong. What is that border now between China and Hong Kong? Formally in the international statistics—in the United Nations, Hong Kong and Macau are still reporting their statistics separately. That has been the case for many decades. But when I start to look at this level of integration, you can see indeed there is a stronger soft power relationship between these two regions before. At some point you would expect that to become a domestic statistic. We'll just have to wait for that to happen.

Eleanor M. Albert: Anecdotally, to support that, I was in Shenzhen a few years ago, and we were taking the train from Shenzhen to Hong Kong in the morning. And sure enough, I was sitting next to someone who was just commuting on his way to work. Cheaper to live in Shenzhen, and a different type of lifestyle, and then able to just take the high-speed rail right in.

Irene S. Wu: Yes, and that was really not so possible 30 years ago. This goes back to some old communications research, going back to the work of Carl Deutsch. He and his colleagues, looked at postal service during the American colonies in the time of the American Revolution, and before the revolution there was more postal mail between individual colonies and Great Britain, UK, than there was among the colonies. But after the revolution, states came together, then there's more postal mail among the states than between individual states in the UK. These communications artifacts are a reflection of the social connections, and it's the social connections of soft power as almost a social capital among countries.

When [Robert] Putnam talks about social capital in a community, that people belonged in bowling leagues, or Elinor Ostrom talks about trust in governance over collective shared resources, how that interaction, over time, even among strangers, gradually you can build trust. Then, if you have some crisis, you have a network of people that you can rely on for good information and to figure out a way out of the crisis. That's what soft power is for.

When you have soft power as a country, what you're hoping is when you need help, some countries will come to your aid. It's the people-to-people relationships. Am I willing to send my young people to help you out of a military crisis? It's a really hard decision to make, and there's some real-politik decisions that always come into play. Hard power is very important, but soft power plays into that decision as well.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. I want to bring China in. I was curious about how your definition and concept of soft power might relate to how China might define soft power, and how it has chosen to promote soft power. Soft power has been in the lexicon for a while in China and in policy circles, but I think it might contrast in some significant ways from how you're conceptualizing it.

Irene S. Wu: There are a lot of ways of thinking about soft power. The best discussion of this in English is Maria Repnikova's book on Chinese soft power. She does document there that the first time that the Chinese leadership mentions soft power—this is ruan shili is the way it's referred to—is Hu Jintao in 2007, the 17th Party Congress. And Xi Jinping has also mentioned soft power a lot. Her analysis of Xi Jinping's use of soft power is that he uses soft power as one of these things that big countries should cultivate. That they should cultivate hard power, which he describes as economic might and military strength. And then also this idea of soft power as culture, values, ideologies. It's not very far off from what Professor Nye talks about as soft power.

What is perhaps a little different is that Xi Jinping, as Professor Repnikova describes it, he discusses as a directive. When he talks about it, he's telling elites, and experts, and officials, and Chinese media that this is part of their job. This is to promote Chinese power, soft power is one of those things.

Professor Repnikova also discusses Chinese scholars’ discussion of wenhua ruan shili (cultural soft power), or ruan shili (soft power). And she identifies a couple of issues, which I think are very telling. First of all, there is a discussion among them about what is the distinction between hard power and soft power. In that Chinese discussion, the distinction is not as clear. If you think of soft power as emanating from the state, then how is that different from hard power, economic power, and military power?

Now, from my American point of view, if you think of soft power as emanating primarily from civil society, and these government programs is just an adjunct, then you can see that it's quite different for military power. Although with economic power, if I take a capitalism, market-oriented approach to the economy, that the strength of the economy is from the entrepreneurship of the ordinary people who are working and building businesses in the economy. You could also think of economic powers as a civil society of power. But if you took a command economy approach, you might think of it as state. So you can see where there are these complexities in looking at hard power and soft power.

Eleanor M. Albert: What's so interesting about that is that the Chinese tend to think more in the market economy sense. Their economy, even though there are directives from the top about priorities, a lot of the market side of things has been more of a bottom-up, entrepreneurial, with partnership with state-owned enterprises, of course. But they really have adopted market thinking. That has led to, I think, the economic being considered more in the ruan shili, soft power bucket.

Irene S. Wu: All these lines are very moveable, depending on what you're interested in emphasizing. But if you look at the general discussion of the American literature on Chinese soft power, that, of course, is very focused on Chinese media, the ramp up of the Chinese government's news organizations. That has always existed domestically. But as the Chinese government had more resources, they're now doing this internationally, and things like the Confucius Institutes, and things like the Belt and Road [Initiative]… These are all government-directed foreign aid programs.

Some of them are successful, and some of them are less successful, not surprisingly. That's true of American aid programs as well. In a way that goes back to the original idea that I have, that the strength of soft power is in the people-to-people relationships, in these long-term interconnections. That's where you're going to see the important shifts. The aid programs are great, especially when they work, and they benefit the foreign country, but that does come and go.

Eleanor M. Albert: It's fascinating too on the Chinese side, if you think about some of the language that comes out of Chinese elites. There is so much focus on people-to-people exchanges. It just might not be among great powers that the people-to-people exchanges are being prioritized.

You talked a lot about it being a global phenomenon, which of course it is. But are there situations in which countries might target different groupings of countries in their policies, to try and promote and cultivate soft power?

Irene S. Wu: Soft power, of course, is usually we talk about the great powers, but in a way, soft power is more important for middle powers and small powers, because they don't have the economic power, and they don't have the military power at their disposal. That is one thing that really comes out when I look at these measurements of soft power.

Since we're talking about China and East Asia, Taiwan, I think, has done some interesting things in the last few years, under the last couple of leaders, to strengthen their relationships with Southeast Asia, where they are physically located, their neighbors really.

My observation is that Taiwan already had these relationships. There were already temporary workers that were coming into Taiwan society to do a variety of jobs. It was a very necessary part of the Taiwanese economy. By formalizing the relationship and promoting the relationship, they are building on a civil society relationship that existed already. Those are the kinds of soft power target campaigns that are actually going to work. I don't think you can force a soft power relationship, in the sense that you can open your society to certain other kinds of foreigners, but you know what? If they don't come, there's nothing you can do to make them come. They have to want to come.

Another thing that I discuss in my book is how there are countries like South Africa, or Singapore… Singapore is a good example, where their soft power ranking is higher than if you do an economic ranking by GDP, or if you do a military ranking. You can see that these are the key countries that, for example, in regional organizations are the leaders who can get other countries to move in a particular direction. It's not all U.S. and China, Russia, Japan. There's a bigger set of leaders and it's possible to look at soft power in that way.

Professor Repnikova does mention in her Confucius Institutes studies that initially the Confucius Institutes targeted other great powers. But now her observation is it targeted other countries where people are really interested in learning Chinese, if there's opportunities for them to become translators, and Chinese companies that are invested in their countries. So there's a very tangible reason for wanting to learn Chinese. It's not for cultural reasons “because I want to become an international citizen,” which is vague, but when the rubber hits the road and you got to learn those characters, maybe it's not enough of a motivation.

Eleanor M. Albert: It's incentivized.

Irene S. Wu: Right. That I think actually is a successful path. Because of those people, most of them want to get jobs. Some of them will get jobs, and really be interested in learning more . But it is not soft power in this great power competition context.

Eleanor M. Albert: You were talking about how China shows up in the rankings when it starts to open up, and from the '90s on you see it. I'm curious what some of the types of policies the government has adopted, or then abandoned over time, and how those compare from those the '90s to now; that's almost 30 years of time. How has China approached soft power cultivation? Has it been successful?

Irene S. Wu: The Confucius Institute path is potentially successful. It's, interestingly, still early days yet, but I think there's potential there. So we'll just wait and see. When I look at the numbers for China and what pushed it into the top 20, mainly it is visitors, and students, and not immigrants. To become an immigrant in China is extremely difficult. The rules are very, very tight. So that is not a path that China is pursuing in terms of cultivating relationships with other countries. But it has welcomed a lot of international students.

Looking prior to the pandemic, the 2020 numbers for international students to China, there are 225,000. And that is up from, if you look at 2006 where there's 35,000. The line is huge: 35,000 to 225,000, huge. This is foreign students enrolled in Chinese university for degree. That is a very high bar for study abroad. There's a much larger group of students who go to study Chinese. So there are even more students than the 225,000 that we see here in the numbers.

After the pandemic, the 2023 numbers are about 200,000, so a loss of 25,000. That is significant, but we'll see if that pops back up. These things take a little bit of time. The pandemic was really something that shut down, shut down the world, and I got to see that in the numbers as well. With international visitors to China, the peak was in 2019 with 163 million—most of those are from Asia Pacific. That gives you a sense of where these relationships are. It's exactly what you would expect. The pandemic has really thrown a wrench into this. In 2022, you're down from 163 million, at the peak, to 25 million. That's a big drop, both on the tourist side and on the business side.

Eleanor M. Albert: It'll be interesting to see in the coming years whether China's decision to have visa free entry for a slew of new countries has some impact or not.

Irene S. Wu: That's where these visa rules, and immigration rules, and student rules that can make a difference. What we're talking about now is recovery from pre-COVID[-19]. So the things that attracted people to China before are still there. And fundamentally, you do see that there are universities that people want to attend, that people do have reasons to visit. Those are the things that really are at the core, from the soft power rubric point of view, of China's attraction to foreigners.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. I want to bring in how pop culture fits into this China soft power story. For a long time that was what a lot of the American literature on soft power, it was, "Well, what is China promoting? Big question mark. Where is its pop culture influence?" I think we're starting to see that that's shifting for a variety of reasons. Some of that has to do with technological developments. I was curious from your position, and your background in media and technology, if you have seen anything that might be changing the ballgame on that side of things.

Irene S. Wu: I think with pop culture, in terms of measuring soft power, pop culture is extremely volatile. Because this year, this group is in, and next year they are out. There is no really social science rational reason for it. Fans have their own dynamic. It can be very interesting to do these kinds of case studies on specific movies, or specific trends. But in terms of global data set, the pop culture thing, it's still hard to get a handle on.

With China, you do see that they have these big movies, this music that is very popular inside China, and that it has audiences abroad as well. I don't think it has reached the United States. But you know what? Is that a goal? I don't know if this is a goal or not. It's pop culture, you just let it flow. Sometimes things will be a hit; sometimes they won't be.

I looked at UK soft power. Of course, if you look at the movies every year, there was a Harry Potter movie. It's important, but it's not consistent. It's not a consistent foundation the way the decision to go to a university is, or decision to immigrate is.

I have colleagues who look at Korean pop culture. And Korean pop culture also has this very big following. Initially in Asia, I remember 10, 15 years ago, I had friends in Malaysia who said that their parents really loved the Korean dramas, and they would get the videotapes from Seoul. And they would watch it. Then gradually, it wasn't just that the Asian audiences were interested, it kept going.

I will say that that phenomenon is primarily market-driven. My colleagues who look at K-pop to try to see is this some kind of soft power campaign from the Korean government, I think the government has really hopped on the bandwagon, but it's not driven by the government. Usually, typically the government culture programs are all the classical culture.

The thing about this pop culture is that watching the movies and listening to music has evolved into foreigners wanting to travel to Korea, and foreigners wanting to learn Korean language because of the pop culture. That is a major leap.

When foreigners start to want to learn your language, which is not really that widely spoken outside that country, then you have crossed a threshold where they are going to have friends who are Korean, because they speak Korean now, and they're going to have colleagues. It's not just going to be business, it's personal. Then, should South Korea need help, all these people actually know something about South Korea, because they've been there, and they have friends, and they have colleagues, and by the way, they watch the movies and they listen to the music. From my perspective, looking at soft power measurements, that is the transformation that you look at.

I think Chinese culture has that potential, and you'll just have to see whether it transforms into that. Also in the Chinese data, you also have to look at how much of that data is people from Hong Kong and Macau, which is a slightly different domestic/international story from the international soft power story. But that's the fun thing for me about the soft power rubric, is that the numbers tell you that you should look here, and then when you investigate, there's a lot of other data to look at, and a lot of other qualitative stuff to learn, and other histories and narratives to explore.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right, it's fascinating because your take puts pop culture on the input side, that then impacts the soft power rubric numbers as opposed to it being the outcome, which is a really interesting shift in perspective. Of course, they all mutually reinforce one another because that's the genius of the muddy soft power concept.

Thinking about how some of these pop culture phenomena get diffused, what role have technology and social media platforms played in bridging the gap? You emphasize that some of these connections are still regional to a certain degree, but with things like TikTok, and algorithms that push content from very geographically disparate places, I think there are moments in time where certain things might break through in a different, but still organic way.

Irene S. Wu: When I looked at the research that Elinor Ostrom did on trust, she actually did some experiments and tried to figure out whether a computer mediated relationship builds trust versus a face-to-face interaction. She very decidedly came down on the face-to-face interaction. But this is now a couple of decades later, and what a computer-mediated or a technology-mediated interaction is very different now than what she was testing, which was words on a screen. I think the richness of the communication that we can have that is mediated by technology today is sufficient to develop that personal relationship. We're talking today over screens. If I see you in the street, I will feel like I know you because we had this extended conversation. That is very different from the typing on the screen.

In that sense, there are huge opportunities. For example, with pop culture fans, when they interact with each other, those are friendships. They may not have a relationship with the star; that is more of a push from the producer to the audience. That interaction is not personal. It is a relationship, but it's not a personal relationship the way the fans know each other, or maybe the fans from different countries know each other, and these may be second, or third, or fourth countries, not the country that the pop star originates from.

When you cross that threshold and you're no longer just consuming the media, but you're actually producing yourself, you're actually interacting, and getting to know other people, that's when you cross the threshold in the soft power rubric area and we start to think, "Oh, okay, this is more than just broadcasting. This is a people-to-people relationship."

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating.The floor is yours if you have any final words you want to add.

Irene S. Wu: I would just say that I have been working on this Soft Power Rubric for over 10 years now, and if people are interested in cultivating soft power with other countries, I think the main thing is to be open to foreigners. It's that relationship, with the people who have immigrated from other countries, who are studying near your home, or visiting your home. Every time you can have a good relationship with someone who's visiting, that's a little deposit in the soft power relationship between our country and their country. It's an important thing to remember that it's in our power as civil society, and it's not all about the government.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.