China's “Politics of Harmony” and the Quest for Soft Power in International Politics

Abstract

This article engages with China's “politics of harmony” to investigate the dangers and possibilities of soft power as a concept and practice. Chinese sources claim that China will be able to exercise soft power due to its tradition of thinking about harmony. Indeed, the concept of harmony looms large in Chinese soft power campaigns, which differentiate China's own harmonious soft power from the allegedly disharmonious hard power of other great powers—in particular Western powers and Japan. Yet, similarly dichotomizing harmony discourses have been employed precisely in the West and Japan. In all three cases, such harmony discourses set a rhetorical trap, forcing audiences to empathize and identify with the “harmonious” self or risk being violently “harmonized.” There is no doubt that the soft power of harmony is coercive. More importantly, the present article argues that it has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing, and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan. A similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too. Ultimately, however, we argue that China's own tradition of thinking about harmony may help us to theorize how soft power might be exercised in less antagonistic and violent ways.

Perception of Harmonious Communication of Young Serbs in the Context of Intercultural Communication and International Economic Cooperation with the PRC

“…Within many disciplines, one can find references to harmony: philosophy -primarily related to antiquity (Löschke, 2020) incl. philosophy of the East (especially Confucianism, Buddhism, and Judaism) and of the West (including ancient Greek thinkers); ethics (Chu and Moore, 2020); family science (Pramono, 2020), social sciences (Yuan, 2020;Taormina, 2003;Naragatti, Rastogi and Singh, 2019;Po-Keung, 2014); psychology (including internal relationships, relationships with others and with the world) (Fabio and Tsuda, 2018;Kwan, Bond, and Singelis, 1997;Hook, Worthington and Utsey, 2009); economic sciences (regarding corporate social responsibility (Lin et al, 2020), sustainable development (Dancer, 2021;Mallabanda and Lipson, 2020;European Commission, 2001), neoclassical economics (Suh 2020), industrial harmony (Ganiyou, 2020), leadership (Nnadi, Okoh, and Nwonye, 2020;Heffernan and Crawford, 2006), conflict management (Leung, Koch, and Lu, 2002;Abioro, Odunlami, and Ekpudu, 2019)) and politics (Hagstrom and Nordin, 2019).…”

Emergence, consolidation and dominance of meta-regimes: Exploring the historical evolution of mass production (1765–1972) from the Deep Transitions perspective

“…These cases also offer opportunities to look into the operation of mechanisms uncovered by our study, e.g. the Fourth Industrial Revolution [ 117 ] as a rhetorical coupling connecting the digitalization of industry to the promise of sustainability, or societal differentiation as a mechanism connecting big data, AI, facial recognition software and social credit schemes to the Chinese vision of ‘harmonized’ society [ 118 , 119 ]. One can also analyse the role of landscape events in shaping these meta-regimes, e.g.…”

Constancia y fluctuaciones: una mirada al discurso de la política exterior costarricense ante la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas (2002-2015)

“…Bajo esta perspectiva, algunos trabajos han enfatizado cómo todo proceso de consolidación de "poder blando" parte de la construcción de un discurso que asocia características positivas con el emisor y negativas a sus adversarios. Además, indagan sobre los distintos mecanismos de difusión y posicionamiento de este discurso en diferentes foros, que van desde la tradicional alocución hasta el uso de estrategias más complejas de comunicación (Hagström y Nordin, 2020;Benhaïm, y Öktem, 2015).…”