Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds

This book examines the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to improve China’s image around the world, thereby increasing its ＂soft power.＂ This soft, attractive form of power is crucial if China is to avoid provoking an international backlash against its growing military and economic might.

The volume focuses on the period since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, and is global in scope, examining the impact of Chinese policies from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Africa and South America. The book explains debates over soft power within China and delves into case studies of important policy areas for China’s global image campaign, such as film, news media and the Confucius Institutes. The most comprehensive work of its kind, the volume presents a picture of a Chinese leadership that has access to vast material resources and growing global influence but often struggles to convert these resources into genuine international affection.

With a foreword by Joseph Nye, Soft Power With Chinese Characteristics will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese politics and Chinese media, as well as international relations and world politics more generally.

Kingsley Edney is lecturer in Politics and International Relations of China at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion (2014) and co-author of Environmental Pollution and the Media: Political Discourses of Risk and Responsibility in Australia, China and Japan (Routledge, 2017).

Stanley Rosen is Professor of Political Science at USC at the University of Southern California, USA. His publications include Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market (2010, co-edited with Peter Hays Gries) and Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (2010, co-edited with Ying Zhu).

Ying Zhu is Professor of Cinema Studies at the City University of New York, USA, and Director of the Center for Film and Moving Image Research at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her recent publications include Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television (2013) and Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Drama, Confucian Leadership and the Global Television Market (2008).