Overall National Strength

Introduction

Comprehensive national strength refers to the force of a country by adding up all her resources and powers for her survival and development, as well as her international influence. It is generally manifested in a country’s economic and military strength, science and technology, natural resources, governance, social development and diplomacy.

Comprehensive national power includes ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’. Hard power refers to economic and military strength. With hard power, a country can achieve its goal through coercion or by providing economic benefits such as through investment and trade relations. Soft power is the power of a country to achieve its goals through its attractiveness. It refers to a country’s influence in terms of its culture, values and social systems. In recent years, after achieving economic success, China has started to enhance its soft power by promoting its culture abroad.

Soft power and hard power complement each other. For example, the US uses its military and economic strength to promote its values and culture. At the same time, it uses its cultural appeal to promote US products (such as movies) in oversea markets.

A stick and a carrot can be used as an analogy to hard power and soft power. Discuss the similarities.

Hard Power

Economic Power

Chinese tourists' spending spree is an important revenue for many countries

Countries that are not friendly towards towards China may face purchase boycott

China as the world's largest exporter means that any disruption to its production will have a significant impact to the global supply chain

Military Power

Soft Power

While hard power is the ability of a country to coerce or reward/bribe other countries through military, technology, money or resources, soft power is the ability of a country to charm or persuade others to give in to its goal so that it can have what it wants.

Soft power is mainly discussed in the following aspects:

Culture: Cultural appeal or lifestyles - A refined or popular culture can bring cultural recognition from all countries, e.g., McDonald's, Hollywood movies, Korean dramas
Appeal of political values: The practice of political values both within or outside a country - such as democracy, liberal freedom, human rights or communist ideals - affects the views on the legitimacy or governance of the country's regime. Some examples of political values are opposing death sentence or prosecuting political dissidents.
Diplomatic policies: Maintaining friendly relations with neighbouring countries, engaging in public diplomacy, upholding justice and maintaining world order all contribute to the legitimacy and moral standing of a state's regime, e.g., sending troops to Kuwait

Other aspects such as a country's international reputation, the civic quality of its people, cohesion of its people or the quality of national leaders are also used for consideration.

Some Chinese scholars list five elements that China’s soft power should have, namely, culture, values, influence in international systems, influence of its development mode and international image. The following section takes a look at China's soft power in terms of these five elements.

Reasons for China’s proactive soft power development

Improve national image: Improve national image, increase international understanding of China -> To relieve worries about threats in terms of world order and different countries’ interests brought by China’s rise,
Consolidate national ruling: Organize major national events -> enhance sense of pride -> consolidate ruling regime
Cultural industry is big business: Promote related industry and expand overseas market -> put new impetus into the Chinese economy -> reduce reliance on polluting industry -> promote sustainable development.
Promote Chinese culture: With China’s long history, unique cultural arts and festivals, China can promote its culture through cultural conservation (enlisting its relics to become World Heritage), enhance the promotion for traditional festivals (e.g. Confucius Festival), encourage the growth of performance industries (Assisting Chinese movies to enter different markets)

Additional information:

Is there a political ideology from China that appeals to a wide audience? Read on to find out!

The 'Beijing Consensus'.

It has been much discussed in the international world that the so-called ‘Beijing Consensus’ is a political ideology that is becoming increasing accepted especially among the developing countries. To understand this we must first understand what the Washington Consensus is.

The Washington Consensus originated from a meeting convened by many international organisation in 1989, such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. The meeting was about setting solutions for economic crisis in Latin-American Countries. Such measures include, balanced budget, trade liberalisation, financial liberalisation, allowing Foreign Direct Investment, nationalisation and floating exchange rate. These measures are known together as the Washington Consensus.

It turns out that these measures did not help the Latin-American countries escape from poverty. In 1998, these measures was applied on Asian countries under financial crisis, but they turned out to make the situation even worse, e.g. foreign capital could flee the country in mass causing exchange rate wild fluctuation. Some criticised this consensus as something that allows manipulation by western countries but do not help relieve poverty in those countries.

In 2004, an American banker published a dissertation on China and compared its strategies since its Reform and Opening Up with the Washington Consensus, which he coined as the Beijing Consensus. The main points are:

1. Emphasis on innovation – the key incentive and means for continuous growth for China

2. Emphasis on sustainable and equitable development – focus on improve the quality of life of its people in order to solve the social conflicts arising during the development process

3. Insisting on independent development – do not follow other countries and brush aside intervention attempted to be made by the developed countries.

The international society, especially the developing countries, shows support to this mode of development as the economic reform is led by its own government. By focusing on innovation, problems on livelihood of the people are gradually solved. This mode of development is more substantial for developing countries as it places economic reform over political reform and insists on maintaining one’s sovereignty.

Exam Corner:

Must do

Reference:

Page updated

Report abuse