Bloggingheads on Soft Power: China vs. Japan vs. US

I discussed Josh Kurlantzick's book on China's soft power on bloggingheads.tv. We spend some time considering what soft power means in the context of China. I sympathize with Josh in his decision to broaden the definition of soft power for his book.

Joseph Nye, the inventor of the term and the head of the CSIS Smart Power Commission with Richard Armitage, defined soft power as the ability to attract rather than coerce (soft) to get what you want (power). As I put it, when someone attractive or cool walks into a restaurant, people want to order what that person is eating. One could apply this principle to a policy menu.

Josh instead includes what Nye categorizes as coercive power, which is the more traditional understanding of power in international relations. If you don't do something, I will use force against you or stop giving you economic goodies. Josh includes aid, trade, FDI, and other more coercive tools when he applies it to China.

But I understand why Josh would want to expand the definition of soft power. First, China itself is trying to expand the definition of power--what it calls comprehensive power includes the economy, its culture, its external economic relations, etc. Second, Asian relations are increasingly economically sticky. There is a greater amount of intra-regional trade in Asia, making economics more important.

Third, China's image is vulnerable and its brand is still pretty weak. As I ask Josh, when was the last time you sought out a Chinese-branded product or tried to emulate a Chinese factory? So the economic tools act as a potential delivery system for its culture--or for its traditional soft power in the future, when people say, we want to be like China.

Although Nye says Japan has the strongest soft power in Asia, Josh was skeptical about Japan's soft power because it has made little progress in getting a permanent UN Security Council seat and in other areas. But Nye and others rank Japan as strong in soft power--having a great number of patents, giving a lot of foreign aid, and generally being seen as a good actor.

I would also add that some of the lack of progress for Japan in influencing countries has ironically been from its reluctance to use coercive power--which is probably a good thing.

Downward Pressure on U.S. Wages - Trade Not All to Blame

Grant Aldonas of CSIS, Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth, and Robert Lawrence of Harvard recently wrote a report entitled "Succeeding in the Global Economy: A New Policy Agenda for the American Worker" sponsored by the Financial Services Forum. While the report finds that openness and globalization has added more than one trillion dollars annually to U.S. GDP, the debate has been too narrow, unfairly blaming trade for workers' woes. Here is an excerpt:

Since 2000 U.S. corporate profi ts have nearly doubled, from $817.9 billion in 2000 to $1.62 trillion in 2006. This rise has not been concentrated in one particular sector, but rather has been enjoyed quite widely across many industries. As a share of total national income, these corporate profits are today near 60-year highs at about 14 percent. The concentration of equity ownership in America means that higher corporate profitability may have contributed to the just discussed skewness of total-income growth.

To summarize: in recent years the large majority of American workers has seen poor income growth. Indeed, 96.6 percent of Americans are in educational groups whose mean total money earnings have been falling, not rising, since 2000. Only a small share of workers at the very high end has enjoyed strong growth in incomes. The strong U.S. productivity growth of the past several years has not been reflected in wage and salary earnings, and instead has accrued largely to the earnings of very high-end Americans and to corporate profits.

Read the full report here.