In Reply to: It's never going to be one or the other posted by DSCBruin on May 27, 2025 at 16:26:15
I'm saying China has no cultural clout, as far as I know. The USA's cultural clout is sinking*, but it's not being replaced with a love for China.
China doesn't do Soft Power. In my first post of this sub-thread, I said "how are we going to compete w/ China's Belt and Road program and the extortion-lite or regular old extortion that goes with it." We don't have the resources. Until Trump, we didn't have the inclination to compete that way, but still, we don't have the resources.
That's what I'm saying - we are not going to be able to compete. I was agreeing with Blindness's comment "it was always a given that we were heading toward a Chinese century." I hope that is buttoned down as a topic.
Now, how China accomplishes this new primary role in the global hegemony? I don't think it's from Soft Power. I think it's from mafia like power plays. You let China do something for you, that's a permanent bye-bye to autonomy.
Sure, programs like AIDE are an attempt to boost power, but it's through the use of Soft Power. You can criticize the United States and say we're not perceived as a benign force. Absolutely true. But, a program like AIDE is about as benign as it gets.
Up until now, the US has done a lot of soft power. A vast projection of Soft Power. Vast. Listen to most radio stations from around the world, you'll get some derivation of American music. People around the world learn English from watching Friends. When Syrian refugees were making their way to Germany, they stopped in some small town for the night. The town was asking what should we do to keep all these people calm. A local suggested they had Tom and Jerry dvd's, if someone had a way to play them in the town square. Word got out, the Syrian kids started chanting "Tom and Je Ree!"
China doesn't do AIDE, it's culture is a non-factor (compared to the US) on the world stage, and they don't do anything like AIDE. Whether they step in to fill that void .... that will be interesting to watch. I'd say there's a much bigger chance of Muslim nations doing that than China.
Lastly, in the past 2 centuries, China has not had the wherewithal to outright invade anyone. But, was China any less in the Korean Conflict than the US?
And, China now has wherewithal.
*I've been listening to the BBC pretty regularly for 30 years. They uniformly talk about Americans as idiots. But, they uniformly talk about American culture allllll the time. Not derisively. Just talking about American music, movies, tv etc.
Now I listen to Australian (mostly) instead of BBC. Same thing. You can't go 10 minutes w/o them referencing an American entertainment product. It's incessant.