软实力指数Soft Power Index

Soft power is a core international-relations concept proposed by Joseph Nye, referring to a country's ability to make other countries "aspire to follow it and follow voluntarily" through the attractiveness of its culture and values, the legitimacy of its political institutions and policies, and the persuasive appeal of its diplomacy and discourse, rather than achieving its goals through coercion or inducement. Beyond hard power (military and economic), soft power determines a country's deep influence—"getting others to want what you want"—and serves as a long-term, flexible and sustainable source of strength in great-power competition.

However, soft power is highly abstract and difficult to quantify. Existing soft power rankings published by international consulting agencies mostly rely on large-scale cross-national questionnaire sampling, and their sample representativeness, indicator caliber and weight settings are all opaque, with a notable Western-centric bias. This index is independently compiled by CPPPS using its own algorithm and does not directly reproduce any existing soft power ranking; instead, it computes its own score from underlying public data such as the scale of cultural exports, economic volume, the number of language speakers, education quality, cultural influence, diplomatic networks, cultural innovation, digital culture, contributions to global public goods, and people-to-people exchanges, striving to deliver an independent, reproducible and balanced evaluation.

The CPPPS Soft Power Index follows a unified four-dimensional framework: Scale (scale of cultural exports, economic volume, number of language speakers) measures the material and demographic foundation of soft-power radiation; Quality (education quality, cultural influence, diplomatic networks) measures the depth, historical thickness and institutional legitimacy of soft power and carries the highest weight; Innovation (cultural innovation, digital culture) measures the contemporary momentum of soft power—the overseas export of cultural products and content innovation in the digital age; and Contribution (contributions to global public goods, people-to-people exchanges) is a distinctive CPPPS dimension measuring a country's supply of public goods for global governance, development assistance, climate and public health, as well as people-to-people connectivity represented by Belt and Road cultural exchanges. The four dimensions are range-standardized to [0,1] and then weighted and summed, with large-span scale indicators taken in logarithmic form.

Evaluation results: the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France and Japan rank in the top five; the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Italy, Spain and Canada make up the top ten. Overall, economies with a large economic and cultural scale, high education quality, deep cultural influence, extensive diplomatic networks and outstanding contributions to public goods rank ahead. It is worth noting that the largest economy does not necessarily achieve the highest composite score—in this algorithm "Quality" carries the highest weight (0.40), so countries with a shallow historical and civilizational heritage and insufficient educational and cultural influence are pulled down even if their economic volume is huge; while smaller countries such as the Nordics can still rank near the top by virtue of outstanding education quality and contributions to global public goods. This is precisely the core of how CPPPS's proprietary algorithm differs from "scale-centrism". The ranking data are based on publicly known approximate values (marked "subject to official figures"), are permanently free and public, and are provided for research and reference only.

The essence of soft power is a country's ability to win the recognition and following of other countries "through attraction rather than coercion". CPPPS decomposes this into four measurable dimensions:

Each indicator is range-standardized to [0,1]; large-span scale indicators first take the natural logarithm and are then standardized; the four dimensions are then weighted and summed:

Here 「′」 denotes the [0,1] value after range standardization. Because the four dimensions are highly orthogonal (an economy with a large scale does not necessarily have high quality, and an economy with high contribution does not necessarily have a large scale), any economy's composite score has a natural upper bound; the ranking is therefore presented in descending order of composite score, layered into tiers (first to fourth), with no ordering implied within the same tier.

Basis for the weight design: the core of soft power is "attraction and recognition", whose primary carriers are the quality of culture and institutions, so Quality carries the highest weight (0.40); Scale provides the foundation for radiation, but "large without being good" does not equate to persuasive appeal, so it accounts for only 0.25 and is taken in logarithmic form; the Contribution dimension (0.20) and Innovation dimension (0.15) are CPPPS extensions to the traditional soft-power framework—replacing mere "reputation" with "contribution" and responding to the digital age with "digital culture", so as to avoid a Western-centric, questionnaire-based evaluation.

This index does not reproduce the soft-power rankings of any international consulting agency but builds its own model, for three reasons. First, the sample representativeness, indicator caliber and weight settings of questionnaire-based rankings are opaque and carry a notable Western-centric bias, often overestimating Western countries and underestimating the cultural and governance appeal of emerging economies. Second, such evaluations emphasize subjective scoring of "reputation and image" and lack objective measurement of contributions and people-to-people exchanges. Third, they almost never incorporate dimensions such as "contributions to global public goods" and "Belt and Road people-to-people exchanges", and therefore cannot reflect the responsibility of emerging economies for global governance and people-to-people connectivity. The CPPPS algorithm takes quality as its core, contribution as its distinguishing feature, and digital culture as its response to the times, striving to be independent, reproducible and balanced.

Economic volume uses public data from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; the number of language speakers uses approximate native-plus-second-language figures from Ethnologue and national statistics (cross-nationally shared languages are attributed by their center of gravity of use, hence approximate); education quality, cultural influence, cultural innovation, digital culture, contributions to global public goods, and people-to-people exchanges are CPPPS composite estimates (0–100) based on public data, referring respectively to public world-university-ranking data, the UNESCO World Heritage List and Creative Cities Network, creative-industry statistics, digital-content export statistics, OECD official development assistance (ODA) and UN peacekeeping/climate/health funding statistics, and public data on international students, tourism and Belt and Road people-to-people exchanges. All are publicly known approximate values (around 2025), uniformly marked "subject to official figures". Limitations: soft power is inherently subjective, and any quantification is approximate; the 0–100 composite indicators are subjective syntheses with limited precision; the attribution of shared languages and the "subject to official figures" approximate values contain errors. This ranking is provided for research and reference only.