Goodwill Ambassadors
- By Harvey Dzodin
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China.org.cn, August 22, 2011
One danger and opportunity combined is that Americans are woefully ignorant about China and most of the rest of the world. In a recent survey a mere 1.6% of Americans could identify that China's current President as "Hu or Hu Jintao" and only 1% of Americans could identify the current Prime Minister as "Wen or Wen Jiabao". I bet that 99.9% of Chinese could identify President Obama!
Ignorance breeds prejudice and fans the flames of war. Knowledge is empowering. The best form of advertising, even today in our 21st century high-tech interconnected world is not in cinematic product placement, internet, mobile, TV, radio or print advertising as clever, creative and tenderly conceived as they all are. The most persuasive is simple person-to-person word-of-mouth. And in this regard, China has two un-deployed "armies" that are infinitely more powerful than those of Emperor Qin Shihuang.
The first group of these are the more than 1.25 million Chinese students attending foreign universities, mostly in the US, Australia, UK, Canada and Western Europe. Each is a potential Chinese ambassador of goodwill. While each one can win foreign hearts and minds for China one person at a time, right now this ambassadorial corps is untrained, undisciplined and unused.
In my opinion, every Chinese student going abroad needs to take a short-intensive course in Chinese Public Diplomacy 101. Chinese students in the main are by nature patriotic and nationalistic so the training should emphasize their importance as representatives of the country. The course, whether online or at university, should also briefly review those things foreigners are curious about here such as what life is like in modern China. Many foreigners mistakenly think China today is more Mao than modern. Believe it or not, but many would be shocked to learn just how up-to-date much of urban China has become.
To be clear this is not about spying or espionage. It's also not about creating a million man and woman corps of propagandists. It's about reminding each student that through them, one person at a time in their host country, can learn more about 21st century China.
And then there is the even larger junior corps of hundreds of millions younger Chinese students. Each one, when sufficiently knowledgeable in English or another foreign language should have a foreign online pen-pal. With the help of online instant translators, language should not be a problem. When I was young we were limited to waiting weeks or months for a reply by post from a pen pal. Now the wait is mere milliseconds. In addition to educating their foreign peers about China, these Junior Ambassadors can learn about the world around them and improve their language skills at the same time.
China will learn to effectively exercise its soft power in the years to come. This takes time however and cannot be done overnight. In the meanwhile, deploying a sensitized corps of student ambassadors can win hearts and minds for China and build personal friendships that last a life time and make the world a better and more harmonious place.
Harvey Dzodin currently is a Senior Advisor to Tsinghua University. He was a Director and Vice President at ABC Television in New York from 1982 until 2004.
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
