Of course. Soft power is akin to PR/Marketing. I've already made a post about this. I can walk down most major streets in Bangkok, HCM, Kuala Lumpur Seoul, Manila etc and see countless Starbucks, McDs, KFCs, Apple etc.
While these are not political machines, they do in fact sell the 'America' brand abroad even on the subconcious level. Most folks in this world use Google, Safari, Edge, Windows, Android on a daily basis etc.
How many people use Baidu outside of PRC? And I, like billions others I'm sure wouldn't know of the name of any OS from PRC.
Perception is everything.
Well people may use Google more than Baidu, but to that if the topic here is tech rather than entertainment, then I would point out that last year TikTok surpassed Google to be the world's most visited website or how pro-Ukrainian Westerners are scrambling to get DJI drones to aid the war effort. And this is all despite China still having a GDP per capita on roughly the same level as Mexico, give China time and it'll continue to dominate other areas, which it is doing.
But as for the bigger picture, ah, another one of these discussions. I think an argument really could be made that there's no group of people more convinced that everything revolves around popular entertainment to the same level overseas born Chinese do. To that I'd like to say this.
For the past decade, Chinese Americans were fed a narrative that the single most important issue in our community was getting people with our faces prominent roles in Hollywood. Which is understandable, if you're East Asian in America you've for sure gone through bullies imitating Long Duk Dong and Leslie Chow in front of you. But fast forward to today and supposedly Chinese Americans have succeeded in their goal. Everything Everywhere All at Once won best picture at the Oscars and is considered by many film fans to be among the most deserving winners in recent memory. Plus you got Beef, American Born Chinese, you got Simu Liu. I mean, that's great and all, but just a few weeks ago a crazy neo-Nazi blew off a Korean mother's face in front of her son and states are banning our people from buying property just because of their nationality. So, shrug, thanks a lot for the guidance Chinese American civil rights leaders, making media representation the core issue of the Chinese American community while ignoring everything else sure was the right call.
Or how about this? Polls have shown that while Americans are overall negative on China, Gen Z'ers are more positive. How can that be so though? For older Americans Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan are household names, and most have seen at least one movie starring them. Gen Z'ers though maybe have heard of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but by and large haven't seen any of their movies unless they're massive Kung Fu buffs. So despite one generation being more aware of celebrities of Chinese descent than the other, the opinions on China for both respective generations are completely flipped.
And plus I would like to bring a past comment I wrote that if everything revolved entertainment, it should've been Turkey or Egypt brokering Middle-East peace rather than China, since soap operas from those countries are much more popular in the region than Chinese ones. But y'all get the point. Everyone here loves to have these debates with pseudo sociological and psychological concepts, I just want to use concrete examples to ram home the point that the role entertainment products have in geopolitics shouldn't even be up for discussion.
Now look, do I want China to have media successes on the level of Game of Thrones? Yeah, it'd be great to promote such an old culture like China's abroad. Do I think China doing so is a life or death struggle akin to cracking EUV lithography? No and frankly you should not be talking geopolitics if you seriously believe that.
