This Week: Charm Offensive
Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club! This is where we regularly invite authors to come and discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators.
This week we'll be discussing Josh Kurlantzick's Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World.
In the book, Kurlantzick argues that China has been quietly building it's international prestige by building relationships around the world with soft power. He argues that unless this "charm offensive" is noted and responded to, China will become an international power to rival the U.S. in relative short order.
Joining the conversation will be Naazneen Barma, Mauro De Lorenzo, Ely Ratner, Devin Stewart, John Feffer, Reed Hundt, Daniel Drezner, and Dan Blumenthal.
Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, and Chris Hayes.
-ahg
I was in China for several weeks this year around Spring Festival. Not enough time to master the situation there by any means of course, but long enough to pick up some interesting tidbits. Especially because the circumstances of the trip were pretty unusual--my brother's wedding to a woman from a tiny ethnic minority in a village only reachable on foot, up in the mountains in Yunnan province. That experience shed some interesting sidelights on the more touristy parts of the rest of the trip. We spent a week living with his new wife's family up there, then traveled more broadly around the country. Some pretty amazing stuff going on everywhere we went.
Among a lot of other things, I was fascinated by the way some of the public theater we saw was geared toward framing the relationship between China and the Arab world as one of centuries' long friendship and mutuality. Clearly a form of propaganda going on there, but fairly sophisticated and not without substance to back it up.
I haven't read Kurlantzick's book yet, but I'm looking forward to hearing more.
June 29, 2007 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink