By Li Xiguang

Soft power is the power of making people love you. Hard power is the ability to making people fear you.

Over the last 500 years, all the world powers gained their hegemony through hard power, but the US has gained its hegemony through combining hard power and soft power, both striking at and assimilating its opponents.

The US has built its soft power by making its values and political system, such as the US interpretation and definition of democracy, freedom and human rights, into supposedly universal values.

The US defeated the former Soviet Union not with guns, but with its political and ideological slogans.

In China today, soft power has become a fashionable term. The government, academia and the press have used it extensively.

Many people in China believe that soft power is made up of cultural products, such as Chinese calligraphy, Peking opera, acrobatics, Peking roast duck, exhibitions, movies and segments of the Great Wall. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

Soft power comes from a country's values, political system and domestic and foreign policies.

Cultural products can improve a country's image in certain situations, but most of the time, they are just cultural commodities.

China's ancient cultural products are not really soft power. Today Japanese have been writing Chinese characters for over 2,000 years and some of them have better handwriting than the Chinese.

But it does not mean most Japanese respect and love China.

Like Japanese, Koreans used the Chinese writing system until the widespread adoption of hangul, the modern Korean alphabet, in both Koreas after the end of World War II.

The use of Chinese characters is now much rarer in Korea than in Japan, especially in North Korea. But this doesn't mean they think less of China than the Japanese do.

In the age of global communication, China's biggest source of vulnerability in soft power is its handling of the Internet. The soft power of the US comes from an open Internet which allows a free flow of information.

The more open the Internet becomes, the more US values, ideas and stories impacts the world. According to a 2000 report from the RAND Corporation, The Emergence of Noopolitik, Toward An American Information Strategy, the US government and the military believe that the Internet is the home of US ideas and has been dominated by the US stories and values.

In contrast, the Chinese government believes that the current Internet does not spread China-made ideas, stories and values. As a result, an open and global online world does not aid China's soft power.

Hard power is a race for military, economic and technological power. Hard power wars are about occupation of land, but soft power battles are about seizing space in information, stories, ideas, and ideology.

As a strategy for building the country's soft power, China should learn from the US in planning a global strategic communication and building a global social network , through which to nurture pro-China scholars, journalists, govern-ment officials by offering them scholarships and internships, holding training programs.

In recent years, the Chinese foreign ministry and the State Information Office have held a number of workshops training media leaders and government spokespersons from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

The core element of soft power is its power of unifying a nation and of a society. But today's world is moving from a State-centered society to an Internet and network-centered society.

The government can find ways to befriend the Internet. Chinese thinkers in the academia must show courage and wisdom in promoting innovations in the country's value system and political system.

China will not be able to compete with the US in soft power until it has a better form of social system and social well-being than the US.

The author is a professor of Tsinghua University and author of the coming book "Intellectual dialogues of Tibet." xiguang@ tsinghua.edu.cn