Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. xviii, 153 pp. $90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-7391-9339-6.
Research on China’s soft power projection has mushroomed over the past decade. Studies have focused on why China is engaging in soft power diplomacy, how it is doing so, and whether its efforts have been effective. This book contributes to this literature, examining a part of the world of growing importance to China because of its Belt and Road Initiative—South Asia. What emerges from the analysis is a comprehensive and highly detailed study that finds China has been fairly successful in winning the hearts and minds of smaller states in South Asia, but is also facing the prospect that sustaining goodwill and its image as a benign power will be challenging. Put differently, China’s soft power diplomacy in South Asia contains elements of both reality and myth, reality having to do with the strategic inroads China has made in the region and myth having to do with the limited appeal of some Chinese values and the downsides of accepting outside influence.
Big ideas in this study are that China is engaged in a “great game” in South Asia that has in recent years produced gains for China at the expense of India, and that these gains have remarkably come in countries with whom China shares little in common culturally, socially, or ethnically. Reasons for this are that China has been doling out economic benefits to many South Asian countries in the form of aid and investment, which the author correctly considers instruments of soft power in addition to other instruments such as academic exchanges, cultural performances, and the establishment of Confucius Institutes, which China is also involved with; a desire of smaller countries in the region that China act as a balancer against India; and problems with Indian diplomacy itself. As the author writes, “The Modi government may make tall claims of winning the trust of a majority of India’s neighbors, but the fact remains that Indian diplomacy lacks foresightedness as well as a long-term, well-calibrated, and a well-integrated policy approach to deal with its immediate neighbors” (23–24).
Details of the analysis are found in the chapters on individual countries or groups of countries as they relate to China. In the chapter on India, the author argues that diplomatic relations between Beijing and New Delhi have been fraught with conflict over the years because of a strategic rivalry rooted in geopolitical issues that include a Sino-India boundary dispute, China’s invasion of Tibet in 1950, thermonuclear tests by India in 1998, and Chinese military support for Pakistan. He also notes, however, that there has been much cooperation between the two countries on matters such as trade and investment, joint military exercises, climate change, and global governance. Recent evidence of this includes record trade between China and India in 2017, robust investment in India by Chinese companies, partnership in the New Development Bank, the Asian Instructure Investment Bank, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which India joined as a full member in 2017, and exchanges between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the 9th BRICS Summit in September 2017 (after the Doklam standoff earlier in the year) and in Wuhan, China in April 2018. In a chapter on China-Pakistan relations, the author argues that Beijing has established close relations with Islamabad by providing military and economic aid in an effort to win support for its objectives, which include gaining Pakistan’s support for dealing with a Uyghur separatist movement in Xinjiang, “on engaging Indian troops to its northwestern borders, and on encircling India through a series of strategic projects, ranging from Gwadar naval base to strategic roads in the PoK [Pakistan-occupied Kashmir] region” (69). Pakistan is willing to ally itself with China because not only does it need Chinese aid, but also shares with China the desire to contain India. Other chapters deal with China’s relations with smaller states in South Asia—the Himalayan states of Nepal and Bhutan, the island states of the Indian Ocean, and Bangladesh. Here too, one gets a story of China using economic aid, sometimes mixed with other soft power instruments such as Confucius Institutes or tourist visits, to expand its regional influence, often at the expense of India even though ideological, cultural, or ethnic similarities are thin. Making China’s job easier are the “anti-India biases” (119) of some countries in the region (mentioned are Nepal and Bangladesh) and India’s own ineffective diplomacy.
The question is: will China’s soft power diplomacy in South Asia continue to produce rich geopolitical—and geo-economic—dividends for China, enabling it to prevail in its strategic competition with India? The author is not entirely clear about this because on one page he says that “China’s soft power influence in the region is likely to grow” (23) and “there is a strong possibility that China will be able to persuade countries such as the Maldives, Bhutan, and Nepal to downgrade their relationship with India” (23), but elsewhere he indicates that smaller countries in the region that borrowed from China might suffer a debt hangover that causes them “to break or loosen their economic and investment ties with China” and “look to India, their old partner in nation building” (135). He also talks about the myths of China’s soft power that proclaim Chinese values and ways of ordering the world to be universally desirable and also notes that some of China’s activities on issues such as territorial disputes in the South China Sea call into question the legitimacy of China’s soft power. These are important issues because Belt and Road projects are being carried out in South Asian nations and doubts are arising that they are motivated by the “win-win” considerations China often claims underlie them.
All in all, however, this is a very strong book, whose hedging is really an attempt to grasp the nuance of China’s soft power activities. Besides being extremely valuable simply for chronicling China’s bilateral relations with South Asian countries, the book adds greatly to the Chinese soft power literature by bringing into focus a region that will likely play an important role in China’s foreign policy for a long time to come.
James F. Paradise
Yonsei University, Wonju, South Korea