SONG CHEN/CHINA DAILY
Increasing China's soft power through more cultural exchanges and regular global communication has found place in the Decisions on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, issued by the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee.
China remains a "big economic power but a weak cultural force" despite about 60 percent of the respondents to a recent survey in 14 countries saying that it is "a global power".
The mismatch between economic strength and cultural influence is also evident in the disparity between the strengths of Chinese and foreign cultural enterprises. Six Chinese steel companies figure on the world's top-10 list in their field, while the highest-ranking Chinese cultural enterprise occupies the 40th spot and only two find place on the list of the top 50 global cultural enterprises. There is no denying that Chinese cultural enterprises enjoy a much lower global status compared with domestic companies in other industries.
Culture is the core of a country's soft power. A country's soft power, according to Joseph Nye, who pioneered the theory of soft power, rests on three factors: its culture in places where it is attractive to others, its values recognized and desired by other countries, and its foreign policies attractive to other governments. Two of the factors are directly related to culture.Experience shows that China can spread its culture abroad, strengthen communication, remove misunderstandings and increase its soft power more effectively by nurturing globally competitive cultural enterprises and helping cultural enterprises to expand overseas. Government propaganda is no longer the most effective form of publicity. Instead, nongovernmental exchanges are the most potent method to promote soft power. By cultivating more and better overseas-oriented cultural enterprises, establishing a pattern that combines cultural enterprises, social participation, market operation and government promotion to expand cultural exchanges with other countries, China can more easily enhance its soft power abroad.
The question is: How to accelerate the pace of cultivating overseas-oriented cultural enterprises? Because of its industrial and spiritual attributes, overseas-oriented cultural enterprises should be treated according to the functions they perform. Enterprises that mainly focus on industrial attributes should put financial benefit first to better meet the spiritual and cultural needs of overseas consumers, and let the market decide the allocation of resources. They will acquire soft power after gaining in economic stature and hard power.
Overseas-oriented cultural enterprises with both attributes should pay equal attention to social and economic benefits, introduce innovative development patterns and combine cultural communications with economic activity.
And cultural enterprises that aim to spread culture but lack finance should make social influence their top priority, establish a corporate governance structure, improve their performance evaluation mechanism and raise the quality and efficiency of their operations to achieve maximum social benefits with the minimum investment.
Overseas-oriented cultural enterprises, while giving full play to their vitality and creativity, should free the cultural market of the elements that endanger the core values, national interests and market order, and violate the requirements of safety, quality and the environment. They should also provide stronger protection to intellectual property rights.
A mechanism should be established to coordinate between the domestic and overseas cultural markets, exploit the advantages of the large domestic cultural market, break industrial and regional segmentation, and encourage fair and open competition to strengthen the cultural industry's chain. Efforts should also be made to develop a number of overseas-oriented cultural industrial clusters and make specialization a trait of the industry to enable it to compete in the domestic as well as overseas markets.
The United States has a well-developed Walt Disney-led industrial cluster in the animation industry with a clear-cut division of labor and wide business coverage, including theme parks and facilities, filmmaking, research and development in derivative products, music and DVD companies, and publishing houses. A reasonable profit distribution mechanism has been established on this basis in production, distribution, derivative product development and sales, making it easier to attract more consumers.
At the same time, we should seize the opportunities offered by the global financial crisis by encouraging domestic cultural enterprises to participate in joint ventures with foreign companies, introduce talents, technologies and management experience conducive to the development of China's cultural industry, and build multinational cultural companies to promote international competition.
Cooperation between the government, enterprises and industry associations needs to be strengthened to form cooperative partnership. The government should enhance its capacity building to actively adapt to globalization and respond timely to risks. A thorough reform needs to be carried out in cultural departments to integrate cultural management and service resources, raise service awareness and improve the level of service. Organizations such as industry associations for overseas-oriented cultural enterprises should be established to facilitate a self-regulatory system, information gathering, capital operation, technology research and development, and marketing.
To strengthen cultural information service, the government should set up or entrust professional information service organizations to improve the index system, establish a database for the cultural industry, collect and process relevant cultural information, and offer comprehensive information service to overseas-oriented cultural enterprises.
International dialogue in and the cooperation mechanism for the cultural industry should be strengthened to give more voice to China in the rulemaking process of global cultural trade. There is also a need to build a platform for web service, exhibitions, marketing activities and presentation of cultural products and services and to organize globally influential trade fairs to encourage and support overseas-oriented cultural enterprises to participate in culture promotion campaigns and publicize Chinese cultural enterprises, and their products and services
The rise of China's soft power is a gradual process reflecting its increasing economic strength. But we should be patient and persistent, and exhibit a more open, cooperative, inclusive and innovative attitude to help domestic cultural enterprises expand in overseas markets and promote Chinese culture across the world.
The author is an associate researcher at the Research Department of Industrial Economy, the Development Research Center of the State Council.
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