The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 83 Embarrassed at the Flattery Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World Joshua Kurlantzick, Yale University Press, 2007, $26.00, hardcover, 320 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVID R EUTHER When Japan modernized in the late 19th century, world powers were those countries with colonies — a club that it and the United States joined by 1898. In contrast, China was a semi-colony and did not even have a Western-style Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A century later, Beijing is amassing power by deftly wielding trade incen- tives, overseas business investments, cultural and educational exchanges, and well-placed aid projects. Journal- ist Joshua Kurlantzick draws on numerous vignettes, public opinion polls and quotes from human rights organizations as he chronicles Chi- nese initiatives in Africa, Asia and South America. Despite its title, however, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World is as much about America as the PRC: specifical- ly, the fact that over the past couple of decades, Washington has crippled or abolished the programs and bureau- cracies that once made it the world’s leading exponent of soft power. Indeed, Kurlantzick could be de- scribing the very successes that were once the hallmarks of USIA (Chapter 4) or USAID (parts of Chapters 5 and 8). Instead, the rise of ideology has made American practitioners see international politics as a struggle not of interests, but of principles — lead- ing to an erosion of American democ- ratic values and influence. But in Kurlantzick’s view, the PRC isn’t just another large and growing market economy responding to the systemic forces any other nation- state faces, selecting policies that any other state might use, or copying the economic and foreign policies those nations that modernized first. No, China is evil . Everyone knows, he intones, that it is exporting its envi- ronmental problems, poor labor standards and shaky corporate gover- nance regulations far and wide. Even its aid, given with few if any strings, undermines World Bank standards. How has a country with such terri- ble human rights and immigration problems, detailed by numerous NGOs, become able to challenge the dominant position of the U.S. in world affairs? By using American-style soft- power programs. So ultimately, this book is an appeal to the U.S. foreign policy elite to return to those policies. That point is a valid one, well worth consideration. Regrettably, it is overshadowed by the author’s almost palpable fear and loathing of Beijing. This is not a book that compares Chinese aid programs with (unques- tionably altruistic) American, German or Japanese programs. Instead, they are characterized without discussion as “opaque,” and dismissed as “tied to policy goals.” (Translation: “The end justifies the means.”) The book freeze-frames on June 1989 as the current status of the coun- try’s domestic structure and assumes the China of Tiananmen Square will remain the China of tomorrow. Conveniently, this assumption saves us the effort of having to look for change in Chinese civil society. We can there- fore comfortably assume that a political party we label communist will not change, even as it recruits business mavens and intellectuals. Nor should we notice that every country in Asia with which the U.S. economy has run a trade deficit evolved in a democratic fashion: e.g., postwar Japan, Taiwan and Korea. These are all unspoken variables of more interest to academics than journalists. Simplistically, Kurlantzick portrays diplomacy as a zero-sum game, in which the U.S. has been bleeding popularity and influence around the world while China has been gaining both. He asserts that authoritarian leaders around the world hail China as the prime example of how to maintain B OOKS Kurlantzick sees diplomacy as a zero- sum game, in which the U.S. has been bleeding popularity and influence around the world while China has been gaining both.