Chartbook 446 Soft power with Chinese characteristics? Notes on Chinamaxxing.

Chinamaxxing is a bit of a thing in the Anglosphere right now.

I’m far from immune to the enthusiasm.

In the salon series that Wang Qing and I host at Accent Society bookstore, I recently had the pleasure of talking with Dan Wang and Iza Ding about the phenomenon. It turned out to be a fascinating conversation very much energized by our sell-out audience.

Though the panelists disagreed in their assessments of the dynamics of Chinese culture in the current moment, there was general agreement that this is not in a time of particular vibrancy. So, the current vogue for China in the West is not plausibly explained by an exciting cultural efflorescence going on in China itself.

The most likely explanations are to be found in the sheer fact of China’s rise on the one hand, the increasing sophistication of its consumer and online culture and the contrast to the sense of the malaise in the Anglosphere and the exhaustion of the glamor of Western brands.

To be more specific, from our conversation one could distill at least seven vectors of China-Maxxing in the current moment.

#1 The most obvious is technocratic envy - Dan Wang’s thesis in Breakneck, that China is a society run by engineers, bent on “engineering the future”.

#2 Then there is the shock of the encounter with Chinese reality on the part of visitors to China - whether those visits are stage managed by official tourist agencies, or not.

#3 Another dimension of enthusiasm is retro-authenticity - street scenes from Beijing on Chongqing as reminders of a lost world of “down to earth” life.

#4 There is a lot of interest in Chinese ways of wellness

#5 The West has discovered that Chinese netizens have a great sense of humor.

#6 Chinese popular culture is one of the great generators of the styles and paraphernalia of “cuteness”.

#7 The erotic realm: recurring rumors of epidemics of “Yellow fever” sweeping the dating scene.

Whatever prognosis one has about the durability of this convergence, or its individual components, as Iza Ding remarks in a recent piece on the “grinning defiance of Chinese soft power” for the Ideas Letter, it should put paid to the common liberal conception that China, under CPC control, cannot be a generator of soft power.

Whether or not this enthusiasm for things Chinese can be utilized by Beijing is quite another matter. Official China is not oblivious to the phenomenon of Chinamaxxing. I heard it referred to several times from the rostrum at the China Development Forum in Beijing in March. But, on the Accent panel there was was skepticism that the current vogue would be skillfully exploited for propaganda purposes. The idea that there are cultural grand strategists at work in Beijing to compare with the CIA and its support for abstract expressionism in the 1950s seems far-fetched.

The current moment of Chinamaxxing may be intense but it is not without precedent.

What came to my mind was the moment of global enthusiasm for Maoism and the cultural revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Mao-maxxing” had far more dramatic political implications than the current social media hype.

Then there was the era of Hong Kong-Kung Fu enthusiasm, embodied by celebrities such as the ubiquitous Jackie Chan.

East Asian developmentalism has long had is Western admirers. Today’s technocratic China-Maxxers are often reminded that China is following in the footsteps of Japan, and South Korea and Taiwan.

“Cuteness”, into which Labubu dolls have exploded, was prefigured by Japanese and South Korean precedents.

So, not only is today’s vogue for China-Maxxing driven by China’s new economic strength and power. It is overdetermined by this wider context of global economic, political and cultural development.

The view strongly urged by Dan Wang was that the question we should be asking is not why Chinamaxxing is a “thing” but why, given China’s spectacular development, it is not even more dramatic. In his view, Beijing’s repression of free cultural activity has the effect of minimizing and dumbing down China’s cultural exports, thus undermining their overall impact. A freer China would be more influential.

Imagine the possibilities if Kaiser Kuo is right in his exciting prediction that China is on the “cusp of a genuine cultural renaissance”.

Such questions are, of course, speculative. But they are interesting in raising the question of what, in a multipolar world of uneven and combined development, one should expect to be the degree of lateral and cross-cutting influence. Japan was a developmental triumph whose influence in Europe and the US is present but hardly hegemonic. Brazil is a huge, middle-income country. India is a giant developing country. In both cases cultural intercourse is relatively uninhibited, but their presence in either European or American culture, let alone in other emerging or developing countries, is limited to particular sectors - food, football and particular segments of the workforce (tech in the case of Indian migrants to the US).

What is the benchmark to which we are comparing these kind of partial and sectoral interactions? Is this, once again, a demonstration of the historical singularity of America’s pervasive cultural, technological, political and geopolitical footprint from the 1940s through to the early 2000s? In an increasingly polycentric world can we even imagine a similar convergence of macroeconomic, geopolitical, mass media, cultural and political forces? How do we (re)imagine the working of soft power beyond hegemony?

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