In a relatively short period of time, China has built close diplomatic and economic relations with a wide range of countries across the developing world. In fact, as a result of its charm offensive, China’s public image in many developing states is currently far more positive than that of any other major power, even as its efforts in places like North America and Europe founder on human rights concerns and trade disputes. This charm offensive is partly an expression of Chinese “soft power.” Many Chinese scholars and officials view soft power more broadly than Joseph Nye, the originator of the term. Whereas Nye described it as the attractive appeal of a country’s values, the CCP definition would encompass virtually any mechanism outside of the military and security sphere, including tools that Nye considered coercive, like aid and investment. President Hu Jintao and other party leaders have clearly embraced the idea of soft power, and it has become central to their discourse about China’s role in the world. While only five years ago Chinese officials and academics vehemently denied that they had any lessons to offer to the developing world, today they not only accept this idea but use their training programs for foreign officials to promote aspects of the China model of development.

In discussing soft power, CCP officials stress the training programs, effective traditional diplomacy, the growth of public diplomacy projects like the Confucius Institutes, and the appeal of China’s economic example, which has sparked particular interest in Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. However, in the long run China’s rulers will need to broaden their appeal to reach the general populations of developing countries. In addition, they may have to expand or adjust their soft power initiative to make headway in the developed world, particularly in Europe, where there may be more favorable sentiment than in the United States.

The CCP leadership’s rationale for pursuing soft power is complex. For one thing, it has become more confident and sophisticated in global affairs. The current generation of officials apparently recognized that Beijing must actively cultivate its relations with developing Asian, African, and Latin American countries. China’s growing economic, political, and security interdependence with the world, and its demand for natural resources, has forced it to play a larger role in international affairs, while a series of events that were detrimental to America’s public image, from the Asian financial crisis to the Iraq war, provided opportunities for a rising power to chip away at the influence of the United States and its allies. In another sense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq showcased the overwhelming power and technology of the U.S. military, indicating to the CCP that its hard-power alternatives were limited.

Finally, as China’s economic growth has continued without a strong democratic challenge from the new middle class, as other authoritarian states like Russia have also produced high growth rates, and as the economies of established democracies have suffered repeated shocks over the past five years, CCP officials have begun to consider the possibility that their model of development—rather than representing a tactical compromise between communism and free enterprise—might actually be a coherent and exportable system that is objectively superior to liberal democratic capitalism. To articulate and sell this idea, CCP leaders have increasingly appropriated the term democracy and applied it to their own arrangement. Much as the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin described its authoritarian manipulations as “guided democracy,” the CCP has twisted the word beyond recognition and stripped off the values that have traditionally defined it. In addition, Chinese officials, academics, and media increasingly point to unrest in places like Kenya and Kyrgyzstan to suggest that Western, liberal democracy is not appropriate for many developing countries.

Over the past decade, China has centered its global outreach on one core philosophy. In statements and speeches, Chinese leaders enunciate a doctrine of win-win (shuangying) relations, encouraging Latin American, African, Asian, and Arab states to form mutually beneficial arrangements with China. Win-win relations also focus on the principle of noninterference, which is particularly relevant for developing-world leaders who witnessed decades of intervention by colonial powers and Cold War antagonists.

CCP leaders extend the win-win idea to a range of other arenas, claiming to stand on the side of developing countries in global trade talks and portraying China as a defender of noninterference at the United Nations. As part of this strategy, the win-win philosophy is implicitly contrasted with that of the West, which Beijing portrays as pushing a uniform “democracy agenda” onto developing nations. While upgrading its diplomatic corps and using high-level traditional diplomacy to show developing states that China places a high priority on bilateral relations, China’s government has also begun founding its own regional multilateral organizations, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia, which it can use to counter the promotion of democracy. Many foreign leaders have been receptive to China’s bid for international leadership. “You are an example of transformation,” Madagascar president Marc Ravalomanana told Chinese officials during the May 2007 African Development Bank meeting in Shanghai. “We in Africa must learn from your success.”

The CCP also seems to have recognized that it needs to build a broader public appeal and improve people-to-people contacts. This is a critical change from the past approach, which focused almost exclusively on forging relationships with foreign leaders. Beijing has developed the China Association of Youth Volunteers, a Peace Corps–like program designed to bring young people to countries like Ethiopia to work on agricultural and language projects. It has also launched the Confucius Institute project to support Chinese language and cultural studies at universities around the globe. It increasingly provides funding for Chineselanguage primary schools in developing countries like Cambodia; students who succeed in these schools often receive scholarships for university study in China.

Training programs for foreign opinion leaders have similarly become a significant softpower instrument. The Chinese government has begun organizing training programs for media workers and law enforcement officials from Central Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia, among other regions. These programs are designed in part to showcase the success of China’s economic strategy, which involves partial liberalization, protection of certain industries, and maintenance of some degree of state intervention.

Development assistance may be China’s most important tool. China has proven especially willing to step up aid to countries like Uzbekistan and Cambodia after other donors express concerns over human rights. It has also dramatically boosted its investment in and trade with developing countries, with the investment often supported by loans on favorable terms. In speeches, CCP leaders suggest that Beijing will be a fairer trading partner than established democracies, helping poorer countries to obtain the technology and skills they need to develop and enrich themselves. With developed countries, too, China tries to emphasize its role as an influential trading partner in order to win other concessions; in the wake of the global financial crisis, China has emphasized that with its massive currency reserves, it will play a proactive role in managing and combating the downturn. However, these inroads are complicated by popular sentiment in industrialized countries that often blames China for domestic job losses.

The CCP’s soft-power tools mean different things to China’s various international partners. It is important to differentiate between the types of government Beijing has relationships with, and to examine the ways in which these relationships imperil democracy. On the one hand, there is a group of harsh regimes—including those of Sudan, Burma, Uzbekistan, North Korea, and Zimbabwe—whose leaders are seeking only financial assistance and protection at the United Nations and other international bodies. Other tools of soft power are largely irrelevant for these governments, and they have little interest in learning about China’s pursuit of economic reform. On the other hand, there is a diverse group of developing countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa that are receptive to all elements of Chinese soft power. They are seeking economic, political, and cultural ties to China, and because they are not purely authoritarian states, China’s allure can extend to the public. These relationships can be more substantial than a simple alliance with an autocrat or ruling clique.

When Beijing initially began building its soft-power strategy, it did not directly threaten global democratization to the same extent as, for example, Russia’s strategy under Putin, which was designed from the beginning to push back against democratic reforms in neighboring countries. However, the “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union frightened the CCP, while the rise of other authoritarian great powers emboldened Beijing to believe that it might have a transferable model. Furthermore, nationalism began to build up within China, and the entire democracy promotion movement faced a global backlash. As a result, the CCP’s strategies began to target democracy promotion more aggressively. Over the past decade China has revamped its visitor training programs to more stridently tout the China model and in many ways to belittle liberal democracy. Today, many of these programs focus almost exclusively on the study of a Chinese example of the topic covered, whether economic institution building, local governance, or the creation of a judicial system.

The training programs often involve discussions of how the CCP has managed to open its economy, keep the middle class on the side of the government, and avoid sociopolitical chaos like that experienced during the transition periods in Russia and many other developing economies. In particular, China has begun large-scale training programs for police, judges, and other security officials from neighboring nations. Since internet filtering and control has been a significant component of China’s regime maintenance, training in these methods is also offered to some foreign officials. The Chinese government has provided information and strategies on filtering and firewalling to Burma, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and several other states.

The scale of this effort is difficult to calculate, but each year the Chinese government trains at least 1,000 Central Asian judicial and police officials, most of whom could be classifi ed as working in antidemocratic enterprises. Over the long term, Beijing plans to step up its training programs for African officials to reach 7,000 to 10,000 trainees per year. The scope of China’s broader aid programs is similarly impossible to quantify, but the World Bank estimates that China is now the largest lender to Africa. At a 2007 gathering in Shanghai, Chinese leaders announced that they would offer Africa $20 billion in new financing.

Chinese aid now outstrips that of democratic donor countries in a range of Southeast Asian and Central Asian states. Cambodia, one of Beijing’s major aid beneficiaries, provides an instructive example. The Chinese government is Cambodia’s largest provider of military aid, most of which goes to antidemocratic security forces that are used as a political weapon by Prime Minister Hun Sen. China has pledged a total of some $600 million in assistance to Cambodia. By comparison, the United States currently provides Cambodia with roughly $55 million in annual aid. The case of Burma shows similar trends. China’s government is now the largest provider of assistance, which again is used mainly for antidemocratic activities. Beijing has provided two $200 million loans to Burma over the past five years, and these “soft” loans are often never repaid, essentially making them grants. The United States provides roughly $12 million in annual aid to Burma, mostly for humanitarian and refugee assistance.

These training and aid relationships allow Beijing and its partner governments to provide mutual assistance with their respective domestic concerns. Security training for Central Asian officials, for example, has provided an opportunity for the CCP to promote the idea that Uyghurs are terrorists and separatists, and that they threaten regional stability. This process has paid off over the past decade, as several Central Asian states have begun repatriating Chinese Uyghurs, often with no cause. Like Russia, Beijing is also beginning to develop its own NGOs, some of which are designed to mimic traditional democracy-promotion groups. Rather than building democratic institutions, however, they advise Southeast and Central Asian countries on political and economic development as part of an effort to push back against democratization.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of China’s growing global presence is that its government now is able to offer more extensive diplomatic protection and support to the authoritarian rulers of countries like Burma, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. The SCO, created by Beijing as a counterweight to U.S. and European influence in Central Asia, plays a pivotal role in this strategy. Both China and Russia have utilized SCO forums to criticize the promotion of democracy and to support Central Asian autocrats as they suppress domestic calls for reform and democratic change.

At the United Nations, Beijing has checked international pressure on human rights abusers like Burma and exploited such moments to improve its bilateral relations with the regime concerned. Soon after the Andijon massacre in 2005 led to increased U.S. and European sanctions on Uzbekistan, China hosted the Uzbek leadership in Beijing and used the opportunity to in crease its access to Uzbek natural resources. This pattern is not seen in every case, of course; China has actively cooperated with the international community in managing a recalcitrant North Korea. But this is largely because Beijing sees instability in North Korea as a direct threat to China, and its agenda for that country certainly does not include human rights promotion.

It remains unclear whether China’s soft-power offensive will succeed in the long run. Many developing states worry that the character of trade links with Beijing, which often focus on the extraction of their natural resources, will prevent them from climbing the value-added ladder. This sentiment finds voice in populist politicians like Zambia’s Michael Sata, who used anti-China sentiment to rally support in the 2006 presidential election, though his bid for office was ultimately unsuccessful. The fact that large, state-linked Chinese energy and construction companies habitually use transplanted Chinese workers for overseas projects does not endear them to local populations.

Furthermore, as Beijing grows more aggressive in its promotion of the antidemocratic China model, it risks becoming the mirror image of the Western powers it criticizes; it will be “intervening” in other countries’ internal affairs, but to squelch rather than to promote democracy. Although Beijing’s vows of noninterference appear to be welcomed, some leaders in the developing world are already wondering whether China is committed to this principle. The Chinese ambassador to Zambia in 2006 warned that Beijing might cut off diplomatic ties if voters chose Sata as their president. As the honeymoon period with Beijing comes to an end, civil society groups in countries that receive Chinese aid will begin to speak out more. Many activists are coming to realize that Chinese assistance can contribute to environmental destruction, poor labor standards, rampant graft, and backsliding on democratic consolidation. Still, if Beijing proves flexible enough to use its soft power on both leaders and the public in the developing world, it could mount a serious challenge to the established values, ideas, and models of democracy.