China’s significant economic, technological, and military growth in the 21st century has presented the United States with its first peer competitor since the end of the Cold War. Significant analysis has gone into comparing America and China in those three categories. What is less understood is how the two countries compare in soft power resources. Soft power competition between America and China is less understood for two reasons: this category of power is historically under examined, and technological change means soft power measurement criteria are constantly evolving. Soft power may be a key part of the geopolitical competition between China and America, but insufficient methodology exists to determine how the countries compare and whether an advantage may be gained through a soft power strategy.

Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book, Imagined Communities, defined the nation as an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” As opposed to earlier societal structures like kingdoms, empires, and city states, Anderson describes how the idea of the nation developed due to the slow deterioration of three earlier concepts that had been central to previous political structures. These three concepts were: primacy of sacral languages as sources of truth, the spread of extralocal communities, and the shift that occurred in the concept of simultaneity in the modern period. These three historical currents combined to create the political situations and personal mindsets necessary for the concept of the modern nation to develop, and they were driven in large part by the expansion of print capitalism and the ways it changed how people communicated.

The lines between entertainment and advertising are blurring more and more everyday. Everyone has a brand, everyone is a publisher, and they are all searching for experiences and products to help them tell their stories. The best companies have already adapted to this, and are working with their audiences to spread a collaborative brand story.