Nothing New Under the Stars: Chinese Sharp Power

Charles W. King

Increasing attention is being paid to how the People’s Republic of China is seeking to influence foreign governments. An Australian MP, Sam Dastyari, recently resigned due to a number of pro-China statements he had made and his relationship with a Chinese businessman. The presence of Chinese money in the war chests of American political candidates has been contentious since the 1990s. China also exerts increasing influence in Western academia, through both funding and public criticism. The National Endowment for Democracy has termed this influence ‘Sharp Power’. Distinct from the attractive nature of soft power and the military power projection of hard power, sharp power is described as manipulation and pressure in the public and political spheres.

While exercising sharp power is new for the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, the United States and others have been the target of sharp power before. Sharp power itself is not a new idea, it was a staple of the great power politics that existed throughout the nineteenth century, and was an important tool during the Cold War. One of the hallmarks of Chinese sharp power in recent years has been its ability to influence the academic discussion surrounding china. The Chinese government is funding Confucius Institutes all over the western world to teach the mandarin, and increasingly as budgets are getting tighter academic institutions are letting them set their own curriculum and programs. The spontaneous stick to the Confucius Institutes’ intentional carrot is the intense public criticism academics face for slights (real or perceived) against the “feelings of the Chinese people” for things like using maps that do not reflect the Chinese position. Influencing academic discourse is a classic method for government influence of a population. Frequently it involves censorship as governments attempt to manipulate their own population; but as international travel became easier—particularly in Europe—it became an important part of great power competition. While the Soviet K.G.B. was probably most proud of the high level agents it was able to insert into British political institutions, it cannot have been dissatisfied with influence the Marxist method of historical analysis continues to have in British academia.

The fear of losing funding is also a large proportion of Chinese sharp power. In the past three decades China has begun to spend huge sums of money not only on Western consumer goods, but on investments abroad. Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road infrastructure investments are just a small part of what China is spending abroad today. China recently founded the Asia Development Bank and is constructing a large military base in Djibouti. This is not dissimilar to the financial influence exerted during much of the Cold War. Egypt’s Nasser famously played the United States and the Soviet Union against each to see who would give him more patronage. More frequently the U.S. and U.S.S.R. used their financial support of governments to get them implement policies they favored, be they control economies or allowing market access. The trick was always to get the client state to a position where they could not function without the foreign funding, and then impose dictates upon them.

Chinese sharp power deserves the attention of Western policy-makers and counter-intelligence experts. It is a new approach for the Chinese, fueled by recent Chinese economic prosperity; it is not an altogether new approach for influencing foreign powers. The West can look to its own playbook from the Cold War and those of the nineteenth century great powers for how sharp power was used, and how it was countered.