The Washington Post-The United States used to have cachet in China Not anymore

2024-04-24T07:57:15.450Z

There was a time not so long ago in China when anything American was automatically seen as better. In the 1990s, weddings were held at a McDonald’s near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. By the 2000s, Nike sneakers, iPhones and dates at Pizza Hut were the badges of middle-class achievement.

America, which is called “Meiguo” or “beautiful country” in Chinese, was the bastion of wealth and ease. Even the moon hung larger in the United States than in China, people used to joke.

Now, Chinese media and commentators mockingly refer to the United States not as “Meiguo” but as “Meidi” — “the beautiful imperialist.” And Chinese shoppers are more likely to be sipping a drink from Luckin, a Chinese coffee chain, than Starbucks or lining up all night to buy Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro than the latest Apple device. Today, no one says the moon is any different when seen from the United States.

“Back in the days you looked at American brands you just felt they were cooler,” said Tracy Liu, a 30-year-old translator in Shanghai. “Now people chase after domestic brands.”

For decades, this soft power was one of the United States’ most potent weapons in China. But over the last few years, the U.S. has lost hearts and minds in China as its cultural luster has faded.

The shift comes as Beijing is expanding its military and technological prowess — and as China’s reputation in the United States has plummeted dramatically amid concerns that it will use underhand tactics to achieve leader Xi Jinping’s vision of a world where the U.S. and China are equal.

Together, these two trends push the countries further away from each other, and closer to conflict.

“If you want to avoid war and you want to manage a competition or you want manage a common problem like climate, a degree of soft power helps both countries,” said Joseph Nye, former dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who first popularized the term soft power in the 1990s and served as U.S. assistant secretary of defense, often dealing with China.

“If there’s mutual desire to accomplish those objectives then the extent to which China is attractive in the U.S., and the extent to which the U.S. is attractive in China can be beneficial to both countries because both countries want an atmosphere that encourages cooperation,” he said.

The change in sentiment in China is likely rooted in great power competition. Surveys are notoriously difficult to conduct in China but point to erosion in positive Chinese opinions toward the U.S.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” said Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. “The U.S. image in China is so bad today. It’s probably the worst in the past 40 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations,” he said.

The weakening of American soft power in China coincides with a China that is growing stronger and richer, and working to create its own cultural cachet.

Xi has seized on these changes to extol the comparative advantages of the Chinese system, trying to boost nationalism through something he calls “cultural confidence,” a kind of soft power wielded domestically that promotes Chinese culture over Western influences.

Xi, in a series of speeches published in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) journal in April, called for enhancing “cultural self-confidence to accelerate the building of a socialist cultural power,” adding that “it is necessary to guide people to have a correct view of history, nation and culture.”

“One of the central claims the CCP makes to legitimate its rule is that only the CCP can save China and make China strong again, and a big part of that is anti-Americanism,” said Peter Gries, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Manchester. “So China being better than America has become central to the CCP’s claim to rule.”

Today, Chinese media opine on the “myth of American democracy” and extensively cover U.S. mass shootings, police violence, political polarization and public security problems. (One popular genre on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is “zero-dollar shopping” in the United States, which features videos of stores being robbed at gunpoint.)

By losing its soft power advantage in China, the United States also loses an important source of leverage over the Chinese government — its ability to appeal directly to the Chinese people.

“A Chinese populace that is broadly sympathetic to the United States is a … brake on some of the more aggressive measures that the Chinese government would consider taking,” said Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman chair in China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It works in Xi Jinping’s favor if the United States is seen in the eyes of the Chinese people as deteriorating and implacably hostile to China,” he said.

‘The East is rising and the West is declining’

At first, the bloom went off the rose gradually. In the decades following the 1976 death of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, whose ideological campaigns isolated China, there was a hunger for the outside world.

Chinese students scrambled to get the latest translations of historian William Manchester’s tomes on American life. Visits to the United States by Chinese professors made the news.

By the mid-2000s, a generation of young Chinese had learned English from pirated copies of the U.S. show “Friends.” Rights activists like Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo looked up to the United States as a beacon of democracy. Even Chinese state media liked to report on how the U.S. dealt with problems facing China like government corruption.

“There was this bubbly excitement of all things Western and for many, America came to symbolize that. … It could do no wrong,” said Gries, who studied in Beijing in 1988 and described his experience as an American in China at the time as being “sort of a celebrity.”

The idea of American atrophy began gaining traction after the global financial crisis eroded faith in the U.S. economic model. During the Trump administration and the chaos of the early years of the pandemic, Chinese leaders began boldly proclaiming that “the East is rising and the West is declining.”

“That event really put the next to final nail in the coffin of Chinese admiration for the USA. The final nail was hammered in by the Trump administration,” said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, referring to the 2009 financial crisis.

“To my knowledge, there is very little residual appeal of the USA among either the Chinese urban public, among intellectuals, or among officials,” he said by email.

Today, Chinese and U.S. officials clash over U.S. controls on tech exports to China, Chinese clean energy products flooding international markets, or U.S. support of Beijing’s rival, Taiwan. Both Donald Trump and President Biden have threatened to increase tariffs on Chinese goods if reelected.

These tensions, as well as the steady flow of reports of America’s domestic problems, mean that today Chinese citizens “no longer regard the United States as some moral high ground or even the future as before,” wrote the popular Chinese blogger, Chairman Rabbit. “The United States has shot itself in the foot and destroyed the soft power that it worked so hard to build in China. Not only that, it has created the most difficult rival for itself.”

The rise of ‘China chic’

With the decline of U.S. appeal comes the rise of “China chic,” a trend encouraged by authorities but also embraced by a public that increasingly prizes domestic over foreign brands. Popular Chinese makeup brands like Huaxizi, or Florasis, use traditional Chinese medicine in their products, marketing them as better for East Asian faces.

Chinese consumers in search of a high-end phones are increasingly looking at homegrown brands. Apple’s sales in China fell 19 percent in the first quarter of 2024, compared with a year ago, according to data from Counterpoint Research, while Huawei’s rose by almost 70 percent, putting the Chinese smartphone manufacturer on the brink of overtaking the American giant.

Once-dominant U.S. television shows and Hollywood movies are no longer part of the mainstream conversation. When Liu went to university in 2012, her peers were still watching U.S. shows like “Friends,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family.”

“They were all household names,” she said. “Now, I don’t think there’s a single U.S. show that everyone knows.”

Last year, Chinese film industry analysts declared the “era of Hollywood over” in China after domestic productions accounted for more than 80 percent of box office revenue. All 10 top movies by revenue were Chinese — a far cry from 2012, when U.S. films like “Mission: Impossible” and “The Avengers” accounted for seven of China’s top 10 box office hits.

Encapsulating this paradigm shift: The Central Perk coffee shop — an exact replica of the cafe in the U.S. television show “Friends,” down to its fuzzy orange couch and a barista named Gunther — on the sixth floor of a mall in Beijing closed in 2020. For more than a decade, it was an enduring symbol of one of America’s strongest cultural exports to China.

One of the most popular shows in the country for years, “Friends” offered a glimpse of an American way of life that seemed to Du Xin, 45, who quit his job as an engineer to start the cafe, refreshingly open and full of possibility. Whether it was due to covid restrictions or changing tastes, a skin care product shop took its place.

“Fewer people were paying for nostalgia,” Du said. Not for television nostalgia, and not for American Dream nostalgia either.

Vic Chiang in Taipei and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.