Soft Power is an Army of Zhang Ziyis

CNReviews.com has a translation of an interesting post by Hong Huang, described as “a magazine publisher and an extremely popular blogger on the Chinese internet,” looking at notions of culture and soft power in modern China. The post discusses a controversy dating back to 2006, when Professor Zhang Yiwu of Peking University wrote in an article published in New Weekly; “One Yao Ming, one Zhang Ziyi are more effective than ten thousand Confuciuses… Only if we emphasize Zhang Ziyi the way we emphasize Confucius does Chinese culture have a future.”

Professor Zhang copped a lot of flak for his remark, but Hong Huang sympathizes with the academic’s position, writing, “We often talk about the great achievement of thousands-of-years-old Chinese culture, as if China today had no culture to speak of.”

Hong Huang’s piece traces some of the fault lines running through contemporary debates about Chinese soft power, including the conflicted relationship many Chinese people seem to have with stars like Zhang Ziyi when they strut their stuff on the world stage (often with a foreign passport in one hand and a foreign boyfriend in the other).

To back up her point the new issue of Hong Huang’s iLook magazine, focusing on soft power, features Zhang Ziyi on the cover. Hong also claims that iLook “is the first copyrighted Mainland periodical to be published in Taiwan," where it has been renamed Metro City. The Taiwanese version will hit newsstands across the strait on January 20.