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China’s Soft Power: From Wary Analysis to Implementation in African Policy
This article examines the conceptualization of Chinese soft power and the implementation
of the PRC’s soft power strategy in Africa. First introduced into academic
discourse by American political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, the concept was subsequently
adopted and critically re-evaluated by Chinese political theorists, most notably
Wang Huning, Yan Xuetong, Yang Shengping and Zhang Guozuo. The term has undergone
a complex process of semantic evolution, emerging as a primary tool of the
PRC’s foreign policy since 2007. The conceptual and methodological framework of this
article synthesizes Quentin Skinner’s linguistic contextualism and Yan Xuetong’s
moral realism. The application of Skinner’s methodology enables a deconstruction of
the evolution of Chinese soft power as a sequence of speech acts intended to legitimize
the PRC’s foreign policy within a shifting international context. The contemporary
Chinese interpretation of soft power, largely shaped by the ideas of Wang Huning and
Yan Xuetong, demonstrates a pivot from liberal idealism toward strategic pragmatism.
The article provides a periodization of the concept’s evolution within Chinese political
culture, analyzes its core ideologemes and initiatives, and investigates the institutions,
instruments, and practices of the PRC’s soft power in Africa. The primary ideologemes
of Chinese soft power are rooted in the four global initiatives introduced by Xi Jinping.
These initiatives provide the conceptual substance of China’s soft power, imbuing it
with the meaning specific to the Chinese context. Unlike the United States, China does
not demand that its partners alter their domestic systems; for many African and Asian
nations, this lack of conditionality is precisely what renders Chinese influence “soft.”
The article concludes that contemporary Chinese soft power, while stripped of Nye’s
original political idealism, should not be construed as hard power. Rather, it remains
firmly within the conceptual framework of soft power, albeit redefined through a
Sinicized lens of pragmatic statecraft.