The Grinning Defiance of Chinese Soft Power
At last year’s climate summit COP30 in Belém, Brazil, a phrase I hadn’t thought about for years suddenly reappeared on my radar: “soft power.”
The venue was an enormous makeshift tent—thirty football fields’ worth of plenary halls, meeting rooms, restaurants, and ice cream shops. Upon entry, one passed into the “blue zone,” where seventy-eight countries had erected pavilions to showcase their climate achievements. At its center stood the Chinese and Saudi pavilions. The Saudi pavilion was almost always empty; I often found myself its only visitor, lured in by my newfound craving for Arabic coffee. China’s pavilion was packed from dawn to dusk. Its tchotchke line curled around the corner, with locals and delegates waiting restlessly for fridge magnets and stuffed pandas. A friend of mine, a tenured professor at a respected American university, wrestled a Brazilian security guard for the right to claim a much-coveted panda headband.
Around then I began noticing the resurfacing of “soft power” in public conversation. Earlier in the year Maria Repnikova had argued in Foreign Affairs that Chinese soft power was pragmatic, while America’s was ideological. This distinction has been neatly captured by an unattributed saying that supposedly goes around among African leaders: When the Chinese come, they build us a bridge; when the Americans come, they give us a lecture. In climate circles, people began speaking of China’s “green soft power” in reference to its blossoming EV industry. A consensus seemed to be forming: China wins influence through economic relations; the US through culture and the ideology of liberalism. A tidy division of labor.
After my professor friend prevailed in her jujitsu with the guard and generously gifted me the panda headband, she and I fell into an argument over soft power. Like most academic debates, ours got stuck on the definition. What on god’s green earth is soft power? Our conceptual argument continued for two weeks after the trip—first over texts, then on the phone, because our thumbs were tired from typing—until she summarily concluded: “I’m not sure what your problem is!”
We called a ceasefire and I started wondering what my problem was. I went back and read everything the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye had ever written on soft power—three decades of books and essays, from the concept’s original formulation to his more recent musings on “sharp power,” a newer term now hopping from tongue to tongue in Washington, DC, to describe Chinese and Russian “influence operations.” After all that reading, I realized that Nye was the root cause of my argument with my friend. His idea is clean in the abstract: Unlike the hard power of military might and economic prowess, soft power is the power to make others do things through attraction rather than coercion or payment; it is the power to be loved rather than feared, to make others want what you want. According to Nye, America’s “power to lead” rests not only on its military and economic dominance but also on its cultural and ideological appeal.1
Yet the moment Nye reaches for examples, his crisp definition melts into a cheesy all-you-can-eat buffet of American greatness. Coca-Cola is soft power, but so is military-to-military contact. Michael Jordan is soft power, but so is NATO. Hollywood is soft power, but so are Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and so were “high cultural contacts” during the Cold War, including the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.2 What is soft is soft; what is hard is also soft. It seems anything short of bombs can be giftwrapped into soft power.
The problem with Nye’s logic is that it cannot be proven false. So long as other countries follow the US into wars and buy American products, whether they do it out of love, fear, dependence, or calculation is a matter of polemics and not empirics. Soft power loses its usefulness as an analytical category when it devolves into blanket flattery for things American. It becomes a way of saying that America’s dominance is deserved, legitimate, and endorsed by what its proponents call the international community.
Yet there is something very real in the idea of soft power, and in the proposition that attraction, payment, and coercion are indeed different ways to get someone else to do what you like, to want what you want. Without question, Coca-Cola is an addictive drink. Michael Jordan was a good basketball player. Titanic, Braveheart, and The Shawshank Redemption didn’t need a carrier fleet behind them because it is human nature to long for love, freedom, triumph, and vengeance. The American way of life, at least as portrayed by mainstream Hollywood in the 1990s and early 2000s, is genuinely seductive—so much so that parents around the world, including mine, made the hardest decision of their lives to send their children thousands of miles away for the best education money could buy. My personal journey is evidence for American soft power.
My personal journey can also be read as evidence for what Nye, in 2012, called “China’s soft power deficit.” China may be a growing economic heavyweight, but the prevailing view is that it lacks the kind of soft power possessed by the US, Japan, and South Korea—the cultural cachet of Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, and KPop Demon Hunters. Not much seems to have changed since Nye wrote in 2005 that despite Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Yao Ming, “China’s soft power still has a long way to go,” because:
“China does not have cultural industries like Hollywood, and its universities are far from the equal of America’s. … Politically, China suffers from corruption, inequality, and a lack of democracy… While that may make the ‘Beijing consensus’ attractive in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian developing countries, it undercuts China’s soft power in the West.”
Nye has many fans, none bigger than China itself. Wang Huning, one of the most powerful Chinese officials of recent decades and now a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, published what may have been China’s first article on soft power back in 1993. Wang—whom the Australia-based scholar Yi Wang has called “the mastermind behind Xi Jinping’s power”—engaged Nye approvingly, recognizing soft power as a “meaningful” manifestation of state power after the Cold War, an aptitude China needed to develop. He even acknowledged that Western democracy, despite its many flaws, was part of what made the West attractive.3
Wang’s first citation was not Nye but Alvin Toffler, an American futurist who had already become enormously influential in China. Toffler’s The Third Wave was endorsed by top leaders and was one of the most widely read foreign books in the 1980s. His book Powershift, published the same year Nye coined “soft power,” described an ongoing “power transition” from force and money to information and knowledge.4
Once translated into Chinese, Soft Power became a national bestseller and Nye became a one-man consultancy. His biggest client? The Chinese Communist Party. Nye’s phrase formally joined the CCP’s lexicon in 2007 when Hu Jintao told the 17th Party Congress that China must “enhance the nation’s cultural soft power.” Hu’s qualifier “cultural” has been picked up by scholars to note that the Party has adopted only half of Nye’s soft-power formula. The other half—“democracy and human rights”—was quietly set aside. Nye diagnosed this omission as the heart of China’s soft-power deficit. One of his favorite anecdotes, retold across several publications, appears in a lecture he gave to 1,500 students at Peking University:
“I responded to the usual question of how China could increase its soft power by mentioning the harassment of the great Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei as an example of too tight control over civil society. … at the end of my lecture, the dean of the School of Marxism took the stage and said, ‘We are flattered to have Professor Nye here, but you students must realize that his use of the concept is overly political and we prefer to restrict it to cultural issues.’”
Xi Jinping is also a fan of the concept, having repeatedly insisted that China must increase its soft power and “tell its story well”—a phrase many Western observers interpret as an overseas Chinese propaganda campaign. In 2021, amid a backlash against the CCP’s “wolf-warrior diplomacy” and negative international attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, Xi told the Party’s top leadership that China must “make friends widely” and present the image of a “credible, lovable, and respectable China.” By one estimate, China spends roughly ten billion dollars a year on its “public relations offensive.” The accounting is generous, including everything from panda diplomacy to hosting the Summer Olympics, from setting up Confucius Institutes abroad to funding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, from the Belt and Road Initiative to Dalian Wanda’s acquisition of Legendary Entertainment.
However, this hundred-billion-dollar enterprise thus far has yielded little “return on investment,” by Nye’s and other experts’ assessment. The evidence most often cited is China’s mediocre performance in favorability polls abroad, especially in the West (though many of these polls were conducted during Covid). More recently, Washington politicos have embraced “sharp power” as an alternative to “soft power” for describing China’s influence: not attraction or persuasion, but “distraction and manipulation.” The Washington consensus is that China’s influence in the world is coercive (or at least more coercive than America’s), remunerative (or at least more remunerative than America’s), and therefore illegitimate (or at least less legitimate than America’s).
And then, a grinning little monster with jagged teeth called three decades of Nye’s writing into question.
After landing at O’Hare on my return from COP30, I went to Starbucks to get a banana. The barista at the counter wore a Labubu pinned to his green apron—his Labubu dressed in a tiny Starbucks apron of its own. On my ride home, I passed a guy biking down North Broadway with a bouquet of Labubus chained to his backpack. That same weekend, I walked by Pop Mart, the exclusive manufacturer and distributor of Labubus, on Mag Mile at closing time, just as the store clerk was physically shoving the lingering customers out the door. That summer, like millions of others, I tracked the rotating Labubus on Naomi Osaka’s tennis bag at the US Open. By Christmas, I was in Soho, London, watching the line outside Pop Mart grow longer.
Somewhere between these sightings, I began to wonder: Could this soft monster be soft power?
Reporters at the Washington Post surely seem to think so, calling Labubu “China’s plushy, soft power tool.” Others have objected, arguing that because Labubu’s designer, Kasing Lung, was born in Hong Kong and spent his teenage years in the Netherlands, Labubu is not Chinese at all. Both interpretations flatten Labubu’s origin story. Labubu first appeared in Lung’s 2015 The Monsters picture-book series, inspired by Nordic mythology. In 2019, Lung struck a deal with Pop Mart, a Chinese toy company founded by Wang Ning, a Henan native who attended an obscure provincial college called Sias University. By then, Pop Mart was already a commercial success in China, popular for its blind boxes, which conceal the product inside and turn unboxing into an adrenaline-filled surprise. Labubu went viral in 2024 after appearing on the handbag of Lisa, the Thai member of the K-pop group Blackpink. (Lisa had no collaboration with Pop Mart.) From there, Labubu began trending in Lisa’s native Thailand and across Asia before becoming a global fashion accessory. By 2025, it was appearing in the social media feeds of celebrities from Kim Kardashian to David Beckham.
If Labubu were a Chinese soft-power tool, it would be definitive proof of the superiority of central planning. But it’s not. No mastermind could have coordinated a Hong Kong artist raised in the Netherlands, a toy company from Henan, a Korean pop star from Thailand, a tennis player raised in America by a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, and Gen Z consumers around the world into a conspiracy to elevate a plush toy to stratospheric heights.
If Nye had lived to see the Labubu mania, he might have argued that Labubu expresses no universal values to sustain its appeal. But the same could be said of Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Nike, and Adidas (which I’d worn my whole life before learning it was German). Whatever universal appeal these objects now seem to possess was not born with them. Most consumers of Hello Kitty have no idea what her story is, or that she had a boyfriend named Dear Daniel (who unfortunately never achieved the same kind of celebrity Hello Kitty did). Ultimately, Labubu took off through the same forces that produced every other global cultural phenomenon of the past: market presence, social and peer influence, celebrity moments, and pure chance. Throw in algorithmic distribution for the twenty-first century. Labubu became a universal object of desire through China’s market power.
As I have written earlier in The Ideas Letter, China does not even believe in cultural or value universalism. Most Chinese cultural productions, such as the 2019 blockbuster Ne Zha and its 2025 sequel, were made first for a domestic audience. Not even I, a Chinese person, caught all the references to ancient myths and stories in what was an animated film for children. Critics who dismiss Ne Zha for failing to achieve KPop Demon Hunters–level impact in the US miss the point: Unlike KPop Demon Hunters, Ne Zha wasn’t produced for a Netflix audience in the first place.
But Labubu also proves Nye half right. Civil society—the market included—is indeed a wellspring of soft power. According to its fans, Labubu’s charm lies in its asymmetry and deliberate ugliness—what fans call “ugly-cute”—a grinning defiance against conventional beauty standards. If soft power is attraction like Nye said, then Labubu, with its crooked teeth and mischievous grin, teaches that anything, even ugliness, can attract. Its popularity among young people is a countercultural embrace, a rejection of the polished and pretty Barbie. No amount of state spending, no fleet of Confucius Institutes, no 24-hour English-language news channel could have produced what Wang Ning stumbled into: a multi-billion-dollar company that makes Gen Z Americans line up around the block for an expensive Chinese toy. Musing about Trump’s implications for American soft power, Nye counseled against despair: “Fortunately, America is more than its government.” Fortunately, China is also more than its government.
Yet “democracy and human rights”—the other half of Nye’s soft-power formula—is not a necessary condition for soft power. Setting aside the question of whom democracy treats as human and whose rights it protects, a glance around the world suggests that democracy is no guarantee of cultural magnetism. Labubu came to power not when China was at its most politically liberal, but as it was becoming less so. Chinese civil society in 2024 was more restricted than in 2012, the year Nye argued that China’s “soft power deficit” could only be corrected with the further unleashing of civil society.
The monster exposes the tautology inside Nye’s claim that soft power stems from “the universalism of a country’s culture and its ability to establish a set of favorable rules and institutions that govern areas of international activity.” If a country can “establish a set of favorable rules and institutions that govern areas of international activity,” it already has power. And if it already has power, it will always argue that its power is soft and legitimate. Nye’s examples of historical soft power reach back to every Western empire that ever ruled, from Rome’s roads and laws to the British Empire’s language and free trade, though neither Rome nor Britain was a democracy at the height of its dominance. The pattern is clear: First comes dominance, military or economic; then comes the culture that dominance circulates; then comes the argument that people were attracted to the culture all along, that the dominance was earned, that the empire was loved and not merely endured. This is what Gramsci understood about hegemony: It can make dominance feel like generosity, subordination like consent or even preference, and hard power feel soft. Reading history forward, soft power is not the cause of hegemony but its softest alibi.
By the time I owned my first Labubu, early last year, it was no longer trendy in China. Chinese kids had moved on to Twinkle Twinkle, Skullpanda, Molly, Crybaby, Hirono, and the rest of the characters in their “two-dimensional goods economy.” By early 2026, Labubu had been absorbed into the larger, befuddling phenomenon of Chinamaxxing on TikTok: drinking hot water, slurping congee and Luckin coffee, walking with hands clasped behind one’s back, wearing indoor slippers and Adidas Tang jackets, and declaring “you met me at a very Chinese time of my life,” a riff on the famous Fight Club line. Chinamaxxers range from Gen Z TikTokers to left-wing intellectuals. Adam Tooze, the renowned historian, has faced criticism on X for his own recent Chinamaxxing, which he defends on the podcast Sinica.
If Chinamaxxing in the US is harder to detect offline, given high tariffs against Chinese goods, Chinamaxxing elsewhere seems more concrete. The New York Times recently reported from Jakarta on Indonesia’s Muslim-majority population turning away from American products: “Compact Chinese electric cars weave through the streets. Chinese cosmetics crowd pharmacy shelves. Chinese hot pot restaurants and milk-tea chains have sprouted across the city’s many, many malls.” In the article’s comments section, David from Brisbane wrote: “Indonesia? That sounds like Australia.” According to authoritative surveys from Singapore, China overtook the US for the first time in 2024 as the preferred partner for most Southeast Asian countries.
Even Ai Weiwei, Nye’s favorite example of China’s soft-power deficit, seems to be Chinamaxxing. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung about his recent trip to Beijing, Ai Weiwei praised the quality of service there, contrasting a “humane” China with a “cold, rational, and profoundly bureaucratic” Germany: “As an individual, one feels confined and precarious [here in Germany], even if people may believe they live in a superior world. But material comfort does not necessarily mean that humanity and humanitarian values will prevail.” Many things have happened in the last few years that would not have been on anyone’s bingo card, and hearing Ai Weiwei praise China for being humane is surely one of them.
Chinamaxxing cannot be separated from Americadowning. Globally, America’s declining credibility appears to be pushing some countries toward China, as in the case of Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy. At home, Gen Z Americans have channeled their frustration with unaffordability, inequality, and irrational foreign policy into various anti-establishment expressions; Chinamaxxing is but one of them. Yet Washington may have been the original, accidental Chinamaxxer. Had the liberal imagination not fetishized China as the post–Cold War totalitarian other, young Americans might not so easily turn China into a stage for acting out their frustration with their own country.
As for China, the durability of its soft power cannot be disentangled from the country’s economic and technological achievements. Pop Mart’s success shows that economic viability cannot be planned, and neither can culture. As Nye would advise, China would do well to leave soft power to the “many talents of its civil society.” At the same time, it should squander neither the goodwill of those who lined up for stuffed pandas at the China Pavilion in Belém nor the benefit of the doubt so many around the world have given to its meteoric rise. Above all, it should credit a connected world for its successes. Pop Mart now collaborates with Disney, Coca-Cola, Marvel, the Louvre, and FIFA.
This is how global culture actually works. It is ephemeral, promiscuous, and indifferent to sacred national borders. It carries multiple passports and salutes no flag. Nye, to his credit, eventually conceded as much: “Soft power is not a zero-sum game in which one country’s gain is necessarily another country’s loss.” A plastic monster could have told him that from the start.
Iza Ding is an associate professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and the author of The Performative State (Cornell University Press, 2022). izading.substack.com
- Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Powers to Lead (Oxford University Press, 2008). ↩︎
- Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004), 54. ↩︎
- Wang Huning, “作为国家实力的文化: 软实力 [Culture as National Power: Soft Power]”, 复旦学报(社会科学版) [Fudan Journal (Social Science Edition)] 1993 (3), 95. ↩︎
- Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). ↩︎
