China's president, Hu Jintao, greeted 2012 with an important essay warning that China was being battered by Western culture: "We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration," he wrote, adding that "the international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.

"


Essentially, Hu was saying that China was under assault by Western soft power - the ability to produce outcomes through persuasion and attraction rather than coercion or payment - and needed to fight back.


Over the past decade, China's economic and military might has grown impressively, and this has frightened its neighbors into looking for allies to balance rising Chinese hard power.

But if a country can also increase its soft power, its neighbors feel less need to seek balancing alliances. ...

Read the full story at International Herald Tribune