Presentation to Digital Publics in the Asia Pacific, QUT, 2 September 2016

2. Soft Power, Cultural Studies and
Post-Globalization
Terry Flew, Professor of Media and
Communication, Creative Industries
Faculty, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia

3. • Entertainment media, cultural power, and
post-globalization: The case of China’s
international media expansion and the
discourse of soft power, Global Media and
China, SAGE OnlineFirst, 1 August 2016
• http://gch.sagepub.com/content/early/2016
/07/29/2059436416662037.full.pdf+html

8. Joseph Nye’s Concept of soft power
‘Ability to shape the preferences of others’
based on:
– Culture (in places where it is attractive to others)
– Political values (when it lives up to them at home
and abroad)
– Foreign policies (when others see them as
legitimate and having moral authority)

9. Nye on soft power and partners
‘Whether potential soft power resources translate into
the behaviour of attraction that can influence others
toward favourable outcomes … With soft power, what
the target thinks is particularly important, and the
targets matter as much as the agents. Attraction and
persuasion are socially constructed. Soft power is a
dance that requires partners’
(Nye, 2011, p. 84).

10. Use of the term ‘soft power’

11. Institute for Government ‘soft power
index’ (2010)
• Culture: level of inbound tourism; international reach of state-sponsored media; number of foreign
correspondents in the country; international use of national language; number of winter and
summer Olympic gold medals;
• Diplomacy: foreign aid as percentage of GDP; number of languages spoken by the head of
government; strictness of visa requirements; ranking of the national “brand”; and the number of
dedicated cultural missions abroad;
• Government: position on the UN Human Development Index; position on the World Bank Good
Governance index; position on the Freedom House index of political freedom and liberty; measures
of trust in government; measures of personal life satisfaction;
• Education: number of universities in The Times Higher Education top 200; number of foreign
students studying at a nation’s universities; the number of “think tanks” in a country;
• Business/innovation: number of international patents as a percentage of GDP; business
competitiveness as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index; the
level of corruption as measured by Transparency International; innovation index measured by the
Boston Consulting Group; and foreign investment as a percentage of total capital investment;
• Subjective measures: the quality of high and popular cultural outputs; quality of national food and
drink; relative international appeal of national celebrities; perceived quality of the national airline;
the reputation of a nation’s embassies; and the perceived global effectiveness of its national head
of government.

12. Institute for Government Soft Power
Index Results (2010)

13. Soft power debates in China
• ‘The Chinese culture belongs not only to the
Chinese, but to the whole world.’
(Hu Jintao, address to the Australian Federal
Parliament, October 2003).
• ‘To strengthen our cultural soft power, we should
disseminate the values of modern China … More
work should be done to refine and explain our
ideas, and extend the platform for overseas
publicity, so as to make our culture known
through international communication and
dissemination’ (Xi Jinping, 2015)

14. China’s Soft Power Initiatives
• Hosting global events (Beijing Olympics 2008,
Shanghai World Expo 2010)
• Promoting scholarly exchanges (China Scholarships
Council)
• Confucius Institutes
• CCTV International, international expansion of
Xinhua News Agency and China Radio International
• Co-production arrangements in films, TV programs
and online games

15. Three dimensions of cultural soft
power
MEDIA PRIMARY AGENT CULTURAL FOCUS
Information/News Media State led High culture
Entertainment Media Commercially led Popular culture

16. Issues with ‘soft power’ theories
• Tendency to conflate cultural diplomacy
(intentionally-driven governmental practice) with
cultural relations (primarily driven by non-state
actors)
• What is ‘cultural’ in this concept?
– ‘high culture’ or mass media?
– Information or entertainment?
– Commercial culture or state-supported culture?
– Culture as things or processes?

17. Issues with ‘soft power’ from a
communications/cultural studies
perspective
• Transmission model of culture – distributional bias
• Culture as things/artefacts rather than as connected to human processes
• Behavioral conception of power
• Where does media/cultural power reside? – producers, distributors,
audiences?
• ‘there is no guarantee that the audience for international programming
will decode the meaning of messages in a way the source would prefer,
since interpretation occurs according to the prevailing cultural, social and
political beliefs, attitudes and norms among individual audience members’.
(Rawnsley, 2015, p. 280)

18. Actors in cultural diplomacy
There are four categories of actor who can be regarded as
making meaning with cultural products in this context, and who
can therefore be described both as cultural producers and
cultural consumers: namely, policy-makers themselves;
institutions and individuals charged with implementing cultural
diplomacy policy …; cultural practitioners; and, finally, individuals
engaging with cultural products which are produced for or used
in cultural diplomacy.
(Clarke, 2014, p. 8)

19. Distributional bias
• ‘There is no guarantee that the audience for
international programming will decode the
meaning of messages in a way the source
would prefer, since interpretation occurs
according to the prevailing cultural, social and
political beliefs, attitudes and norms among
individual audience members.’ (Rawnsley,
2015, p. 280)

20. ‘Active audience’ debate in
communication and cultural studies
‘The field of Cultural Studies has perpetually oscillated
between an emphasis on ‘power’ in terms of the
imposition of ideology through culture, on the one
hand, and ‘agency’ in terms of the relatively freedom of
the consumer, on the other’.
(Gibson, 2007, p. 167)

21. Five paradoxes of soft power
1. Media globalization provides the context for soft power
strategies, but rests upon understandings of audiences that
most globalization theorists reject;
2. It is nation-states that are leading soft power initiatives, at a
time when it is widely assumed that globalization weakens the
power of nation-states;
3. Media content is most likely to have soft power influence when
it is perceived to be distanced from governments, yet national
governments invest in such content as part of their cultural
diplomacy initiatives;
4. Popular entertainment media arguably has the most soft power
influence, but governments invest primarily in international
news services and “high culture;
5. Most discussions about soft power focus on traditional media
(newspapers, films, television), but the most effective strategies
may be those that operate through digital media.

26. Blockbusters
• The Hollywood blockbuster has had great cultural
influence in China
• Appeal of Chinese blockbusters has declined over time –
mid-budget films more popular with local audiences (e.g.
Lost in … series)
• Chinese interest in co-productions
– Outlet for investment capital
– Access to knowledge and soft skills
• US interest in co-productions
– Access to Chinese finance
– Access to Chinese domestic market

28. Digital soft power