Are universities effective sources of soft power?

“Higher education has been a source of soft power since the Middle Ages,” says Arthur Petersen, professor of science, technology and public policy at UCL. “By generating through exchange of students an attractive image of a host country, some power can be acquired by that country to achieve desired outcomes.”

Soft power is frequently evoked in discussions of the value of educational and cultural exports, yet, interestingly, the specific term was coined as recently as the 1980s. Joseph Nye, the American political scientist who popularised the concept, describes soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment – magnets rather than carrots or sticks”. And higher education often has such magnetic effects, adds Nye, who was chair of the US National Intelligence Council under President Bill Clinton and is now a distinguished service professor emeritus at Harvard University.

“If a university treats its students badly, there is unlikely to be lasting attraction,” he tells Times Higher Education, “but I suspect there are more positive examples, which leave a lasting attraction.” And Nye believes the UK and the US continue to “punch above their weight” geopolitically in part because of the favourable reception they largely receive from foreign diplomats, politicians and industrialists who were overseas students there.

In the US’ case, the Fulbright programme was established in 1946 specifically to promote Western ideas at the beginning of the Cold War, according to Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government at Wesleyan University. “Fulbright was an attempt to win the ideological battle against communism, so the idea was to bring people into America from all over the world,” he says. It was a “direct diplomatic concoction” dreamed up by the US government and William Fulbright, the senator who proposed it.

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More recently, the West’s major strategic rival, China, has also got in on the act. Last year, for instance, marked the 10th anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative – an unprecedented pipeline of construction and investment spanning about 150 countries that has become “one of the largest exercises the international community has seen in terms of soft power projection”, according to Benjamin Barton, associate professor at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus.

And while the initiative has not had much specific emphasis on education, Barton says, China has sought to promote international exchanges and cooperation, with 45 countries so far agreeing to the mutual recognition of higher education degrees. This has enhanced China’s ability to attract international students, mainly from the developing world, to study in its top universities, according to Hongyi Lai, associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Nottingham.

“Bringing international students to China is one way to spread its power beyond its borders,” says UCL’s Petersen. “This is part of China’s gradual adoption of the approaches to higher education by traditional great powers, in the context of increasing multipolarity.”

China’s 500,000 inbound students in 2020 mark a fivefold increase since 2004. But international education is not China’s only soft power tactic. Petersen also cites the Asian Universities Alliance, a 15-member group focused on staff exchange and research collaboration that was initiated in 2017 by Tsinghua University. The Beijing institution, which is the highest ranked Asian university in the THE World University Rankings 2024, also hosts the group’s secretariat.

Then there is the network of government-funded Confucius Institutes that China has established at universities around the world since 2004, with the aim of teaching and promoting Chinese language and culture.

According to Barton, the language classes and other types of educational activities offered by the institutes are designed to promote a particular image of life in mainland China. The institutes “have afforded foreigners a greater view, from afar, of what life is like in the People’s Republic of China”, he says. And the controversy they have attracted in recent years in the West, with many universities shutting their own institutes amid concerns that they are media for Chinese propaganda, reflects a recognition of education's potential to win hearts and minds. Welcoming the shutdowns, Anthony Finkelstein, president of City, University of London and a former chief scientific adviser for national security to the UK government, told MPs last year Confucius Institutes are an “explicit tool of Chinese influence”.

Others, too, are sceptical of the institutes’ claims to be purely educational institutions.

“Contrary to the official line, the Confucius Institutes are not the equivalent of the British Council or the Goethe Institutes, just in the same way CGTN [China Global Television Network] is not the equivalent of the BBC, CNN or Al-Jazeera,” says Gary Rawnsley, professor of public diplomacy at the University of Lincoln. 

Western suspicion of Chinese influence is not mirrored everywhere, however. According to Nottingham’s Lai, Confucius Institutes are “viewed as playing a far more beneficial and benign role in the developing nations than in the developed ones, [where they] are more likely to serve as a tool of soft power for China”, he says.

China’s recruitment of international students is also markedly skewed towards the developing world. Even before Covid-19 closed borders, just 11,000 US students were studying in China, and recent figures put the current number at only 211. That precipitous fall is due in part to China’s shutdown during the pandemic and in part to China’s perceived lack of safety for US students – tied up with the rising tensions between the two nations – which means that those who go there anyway are not eligible for federal student aid.

But China has strategically targeted its scholarships elsewhere. Indonesia is one example; by currying positive relations with the world’s most populous Islamic country, China hopes to influence how it is viewed in the entire Muslim world. Meanwhile, in Africa, Barton says, China educates students who may otherwise not have the opportunity to study overseas. And the rewards of doing so are not limited to gratitude from the scholars themselves. “It also helps boost China’s soft power amongst African elites, the local population and elsewhere across the Global South, as China is seen to be giving a chance to the less fortunate,” Barton says.

Offering the scholarships is also a way to boost the study of Mandarin in African countries and to provide an appropriately qualified and socialised local workforce for Chinese firms active in Africa. And it “helps to mitigate possible negative connotations” of phenomena such as “the mistreatment of African employees by Chinese employers, accusations of land grabs, corruption [and] racism towards African expats in China”, Barton says.

China has been expanding its presence in universities in the Gulf states as well. David Roberts, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, has noted a growing trend of exchange trips, academic visits and support for Mandarin programmes there, which may reflect China’s intention to exert greater influence in the region. “The ultimate goals are…intra-regional communication – soft power is getting people to understand your way of thinking,” Roberts told THE last year.

Russia, too, appears to be attempting to expand its influence outside the West. Tracey German, professor in conflict and security at King’s College London, estimates that there has been a fourfold increase in the number of Russian scholarships offered to African students over the past decade.

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This echoes Cold War tactics to win “hearts and minds” in the developing world, she says. And that neo-communist strategy appears to be reflected in the reversion of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN) to its former title, the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University. Founded in 1960 and named after a Congolese independence leader, the renowned Moscow-based public research university was used by the Soviet Union to spread communism by educating personnel from countries that had recently achieved independence from colonial powers. It was renamed in 1992, but experts suggest that its re-adoption of its Soviet name reflects Russia’s adoption of an anti-colonial rhetoric in its foreign policy, especially towards the Global South.

For all the focus and expenditure on soft power, however, there appears to be little direct evidence of its effectiveness.

According to Lincoln’s Rawnsley, for instance, while “China may view the Confucius Institutes as examples of Chinese soft power”, their “‘power’ is very limited”.

And the same may be true of Western universities. UK government research published in 2013 uncovered a man working in a Chinese bank who liked to refer to Cambridge, where he had done a PhD, as his “second hometown”. “When the Bank of England or other UK people visit me in my office or duty, I will [treat them] like family, quite like a kind of large family, like an old friend,” he told the researchers. But Rawnsley says an “obsession” with quantitative methods means that qualitative studies of soft power are all too rare. And the recent downturn in relations between China and the West might be seen as evidence that Western universities’ education of several million Chinese students in recent years has yielded few soft power benefits.

Rawnsley cautions against measuring the success of international education in such terms, however. “It is not the purpose of education to make China more ‘Western friendly’ or the West more ‘China friendly’,” he says. “Educational links may encourage greater communication, interaction, and collaborations in the long term. The needle may move one student at a time, but that’s not a bad result.”

He also warns that the UK’s focus on international student numbers risks neglecting students’ response to living and studying in the UK.

“I know many international students who have had a very bad experience of living in the UK, but they are still a statistic, a number that measures our ‘soft power success’,” he says.

And he warns that a country’s soft power capabilities can be damaged by national policy, such as the UK government’s recent hostility towards overseas students. Restrictions on their ability to bring dependants and to work in the UK after they graduate may bring down historically high migration figures, but Rawnsley “shudder[s] to think what damage the announcements…have done to the UK’s soft power and our chances of maintaining a welcoming and constructive environment for international students”.

While quantifying soft power might be hard, the Soft Power Index, published annually by the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), makes an attempt at doing so by counting the number of serving national leaders (monarchs, presidents and prime ministers) who undertook higher education in countries other than their own. According to Nick Hillman, director of Hepi, educating world leaders is the “most clearly visible” sign of soft power – even if those leaders do not always act in accordance with Western interests (witness Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who studied ophthalmology in London).

The UK briefly topped the rankings in its first year, 2017, before the US overtook it, retaining its pre-eminence every year since, with France third. And while Russia might be seeking to stoke and exploit anti-colonial attitudes in the developing world, Hillman says the “legacy of empire” accounts for those countries’ monopolisation of the top three spots. The US and the UK also have a “massive advantage” from speaking English.

However, Hillman thinks it would be naive to assume that the status quo can’t be altered. “We always assume that countries that send large numbers of people to the UK don’t themselves recruit large numbers of international students, but China does – many from developing countries. It’s completely conceivable that many leaders of African countries in a few years’ time will have links to Chinese universities,” he says.

Hillman notes that educating the “best and the brightest” is so important to the UK sector that even sceptics of international students support it. This is why hardline former home secretary Suella Braverman reportedly suggested to prime minister Rishi Sunak that there should be fewer restrictions on international students studying at elite Russell Group institutions, where future leaders are likely to be concentrated.

Another major and potentially confounding factor in international student recruitment is, of course, money. For many anglophone universities, income from international student fees has become crucial to their survival amid flatlining domestic sources of revenue. Institutions have become particularly dependent on the Asian giants of India and China, leading to concerns that, as well as promoting Western soft power, the dynamic also potentially gives India and China undue influence over Western universities and even governments.

Chinese students, for example, now make up around a quarter of the UK’s international student population, rising to 41 per cent within the Russell Group. Australia, is, if anything, even more dependent on the Chinese market; in 2019, 30 per cent of the University of Sydney’s entire revenue came from Chinese fees, for instance. And the pandemic concentrated fears in Western universities, particularly in Australia, about what would happen if a virus or a diplomatic crisis led to a sudden collapse in the Chinese market.

Similar fears were voiced more recently in Canada, after the country’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, accused the Indian government of being complicit in the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Sector figures worried that the diplomatic row could see a downturn in Canadian universities’ recruitment of Indian students, who currently account for the largest share of international students in the country, totalling 320,000.

The sheer size of that cohort represents one of the many tools of soft power that India has at its own disposal, according to Aurel Braun, professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto. Were Delhi to pull its students out of Canada, it would be “devastating” for the country’s higher education system, he says.

So do universities really care about their ability to enhance international understanding and the soft power of their nations, or is overseas recruitment all about balancing the books? Wesleyan's Gallarotti believes it is mostly about the money, but Nye and Barton think it is a bit of both. Whatever their economic value, Chinese international students are also exposed to critical thinking and Western perspectives, Barton says, such as individualism, human rights and the rule of law. 

“Encouraging students from mainland China to study in the West, and vice versa, can only be a good thing in absolute terms because what has been noticeable over the past few years is that ties have become strained due to a lack of dialogue and understanding,” Barton says. “We need more students from the West and China to be knowledgeable about each other’s respective cultures, languages and morals in order to foster more meaningful and sustainable trust as a way of countering rising suspicion.”

Regarding the apparent inability of Western international education to win Chinese hearts and minds, Barton warns against confusing Beijing’s hostile tone with the feelings of the general population in China. And Nottingham’s Lai makes a similar point, noting that the Chinese Communist Party is very top-down, and much depends on the views of the man in charge. Xi is noted for his more aggressive approach to foreign policy than previous general secretaries of the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, Chinese graduates from Western universities are more likely to work in academia or specialised governmental agencies than in vital political organisations such as the Politburo, Lai adds. Indeed, China seems to have halted training its senior officials in leading Western universities, he says – and there will always be more trained within China anyway.

Are branch campuses in students’ home countries potentially a more effective source of soft power? The West has established relatively few in China, but there are more significant concentrations in the Gulf region. Qatar’s flagship Education City, for instance, has housed six since it opened in 2003.

Safwan Masri, dean of one of those campuses, Georgetown University in Qatar, says his institution wields a direct form of soft power in that it helps the Qatari state advance its goals regarding its role in the world. And the Qatar campus’ potential to advance some of Georgetown’s common values was “at the heart of the decision” to establish it – alongside a desire for Georgetown to “remain relevant and become more global”.

But Nye cautions that the success of branch campuses as instruments of soft power is far from guaranteed, either: “It depends on the balance of positive and negative experiences. And sometimes foreign campuses are criticised if they are poorly connected with local culture.”

Moreover, as UCL’s Petersen notes, branch campuses do not offer the wider cultural exposure that studying in the campuses’ home countries affords. “Soft power is, of course, stronger when students have been fully immersed in the host country,” he says.

Soft power also has its own internal limits. Toronto’s Braun, who is also an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, notes that it can’t operate alone: “Soft power is like the cream in the coffee,” he says. “It’s very nice, and it adds flavour, but you need hard power as well because without that you don’t have any impact.”

But whatever the uncertain effects of soft power and the unclear influence that higher education has on it, universities continue to be valued by government as instruments of international influence. In a 2022 journal article on higher education and soft power, for instance, Oliver Caldwell, a US Department of Education official, predicted that “a principal arena for the contest between the two great ideologies of our generation will be the classrooms around the world.”

And while unease about immigration levels is apparent in many countries, the jockeying for global influence, alongside nations’ economic need to attract top global talent and universities’ economic need to attract revenue, is leading to ever-increasing competition for international students.

“Education is a totally ideological war, and it always has been,” says Wesleyan’s Gallarotti. And “the new cold war between the US and China and even Russia” is such that “the competition for soft power in higher education is probably at its peak”.