A Superficial Death of Soft Power: It’s another Made-Up Term.
March 18th, 2013
One might as well call it “the Pink Powdery Pixie Dust of Hippie Magic,” because it is really quite a made-up concept that doesn’t make sense relative to its own applications.
Joseph Nye first defined and popularized the notion of “soft power” as the ability to attract and influence others. But somewhere down the path of popularity, such a general idea became shrouded in numbers and PR. Now, it is no longer enough to merely “attract”, no longer enough to be “soft”. ”Power” and “Influence twisted the essence of the notion until “soft power” became a plan of attack, like a soft drink overloaded with caffeine and sugar and double spiked with rum and turned into a 12 hour Energy Drink.
Mr. Nye may have defined “soft power”, but he certainly did not create it. He merely sought to coin a word and define what he thinks was missing from Western traditional exercise of “hard power”. But that means, Mr. Nye may himself be wrong in what he perceived, and he cannot give all the answers.
Worst of all, it is now being used to PR against China to prove rhetorically silly media lines like “China doesn’t have Soft Power Afterall.” Well, I don’t think any one can say China has lost that Pixie Dust of Magic, because I don’t think China ever claimed that it had it in the first place!
What Mr. Nye (and the followers of his “soft power” theory) is encountering, is the denial of the limitation of their own theory. That being, they can’t explain why the data in China’s case don’t fit their model, and yet they still insist that their theory must be correct.
Read more here.
via A Superficial Death of Soft Power: It’s another Made-Up Term. | Hidden Harmonies China Blog.
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Filed under: Information operations Tagged: Asia, Business, China, Hard power, Joseph Nye, Nye, Soft power, United States
