Thoughts on U.S.-China Relations and the Importance of the Fellowship

January 24, 2013 by Leave a comment

Recently, Nancy Yao Maasbach wrote to all of us to ask for our thoughts on the greatest unmet opportunities, the most significant blind spot, and the next generation of engagement in the U.S.-China relationship.  Here are the thoughts I shared with her; feel free to add your own in the comments section:

I think the most significant blind spot today in the U.S.-China relationship is opportunism, and that the next generation of U.S.-China relations must take on forms that transcend opportunism and drive directly at building trust.  Too much of the exchange that happens these days is distracted by motives other than building trust, yet trust is the outcome we all hope for in the long run.  Americans set up businesses in China to make money, Chinese graduate students come to the U.S. to study, young Americans go to China to teach English, Chinese professionals come to the U.S. for career development, and all along the way it seems we expect these pursuits to lead to trust and respect, but trust and respect are not things that we can stumble onto by accident.  Investing, studying, teaching, and training carry enough challenges of their own – there is only so much mutual trust that will come about as a byproduct of these activities.  We need people to take a step back and think about the larger context of cross-cultural interaction and take time to unclamp their minds enough to truly open them to new ideas – not just new foods, new language, new holidays; otherwise, we have a relationship built solely on the success of business, on a deficit in the Chinese educational system vis-a-vis the U.S., on the status quo.  If we first understand each other, things can change – things can even go wrong – without the whole relationship collapsing.  And if we establish this foundation, all those other pursuits – business, education, even tourism – will have so much more potential for success.

This, of course, relates back to the diagram I showed you and the thinking we are developing for the fellowship, where we zoom the lens out from just teaching and look at the broader bilateral impact that can be had.  It is amazing to me to meet people who have spent far more time in China (or in the U.S.) than Yale-China Fellows spend at their sites, yet have far less understanding to show for it than any Fellow – and I run into these people all the time, whether it’s in the business class lounge at the airport or another teacher at the CTC conference.

Trust and understanding that can stand independent of other interests – something you might call friendship, or even family – this is the great need that is the essence of the next step that needs to be taken in the U.S.-China relationship.  Not everyone has recognized this need yet, since not everyone realizes that there is a level of trust to be built beyond the ad hoc trust that can arise through a business venture or a university enrollment, but those who have had the chance to break through that barrier can appreciate the difference so clearly, and we need more of these people to spread the word and help others realize there is more to learn.  This is why we are so proud of what the Fellows do – they are the vanguard of this next generation.

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China went from being a closed system with open minds to an open system with closed minds

January 24, 2013 by Leave a comment

China went from being a closed system with open minds to an open system with closed minds

December 5, 2012 1 Comment

Originally published December 3, 2012 (Quartz.com)

http://jamesmcgregor-inc.com/2012/12/05/china-went-from-being-a-closed-system-with-open-minds-to-an-open-system-with-closed-minds/

 

xi-ap-photo-yves-logghe1
Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping must learn to appreciate outsiders’ contributions to China too. AP Photo / Yves Logghe

When I first visited China in 1985, the country was a blur of bicycles, blue Mao suits and impatient curiosity. As my sister Lisa and I backpacked across the country, we were besieged by people of all ages who wanted to practice English and quiz us about the world beyond their borders.

China was a closed system with rapidly opening minds. Today, China is a much more open system with some purposely closing minds.

China has advanced at a dizzying pace in the 23 years I’ve lived in Beijing. Foreign investment and its workshop-of-the-world export prowess have created incredible wealth and made China the world’s second largest economy.

According to a thorough new study by Associated Press writers Joe McDonald and Youkyung Lee, China is fast replacing the US as the top trading partner for countries large and small:

As recently as 2006, the U.S. was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, versus just 70 for China. By last year the two had clearly traded places: 124 countries for China, 76 for the U.S. In the most abrupt global shift of its kind since World War II, the trend is changing the way people live and do business from Africa to Arizona, as farmers plant more soybeans to sell to China and students sign up to learn Mandarin. The findings show how fast China has ascended to challenge America’s century-old status as the globe’s dominant trader, a change that is gradually translating into political influence. They highlight how pervasive China’s impact has been, spreading from neighboring Asia to Africa and now emerging in Latin America, the traditional U.S. backyard.

So how is China preparing it citizens to become global leaders? By preserving ancient habits and purposely stifling knowledge while instructing its citizens to become the world’s most creative thinkers. The Party is pushing its behemoth state-owned enterprises to “go global” and beat the leading multinationals as it exhorts scientists and entrepreneurs to transform China into a technology and innovation powerhouse.

At the same time, the ancient tradition of Yumin Zhengce (愚民政策, keeping the masses ignorant so they will follow the leaders) is still at the core of Chinese education and propaganda. In the days of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor, the idea was that an ignorant population would focus on agriculture, thereby providing the solid economic base needed to defend against invaders and conquer enemies. As Shang Yang (390-338 BC), a prominent scholar and statesman during that period put it: 民愚则易治也 (minyuzeyi zhidian, an ignorant populace is easy to rule).

The Chinese people today are anything but easy to rule. They are informed and often indignant about what is happening in China thanks to the internet and social media, despite pervasive and sophisticated censorship. But they are much less informed about or focused on international affairs. To distract from out-of-control corruption, gaping income disparities and a litany of inequities resulting from the lack of rule of law and breakneck growth, the Party blames most of the country’s problems on “foreign forces” that are determined to quash China’s rightful rise. Inflation? US Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing. Resource and territory disputes with neighbors? American manipulation and encirclement.

The Party refined this victimization narrative for the October 2009 60th birthday of the People’s Republic. The vehicle was the “Road of Rejuvenation,” a Broadway-style show with some 3,200 performers singing and dancing their way through 170 years of Chinese history, from the mid-1800s Opium Wars to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Rag-clad peasants staggered under crates overflowing with gold bars destined for foreign ships. Electronic waterfalls of blood dripped down the theatre walls as hundreds of Chinese corpses stacked like timber came alive to rise up and vanquish Japanese invaders.

The storyline is simple. China was a glorious place until the foreigners came to exploit and humiliate. And China is regaining past greatness because the Party protects the country from foreigners who remain determined to keep China poor and dependent.

On Nov. 29, newly installed Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping brought the six members of his top leadership team (his colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee) to visit the “Road of Rejuvenation” exhibit at the National Museum bordering Tiananmen Square. After “carefully examining the exhibits,” according to Xinhua, Xi said that “we have to continue taking this road, unswervingly.” But he stressed the positive instead of stewing in victimization: ”I believe that by the time when the Communist Party of China marks its 100th founding anniversary, the goal to complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects will be inevitably achieved.”

It is gratifying to see Xi begin his decade-long term as China’s top ruler trying to stress a positive vision. For Chinese people to be comfortable with the country’s role as a global leader, Xi will have to sideline the anti-foreign rhetoric that is the core of today’s foreign policy propaganda.

It is a pity that his Party’s censorship strictures will make it difficult for Xi to get his hands on the new book “Restless Empire” by historian Odd Arne Westad.

In a Washington Post review this weekend, veteran China watcher John Pomfret says the book “tells the story of the foreigners who helped China become what it is today, from China’s first interactions with the West to the current era. In doing so, Westad upends, but ever so politely, a slew of misconceptions about China that have been concocted by his academic predecessors both in the West and in Asia.”

…despite claims by communist historians, foreigners were key to China’s modernization. British, Americans, Japanese, Germans and Russians played enormously important roles as advisers, models, teachers, guides and enlighteners of the Chinese. While Westad does not underplay the depredations meted out by the imperialist powers, he also tells the other side of that story — that American missionaries brought education, science and modern medicine to China, that the British imported modern administrative techniques, that the Germans taught the Chinese a significant amount about warfare. Heck, the French even created China’s postal service.

Pomfret also directly contrasts the book with his own visit to the “Road of Rejuvenation” exhibit.

(Westad’s) book will not be published in China because a mainland publisher demanded too many cuts. And that’s important, because how China frames its past weighs on how it will face our common future. I recently visited the permanent exhibition on China’s rise at the newly renovated National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square: “The Road of Rejuvenation.” Foreign contributions — other than those from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin — are nowhere to be found. Panel by panel, a story emerges of murder, rape and pillage by one Western army after another in a totally distorted netherworld of humiliation and pain. The operative sentiment I felt on leaving the exhibition was: “Earth to the Chinese Communist Party, grow up.” Reading Westad would be a good place to start.

I just downloaded the book and look forward to reading it. I hope Xi also finds his way to a copy.

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Redefining the Meaning of ‘Chinese’

January 24, 2013 by Leave a comment

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/world/asia/24iht-letter24.html

Redefining the Meaning of ‘Chinese’

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

TAINAN — Taiwan and its 23 million people will eventually be absorbed by China, which claims it as a breakaway province, by a process of economic osmosis. So runs the conventional wisdom among many businessmen, and some diplomats.

Or will it? Instead of China changing Taiwan, might Taiwan change China?

Taiwan has a powerful weapon at its disposal: an inclusive national identity that absorbs and celebrates difference, said Mark Harrison, a Taiwan specialist at the University of Tasmania.

“Taiwan is actually very significant in terms of China’s future,” Dr. Harrison said. “It points the way to a politics of identity-making.”

Because what China cannot seem to do — and probably not for a long time yet — is this: build a broadly attractive definition of what it means to be “Chinese” for all its various ethnic groups, including the increasingly restive Tibetans and Uighurs, and thereby genuinely bring together the different voices within its borders, Dr. Harrison said.

Tied to that: It cannot, for now, show the world that a Chinese society can be open, tolerant and democratic. But Taiwan can.

That inclusiveness is clearly on display in Taiwan’s open news media, culture and academia, but also here, in the southern city of Tainan, where the decade-old National Museum of Taiwan Literature celebrates a rich range of narratives from the cultures that make up the island’s highly diverse history.

In a handsome, brick-and-column building dating from 1916, designed by the Japanese architect Moriyama Matsunosuke and beautifully updated since, dozens of voices are documented in exhibitions: the indigenous Austronesians; native speakers of Taiyu, a local language; Dutch colonial rulers of the 17th century; the Chinese of the late Ming and the Qing dynasties who sailed over from the mainland; the Japanese colonists; and the Chinese Nationalists who retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat to the Communists in the civil war.

For a longtime resident of Beijing, the capital of a state that stresses a rigid vision of national identity and tries to restrict the spread of even its major regional languages, like Cantonese, a visit to this museum was electrifying.

Here is the story of a “Chinese” state — Taiwanese, in reality — that celebrates the existence of different, critical voices, and freely admits the mistakes of the past, when it tried to smother them. It even offers some exhibits in digraphia, a mixture of Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet that some scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, say is important for modernizing Chinese, but is rejected by a Beijing government intent on preserving linguistic “purity.”

All this offers a lesson for China, said Dr. Harrison, as it faces dissatisfaction from peoples in the vast border regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.

“Somehow the Chinese need to let the Tibetans and Uighurs feel they are Chinese, they need to rethink their identity in a way that makes that possible, and I think the Taiwanese show how it can be done,” he said. “But the Chinese government doesn’t even begin to think in those terms. They take a colonial view, ‘We’re doing so much for these people, why aren’t they satisfied?”’

“For the Chinese, being Chinese is an objective fact. You can’t become Chinese. You are born it. But for the Taiwanese there’s the possibility of choosing to be Taiwanese,” a process that allows meaningful cultural differences while being a part of the nation, he said.

“Their attitude is, ‘We’re all here now on this island, we have to learn to live together, we must all be Taiwanese,”’ he said. “It’s a postcolonial identity. Inclusive. Open.” He calls it the Formosan voice, after the Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan.

Things weren’t always like that here. For decades after 1949, the Nationalists, who harked back to their mainland China roots, ruled with an iron fist. Yet the process of identity-building was fermenting below the surface. It gathered speed after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and for the past 20 years has been in high gear.

For sure, Dr. Harrison added, “There are a lot of other voices that are yet to be really heard, including migrant workers and expatriates. But it’s being shaped.”

No one is expecting China to start listening to Taiwan anytime soon. After trying military threats to intimidate the island into reunification, for the past decade under President Hu Jintao, China has offered financial incentives and increased trade to encouraged re-unification, dubbed by some “hongbao” diplomacy, a reference to the Chinese custom of giving red packets with money on special occasions like weddings.

Yet it’s not impossible that one day, China will be faced with such severe problems trying to hold together a state that is based on the borders of the last imperial dynasty and negotiating the disparate interests therein, that it may start looking to Taiwan for some answers.

“What Taiwan says is that there is nothing immutable about being Chinese, and there are a lot of other ways of thinking about being Chinese that are beyond the nationalism of the People’s Republic of China,” Dr. Harrison said. That model could eventually convince ethnic minorities that they are truly equal members of the Chinese state.

If that state were listening.

 

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China’s “left behind” children

October 2, 2012 by Leave a comment

Hey guys,

Thought you might be interested in this short BBC video about what happens to the children living and going to school in Anhui but whose parents are migrant workers elsewhere: China’s left behind children growing up without parents.

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Encouraging Participation (and Note on E-mails)

May 15, 2011 by Leave a comment

This past semester I encouraged participation in my Communications for English Majors II class in many of the ways we discussed at conference; I was explicit about expectations and gave examples of what good participation looks like. Also, throughout the semester I gave specific, immediate praise to students who went beyond simply answering my questions (e.g., if they responded directly to what another student said by building on it/critiquing it, if they asked a question that was not solicited but was still on topic). All these things helped raise participation levels. Something else that increased participation dramatically however was when I sent out a ‘Participation Progress Report’ midway through the semester.

I sent out these reports in individual e-mails and in them praised students specifically for what they did well at with regards to participation (e.g., quality comments, consistent comments, building on what others said, critiquing what others said well, etc.), told them if their participation levels needed to increase (and roughly by how much), and how many absences/tardies they’d had. Additionally, if a student didn’t participate much but wrote excellent papers (several students fell into this category), I commented on how given the quality of her/his papers, s/he would contribute greatly to the class if s/he spoke up more. After sending out the reports, every student participated voluntarily at least once per class and most mid-level participators turned into high level participators. I’m not sure exactly why it worked (The praise? The knowledge that I was watching them closely? The reminder they were being graded in participation?) or how well it will work again, but at least for this semester, it worked very well.

A side note on e-mails though: I’m not sure what it’s like at other sites, but at least most of my students are used to more indirect feedback/are more sensitive to write I write in e-mails than their American counterparts might be. Because of this, I now make sure to add plenty of praise in my e-mails, to warn them of the directness of my feedback beforehand, and to be direct but gentle in my comments.

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Reflections

April 15, 2011 by Leave a comment

Douglass Endrizzi
Slightly frivolous, but fun. I had a student send me a chain email full of English and Chinese positive quotes. I was reading them, and I noticed a few where the English is quite different from the Chinese. Here’s my two favorite, from which I will extrapolate to make erroneous assumptions about Chinese culture in general:

Email’s English: Fall in love with someone..
Email’s Chinese: 尝试坠入爱河……如果不影响你的其他更重要的事情
My translation: Fall in love with someone…if it doesn’t influence your other more important affairs.

Email’s English: Live up to your name.
Email’s Chinese: 别辱没你的名声
My translation: Don’t disgrace your name.

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Book Review: “How to Read a Book”

March 15, 2011 by Leave a comment

by Elizabeth Weissberg
Authors: Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

How to Read a Book is a book that discusses exactly what its cover suggests it might–it contains a step by step description of how to read a book. It was assigned reading the summer before my senior year of high school, and although I read in ways in addition to those it suggests, it did make me a better active reader. This semester, the book has helped me with my teaching in two ways.

1) It’s what I used to prevent myself from reinventing the wheel–that is, in my English class, where we’re reading Brave New World, I taught my students some of its methods to use while they’re reading the novel.
2) It’s the book I recommend when a student in a class where I won’t be reading lit with them asks how to become a better reader.

There are a few drawbacks to the book.
1) It’s rather long.
2) It is perhaps overly focused on its step by step approach and begins to feel wearisomely meticulous and rule-heavy at points. At the same time, this is part of what makes it so useful–it’s really clear and leaves a strong impression as long as you can get through it.

Also, in the way many stodgy books are, it has its witty moments and can be quite funny at times.

The detailed table of contents is as good as any summary I could write here. The text of the book itself can be found here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27663860/Adler-Mortimer-J-Charles-Van-Doren-How-to-Read-a-Book-Rev-Upd-Ed-Schuster-1972

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YCTB Vol. 1 No. 7 Introduction

March 15, 2011 by Leave a comment

This month I have a link to share:
http://www.economist.com/content/chinese_equivalents
It’s a map of China that shows the GDP of each province; they have also listed a country with a similar-sized economy for each province.

I hope you all were able to get your tickets to Huangshan without any trouble. See you in Xiuning next week!

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HKU China Media Project

February 15, 2011 by Leave a comment

 by Brendan Woo
I heard about this website at a talk given at CUHK by Prof. David Skidmore of Drake University. It’s essentially a news translation project run by Hong Kong University, and has a lot of interesting features, including a “media dictionary,” which highlights the nuances of various Chinese terms appearing in the news.

This could be a great way to keep up with Chinese news if your Mandarin reading level isn’t up to the newspaper standard yet! Here’s the link:
http://cmp.hku.hk/

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