Iza Ding in The Ideas Letter:
At last year’s climate summit COP30 in Belém, Brazil, a phrase I hadn’t thought about for years suddenly reappeared on my radar: “soft power.”
The venue was an enormous makeshift tent—thirty football fields’ worth of plenary halls, meeting rooms, restaurants, and ice cream shops. Upon entry, one passed into the “blue zone,” where seventy-eight countries had erected pavilions to showcase their climate achievements. At its center stood the Chinese and Saudi pavilions. The Saudi pavilion was almost always empty; I often found myself its only visitor, lured in by my newfound craving for Arabic coffee. China’s pavilion was packed from dawn to dusk. Its tchotchke line curled around the corner, with locals and delegates waiting restlessly for fridge magnets and stuffed pandas. A friend of mine, a tenured professor at a respected American university, wrestled a Brazilian security guard for the right to claim a much-coveted panda headband.
Around then I began noticing the resurfacing of “soft power” in public conversation. Earlier in the year Maria Repnikova had argued in Foreign Affairs that Chinese soft power was pragmatic, while America’s was ideological. This distinction has been neatly captured by an unattributed saying that supposedly goes around among African leaders: When the Chinese come, they build us a bridge; when the Americans come, they give us a lecture. In climate circles, people began speaking of China’s “green soft power” in reference to its blossoming EV industry. A consensus seemed to be forming: China wins influence through economic relations; the US through culture and the ideology of liberalism. A tidy division of labor.
After my professor friend prevailed in her jujitsu with the guard and generously gifted me the panda headband, she and I fell into an argument over soft power. Like most academic debates, ours got stuck on the definition. What on god’s green earth is soft power?
More here.
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