Much to be done to promote China's soft power

Screenshot from the video Song of Shisanwu. [Photo/Agencies]

'If you wanna know what China's gonna do, best pay attention to the Shisanwu (13th Five-Year Plan)" is the chorus of a new video from Xinhua News Agency, which has attracted modest online audiences and mixed reviews worldwide as it attempts to explain in a few minutes in American-accented English with Chinese subtitles the process of enacting China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

Though criticized by some, it's a refreshing step in the right direction compared with earlier efforts. Nevertheless, it's only a drop in the ocean compared with what China needs to do to improve its until-now meager efforts to project its soft power if it is to win hearts and minds abroad.

Described variously as "groovy", "trippy", "bizarre", "crazy", and "like watching 'Play School on acid", the video features the likenesses of, among others, Albert Einstein, David Bowie, a rubber duck, disco balls and department store dummies, as it explains in idealized terms the deliberative process of creating the Shisanwu.

Aimed at young foreign audiences, it's catchy, fun and not at all what one expects from the publicity machine of the Communist Party of China. It brings to mind the iconic 1988 American advertising slogan trying to rejuvenate an automobile brand that appealed to an older demographic: "This is not your father's Oldsmobile."

The video is the latest in a series of advertisements/programs promoting China produced by Fuxing Road, a little-known production company. It's light years ahead of China's expensive and ham-fisted Times Square ad campaign that featured mostly images of people unknown even to the sophisticated New Yorkers that coincided with former Chinese president Hu Jintao's 2011 US visit. Clearly, Fuxing has done its homework to create a video that is hip and whose chorus lingers in the mind.

I watched Fuxing's other videos. They are all well made but occasionally suffer from flaws. The only one in Chinese has the best title: Follow Xi Dada to Bo'ao. Others include How Leaders are Made, explaining how Chinese leaders rise through the CPC gaining experience, and The Communist Party of China is With You Along the Way which needs no further explanation. The best are the most recent: emotion-laden and slickly-produced shorts released before Xi's visits to the United States and the United Kingdom, When China Met Carolina and Britain Meets China. These extol bilateral friendship and the role of Chinese businesses.

As well done as these are, their impact is a mere drop in the ocean. Looking at YouTube views, Shisanwu has received a mere few hundred thousand hits, which shows China has to do much more to create an impact.

China has been making good progress in co-production in movies. If there's one thing Hollywood loves, it's OPM－other peoples' money－and this will definitely make a huge difference to China's image.

China's First Lady Peng Liyuan has been a huge success during her US and UK visits. Her comments in English at Juilliard School in New York and the United Nations were a revelation.

And the best form of diplomacy is not YouTube videos but old-fashioned person-to-person friendship. When I was younger, we had foreign pen-pals. It took weeks for a reply. Today's home-grown WeChat has a translator that easily permits those with no shared language to talk with each other. Forget about adults; go for primary school students to build lifelong friendships and to upgrade bilateral relationship from "frenemies", friends and enemies to something closer to friends.

So Fuxing Road, irrespective of who runs it, doesn't really matter for outsiders, because it has moved China's soft power outreach in the right direction. This only goes to show, however, that so much work remains to be done.

The author is a senior adviser to Tsinghua University and former director and vice-president of ABC Television in New York.