CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DENYING “AMERICA’S DECLINE”:

THE NEW DEVELOPMENT OF JOSEPH NYE’S

“SOFT POWER” THEORY:

CHINA’S PERSPECTIVE

RUIPING WANG

1

Introduction

For a country that claims to be a world-beater, but has a strong sense of
crisis, debates about whether America’s hegemony will decline or last
have emerged in America’s modern history unceasingly. That is to say, the
dispute about whether America will decline, which we hear in China at
present, is actually an out-and-out American topic.
Since the 1950s, there have been about five influential theories “of
America’s decline.” In the 1950s, when America did not win the Korean
War, and the first artificial satellite was launched by the former Soviet
Union, some scholars believed that American hegemony would fade
swiftly. In the 1970s, the Bretton Woods System of fixed exchange rates
collapsed, the oil crisis caused America's massive recession, and the
United States lost the Vietnam War, while some revolutionary states
supported by the former Soviet Union saw successive victories, etc.–all of
which resulted in America’s global strategic space being further squeezed,
and the “theory of America’s decline” becoming more gigantic and

(^1) Ruiping WANG, PhD. – Researcher, Erasmus Mundus Fellow, Université Libre
de Bruxelles. Research interests: international relations theory; the global studies
(global issues and global governance); the European studies, particularly EU’s
external relations; diplomacy, especially China-EU relations in the context of
global governance.