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Soft power has become a major issue in urban economic development in China in recent years. Chinese scholars have creatively applied soft power theory in their studies of different city development strategies. Shantou is located in one of five Special Economic Zones in China and its rate of economic growth has sped up in recent years. However, compared with other Special Economic Zones Shantou has lost its opportunities for fast development in both hard power and soft power. The article suggests that Shantou can mobilize its resources and choose to enhance soft power development as a break through point to gain socioeconomic full-scale development. The article further suggests that to build up the city's spirit and to increase the city's brand value would be a breakthrough point for the development of the city soft power.
INTRODUCTION
Today, urban development mainly determines the world development and in the future, every country's economic growth will rely more heavily on the contribution from cities. All scholars agree that a city's development must take synthesized strength as its foundation. We categorize the infrastructure construction and other resources that can be transformed into material products as hard strength or hard power of a city; categorize the intangible assets, such as spiritual and the cultural traditions and characteristics as soft strength or soft power of a city. Repeatedly encountering the bottleneck constrains urban development, such as limiting land resource, degrading environmental protection, and exhausting the production capacity. To enhance and develop soft strength and power should become a rational and feasible choice facing most decision makers for urban development (Wang, 2009).
It is not difficult to find out that in today's world those most developed, charming and attractive cities, except for their strong hard strength and power, they all have their unique soft strength and power formatted from their social capital, such as energetic cultural dynamics, their spiritual assets, and their traditional values. The mechanism that integrates those intangible assets into strength and power enhances the overall development of the cities and thus becomes a competitive advantage of those cities. Therefore, social capital is the soft resources of regional economic development. The meaning of soft power and its formation mechanism based on social capital becomes one of the most discussed...