Peace Corps News

China has been using a new approach to public diplomacy to expand its influence and global appeal

China has been using a new approach to public diplomacy to expand its influence and global appeal
It's an approach at which the United States once excelled but now does badly.  Call it "soft power." This term was coined over a decade ago by Harvard professor Joseph Nye to describe a country's ability to lead by example and get others to follow because they admire what you are. The Chinese have expanded people-to-people diplomacy, set up their own Peace Corps, and trained diplomats to speak local languages and appear on local TV shows.

China took advantage of the decline of America's soft power even before the Iraq war. That decline began in Asia when U.S. officials were perceived as indifferent to the suffering caused by the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. Our soft power eroded further when we eviscerated the United States Information Service and its cultural centers during the 1990s. Then came Iraq. President George W. Bush touts the need for public diplomacy. But his appointment of Karen Hughes as public diplomacy czar has been a failure, as evidenced by poll after depressing poll.

What's so disturbing about "Charm Offensive" is the larger problem it illuminates. America is no longer taking advantage of its greatest strength: leading the community of democracies by example. Our diplomacy, as Kurlantzick notes, is preoccupied with Iraq and the "war against terrorism" to the exclusion of other countries' concerns. Read more.

Beijing has created a Chinese version of the Peace Corps to send idealistic young Chinese on long-term volunteer service projects to developing nations like Laos and Burma
In the past decade, China has upgraded its public diplomacy, which has focused on selling the idea that China will not be a threat to other nations. China’s public diplomacy efforts reinforce the concept of peaceful development. They include museum exhibits in Malaysia and Singapore to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the voyages of Zheng He, a Chinese admiral who sailed across Asia, encountering but never conquering other nations.

Part of this new public diplomacy has been increasing cultural exchanges with Southeast Asia. China has begun hosting overseas scholars, the kind of programming the US State Department has long done.

Beijing also has created a Chinese version of the Peace Corps, run by the China Association of Youth Volunteers, to send idealistic young Chinese on long-term volunteer service projects to developing nations like Laos and Burma. Read more.

Young Chinese idealists vie to join their 'Peace Corps' in Africa
Across the border from South Sudan, in the small Ethiopian village of Asossa, Sun Yingtao, a young agriculture student from Hebei Province in China, is teaching subsistence farmers – many of them refugees from war-torn Sudan – techniques for getting good yields out of their meager lands.

Seconded to the Ethiopian Department of Rural Development, Mr. Sun spends his days trying to identify various vegetable diseases, discussing possible alternative water usage, and debating the pros and cons of sowing onions and peppers in rows or in a scattered fashion.

Sun, who has been here for six months, is a civilian volunteer – one of a group of 50 young men and women who have been sent by the Chinese government as part of a new, experimental "peace corps" project in the country. This is the program's second year, and there are small volunteer groups in three locations: Ethiopia, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe – three countries of limited economic importance for China.

Tens of thousands of young Chinese went through a rigorous three-month application process last year to compete for a spot on the volunteer team, says Liu Wei, another volunteer in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. And, though small now, the program is expected to expand.

Last November, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, President Hu Jintao said China would send 300 young volunteers to Africa by 2009 to do jobs ranging from teaching Chinese to introducing poultry technologies to introducing traditional Chinese medicinal treatments in local hospitals. Read more.

Caption: Sun Yingtao, A Chinese volunteer in rural Ethiopia, helps local farmers use techniques to get better yields for their crops. Photo: Danna Harman

Read more about Peace Corps China.

Read more about the Peace Corps and Public Diplomacy.

RPCV Bill Turner writes: America Spends; China Is Buying

RPCV Bill Turner writes: America Spends; China Is Buying
About 15 years ago, I hosted a 10-man team from the Chinese Ministry for Non-Ferrous Metals. They were on a quest to purchase copper properties and they were looking at a copper leaching project owned by Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) near Silver City. Then they did not buy it. Today they might. More recently, the Chinese sought to buy oil and gas interests in the United States. China's consumption of raw materials will outstrip that of the United States. Their population already does by a factor of five.

China's acquisition of those raw materials to the detriment of the nations that possess them will be financed by the United States and the other G-8 countries and China's own low labor costs. In a world where "globalization" and "free trade" are modern buzzwords, China is becoming the new global imperialist power, while America will become a Third World Country dependent upon them for products while acting as their global policeman.

Americans gobble up everything from toys to cell phones and computers and everything else that Wal-Mart sells, exporting dollars to China. Meanwhile, Chinese President Hu Jintao is quietly traveling the world signing trade pacts right and left. China is buying up natural resources for its rampant economic growth.

The Bush administration has so damaged America's image around the world and has so driven nations around the world into the Chinese camp that we cannot recover for generations if at all. And, we do not have generations to spend in a world where events can overtake us faster than Hitler's blitzkreig. The conclusion is that while, in time, Iraq and the Middle East may move to democracy, we do not have the time to wait. Though we can produce awe and thunder on the battlefield we are now losing the economic war. China is no longer the sleeping giant of Asia. It is on the march. The Won is up and the Dollar is down. Is anyone out there?  Read more.

About the Author
Bill Turner was a Peace Corps volunteer in the first and only Peace Corps project in Cyprus.  He served as a geologist doing basic water development survey mapping.  He became fluent in Greek and knowledgeable in Turkish.  Opposite of the 60's era BA generalists, he joined with a specific professional skill needed in a project.  The project was suddenly withdrawn in late 1963, because of a developing Civil War. He now lives in New Mexico and is a New Mexico natural resources trustee (1995-2003); trustee of more than five different private companies related to water rights, environmental projects or hydrology (present). Elected to board of directors, Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (2005 to present).

Christopher Hill announces Draft Accord reached in North Korea Nuclear Talks

Christopher Hill announces Draft Accord reached in North Korea Nuclear Talks
The American envoy, Christopher R. Hill, said diplomatic teams from the United States, North Korea and the other four participating countries — China, Japan, South Korea and Russia — pushed negotiations past a self-imposed Monday deadline into early Tuesday before finally agreeing on a final text. The six chief envoys are scheduled to reconvene at 10:30 a.m. in Beijing (9:30 p.m. Eastern time on Monday) to learn if each nation has approved the deal. The agreement is expected to include some significant concessions by the North Koreans, although they did not agree to give up their existing nuclear weapons.

Mr. Hill declined to offer any specifics about the new accord until approval was assured. But he suggested that the pending agreement was essentially the same as the draft proposal that has been under discussion for the past five days — except for revisions in a single paragraph. That paragraph presumably has focused on the question of energy assistance for North Korea. The North Koreans’ demand for huge, upfront shipments of fuel oil and electricity had threatened to scuttle the talks. “Everybody had to make some changes to try to narrow the differences,” Mr. Hill told reporters as he returned to his hotel at 2:41 a.m. local time on Tuesday. He added: “One would hope that we can all agree on this.”   Read more.

Caption: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill  in Beijing, China. Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/Associated Press

Christopher Hill is a Celebrity In China
Little known in his home country, the boyish-looking U.S. assistant secretary of state has become a celebrity in China's capital and not just for his role as Washington's chief envoy in talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program. His easygoing manner has also won over the media, in comparison to the stonewall public relations efforts put forward by some of the other countries in the talks. And with the negotiations taking place for hours on end behind closed doors, the idle time fuels speculation and jokes about Hill. Hill, who is on the evening television news every day he is in Beijing, has been mobbed at the Beijing airport with Chinese travelers rushing over to have their picture taken with him, said one of Hill's security officials, who asked not to be named.

The interest in Hill may also stem from the fact that he speaks every morning and evening to the media, while his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, gives only the occasional chaotic news conference. Hill, a Boston Red Sox fan, also won over the Japanese media by turning up for meetings in Tokyo wearing a Seibu Lions baseball cap — the Red Sox had just signed pitching star Daisuke Matsuzaka from the Lions. Read more.

Hill learned first lessons in Diplomacy as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, who reached a tentative agreement with North Korea on ending its nuclear programs, was a fresh-faced 21-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon when he learned his first lesson in diplomacy.

Hill's job in 1973 was to ride around on a Suzuki dirt bike and audit the books of credit unions in 28 villages and plantations. He discovered one board of directors had taken 60 percent of the money, so he gave an impassioned speech denouncing the malfeasance to hundreds of villagers sitting on a mountainside. His presentation was met with applause and gratitude -- and then the assembled group immediately reelected everyone he had just condemned.

"I realized I didn't know beans about what was going on in this tea plantation," Hill recalled over breakfast recently. It turned out the board reflected a careful amalgam of tribal interests, and it didn't matter whether it ran a good credit union or not.

The lesson, according to Hill: "When something's happened, it's happened for a reason and you do your best to understand that reason. But don't necessarily think you can change it." Read more.

Read more about Christopher Hill.

Spotlight on Peace Corps China

China RPCV Craig Simons writes: Wolong today is home to the largest cluster of the world's remaining wild pandas
Photo: tangtang Courtesy Flickr: Creative Commons
Beautiful and Pure were tussling: Pure had just scampered up a 6-foot post when Beautiful charged over and locked her teeth around a clump of his hair. After some determined pulling, both fell in a pile on the grass below.Then the real melee began: Four other year-old giant pandas padded over and joined in the raucous play, tumbling over each other in a black-and-white ball that left me and a handful of overjoyed tourists guessing where one animal ended and the next began. A plethora of pandas is why most visitors journey to the Wolong Nature Reserve, an 800-square-mile park in China's southwestern Sichuan province. Set up in 1963 to protect giant pandas, Wolong today is home to 153 wild pandas (the largest cluster of the world's estimated remaining 1,590 wild pandas) and 69 captive pandas (of 212 worldwide).

Wolong had some 80,000 visitors last year, about 20 percent of them foreigners, but fall is off-season and we shared the 64-acre center with only a few dozen other tourists. With aid from the World Wildlife Fund and American zoos -- including Zoo Atlanta, which works with researchers in Chengdu -- birthrates have soared as scientists have mastered using artificial insemination and raising young pandas abandoned by their mothers, which often give birth to twins but generally will raise only one cub. Read more.

Peace Corps Volunteer Peter writes: The Beats in China
It looks like I will be starting a reading group with some graduate students on the Beat Generation. This was my idea, not theirs. ...I think they will definitely get something about America out of studying the Beats, for I think there is something quintessentially American about the Beats, especially about Kerouac, with whom we will begin. One of the article I assigned described On the Road as a love poem to America, and I think that is right. Read more.

China Peace Corps Volunteer Chinkfly writes: How much Mandarin can you expect to learn during your assignment?
How much Mandarin you learn during your two years is completely up to the individual volunteer's ambition. Of our group of 50, about 10 had good Mandarin and the remaining 40 of us were starting from the very beginning. During PST, we started with the alphabet and learning the tonal sounds, and worked our way thru about 30 sections in the workbook on subjects like introductions, where we're from, what we do, direction, shopping for groceries, taking public transport, etc.. Basically, the how to get around in China stuff. We had a full 12 weeks of language training, and had a tough time (4+ hours a day, plus homework) getting thru it all---so due to your abridged training time, I'm not sure what the staff have planned for you. We learned a little bit of Hanzi (the Chinese characters), but most of that was left for us to learn on our own. Peace Corps does pay a certain amount for you to hire a tutor, up to a max per week(which I can't remember). It's up to you to find your own tutor when you get to site. You'll get guidelines for how much to pay your tutor---but it is really up to you to make your own deal. Some volunteers pay, some trade English lessons for Mandarin...you can be creative. If your tutor wants more than PC is willing to pay, you just have to make up the difference with your own monthly stipend. Read more.