Chapter 8 - Digital Immersive Art and the Problem of China’s Soft Power

Summary

Olympic Games, Expos and major festival events provide nations with a global platform for showcasing cultural achievements. At the Olympic Games closing ceremonies, it has become a convention for the next host nation to introduce itself with artistic displays, usually in the form of dance and performances that are representative of the host city. This tradition began at the 1976 Summer Olympic Games (IOC, 2009). At the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, for instance, the renowned film director, Zhang Yimou, utilised advanced digital technology to draw attention to China's 5,000-year-old culture. The international news at the time reported a sudden rise in China's soft power. ARD (2008, as cited in Schneider, 2019, p. 110), Germany's main state TV channel, expressed surprise that the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony had not been ‘a propaganda show’.

Soft power is a term coined by the US political scientist Joseph Nye (1990). In public diplomacy, ‘the term usually describes a government's ability to influence foreign public opinion in its favour and to generate goodwill among the citizens of other countries for its foreign policy’ (Schneider, 2019, p. 205). In contrast to military power, economic power, and technological power (i.e. hard power), soft power is related to ideology, foreign aid and culture. Essentially, it is a form of national branding that emphasises resources ( Jullien, 2021; Pan, 2012; Sigley, 2015).

Today, many people hold the view that China is rejuvenating itself, changing the stereotype of a copycat nation (Made in China) and becoming an emergent technological power (Digital China). The origins of China's technological advance go back to the late 1980s when the four modernisations became part of statecraft. But technology was articulated most clearly in 2006 when the leadership announced that China would become an ‘innovative nation’ by 2020. In his summary report to the nation's Seventeenth National Congress in the following year, Hu Jintao, the former Chairman of the PRC, highlighted China's creative and innovative spirit and spoke positively about the role of digital technology in generating ‘cultural confidence’ (Xinhua, 2012).