China operates one of the world’s largest external cultural policy (ECP) apparatuses, with approximately €8 billion in government funding and over 1,500 institutions in about 190 countries. However, it has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. After the post-2007 expansion era, China shifted from spending-driven growth toward a more targeted, regionally differentiated strategy. For example, Confucius Institutes have contracted in the West but expanded in the Global South and a deliberate decentralization program is underway, suggesting it seeks not to replace the US as soft power hegemon but rather fuse new links between culture, economic development, and foreign policy.
Knudsen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.