I don't think US needs to spend that amount of money, I think China is doing enough stupid things to spur anti-China sentiments overseas. Also, they could just remind people that China released COVID which killed millions and cost countries billions.
for example: US, EU raise alarm over China’s ‘very substantial’ support for Russia in Ukraine war. Beijing’s ‘significant’ exports said to be used on battlefield and given in exchange for Kremlin’s sensitive military technologies https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3278160/us...
Outside of very specific niches like trade deficits, job and industry losses (moved to China), and geopolitical saber rattling, I feel the sentiment of the average man is actually very pro-China thanks to how much sheer money China pours into soft power.
I recommend seeing what China has its monies in, because they are in fucking everything today.
As an example, China has their monies in like 80~90%+ of the global video game market through Tencent, and video games are one of the heralds of pop culture and thus influence today. More critically, China has a growing stranglehold on the next generation of global payment processors through Alipay and WeChat Pay among others.
Also, perhaps ironically: This entire thread with numerous pro-China/anti-US/anti-west sentiments.
To put this in Civilization terms, China is going for an Econo-Cultural Victory and I daresay it's working.
I would take surveys with a large serving of salt. By their own admission, the American survey only concerned a selection of 3,600 by phone call, and those who refused to answer are not counted in the results. That's not going to create a reasonable representation, because for starters most people these days fucking hate junk calls.
Also of note in that survey is that the anti-China sentiment is heavily biased towards older conservatives. That means the current and coming younger, more progressive generations are more pro-China, relatively speaking.
This is China's investment into soft power blossoming in spades.
As for the country survey, have a closer look at that breakdown: The west, to include Japan and South Korea, are anti-China as a collective. Most of the rest of the world is at worst neutral and at best pro-China; South and Central America is almost entirely pro-China including Mexico, the US's immediate neighbour to the south.
Also, despite Indians' claimed anti-Chinese sentiment, India is also one of, if not the, China's biggest strategic ally if not necessarily a friend.
Again, China's investment into soft power blossoming in spades.
While the efficacy of American anti-Chinese propaganda is certainly debatable, it's clear the US and the west at large are losing the econo-cultural fight and need to respond somehow.
I grew up in a very international diverse environment, but I cant name a single popular movie, song, or other media that I knew is from China, other than the meme where John Cena is eating icecream. I suspect this is the same for over 95% of Americans.
Excluding cultural icons, as I understand the definition, these are not examples of soft power. These are just power.
Nobody here is denying china has an economic strength but that has nothing to do with soft power. Soft power has to do with cultural export, and china has none. Zero. Nothing.
I am not in denial. Nobody outside of china gives a rats ass about chinese music or movies, or chinese blue jeans. They just know about the great wall, and about how horrible the government is.. Everyone thinks genshin is japanese, and loves japanese denim.
And you cant just flag comments that you disagree with to make them dissapear. That might fly in china but thats not how civilized nations operate. The reason I accused you of being a wumao is because of the way you behave. Not because I am in denial. I am a native born american citizen. Never met anybody who knows a damn thing about chinese cultural exports. that is because there arent any.
China can not achieve a cultural victory. They are exporting their form of government, but Chinese culture is still a mystery in the west to this day, unlike, say, Japan or Korea. Can you name one Chinese pop star or movie star? Other than the Hong Kong ones, I can’t.
I think you've missed the Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail craze, those two Chinese games took the global video game market by storm.
I'm not going to mention the smaller hits like Arknights and Azur Lane and many more.
Japanese and Korean pop culture are yesterday's news, Chinese pop culture is the current trend. And note, I say that very begrudgingly as a Japanese; even in Japan now the Chinese games are more popular than homegrown Japanese games.
That monkey god game (Wukong something) also just came out this month and it's become one of Steam's most played games ever.
And of course Tencent also owns part of Path of Exile, Epic Games, Discord, Roblox, etc.
China used to own AMC Theaters too, and still owns some Hollywood studios like Legendary (Batman, The Hangover, Pacific Rim, Interstellar, etc.) through the Wanda conglomerate.
While we're talking about pop culture, China is just quietly buying up America piece by piece...
Buying things isnt soft power. The discussion was about soft power. Owning things is not soft power. He is referring to cultural exports. And there are not any.
How are they exporting their form of government? I guess you meant talking to dictators and democracies alike, which also EU or US is doing.
Just look at extremely friendly unwavering long term support for say Saudi arabia, from where all 9/11 attackers and whole extreme wahhabism came from. Say Mohamed bin Salman is proven vicious psychotic murderer yet ie Trump admires him, and no western democracy refuses saudi oil.
It is disingenuous to say that covid was naturally occuring. You should probably go look up the lab it came from, and who was funding it. (Canada and the US were involved.)
The scientific consensus is that the virus spilled over from wild animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. There's strong evidence to back this up.
There's zero evidence that the virus has anything to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in fact relatively strong evidence that they didn't have or even know about the virus before it spilled over.
This is the definitive study that shows the epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak was the Huanan Seafood Market: Worobey et al. (2022), in the journal Science [0]. This is a study that discusses the genetic evidence that there were multiple spillovers at the market: Pekar et al. (2022), also in the journal Science [1].
The above two findings are completely inconsistent with the idea of a lab leak. Why would a lab leak cause an outbreak at a market that sells wild animals, of all places? And how would it cause two different lineages of virus to emerge at that market?
If you know how the original SARS spilled over, in wild animal markets in a major Chinese city (Guangzhou, far away from where the bats that carry SARS live), the Wuhan Seafood Market spillover looks nearly identical - just 17 years later.
Meanwhile, no evidence at all has emerged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Scientists at the WIV were regularly publishing and giving talks about exactly what they were working on, and they never mentioned anything closely related to SARS-CoV-2. They were working with viruses much closer to the original SARS, which is what most people back then were interested in. After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, you could actually go back and look into the WIV's publications to find the most closely related virus. It's called RaTG13, and it was published by scientists at the WIV all the way back in 2014. However, it's way too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be the progenitor virus, and in fact, more closely related viruses have since been found by a French team in Laos. Basically, all the evidence about who knew what when, the genetics of more closely related viruses that have been discovered since the pandemic began argue positively that the WIV had nothing to do with the origins of the pandemic. This is in addition to the strong evidence that the initial outbreak was not at WIV, but rather at a wild animal market (which is exactly what you'd expect for a natural spillover).
None of this has made its way into the American public's consciousness, though.
I recommend seeing what China has its monies in, because they are in fucking everything today.
As an example, China has their monies in like 80~90%+ of the global video game market through Tencent, and video games are one of the heralds of pop culture and thus influence today. More critically, China has a growing stranglehold on the next generation of global payment processors through Alipay and WeChat Pay among others.
Also, perhaps ironically: This entire thread with numerous pro-China/anti-US/anti-west sentiments.
To put this in Civilization terms, China is going for an Econo-Cultural Victory and I daresay it's working.