Which country offers the most attractive model for development for a rising country – the United States or China?

The answer used to be easy, but not any longer.  Mired in a lost decade kicked off by the attacks of 9/11, two long and devastatingly costly wars, and capped off by a sub-prime mortgage crisis of baffling greed and investment banking shell games, the United States has lost more than just its luster – it’s also lost it’s place as the undisputed champion of soft power.  When at one moment the iconic Abu Ghraib photos circulated, just a few years later the Chinese celebrated an impressive Olympics with panache and confidence, heralding an arrival of some sort to the next level of global presence. Tens of millions of Chinese citizens have been lifted out of poverty, while the economic growth of the country in the past few decades may be unprecedented in world history.

Although China has proliferated its relationships with a vast number of new countries from Africa to Latin America, their soft power remains constrained by an inflexible political system that resists competition and disagreement.  Looking into the benefits and limits of Chinese soft power, David Piling of the Financial Times takes note of a new Central Committee directive that has dedicated a new $174 billion fund not to industry, not to defense, and not to infrastructure – but rather to culture, so that famous chefs, filmmakers, artists, and musicians can take the world by storm and spread the core values and ideas of the Chinese nation.  But will this really work if those values and ideas are not allowed to be debated and negotiated in the public space?  From the FT:

What is the soft power that China seeks? Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who invented the term, defines it as “the ability to use attraction and persuasion to get what you want without force or payment”. Thus, he says, neither Canada nor Mexico seek Chinese protection against the nearby US. But China’s neighbours, for all Beijing’s “smile diplomacy”, still want a US presence in the Pacific. (…)

By comparison, China has little to offer. To put the best gloss on it, China has a pragmatic model for digging people out of poverty and a guiding principle of non-interventionism. But it is unclear whether China’s success in economic lift-off – partly dependent on its massive labour pool – is exportable to other countries. The Beijing Consensus offers a combination of economic pragmatism and authoritarian government. But that is more likely to appeal to the world’s dictators than to its citizens.

Nor has China’s doctrine of non-interventionism done the soft-power trick. A search for China’s friendly neighbours will tell you as much. They are not to be found in Vietnam, Japan, India or Russia, all of which in their way fear China’s growing power. To find China’s diplomatic buddies one has to look to North Korea, Pakistan and Burma. (…)

The Communist party’s jealous monopoly on power and truth means China cannot match this cultural breadth. Naturally, it can produce dissenting art. Authoritarian states always do. But the harassment of Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist recently served with a huge tax bill, or of Liu Xiaobo, still in prison despite winning the Nobel Prize, shows the limits on expression. These are the people who could be carrying the flag of Chinese soft power. Instead, their treatment at the hands of the state reveals a much uglier side.