While the world is getting used to China’s ballooning global trade surplus, Chinese mandarins fret over the one area that the country has been posting a continuous deficit — in culture.

China may now be the world’s fourth largest economy, wielding influence in everything from global trade talks to currency rates but it lacks the success stories of “Harry Potter” and “The Da Vinci Code”, which would transform it into a cultural heavyweight producing works of universal appeal.

As far as culture is concerned, “we still have very bad deficit to resolve,” Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the state council information office said in May this year. “It runs counter to China’s fast growing economy which has been expanding by an average of 10 per cent since 1979.”

Redressing the country’s cultural deficit is not a problem that the Chinese government officials are intent on leaving on the backburner while labouring to appease global fears of China’s increasing trade might. On the contrary, the rise of what are domestically described as “cultural industries” is seen by Beijing as the next step along a path marking the country’s transformation from developing nation to world power.

With Beijing due to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games, the next few years are being perceived as an opportunity for the country to show that it is more than just the world’s largest manufacturing workshop.

“It is high time to make ourselves better understood by the world’s people,” says Du Ruiqing, a scholar from Xian International Studies University. Attempts to use cultural pursuits in boosting China’s image are part of Beijing’s overall diplomatic strategy to portray itself as a “soft power”, as opposed to the United States’ profile of a harsh-talking and domineering power, which also does not seek to impose its development values or interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.

In diplomatic corridors from Africa to Latin America and Asia, Chinese politicians have tried to advance the image of a harmonious and peace loving country, guided ethically by its Confucian values of universal acceptance and peaceful co-existence.

Culture has come to play an important part in the persuasion process. “To go global, China must perfect its cultural policy and rebuild the image of Chinese culture,” noted an editorial in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship, in the fall last year. It went on to call for the creation of “China-made” cultural products. “While China continues to welcome foreign cultural products, a ‘China wind’ has still not stirred up much dust,” it lamented.

Chinese people and cultural officials complain that observers overseas get a very slanted view of China from existing art, culture and news reporting. Now, Chinese cultural gurus are keen to reverse that. But as the government has fervently embraced the hot cultural industries some intellectuals have sounded caution. “I’m all for China-made cultural products,” says famous writer Hong Ying.

“However, I don’t want to see them being manipulated in some new political campaign. If Chinese leaders are really intent on promoting culture they should abolish censorship so that free ideas can flourish and hundred thoughts contend.” — IPS