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Schlagwort: Business

The influence of media on China’s “Soft Power”

The influence of media on China’s “Soft Power”

 

Academic debates about China’s “soft power” are controversial. Internationally renowned scientists such as Joseph Nye and David Shambaugh believe that many efforts of China’s central government aimed at accumulating cultural soft power had only a very limited return on its investments. But this may change now, thanks to the coverage of some influential non-Chinese media outlets.

Today, the Financial Times published an article titled “Beijing’s endgame: football with Chinese characteristics”. The article is mainly about the overdose of Chinese investments in English football clubs. It is argued that these investments are a response to President Xi Jinping’s football reforms, which are a means to boost China’s international influence.

But is this conclusion coherent? Are not the Chinese national team and the domestic league the key to increasing soft power? I’ve heard relatively little about German investors in foreign football clubs – even though the money is there. Nevertheless, football is a very important element of German soft power. The reason for this is obvious: the national team has been sustainably successful for decades and even more appreciated globally since the 2006 World Cup and the Klinsmann/Löw revolution.

In recent years, there has been an inflation of studies about Chinese soft power. Just because there are repeated scientific claims that China possesses (more or less) soft power, it does not mean that this is necessarily the case. From a scientific point of view, one major difficulty is already to quantify soft power. How exactly do you measure it?

What’s even more important (and not discussed in the FT article) is that the term “soft power” is interpreted differently by different scholars, especially in China. While the traditional understanding framed by Nye (1990) considers soft power mainly in the context of international relations, Chinese scholars and policy analysts also apply the concept to the context of domestic politics (Wang/Lu 2008: 445). That’s why we might miss the point in the soft power debates.

However, what I noticed recently is that the constant reporting of non-Chinese media – especially about Chinese football – has resulted in an increased awareness and interest in contemporary China’s popular culture.

What I mean by this is that the issue of Chinese soft power has shifted from a purely academic debate to a widely discussed topic in other fields like European football for example, which may have paradoxically led to China having actually more international influence and, consequently, more soft power.

Even now that you have spent your energy and time reading this text, it may be that I have influenced your perception of the capacity of Chinese soft power. Talking, writing, blogging about Chinese soft power may well turn out to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What the Neymar transfer tells us about Football in China

What the Neymar transfer tells us about Football in China

 

Paris Saint-Germain signed Brazilian forward Neymar for a world record fee of 222 million euros from FC Barcelona. The football public went crazy and some people accused Neymar on social media of being immoral. Most people, however, forget that the greatest value of football is not money; it is attention.

Imagine if football would not receive worldwide attention, as it is nowadays. Do you believe that so many entrepreneurs would be willing to invest their money in football, where a large number of clubs generate no or very low financial returns compared to other industries? Probably there would be some benefactors who voluntarily sponsor their home teams. But would these enormous sums of money be spent on sponsorship and TV rights if football would not receive the attention of so many people? I don’t think so.

The irony of the Neymar transfer is that most people who are now terribly upset and angry about it will most likely turn on the TV when Neymar plays against his former colleagues in the Champion League.

Many people are unaware that football is, in fact, a made-up game that is invested with so much meaning that it becomes reality. It involves elaborate rituals, and the results of the competitions have substantial impact on the social, economic and political standing of both players and spectators. Without the global attention, the social, commercial and political impact of football would probably not be worth mentioning. In fact, football would have no effect at all if we did not believe it had an effect. But it has an enormous impact! This is the reason why football is “more than a game”.

Football is a “religion” that people usually join very early in life. Of course, there are people who convert only at advanced age from other sports to football, but according to a study of FREE (Football Research in Enlarged Europe) about 89 per cent of respondents (over 8,000 European football fans) stated in a survey that they started to be interested in playing and watching football before they were 12 years old. This means that football socialisation takes place at a very young age.

In 2015, China’s Ministry of Education included football on the physical education syllabus in all primary and secondary schools and made football a compulsory part of the national school curriculum. In contrast to many European countries, youth football should be developed mainly in schools and not in clubs. The basic idea behind these efforts is to popularise football in the Chinese public. Thus, a special programme called Campus Football should “develop excellent grassroots to provide a growth path from social football to professional football”.

But it’s not the party, it’s the people who really matter. The Chinese population plays a decisive role in the development of national football. A comprehensive development of national football in China cannot be performed without the voluntary decision of the Chinese public to pay attention to and participate in football-related activities. This is the power of attention. It is all the more surprising that the role of football communities are often underestimated in the public debates not only on Chinese football.