[scandox]

I think he's making a deeper point. China can be a global power in the sense that you mean: like just wielding influence in the crudest sense - "an advantage" as he puts it.

He's questioning what the meaning of that is without a real Chinese identity expressed via the people. It's more like the power a business exercises which ultimately may be broken up, bought or which is assimilated into the culture it seeks to alter. Chinese power in this concept would be a superstructure over the world, not a force within it.

By contrast, American influence over time (love it or loathe it) has been culturally formidable because it has a very powerful grassroots (for want of a better word) identity. It is something which has taken possession of the world from the ground up.

[pm90]

This is a relatively recent thing, for sure. For most of human history, powerful nations exercised their influence mostly via military power and trade, not through soft power such as promoting a better quality of living (middle class itself is pretty recent, a product of industrial revolutions).

I think its disingenuous to dismiss the very real progress that China has made in industry and military as inessential just because they haven't had the same cultural impact as the US. Prosperity, strong and healthy middle class and political stability are what is necessary for the development of a strong, lasting culture.

There is also the often overlooked fact that the US, being an English speaking country, got to ride the cultural train for free since the British Empire had already established English as the lingua franca of the world. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture which we aren't aware of since its mostly in Chinese.

[soundwave106]

As a side note, my impression is that cultural exports from Hong Kong have declined a fair bit since China took over the island. (Japan and (especially) South Korea seem to dominate Asian cultural exports at the moment).

I think a big issue regarding China and culture is that, with their need for "great firewalls" and the like, they've effectively removed a huge channel for people to communicate their ideas and culture outside the nation. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture that we don't know about; the problem is, with many Western social media channels blocked inside the country, it is probably much more difficult for Chinese to obtain a non-Chinese audience online even if they wanted to.