Pirated translations of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends And Influence People are available on most Chinese street corners and it would appear Chinese Communist Party officials have picked up a few copies. Maoist China used to assert itself on the world stage by exporting revolution and waging wars. But today’s Chinese leaders have learnt the value of a warm smile and firm handshake.

“Since we couldn’t beat ‘em, let’s charm ‘em”, appears to be Beijing’s new dictum, and China’s new global ambassadors are not chiselled-faced Red Guards in fatigues, but svelte-suited diplomats, actors such as the amply bosomed Gong Li, designers such as Vivienne Tam, intellectuals such as Ha Jin, and billionaire businessmen.

This is partly natural. As China has opened its door and mind to the world, the once stifled economic and artistic creativity of this ancient nation has mesmerised the world. But as Joshua Kurlantzick outlines in his disarmingly easy to read new book, Charm Offensive, the rollout of this new ‘China chic’ is partly also being as carefully choreographed by the Chinese government as a big-ticket Hollywood premiere. Its goal: the acquisition of what Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye, Jr. calls ‘soft power’, that is, the influence a nation enjoys when its culture and ways are admired by others.

I studied under Nye in 1999 and he was already of the opinion that China and India would be the new ‘soft superpowers’. But even Nye must be surprised at how aggressively Beijing has moved. China’s motley soft power campaigners are aggressively traversing the developing world in a bid to gain access to much-needed raw materials and win friends at the UN.

The campaigners’ first ports of call are usually capitals alienated or ignored by the US — places such as Iran, the Sudan, and Burma, where the Chinese eagerly take up the great power space once occupied by Washington. Consider one of the most literal examples of this Kurlantzick gives in his book. In Songhkla city in Thailand, a country currently out of favour with Washington because it is under military rule, the erstwhile the US consulate has been taken over by a Chinese economic agency.

Driving this is the Communist Party’s desire to dampen growing concern over what China’s resurgence will mean for the world economically, militarily, environmentally, and culturally. Kurlantzick seems uncomfortable with this, indeed with China’s entire current obsession of becoming a da guo, or great nation. He fears will turn China into an ‘alternate pole’ of power. Many Indians might share those concerns. But China’s quest for soft power is no more manipulative and no less mendacious than America’s own, which commenced with the onset of the Cold War, when Hollywood and Radio Free Asia freely used rock’n roll, Mickey Mouse and starlets to sell the American dream and outshout boring Soviet propaganda promising just societies and revolution.

Still, many Westerns and Indians seem unable to tear themselves away from the assumption that whatever China does is sinister, dubious and suspicious. Ironically, this is precisely the reason Beijing believes it needs to invest in soft power. That’s why the core of China’s soft power campaign is built around the idea of “China’s Peaceful Rise”, a saccharine tagline conceived by Zhang Bijian, a close associate of China’s President Hu Jintao.

JOSHUA KURLANTZICK is special correspondent for The New Republic and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has covered Southeast Asia and China as correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and The Economist

Primary evidence shows Zhang’s line is resonating in many nations. Numerous surveys show people are becoming more comfortable with China’s growth, and many countries see it as less of a threat to world peace than the US. The oddest example of this has got to be Cambodia, where a new-found admiration for China stands at odds with the gruesome role Beijing played in supporting the Khmer Rouge that killed 2.5 million Cambodians.

This underlines why the use of soft power has a dark side. It is designed to obscure more painful truths, such as China’s continued arms sales to the Sudanese government, which is accused of genocide in the Darfur region. More significantly, China’s economic success is also fraying the notion that democracy is necessary for economic growth. For example, in India many take the dim-witted view that the country must surrender its democracy if it wants to develop like China.

Kurlantzick covers these morally cumbersome elements of China’s soft power succinctly. But here too, he slips up in talking about how global perceptions of the US’s own dark deeds are diluted by its own soft power. For example, misdirected American wrath over the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people has resulted in the death 300,000 Iraqi civilians that had nothing to do with terrorism. Yet US’s image, though tarnished, continues to lend it immense global influence.

Where Charm Offensive also disappoints is that it is light on first-hand field reporting and heavy on analysis using secondary news sources. Though overall the book provides a nice peek into one of the great forces changing our world, Kurlantzick’s hypothesis that China’s soft power somehow needs to be curtailed — he even devotes the end of the book to outlining how this can be done — seems a bit excessive.

One of the best books that I have read is A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING by Bill Bryson. It is about science and is written by a non-scientist who explains startling facts about science in a gripping manner. I try to read any book that gives me useful information and makes me a wiser person.

Though I have never been to the Strand Book Stall in Mumbai, it is my best guide for books. I regularly contact them for recommendations. I also make a synopsis of a book each month and circulate this among close friends

In the forbidding heights of the Karakoram, a lost mountaineer finds warmth in Korphe, a remote habitation. American climber Greg Mortenson, nursed back to health by these extremely poor people, promises to return and build a school for the children. He does so, but his mission does not end with Korphe. Mortenson builds 55 schools in the inhospitable terrain, schools specially meant for girls. This is the tale of a strange man — Mortenson is the author but writes in third person — who fights odds as daunting as the K2 to raise funds for the schools.

Here’s a business book that is not about how companies that made billions. It is about how companies grow from within. Not satisfied with the way companies were being measured Edward Hess, a professor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, US, came up with his theory of how organic growth was often delivered better results than growth through acquisitions or buy-outs.

Hess believes that although high sales are a positive indicator of corporate health, these alone are not enough. He readily admits that the idea of measuring organic growth is not his. Hess and his team borrowed from formulas that were already developed by financial services firms such as Merrill Lynch, Standard & Poors and Stern Stewart.

The team then created their own Organic Growth Index (OGI) to unearth companies that were the best at growing from within. In other words, they found the companies that grew significantly without relying mainly on acquisitions or buy-outs to boost sales.

The 22 companies listed on the OGI really are star performers. Between 1996 and 2003, when the NASDAQ 100 index returned capital gains at 159.75 per cent, the OGI gave returns of a staggering 779.05 per cent. What is really surprising is the names — American Eagle Outfitters, Walgreen, Brinker, SYSCO Foods, Best Buy — ones that barely ring a bell outside the US.
So, what makes the 22 high achievers? All of them posses six key characteristics — simple business models; high customer focus, constant performance measurement, humble, internally focused leaders and flawless execution of plans.

The book is peppered with case studies from these companies; each with its own insights that support Hess’ theory. Employees at Sysco, a restaurant supplies provider, for example, regularly pitch in to help client restaurants when they were short-staffed. Not only does this endear Sysco to its clients, but it also tells customers that Sysco is a business partner in every sense of the word.

At a mere 200 pages, the book is a quick read. Yet, Hess manages to fill his pages with insights that can help any company unlock the secrets of growing from within. This is recommended reading for anyone looking to make their business more profitable without having to break the bank for an acquisition.