Is China's soft power really rising, or is America's just crumbling?

Photo by David Kristianto on UnsplashSoft power is notoriously hard to quantify, but it’s difficult to argue that global soft power has been shifting steadily toward East Asia in recent decades. A few years ago I wrote a post about how South Korea became a cultural superpower on purpose, while Japan became one by accident:The big question then was: When does China get its turn? China is a lot bigger than either Japan or Korea, so you might assume that if the world loves East Asian stuff, we might eventually get a Chinese Wave. So far, it’s been slow to arrive. In my post about the Chinese Century last year, I argued that China’s closed political system meant that its cultural influence would lag its technological and geopolitical might:In the cultural realm, I expect China to be more isolated and less influential than America was…China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That’s the kind of…