Before and Beyond the Confucius Institute:An Epistemological Turn to Understanding China’s Soft Power in MENA

Abstract: 

The Western international relations concept “soft power” has deeply penetrated official, academic, and public vocabulary of China’s presence in the MENA region in this century. The Confucius Institute (CI) has become the Leitmotif of scholarship on China’s soft power in cultural domain. However, the region has also witnessed the emergence of a range of non-CI language or cultural-cum-language training spaces. This working paper argues that a study of local non-CI sites and agents of Mandarin teaching and learning provides a vantage point through which to understand how China’s cultural soft power generates, shapes, and works from below. This allows us to better understand how China’s soft power is socially constructed and produced through, and in, interactions between local individuals and various social relations, rather than a “power” (or, force) simply being imposed from outside in a top-down fashion. In this fashion, we take “an epistemological turn” for a more solid analysis of China’s soft power.