CHINA has overtaken the UK to secure second place globally, advancing one position from the previous year, according to the Global Soft Power Index 2025.
The latest report by the influential brand valuation consultancy, Brand Finance, highlights China’s remarkable progress in the ranking, reflecting its growing power and influence in world politics and international relations.
This report is based primarily on key indicators in economics and business while also measuring attributes related to culture
and heritage, media and communication, education and science and sustainability.
Together, these factors are increasingly seen as the more influential and effective side of the power coin as compared with the flip side of hard power, which is associated with military power and intervention, coercive diplomacy and economic sanction.
The report notes that China has retained the top spot globally for “ease of doing business in and with” and “future growth potential” for
the past four consecutive years. This is a picture quite different from the portrayal of “China collapsing” and “China in economic crisis” regularly featured in Western mainstream media and reproduced by supporting Asian media.
What is also notable is that China has soared to seventh place in the rankings for culture and heritage and media and communication attributes.
This trend is strengthening with the further opening up of the country to foreign visitors as well as the global impact of the movie Ne Zha2 (NZ2) and artificial intelligence (AI) app DeepSeek.
The impact of the latter two soft power successes in their respective fields has been so significant that even Western media outlets like CNN, BBC and The New York Times – known for engaging in anti-China reporting and ignoring or marginalising Chinese achievements – have been reluctantly aroused to run stories on them, albeit with their mandatory negative comments.
Movie megahit
NZ2, the latest China-produced animation film hit, with its storyline of family, friendship, loyalty and sacrifice encapsulated within a framework of Chinese mythology and techno-wizardry has captivated movie audiences wherever shown.
It is expected to generate more than US$2 billion (RM8.79 billion) in box office takings. This will make it the highest-ranking box office animated film in the world.
What is appealing to movie fans, especially American audiences viewing it in the small number of cinemas it is showing – 300 of the 9,595 movie theatres in the US – are not just the universal themes of courage and resilience but also the absence of messages relating to wokeness, political correctness and attitude.
Unlike in the West, where cultural dominance has been based on colonial conquest, religious expansion and political dominance, this example of
film-making and cultural influence is different.
In today’s high-tech era, films like NZ2 demonstrate how technology, storytelling and cultural heritage can converge to create a new film-making and culture-dissemination model rooted in non-ideological equality and dialogue rather than the legacy Western model, with its message of white, Christian and ideological goodness, superiority and supremacy.
Movie audiences are no strangers to mythology-based storytelling. However, Chinese and other non-Western mythology and storylines have been under-explored in the global entertainment world despite their rich history and universal themes.
This is not only due to cultural and historical differences. It is more importantly an outcome of American dominance in the development of the movie industry since the early 20th century.
Hollywood, with US government support, has dominated the world box office for more than a century and helped to shape how audiences in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America view the US and the world.
Whilst this trend continues today, the success of NZ2 and
its sequel should encourage other countries to embrace cultural confidence and have the ability to tell their own stories. This, in turn, will influence the soft power and global rankings of nations worldwide.
Sputnik moment and bombshell impact
NZ2 comes on the heels of DeepSeek, with the latter emerging like a bombshell in app stores around the world.
As the most downloaded AI app, replacing ChatGPT, the Chinese AI model has significantly impacted the global tech industry by its cost-effective low-budget development. This has caused major tech stocks to plummet and raised questions about the shifting power dynamics in the AI market.
Many now see China as a major player in AI development that can challenge Western AI apps presently dominating the market and tech giants, such as Microsoft and Google.
What is important to the five billion smartphone users in the world – they account for over 60% of the world’s population – is not that it is a Chinese app, but that it is free.
For those using it, DeepSeek has pioneered and opened the door to an open-source app that can be used and modified easily, and without the need to pay a fee or royalty.
DeepSeek and NZ2 are not the only examples of China’s growing soft power. They follow Huawei, BYD, TikTok, Red Note and other recent China innovations and products developed entirely or mainly with homegrown talent, whose ripple effects are affecting and undermining the US and Western domination of the existing world order.
Global power balance
Perhaps the greatest asset to China’s influence in the world for now comes from an unlikely source – President Donald Trump.
As the world’s greatest political influencer and newsmaker, Trump, in his mission to “Make America Great Again”, has embarked on a foreign policy campaign that has made US allies realise their client status means their interests will inevitably be placed on the sacrificial table if they stand in the way of Trump’s redefinition of American hard and soft power and relations with Russia, China or any other traditional or new adversary.
Combined with China’s burgeoning soft power achievements and Belt and Road Initiative, with its emphasis on economic development and regional connectivity to bring about shared prosperity, this will result in the rapid remaking of the current world order to a more equitable and inclusive multipolar one.
Lim Teck Ghee’s Another Take is aimed at demystifying social orthodoxy.
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