Yearender: Soft power 2.0 -- the rise of an appealing China

by Xinhua writers Yu Xiaohua, Ren Ke

BEIJING, Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- 2025 was a year that a new image of China quietly unfolded before vast numbers of people in the world -- not through grand pronouncements, but through mundane online and real-life encounters.

When U.S. users fled a looming TikTok ban online in January, some migrated to Xiaohongshu, a popular social media platform in China. On Xiaohongshu, they found fragments of ordinary Chinese life: grocery hauls, medical bills, and memes ricocheting in real-time communication.

Chinese cultural products have followed a similar trajectory. Ne Zha, a defiant boy-god from Chinese mythology, burst onto the silver screen in theaters around the world. In Los Angeles, queues formed for Labubu plush charms that would dangle from the handbags of shoppers. And Chinese web novels, online games and online film and television series found international audiences.

A different image of China took shape: tangible, contemporary, and increasingly desirable.

"I look at China now, not the way the media and politics see China, but as genuine, kind and happy people," reads a comment on British YouTube vlogger Mike Okey's 2024 video of his 2,000-kilometer spontaneous hitchhiking trip from northwest China to Beijing. The video has now garnered over 13 million views and 30,000 comments, with the majority being positive.

This shift in sentiment has been measurable. In July, the Pew Research Center reported more favorable views of China in 15 of the 25 countries it has surveyed since 2024. In most countries, younger people tend to have more favorable opinions of China than older people.

That finding aligns with a similar observation in February. The London-based Brand Finance released its Global Soft Power Index 2025, ranking China second, only behind the United States. This was an outcome the consultancy said reflected China's growing role in shaping the future of the global economy, culture and sustainable development.

"If soft power is understood as the capacity to shape national image and narratives, then China's has clearly shifted," Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China, told Xinhua.

In years past, China's outward communication was largely explanatory -- aimed at helping the world see and understand the country -- but uneven in its regional reach. Its symbols were usually the same and mostly static.

Over time, that posture moved beyond explanation. Attraction and appeal accumulated through largely unchoreographed processes, shaped in part by serendipity and by what China was doing in the world and what it could offer.

"Let's call it a new kind of soft power, or soft power version 2.0," said Wang.

China's newfound global resonance is, in part, a spillover of domestic reorientation. A renewed enthusiasm for tradition and heritage has converged with rising confidence among younger generations, particularly Gen Z.

From the revival of traditional attire in the early 2000s to contemporary reinterpretations of ancient motifs, cultural expression has shifted from imitation to self-possession. Where earlier generations often measured themselves against the West, many young Chinese people now meet the world on equal terms.

That confidence has fed a flourishing cultural economy in which tourism, film, gaming and design have learned to refashion the past into modern forms.

"Ne Zha 2," the world's top-earning animated feature and one of the five most commercially successful films of all time, illustrates this evolution. Its production involved more than 4,000 animation artists from nearly 140 domestic studios. Its director, Yang Yu, founded his studio just over a decade ago.

The team rapidly ascended what is typically a steep learning curve. Across more than 1,900 visual-effects shots, they achieved breakthroughs in fluid dynamics and particle effects simulation, rendering scenes of the sea with scientific precision and sentimental intent.

Mythology, in this telling, was engineered as well as illustrated. "We wanted even the sea itself to carry emotion," Yang explained.

While long-term cultural renewal laid the foundations, policy also mattered to this shift. China's post-pandemic relaxation of its visa rules became a catalyst, and unilateral visa exemptions for nearly 50 countries, along with expanded visa-free transit schemes, triggered a surge in inbound tourism -- and in user-generated content online.

In 2025, a carousel of influencers and celebrities traveled to China. Among these visitors were U.S. YouTuber Darren Watkins Jr., who is perhaps better known as IShowSpeed, as well as political commentator Hasan Piker and football legend Zinedine Zidane. Their footage captured high-speed trains, cashless payment systems, regional cuisines and everyday urban order, revealing a China that was far cleaner, safer and more modern than many had been led to expect.

Such people-to-people encounters, said Li Haidong from China Foreign Affairs University, have punctured long-standing information silos, particularly among younger Western audiences.

When the 20-year-old IShowSpeed danced with robots, rode amphibious electric vehicles and received food delivered by drone in south China's Shenzhen, his verdict was unvarnished: "China is different, bro."

If casual visitors tend to be struck by China's everyday modernity and diversity, more analytical observers are focusing on its vision, strategic capacity and implementation. Elon Musk has pointed to China's advances in power generation and electric vehicles, while Columbia University historian Adam Tooze has described the country's rise as "the most profound economic story of our lifetime."

Adding to such individual endorsements, China's growing presence in frontier technologies is increasingly shaping perceptions of its long-term competitiveness.

Chinese open-source AI models, including DeepSeek, now handle nearly 30 percent of global AI usage. According to a recent article in The Economist, China is now the world's second-largest developer of new medicines, with Chinese companies running nearly one-third of global clinical trials last year -- up from just 5 percent a decade ago.

All this has unfolded against a volatile geopolitical backdrop. As tariff battles set the global economy ablaze, China's willingness and ability to stand up against coercion have further influenced international perceptions. The results of a Pew Research Center poll released in April, at the height of tensions, recorded a modest warming of U.S. attitudes toward China for the first time since 2017.

Similar, if uneven, shifts have been registered in Europe. The results of an annual survey released in December by Spain's IE University found that support for closer ties with China is rising sharply, up by 15 percentage points since 2023.

Taken together, these developments may not amount to a wholesale realignment of global opinion. They do, however, point to something more incremental, and potentially more durable: China's growing ability to shape perceptions through appeal and attraction, with cultural visibility, competence and the quiet accumulation of credibility. ■