China: Soft power or hard sell?

Over the past few weeks, stories coming out of China have dominated the global headlines. First came the Bo Xilai political scandal, followed by the story of Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident, and more recently, the expulsion of Al Jazeera's sole China correspondent Melissa Chan. Chinese authorities have yet to specify the reasons why Chen was not allowed to stay, and it has left room for speculation, mostly negative, in the Western media. Meanwhile, Beijing is addressing what it sees as an unfair deal in the Western media through its own soft power push. China has reportedly spent $6mn on news channels broadcasting in English, Russian and Arabic. In this week's News Divide, we look at one of China's growing exports - the image of itself.

So when China asserts a nine-dash line claim far from its mainland and close to the shore of some overmatched country like the Philippines and repudiates any form of third-party mediation, the Chinese action is understandably attributed to some combination of arrogance, obtuseness and appetite for aggression. Reuters threw another possibility in the mix: that the Chinese government has lost its geopolitical marbles and its South China Seas policy is simply a stewpot of conflicting ad hoc initiatives.

As tension mounted at Scarborough Shoal, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group warned in a report late last month that China's poorly coordinated and sometimes competing civilian agencies were inflaming frictions over disputed territory. "Any future solution to the South China Sea dispute needs to address the problem of China's mix of diverse actors and construct a coherent and centralized maritime policy and law enforcement strategy," it said. [1]

This scenario has a familiar ring to it, if one remembers the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands incident of 2010. It began with a similar confrontation between Chinese fishing boats and Japanese Coast Guard vessels. That situation rapidly escalated thanks to the intemperance of the Chinese captain, who collided with Japanese Coast Guard vessels while trying to evade boarding, and the political calculations of Seiji Maehara, the ambitious Japanese home minister and darling of the US State Department. In the Japanese case, the boat was seized and the crew arrested, a trial of the obdurate Captain Zhan was threatened and, when China predictably went ballistic and choked off rare earth shipments, Maehara jetted off to obtain the support of the US government.