Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

On Wednesday, the South China Morning Post published an analysis piece titled "Why Japan thinks China's growing cultural clout is something it needs to counter," thrusting the soft power contest between China and Japan back into the spotlight.

The article noted that Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced plans to hold cultural promotion events in more than 20 countries by the end of this month. The Yomiuri Shimbun was characteristically blunt in framing the initiative: Japan was acting because China had been "using cultural diplomacy to undermine other countries' reputations," and Tokyo needed to go on the offensive to create a more Japan-favored environment. The implication is clear - China's growing global soft power footprint is wrongfully translated into a "deliberate act of sabotage," and Japan is the aggrieved party in what it perceives as a "cultural war."

But this framing misrepresents what soft power actually is. At its core, soft power is a country's ability to attract and influence others on the basis of its own strengths. The global phenomenon of players willingly spending their own money on Black Myth: Wukong, readers around the world voluntarily championing The Three-Body Problem, and overseas consumers lining up to get their hands on Labubu - none of this is the product of top-down "cultural diplomacy." These are spontaneous market responses, driven by the pull of the content itself.

To label another country's cultural appeal as an attack on one's own reputation is simply to dress up competitive failure as victimhood. And this reflexive victim narrative only reveals that Japan may not be genuinely willing to face the real reasons behind China's soft power rise.

Apart from China's rich cultural resources gained throughout history in various spheres, those real reasons come down to one thing: innovation. China's cultural products have captured global audiences because they're innovative. The Global Soft Power Index 2026 by global brand valuation consultancy Brand Finance bears this out - China not only holds steady at second place globally, narrowing the gap with the US to just 1.5 points, but tops the "advanced in technology and innovation." That is both a validation of China's soft power and a recognition of its innovative capacity.

Soft power derived from the cultural sector is one of the most telling indicators of this broader competition - and surveying the Chinese cultural products that have genuinely broken through internationally in recent years, the pattern is hard to miss: Innovation is giving Chinese culture a new vitality and radiance.

From the "new trio" of China's digital cultural exports - online literature, video games, and streaming drama, to the global reach of short-video platforms and the digital reconstruction of museums, these phenomena are quietly sketching the outline of an emerging cultural brand - a "Cool China," still taking shape, but unmistakably present.

It is fair to say, then, that growing cultural soft power requires growing innovative capacity. China's journey from name recognition to genuine trust and identification is still far from complete. But the direction is clear enough. As China's innovative capabilities change at a visible pace, the world-class cultural products they give rise to are steadily reshaping how the outside world sees and imagines China.

For a Japan that seems rather prone to casting itself as the victim, the more pressing issue may be closer to home. In news that has rattled the tech world these past few days: On Tuesday, Japanese tech company Rakuten Group unveiled what it billed as Japan's "largest high-performance AI model" - only for the tech community to discover, soon, that its core architecture was entirely derived from China's DeepSeek, with no attribution in the initial release. A few decades ago, the idea of "a Japanese tech product standing on the shoulders of China's cutting-edge technological innovation" would have been unthinkable. Today, it is simply the new reality.

Innovation has never been merely an engine of hard power - it is equally the force that propels cultural soft power into an era of genuine growth. As Japan's innovative momentum continues to falter, the distance between the country and the "Cool Japan" brand that its government once poured vast resources into building will only grow. Meanwhile, a China that keeps breaking new ground through innovation is - product by product, story by story - turning "Cool China" from a concept into a reality that more and more people around the world are "maxxing."