At present, all countries in the world attach great importance to the construction of soft power and give play to the role of soft power in its foreign strategy and policy. The essence of soft power is the cultural influence. Chinese government puts forward the goal of “the construction of national cultural soft power” in order to make its own contribution to international relations in all aspects. At the same time, China should also take into account the requirements of governments and peoples of the countries across the world, compensating for the weaknesses of the soft power.

The kernel of soft power is culture and mainly the values, which is the kernel of culture. It is the cultural values that govern our attitude and viewpoint upon everything in the world. Cultural values are real and fluid, which can bring about tremendous, tangible effect.  Strengthening soft power will make a country more attractive, convincing and influential on international arena.

China is a country of ancient civilization widely recognized in the world. Chinese culture is vast, profound, comprehensive and open to all civilizations, and is the only uninterrupted culture system in the world. With all schools of Chinese ancient thoughts, most typically the Confucianism, and even the Western ideas introduced in modern times, Chinese culture changes and updates constantly, showing an exuberant vitality. It will be in vain to talk about Chinese affairs apart from its cultural background.

Chinese diplomatic strategy and policy reflect, consciously or not, the influence of Chinese culture. In 1950’s, China, India and Burma jointly initiated the five principles of peaceful coexistence”; later on, Deng Xiaoping put forward “peaceful development” as the theme of the times, and Hu Jintao put forward the idea of “harmonious world”, all of which embodied the cultural values of “good-will” philosophy. The Communist Party of China localized Marxism into the socialism with Chinese characteristics. The latter consists of the cultural essence of Chinese culture including meritocracy, the doctrine of the mean, the combination of free market and government intervention, etc.

Along with the growing of China’s comprehensive strength and international status, the world community is more concerned with the direction in which China is heading. “China will collapse”, “China is retrogressing”, “Chinese threats”, “new colonialism”and assumptions alike can be heard endlessly in the past 30 years. In response to the criticism and suspicion, China should do much more to play the role of soft-power of culture, to prove its resolution in taking the road of peaceful development, to win the heart and soul of the people, and to create a better environ of international cooperation. Meanwhile, the world wants China to assume the responsibility of a big power, to provide more public goods, and make greater contributions to the progress of international relations. Therefore, China has not only to invest more in hard-power, but also to prepare with stronger soft-power, such as thoughts, ideas, strategy, policy, public psychology and demeanor, to prove “China’s contribution”.

Of course, China’s construction of cultural soft-power is still in its initial stage of exploration, areas with many shortcomings and deficiencies remain to be improved.

First of all, the traditional mindset of preferring hard-power to soft-power should be revised and the significance of cultural soft-power should be revisited. China can only become a new-type of country by learning from other countries’ experience and by rethinking culture, especially the significance of cultural values. To the last analysis, any enhancement of China’s soft-power must be based on strengthening the construction of the value system of China’s culture, and declaring itself with concise and explicit language in order to get recognized and accepted by more and more people. Domestically, it is the most important to make the core values understood correctly, and incarnated in action. Obviously, this requires long-term education and cultivation, not something to be accomplished overnight. Secondly, it is called to keep pace with the times in understanding ethnic and religious problems, and to build a platform for international exchange of views on ethnic and religious issues.

Thirdly, NGOs have to strengthen external exchanges. It is assumed widely abroad that Chinese NGOs are virtually invisible in international arena, which constitutes a blind spot of China’s soft power. It is important to build up more NGOs, but it is more important to make better use of the existing ones, such as enterprises, think tanks, associations of industries, academic societies, federations of women, youths, students, to make them courageous and active enough to participate in international dialogues and on international arena. In addition, in the context of globalization, China’s media must transform into a pattern of“external transmission”, and shift from self-orientation to audience-orientation, from focusing on viewpoints deduction to focusing on facts induction, from focusing on release official information to focusing on experts’ lecture and folklores, from one-way indoctrination to two-way communication, and from re-action model to pro-action model in making public relations.

Source of documents：