Measuring Soft Power in Cyberspace
Is China the Internet’s New Super Power?
China’s significant economic, technological, and military growth in the 21st century has presented the United States with its first peer competitor since the end of the Cold War. Significant analysis has gone into comparing America and China in those three categories. What is less understood is how the two countries compare in soft power resources. Soft power competition between America and China is less understood for two reasons: this category of power is historically under examined, and technological change means soft power measurement criteria are constantly evolving. Soft power may be a key part of the geopolitical competition between China and America, but insufficient methodology exists to determine how the countries compare and whether an advantage may be gained through a soft power strategy.
Soft power is a term, coined by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in the late 1980s, to distinguish a state's available strategies and tactics of persuasion from those of coercion. Soft power, in its most basic sense, is the ability to get other states to want what you want through attraction and affinity. Often relegated, in American geo-strategic discourse, to the domain of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, soft power is much more than advertising savvy or pop culture adoption. In his 2004 book on the subject, Nye articulates 3 different sources of soft power:
“its culture (in places where it is attractive to others);
“its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad);
“its foreign policies (when they are legitimate and seen as having moral authority)”
Nye saw that the information age would increase the importance of soft power. He wrote that, "The information age is creating virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders," which would enable these groups to develop soft power in ways that would rival nation states. Foremost in Nye's focus was transnational terror groups, and the intervening decades have shown his prediction to be true. As groups built soft power in the new realm of cyberspace, individuals learned to feel affinity towards the groups sharing information online that resonated with them. In an eerie echo of the "alternative facts" thinking of current American politics, Nye added, "The ability to share information — and to be believed — becomes an important source of attraction and power." In short, effective use of cyberspace becomes a 4th source of soft power. In recent years, Jonathan McClory has defined a methodology for evaluating soft power first as part of the Institute for Government and most recently at the strategic communications firm Portland. McClory's methodology examines both objective and subjective criteria which will be explored in depth later in this analysis, but it has built on Nye’s original ideas to the point that is does include a dedicated ‘Digital’ section that helps determine a country's soft power score.
In his writings, Nye used books, television shows, movies and other media products and their worldwide audience as a measure of a country’s attractiveness. It’s clear that the spread of digital communications technology has drastically changed the media landscape around the world, and therefor must have had an impact on soft power. Yet, the foremost thinkers on the topic seem to barely wade past the shallow end of how it is cultivated and leveraged in cyberspace. This analysis seeks to articulate an enhanced understanding of how nations are engendering affinity with foreign audiences through their contributions to cyberspace's hardware, software, and the content that makes up user discourse online.
China's Growing Digital Soft Power
The production, means of distribution, and content of global culture has been more dominated by American books, movies, brands, and science than by any other country since Nye began quantifying soft power 40 years ago. In more recent decades, that trend has continued in cyberspace based on the central role that American firms like Google, Apple, and Facebook have played in the digital world. However, the United States is no longer the clear leader in cyberspace. As China contributes more and more hardware, software, and content to cyberspace, Beijing's stores of digital soft power grow.
Skeptics may point to the shear size of the Chinese population, arguing that as more Chinese gain access to the internet the country’s prominence in cyberspace will naturally grow. For example, We Are Social reports that as of January 2021 65.2% of China's 1.4 billion people use the internet, giving them an estimated user population of over 900 million people. Compared to the 90% of Americans that use the internet, equivalent to 295 million users, it makes sense that Chinese share of voice is greater. But cyberspace is not one single place totally navigable to every user. Much like the physical world, there are realms of cyberspace that Americans frequent and Chinese don't, and vis versa. Chinese users have a hard time getting on American apps like Facebook, Youtube, or Google. Meanwhile, few Americans are active on Chinese apps like QQ, WeChat, or Sina Weibo. This bifurcation of cyberspace should be our first cue to look for a Chinese strategy towards the internet and its role in geopolitical competition. And one doesn't need to look too far to find successive Chinese administrations highlighting digital soft power as a strategic focus.
In 2007, then-president Hu Jintao connected the importance of China's international image to it's growth for the first time. He cited numerous realms where China's image should be manicured and spread, including cyberspace: "We will strengthen efforts to develop and manage internet culture and foster a good cyber environment." Seven years later, Xi Jinping was even more specific, describing his aspirations for a cyber strategy that would, "...increase China's soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China's message to the world." One outcome of this evolving policy has been the Digital Silk Road, the telecommunications arm of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is evident that using cyberspace as both a tool to grow, and an area to exert, soft power is a strategic focus for Beijing. But given the nebulous quality of soft power and the complexity of cyberspace, how can these efforts be quantified to determine whether China has been successful?
How Soft Power is Measured
Soft power is typically a term evoked when discussing strategy and infrequently quantified or specified. As discussed above, McClory has done the most to produce a methodical, transparent measurement of soft power rankings. His work, which has made him “a globally recognized expert on soft power,” leads to the annual production of the Soft Power 30 that is released by the London-based political consultancy and public relations agency, Portland.
The Soft Power 30 judges soft power based on objective criteria (divided into Enterprise, Culture, Digital, Government, Engagement, and Education) and subjective criteria gathered through international polling in G20 countries which covers an array of topics like favorability, perceptions of a country's contributions to global culture, and perceptions of a country's technology products, to name a few. Of concern in this analysis is the Digital category of Portland’s objective criteria and the cyber-related polling questions.
In their Digital category of Objective Data, Portland weights a country’s Digital score as 13.1% of its total score for the objective Data section. This makes it the 5th out of their 6 categories in this section, with Government counting the most (20.8%) and Culture counting the least (12.5%) towards a nation's total score. The criteria of the Digital Category are:
Facebook followers for heads of state or government (outside of country)
Facebook engagement score for heads of state or government (outside of country)
Facebook followers for ministry of foreign affairs (outside of country)
Facebook engagement score for ministry of foreign affairs (outside of country)
Number of internet users per 100 inhabitants
Secure internet servers per 1 million people
Internet bandwidth
Government Online Services Index
E-participation Index
Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people
However, not all of these metrics truly show a country’s influence in cyberspace. For example, while digital connectivity and telecommunication infrastructure are important measurements, they don't provide clear insight when it comes to how a country is perceived by foreign populations in cyberspace or the affinity netizens show toward a nation. Thus, we're left with 4 Facebook metrics to gauge how much digital soft power a nation has amongst the rest of the world. The world of advertising and marketing has left Facebook followers behind as a key performance indicator, and its time public diplomacy did as well. The Facebook engagement scores of heads of state and ministries of foreign affairs are important metrics, but they are hardly sufficient to account for global soft power in cyberspace. Beyond the fact that Facebook is just one app in a very competitive neighborhood, is the average person's opinion of Japan really effected by what Shinzo Abe posted to Facebook in 2019? Would the average person know that, when stumbling across the Facebook page for Auswärtiges Amt, that it was the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Obviously, these metrics don't tell the whole story when it comes to a nation's digital soft power.
Improvements to Digital Soft Power Measurement
As shown, existing soft power measurement relies on traditional examples of how a person can be influenced by another country. Not so much outdated as increasingly incomplete, the set of metrics used to gauge a country’s soft power stores need to be expanded to include the myriad ways that individuals are exposed to other countries in cyberspace. And while cyberspace is an increasingly central part of the daily life of many people around the world, its prominence can be hard to compare to or separate from the rest of our daily life.
One way to do this, however, is to examine what portion of the time that the average person is awake during the day is spent on the internet. Based on OECD Time Use data detailing how much time people in countries around the world spend asleep, along with data showing how much time people spend on the internet by country, it can be determined that the average person spends 41.07% of their waking time on the internet. Table A shows the proportion of waking time spent online for a sample of countries.
As more people gain access to the internet, a population that has grown by 7.37% yearly between 2016 and 2020, ever more time will be spent in cyberspace. The analysis in the next section attempts to provide the new ways to quantify a country’s soft power at the 3 levels of cyberspace (hardware, software, and content) to more accurately determine a country’s ability to influence and attract foreign audiences. This analysis will focus on China’s activities in these 3 levels of cyberspace, compared to the United States for reference, though it could be conducted for any country at all, or some, of the levels of cyberspace in which they participate.
First, we’ll look at hardware to see how much of the infrastructure makes the internet function, and provides the invisible connectivity that many people depend on for social and professional activities, depends on Chinese technology, Chinese firms, and Chinese funding. The focus of this section is the Digital Silk Road (DSR), a sub-project of the Belt and Road Initiative. The DSR increasingly represents the disparate efforts of Beijing and various Chinese firms to expand their digital involvement beyond China’s borders. Using statements from company leaders, it is possible to get a rough idea of the proportion of individuals around the world who, at least in part, have China to thank when they connect to the internet.
Then, the analysis turns towards software. The experiences that individuals have online are often novel, and the utility that a new application or software has in one’s life (albeit to save time, provide entertainment, or create opportunity) is often significant. When these applications and software gain a place in people’s daily routine or tool set they, as a cultural product, can exert an influence over users. This analysis focuses on major Chinese apps WeChat and TikTok and compares the user bases of these apps, and the time users spend on them, to their American counterparts.
Finally, the analysis dives into the firehouse of content that makes up the discourse on the internet to begin to quantify China’s share of voice online. While attempting to exactly quantify share of voice on the internet in real time is beyond the scope of this analysis, the goal of this section of the report is to show how available metrics, like hashtag usage and follower counts, can be used more effectively than in the measurement models described above. Additionally, using Google Trends, a comparison of state-offered versus non-state offered narratives was made for two key Chinese issues: Taiwan sovereignty and treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This comparison shows that not only can a country’s share of voice online be quantified by volume, but the effectiveness of the country’s influence can also be measured. As will be shown, while Beijing may push the concept of Taiwan as a breakaway province, the volume of Chinese content online has not lead to the government’s desired narrative being adopted and thus shows the limited success of soft power tactics in the example of Taiwan. Just as travel to and consumer goods from other countries expose individuals and their networks of family and friends to foreign countries, so do the stories, videos, and images they are exposed to online. Share of voice in cyberspace, then, obviously plays a role in how often people are exposed to a country. With so many different metrics available, this category at once presents the most potential and the most difficulty for measuring soft power in cyberspace.
Throughout the analysis section, public polling data from Pew Research, which maintains a Global Indicators database that has been crucial for this analysis, is used to show how the growth in China’s presence at each level of cyberspace may, or may not, align with increased global favorability towards China around the world.
Analyzing the 3 Layers of Cyberspace
Layer I: Hardware
This analysis will look first at hardware, the technical infrastructure and equipment that makes up cyberspace. Chinese involvement in this portion of cyberspace can be examined through the activities and footprints of its major telecommunication companies, ZTE and, in particular, Huawei.
David Greene, of the Carnegie Endowment, details how disparate efforts by Beijing and Chinese companies have coalesced since the early 2000’s into the Digital Silk Road (DSR), initially a branding effort by Beijing but now an increasingly important aspect of the broader Belt and Road Initiative. As part of this policy, “Beijing will invest resources to help its domestic tech giants pursue commercial business opportunities and be involved at all levels of the digital infrastructure built along the DSR: fiber-optic and mobile equipment infrastructure, telecommunications carrier services, and over-the-top providers of applications services.” Since the formal announcement of the DSR in 2015, Chinese companies have both self-aligned their efforts with Beijing’s policies and had previously established international expansion projects be brought under the auspices of the DSR. Many critics of the DSR worry that, “China will use the DSR to enable recipient countries to adapt its model of technology-enabled authoritarianism,” including surveillance, censorship, and espionage. What is relevant to this analysis is, not so much the level of state-controlled coordination or worrisome tactics that the DSR enables, but whether the spread of Chinese technology around the world will impact the soft power China cultivates with customer countries.
One of the factors that has driven favorability of the United States around the world is respect and admiration for American innovations in technology and science. In both 2007 and 2012, Pew found that America’s scientific and technological advancements were more admired around the world than American media, ideas about democracy, business practices, or ideas and customs. With Chinese apps becoming more advanced and more adopted around the world, it follows that China may begin to attract some of the soft power in this category that has, in recent decades, been the United States’ main store of international admiration.
Source: Pew
There are approximately 50 countries potentially taking part in DSR projects. According to Deloitte, as of 2018, China had spent $79 billion of the forecasted $200 billion that the DSR will include. And the impact of the DSR goes far beyond a stronger signal for your mobile device and includes “…telecommunications networks, artificial intelligence capabilities, cloud computing, e-commerce and mobile payment systems, surveillance technology, smart cities, and other high-tech areas.” Whether or not those efforts are stemming from strategic oversight in Beijing, whether or not they enable customer countries to surveil their citizens, whether or not potential backdoors in the technology enable China to exploit foreign data, the idea that people of the DSR countries will have access to the most advanced technology in their daily lives through Chinese innovation, aid, and instruction, will cultivate soft power. The goal of the policy, according to Greene, is to have China and Chinese firms “…contribute more to the global [cyber] standards-setting process, which would help advance Beijing’s vision of a more China-influenced technology stack."
On its website, Huawei states that, “more than 3 billion of the world’s population uses Huawei products and services to make calls, send text messages, or surf the internet.” As of mid-2019, the company’s CEO, Ryan Ding, stated that, “Huawei equipment is now behind two-thirds of the commercially launched 5G networks outside China.” It is important to reiterate that, while some assert that Huawei and ZTE present national security threats to the United States, that is not the issue at hand in this analysis. Instead, this report seeks to make the case that China’s growing involvement and investment in the technological advancement of countries around the world, and the subsequent soft power gains it will create, is not being properly interrogated, regardless of what motives Beijing may or may not have.
For example, consider how the African Union, in 2018, responded to the type of event that American politicians typically use for political leverage against China: the revelation of a data breach. In 2018, it was reported that the IT systems at African Union’s headquarters had been “…compromised, leading to a leak of information to China over a five-year period.” The IT equipment had been supplied by Huawei, and the company had also set up the AU’s servers and trained local staff. While none of the behavior points explicitly towards espionage, the AU’s response to the event was indicative of the trusting relationship that it has built with China. The two parties denied any allegations of spying and continue to work together on various technological advancements.
Layer II: Software
Chinese software is also becoming a more prominent part of the average social media user’s daily life. While the apps owned by American companies like Facebook (such as Facebook, Instagram, FB Messenger, and WhatsApp) and Google (YouTube) still have many of the largest user bases in the world, Chinese apps are joining their ranks. Based on the social media apps analyzed as part of the Digital 2021 Global Overview Report, an annual collaboration between Hootsuite, a social media company, and the advertising agency We Are Social, TikTok had grown the 3rd largest user base as of 2020. (In this analysis, TikTok’s global audience has been combined with the domestic audience on the app’s Chinese version, Douyin.)
The story is similar when looking at messaging apps, where Tencent-owned app WeChat (colloquially known as Weixin in China) has the third largest user base behind Facebook’s two messenger apps, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
WeChat, despite being the world’s third-most used messaging app, hasn’t seen much adoption outside China, where 75.1% of internet users use the app. Hong Kong (32.3%) and Taiwan (12.3%) have relatively high penetrations amongst their populations of internet users, while only other Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have penetration rates higher than 4%.
Tiktok’s growth was a major news story throughout 2020, from its expansion in Southeast Asia to its rapid adoption in the United States. As the charts below show, the numbers support the widespread media attention. In the United States, TikTok’s user base increased by 150% between the end of 2019 and August 2020. And while the United States’ domestic user growth of TikTok over the course of 2020 was dramatic (85.3%) it was hardly alone in experiencing the rapid adoption of the Chinese app as several countries saw their TikTok user base more than double: Italy, Russia, and Norway.
Globally, China has the largest TikTok user base, with 57.6% of China’s 424.8 million internet users using the app. Southeast Asian countries also have high penetration, but so do Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Kenya. And despite the rapid adoption of TikTok in the United States, only 17.9% of American internet users are on currently the app, meaning it has plenty of room for expansion.
While TikTok’s rise and widespread usage are important measures of how foreign users are experiencing Chinese technology, an aspect of the narrative around TikTok is key to understanding it’s potential as a soft power generator. The artificial intelligence (AI) that powers TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm has been described as “groundbreaking,” and has been characterized by Bloomberg thus: “Within a day, the app can get to know you so well it feels like it’s reading your mind.” While Facebook’s algorithm, for example, relies heavily on what your friends have engaged with to recommend content and posts that you may like, TikTok has a new approach. It records data on what users actually click on, “right down to the type of music, faces, and voices in videos,” and recommends videos based on these criteria that users may not even know they are interested in yet. Because of its innovative use of AI, TkiTok has a claim as the most advanced social media network available. Again, the idea that Chinese technology is superseding that of its American counterparts is part of the story and justifies further examination of just how much of the growth and evolution of cyberspace future populations around the world will attribute to China compare to the United States.
Layer III: Share of Voice
The third level of cyberspace in which to measure influence is the content that populates the newsfeeds that dominate most users’ online experiences. Share of voice is an advertising metric that tracks the portion of the overall conversation in a certain arena that focuses on a given topic, typically a brand. The content level of cyberspace is a massive an amorphous region that would be difficult to ever fully measure, but by examining a few initial metrics it becomes clear what to track in order to approach an understanding of how a country’s influence can be measured in online discourse.
Looking specifically at social media platforms, they are a place for user generated content to be shared and viewed. While some of those users are media outlets and companies, obviously a significant portion of them are private citizens from all over the world who may, or may not, contribute content to the platforms they spend time on. Data on the number of posts that users of specific countries publish across various social platforms is not readily available. However, an imperfect measurement of social media activity is the amount of time a user typically spends on social media and the number of social media accounts the average use has.
As the table below shows, Chinese and Americans spend roughly the same amount of time on social media and are typically a few seconds below the worldwide average. When it comes to social media accounts, Americans have consistently had about 7 different social media accounts on average since early in 2019, while Chinese have seen their average number of accounts decrease recently to 7.4, down from a peak of 9.3. While these numbers hint at being able to quantify which nation, and the narratives their citizens knowingly and unknowingly promulgate with their social media content, dominate cyberspace, they can’t provide the whole picture. What they do suggest, though, is that the average citizen in the two countries has very similar social media habits.
Google Trends provides another way to gauge how influential a country’s narratives are online. As the adage goes, there are always two sides to a story and measuring which side’s terminology is being searched more frequently provides insight into which narrative is influencing the digital discourse more.
For example, the topic of Taiwan’s sovereignty is a contentious one where China pushes one side and Taiwan pushes another. From China’s perspective, Taiwan is a breakaway province referred to, unsurprisingly, as ‘Taiwan Province’. The government in Taipei and the people on the island of Taiwan, on the other hand, see their island as the ‘Republic of China,’ a sovereign nation run by a government in exile. Google Trends provides data on the relative interest over time that each of these search terms have elicited. As the graph below shows, ‘Republic of China’ has been searched much more frequently since 2004, though is trending downward over time. ‘Taiwan Province,’ on the other hand, has elicited very little interest. Two caveats must be pointed out when examining Google Trends data: first, Google is not widely accessible in China and so a major portion of potential searchers are not included in the data, and second, Google data is notoriously obtuse and absolute values of interest are unreliable. Relative differences are what this data shows, and the relative difference in interest between these search terms shows that Beijing’s narrative on Taiwan has little traction when it comes to global search behavior.
Another controversial topic with competing narratives is the situation in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have focused on addressing issues of terrorism in the region while the global community has questioned whether China is committing genocide against the Uyghur minority there. This topic, from a search trend perspective, is more competitive. While the term ‘Uyghur Genocide’ has gained more interest in recent months and briefly late in 2019, in general these narratives have typically generated a similar amount of interest when measured using these overarching search terms.
The existing soft power index looks at social media follower counts and engagement rate for official Facebook pages, those of the head of state and the foreign ministry. This approach is too narrow, but it does identify a key way to measure the affinity that an international audience has towards a country. By looking at social media engagement metrics that signal affinity from more typical people who aren’t necessarily following the foreign ministry of the country they’ll be visiting next, one can see another perspective on how countries own share of voice online.
The table below shows a set of tourism-related social media signals that can be used to measure the affinity towards a country on social media. Measuring the number of hashtag instances of country names, tourist attractions, and top tourism cities gives a digital footprint of real-world travel experiences and also shows the reach that digital content from tourism has in cyberspace as it proliferates in the feeds of posters’ networks based on algorithmic recommendations. Finally, measuring the audience size of a nation’s tourism brand, which typically posts content to the internet that is of more interest to the average person than the nation’s foreign ministry or head of state, provides better insight into the affinity a netizen may have towards a specific country.
The bifurcation of social media apps between those used by Americans and those used by Chinese complicates the comparison between the two countries. However, the importance of these data is the same as the other metrics analyzed at the content level of cyberspace: it is possible to get a much more detailed picture of share of voice online, and the soft power stores that it indicates, than current measurement models are using.
China’s Cyber Prominence Hasn’t Generated Soft Power
Despite China’s growing presence throughout the 3 levels of cyberspace, Beijing has not be able to translate that prominence into soft power. While the current soft power measurement methodology does not adequately quantify the digital influencer a country can exert or the actual affinity that global populations pay a country, the outcome of a successful soft power strategy is the same: being seen favorably in the eyes of the world. While the spread of Huawei technology is connecting more and more people to cyberspace, and Chinese apps compete with their Silicon Valley counterparts, and digital depictions of Chine proliferate on social media news feeds, opinions of China around the world have fallen in recent years.
Pew Research Center maintains a Global Indicators database, where they ask a sampling of countries different geopolitical questions each year. Since 2002, Pew has surveyed a total of 61 different countries and gathered 416 responses to the question, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of China?” The graph below shows how global opinion of China has changed over the period.
As recently as 2015, more than half of the world’s opinion of China was favorable. As of 2020, average favorability was down to 45%. Data from the BBC shows the same pattern of decreasing favorability. And the pattern is consistent when the surveyed nations are grouped by geopolitical affiliations, as the comparisons below show between OECD member versus non-member states and Belt and Road Initiative member versus non-member states.
In its analysis of the 2020 survey data, Pew attributes the recent decreases in favorability towards China to the coronavirus pandemic, as “The rise in unfavorable views comes amid widespread criticism over how China has handled the coronavirus pandemic.” Narrowing the time period in question does sow significant changes in public opinion towards China in many different countries starting during the pandemic, as shown in Chart A in the appendix. However, the graphs above show that his trend in declining Chinese favorability has been occurring since long before the pandemic so while the coronavirus outbreak has obviously created significant issues for Chinese popularity, it does not explain a decades-long trend. Additionally, to see popular opinion of China generally decreasing throughout the 21st century despite the global efforts of the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013, is surprising.
This analysis has focused on how to better quantify China’s soft power in cyberspace, and it has articulated numerous novel ways to track a country’s influence over international audiences, measure the affinity people around the world have towards a foreign country by establishing the crucial role that cyberspace plays in the lives of people the world over. It has shown that China’s digital soft power is not accurately demonstrated in existing soft power calculations, and pointed to the fact that Beijing’s goodwill online is likely higher than it had previously been given credit for. However, McClory is right to weight the Digital criteria for soft power less than Education, Enterprise, Engagement, and Government. As the data from Pew and the BBC shows, there are bigger geopolitical forces shaping public opinion than a country’s prominence in cyberspace.
So while China’s influence online, and the importance of cyberspace in soft power generation in general, is only likely to grow, in the near future this blind spot doesn’t seem likely to cause any strategic miscalculations on the part of countries looking to counter China in any of the realms of state competition. China is not the internet’s new super power, though analysts do need a better methodology to track soft power online in order to continue to be sure of that fact.
Appendix A
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