China’s Communist Party: Searching for its softer side
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IN THE past several days, China has been doing much soul-searching. More than 300 of the Communist Party’s most powerful leaders met in Beijing and discussed ways of boosting the nation’s “cultural soft power”: an admission that for all the country’s economic prowess it lacks the magnetic draw of a country like America. Ordinary Chinese, however, have been more preoccupied with a hit-and-run accident that caused the death of a two-year-old girl. A dearth of what one Chinese newspaper commentary called “moral soft power” has been widely blamed for her demise and the seeming cold-heartedness of passersby.
The party’s meeting from October 15th to 18th was the first annual conclave of its central committee to focus on the issue of cultural soft power (a term that came into official party use after President Hu Jintao used it in a speech in 2007). The resolution it adopted (in Chinese) spoke of an urgent need to build up such power, which Joseph Nye, an American scholar, first drew attention to 20 years ago as a component of national strength. A country with soft power, Mr Nye contended, could bend others to its will without resorting to force or payment. “Success depends not only on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins,” wrote Mr Nye in 2005 (in what, from the party’s perspective, was a remarkably bullish article about the gains China appeared to be making in developing soft power).
The story of Little Yue Yue, as the Chinese media have nicknamed Wang Yue, who died on October 21st as a result of the accident eight days earlier in the southern city of Foshan, has been anything but a winning one. To many Chinese commentators, it has revealed a widespread callousness fostered by an amoral pursuit of wealth. Footage of the accident caught by a surveillance camera (be warned it is harrowing) showed Little Yue Yue being hit by a van, which stops and pauses, only to run over her again with a rear wheel, as its driver decides to proceed without checking what has happened. A little later a lorry rolls over her injured body. In the space of seven minutes, no fewer than 18 people walk by the bloody but still living girl before a rubbish-cleaner finally tends to her and summons Wang Yue’s mother.