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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction: the Chinese dream of a harmonious world: a story of appearance and disappearance -- 1 Policy discourse under Hu Jintao: doing and undoing things with words in Chinese politics -- 2 Chinese academic discourse: reinventing a hierarchical world order -- 3 Propaganda at the Shanghai Expo: foreclosing futures and simulating Chinese world leadership -- 4 Online spoofs under harmonization: complicating cooperation and resistance

Scholars have recently paid increasing attention to China's "mega events" as a form of image management striving to influence future world order. In this article, the author examines China's recent world fair, Expo 2010 Shanghai China, and argues that we need to move beyond the reading of mega events as simple representation and ideology and read it also as simulation and simulacra. Reading the Chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can provide different ways of relating "the West" to its "other country" China. The author examines this relation through asking what it means to be the fair: Where is the world fair? When is the world fair? Who is the world fair? Reading the world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the fair's notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable.

Examining three key symbols and three key practices at Expo 2010, this article argues that if we read these symbols and practices with sensitivity to their plural messages, the traditional binaries of hard and soft power become unworkable. Expo's symbols contain possible messages of the harmony, benevolence, and legitimacy of China's rise, but one can simultaneously read them to express violent harmonization, coercion, and illegitimacy. There are implications here for policymakers and researchers. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

This article engages with China's "politics of harmony" to investigate the dangers and possibilities of soft power as a concept and practice. Chinese sources claim that China will be able to exercise soft power due to its tradition of thinking about harmony. Indeed, the concept of harmony looms large in Chinese soft power campaigns, which differentiate China's own harmonious soft power from the allegedly disharmonious hard power of other great powers—in particular Western powers and Japan. Yet, similarly dichotomizing harmony discourses have been employed precisely in the West and Japan. In all three cases, such harmony discourses set a rhetorical trap, forcing audiences to empathize and identify with the "harmonious" self or risk being violently "harmonized." There is no doubt that the soft power of harmony is coercive. More importantly, the present article argues that it has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing, and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan. A similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too. Ultimately, however, we argue that China's own tradition of thinking about harmony may help us to theorize how soft power might be exercised in less antagonistic and violent ways.

AbstractThis article engages with China's "politics of harmony" to investigate the dangers and possibilities of soft power as a concept and practice. Chinese sources claim that China will be able to exercise soft power due to its tradition of thinking about harmony. Indeed, the concept of harmony looms large in Chinese soft power campaigns, which differentiate China's own harmonious soft power from the allegedly disharmonious hard power of other great powers—in particular Western powers and Japan. Yet, similarly dichotomizing harmony discourses have been employed precisely in the West and Japan. In all three cases, such harmony discourses set a rhetorical trap, forcing audiences to empathize and identify with the "harmonious" self or risk being violently "harmonized." There is no doubt that the soft power of harmony is coercive. More importantly, the present article argues that it has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing, and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan. A similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too. Ultimately, however, we argue that China's own tradition of thinking about harmony may help us to theorize how soft power might be exercised in less antagonistic and violent ways.