Quote:
Originally Posted by Bisonzabi
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That's a mixture of economic influence more so than soft power (your image, aspiration potential on other nations). The problem is that the end result is not to their liking. They're very blunt and jump in like a bull in a chinashop (no pun intended) when things don't go their way. And while they might buy shares into these companies or bribe them with their own populaces potential market, they don't actually produce the movies themselves nor do they understand how to deal with backlash without throwing an all out censorship temper tantrum which is what they're doing with the NBA fiasco. And this shows how flimsy their soft-power is when you see a major immediate counter reaction in how they deal with tension by escalating immediately to hard power.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chi...bet-soft-power
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-h...em-11567696212 |
Interesting link, the CFR one - thanks. I think their inability to deal with the reaction to the NBA fiasco comes from them not really understanding how much noise can be made on the free internet, understandably perhaps as they don't have the free internet. I could be wrong here as I'm not in the US but I don't think it was CNN or the NYT who first reported on the NBA/Blizzard issues - if this was the pre-internet age I wonder if we'd know about it at all. I suggest that the free internet is going to come under sustained attack over the next few years, already in my country the EU has succeeded in making the internet less free - many US news websites will not serve content to me because of EU passed laws. I also have concerns about things like abandoning net neutrality and how that could be abused to make wrongthink more difficult to access.