America’s global ‘soft power’ strategy is aging poorly — especially compared to China’s 

While visiting California last November, Chinese President Xi Jinping made an offhand remark at the end of his first day with President Biden: Chinese pandas may soon return to American zoos.  

The remark was covered in every major U.S. news outlet simultaneously, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fox and all the major TV networks, and was echoed last Friday by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. 

Ever since Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, pandas have played a role in U.S.-China relations, first as outright gifts and then, after the mid-1980s, as leased property of the Chinese government. Today, any country that accepts pandas from China pays $1 million per panda per year for the privilege, with the added stipulation that any cubs born in captivity are the property of Beijing.  

China has since used their charismatic national animal to generate goodwill in dozens of nations. According to one estimate, panda diplomacy has sent $300 million to Beijing in the past 30 years. You could be forgiven for asking whether China’s panda policy is cultural diplomacy or simply a going concern. 

On the day of Xi’s remark, the headlines could’ve been about other, more urgent issues: growing tensions over Taiwan, the theft of intellectual property, unauthorized surveillance internationally, the crisis in the South China Sea, tightening controls over tech exports from the U.S., or bad blood over China’s growing closeness with Russia.  

But on the day Xi made the remark, the pandas led the headlines. Such is the power of cultural symbols. 

Panda diplomacy is just one plank in China’s platform of cultural diplomacy, an issue that has been a priority for Xi since before he took office. In the last 10 years, President Xi has put the muscle of the Chinese state behind a coordinated soft power program.  

While foreign aid from China is still dwarfed by what is supplied by the U.S. or China’s regional rival, Japan, there is arguably a wider gap in the realm of cultural diplomacy. Closing this gap is an accessible and economical way for Washington to maintain, at minimum, parity with Beijing around the globe.  

As of 2018, China was spending $10 billion every year to build up its soft power. Some of that money went to fund 500 “Confucius Institutes” around the world, where university students not only learn the Chinese language but also take in fundamentals of Chinese culture. While 104 out of the 118 Confucius Institutes that existed in the U.S. have shut down in the last three years, there is no reason to assume that the other 400 or so are not still in operation.  

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is thought of in Beijing as a big bet on soft power. Port deals and infrastructure projects with Chinese financing are augmented by economic arrangements, academic exchanges, and cultural initiatives meant to tie the economies and societies of the global south more closely to Beijing. 

China’s expanding state-sponsored media program has the same aim. As of 2021, Xinhua, the Chinese government’s official news arm, operates in 181 countries around the world. The newspaper China Daily is distributed to key cities in 150 countries. Walk through Times Square in New York, and you cannot miss Xinhua’s billboard. But the real influence of Chinese state media may be in the global south, the so-called middle-income countries primarily located in Africa and Latin America. In these countries, views of both China and the U.S. are positive. Compare that to high-income countries in Europe, where views of China are overwhelmingly negative.  

There is a war of perception then to be won in the global south, and the U.S. is already doing much to win it. Aid packages from Washington are still robust and are still worlds better than what is on offer from Beijing, though political trends in the U.S. may imperil that advantage if Republican-led efforts to cut aid to Ukraine and Israel are any indication.  

Across the world, younger people are more likely to have positive views of China’s regime, technology and culture than are older people, even in Japan. And in African countries for which there is data, a majority of some populations believe Chinese culture is above average or the best in the world. The era where the U.S. can assume a soft power advantage from Hollywood, pop music and fast food in the developing world is long over. 

The U.S. needs to invest more robustly in a global cultural diplomacy strategy for the future. As in foreign aid, we have a foundation to build on in this area. But what we do today is largely a holdover from the Cold War.  

Our Art in Embassies program started 60 years ago. Touring arts companies, like the American Ballet Theatre, can trace their international initiatives as far back as the Eisenhower administration. The loose network of foundations, collectors, artists, philanthropists, and NGOs that keep these and similar programs alive need to be celebrated and supported. 

But in an era of what some are calling a new phase of great power competition, and in which democracy is under threat in many regions, we need to supercharge our cultural diplomacy efforts. We need to find a way to coordinate our influence outside the traditional venues of high culture: stages, museums and even cinemas. In Japan and in our European counterparts, there are state-funded institutions to spread national cultures abroad.  

As a pluralistic society, we have long struggled to agree on what constitutes “an American culture” worthy of state-supported export. But this seeming disadvantage could be a strength if we embrace it. Take hip-hop diplomacy, a loose collection of embassy programs that have over the years put state support behind hip-hop around the world. Hip-hop is an art form that could only come from a sprawling, syncretic democracy like our own. To promote it is to promote the strength and vitality that come from our democratic traditions. Similar programs, whatever they may look like, are the way forward.     

Merely to match our monocultural rivals tactic for tactic is a recipe for failure. But if we do not try to find a new, fresh path forward for our cultural diplomacy, global attitudes will be swayed by other countries who do. 

Fred P. Hochberg, chairman of the United States Export-Import Bank under President Obama from 2009 to 2017, is the author of Trade is Not a Four-Letter Word: How Six Everyday Products Make the Case for Trade, published by Simon & Schuster. He is currently chair of Meridian International Center, a D.C.-based nonprofit.