Abstract:

How does an in-depth and comparative picture of China’s soft power in Kazakhstan look like amidst a shifting society and evolving geopolitical environment? This paper utilizes a novel theoretical framework bridging Strategic Narrative Theory (SNT) and soft power literature to apply a measured analysis on China’s soft power across metrics of the Soft Power Matrix – encompassing systems, identity, and issue narrative levels, as well as economic, cultural, and political dimensions. As one part of a comparative trio, alongside equivalent soft power analyses on Russia and the EU, this paper employs a mixed-methods approach, combining statistical trends from an online survey of students in 4 leading Kazakhstani universities (N = 848) conducted between October-November 2022 with qualitative data from 14 in-person focus groups and interviews (42 participants in total) conducted on the same target population between November-December 2022. The findings paints a nuanced picture of China’s soft power that, while revealing weaknesses noted in the previous literature, also highlights significant areas of strength, particularly in its systems level narratives and its economic and political dimensions of attraction, all of which seem to benefit from favorable geopolitical conditions. Furthermore, statistical survey patterns and focus group data generally confirm this author’s hypotheses regarding the relationships between the different variables of the soft power matrix, as well as on the predictors of these variables - namely of the intensity and positivity of people-to-people relations as soft power amplifiers, as well as the impact on opinions from triggering events, such as the Ukraine War or China’s ethnic policies in Xinjiang.