China, a New Cultural Strength? Soft Power and Sharp Power

Hybrid political system or “democracy” , China has endorsed the double use of “hard” and “soft” power by directing its priorities on the necessary establishment of a “cultural safety” (wenhua anquan). Not suffering from any type of dissidence, China responds to the need of creating its proper cultural industries in the audiovisual and the digital domains but also for the purpose of building a speech allowing the reinterpretation of the history in support of the power, Chinese, of course. In this context, the New Road of Silk’s policy – also called OBOR (“One Belt One Road”; « Yi dai yi lu” in Chinese) – initiated in 2013 by Xi Jinping is both a commercial type of strategy and a worldwide cultural project. It aims to exploit deposits in potentialities offered, for example, by the superior education for the African or Central Asian elites. It is based on the culturalist postulate according to which China has its own values, neo-Confucians in particular. These values have a universal aim that the Party-State wants to promote thanks to a large spectral cultural diplomacy. Understanding the challenges of this is one of the keys of our century…