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Last week, the International Monetary Fund confirmed that mainland China's economic output this year should overtake the United States. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Mr. Shangkong
by George Chen
Mr. Shangkong
by George Chen

China, as world's new No 1 economy, still struggles with soft power

As Beijing shifts its economic focus to quality, it needs to learn that soft power can't be bought

It's official now. China is No 1 and America is No 2. I'm talking about which economy is the world's largest.

Last week, the International Monetary Fund confirmed that mainland China's economic output this year should reach US$17.6 trillion, against about US$17.4 trillion for the United States. Beijing, shall we celebrate?

Interestingly, Beijing didn't want to make this a big deal. Instead, Xinhua has published a series of articles in the past few days to urge people to focus more on "quality" of the economy rather than to just continue to play the numbers game. After all, we all know there is no way that the mainland can keep growing its economy at even 7 per cent a year for the next decade without structural reforms on both the economic and political fronts.

Top leaders in Beijing are definitely not stupid, so clearly it's time to change the focus of the game.

I've also noticed another interesting phenomenon - as Beijing is trying to shift its economic focus to quality from quantity, the central government is also becoming increasingly interested in demonstrating its so-called "soft power" to the rest of the world.

Every country wants to put out some propaganda so there's nothing wrong with China promoting itself externally, but Beijing needs better public relations managers to help it, otherwise the effort could backfire.

Last week, I was in New York, where some years ago Xinhua got a big screen in the heart of Times Square to promote China - mostly about Chinese history and tourist destinations. This time, I noticed another big screen right next to it, owned by a Chinese advertising company, that repeatedly showed videos of beautiful scenes around China with captions in Chinese rather than in English.

The Xinhua screen has exactly the same problem. If the government spent huge sums of money occupying the best spot in New York to promote the image of China, who would be its target audience? Chinese tourists in America? As a Chinese national, I don't think I need to be educated about how beautiful the Great Wall is when I am in New York.

Those big screens risk becoming a waste of money and effort.

As the world's No1 economy, China has plenty of reasons to improve its image around the world. However, a better strategy to demonstrate China's "soft power" is not as simple as climbing the ranking of global economic power by showing how big the economy is. No country can just spend money to buy soft power.

In the case of China's propaganda screens in Times Square, unfortunately they only told the world once again how small and weak China still is when it comes to engaging with the West.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: The new No 1 struggles with soft power
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