6 - China's Soft Power in Africa: Past, present & future

Summary

The different elements of China's human resources development with Africa have traditionally been embedded in the discourse of cooperation, mutual benefit and political equality, reinforced by the focus upon South-South cooperation. As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, the discussion of soft power seems to come out of a different universe – one of competition for cultural and public relations influence rather than of collaboration for development. Whether the rise in the use of the term soft power points to any evolution in China's aid policy, we shall need to examine, but also how the many different modalities of China's human resources cooperation may illustrate soft power.

However, one of the first things that is noticeable about the term soft power is that in some ways it is increasingly widely used in China, but in others, it is not used at all. For instance, in the White Paper on China's Foreign Aid (China, 2011a), soft power does not appear at all, and ‘culture’ and ‘cultural’ appear more in the sense of China's providing cultural utilities for other nations than in promoting its own culture overseas. The same is true for a document, China 2030 (World Bank and DRC, 2012), which though it is principally concerned with China's domestic development does pay some significant attention to its ‘development assistance’ and ‘foreign aid’. Given its subtitle, Building a Modern, Harmonious and Creative High-income Society, it might have seemed a natural location for some discussion of soft power, but there is none.