With the goals of making China a cultural powerhouse and the Chinese voice heard globally being a priority for the current Chinese leadership, understanding China's soft power has never been so crucial. The topic receives unceasing attention, with numerous scholarly and media analyses examining the effectiveness of China's soft power strategy, its instruments and mechanisms, and its evolution from Hu Jintao's to Xi Jinping's era. This book adopts a different approach seeking to reconstruct the journey of Joseph Nye's soft power theory to the People's Republic of China and understand what soft power actually means - conceptually and discursively - in the Chinese context.