This edited volume is a significant contribution to linguistic, educational, and social studies of English in China, and it is also a valubale addition to the existing literature of studies on language and cultural identity. It is an insightful volume that takes on many of the current issues that are of great interest to a wide range of readership from English language teachers and learners to researchers and scholars focusing on culture and identity as well as Chinese studies both within China and worldwide.

What is remarkable in this volume is not only the ways in which the discourses of this dichotomy resonate in the early twenty-first century, but also the ways in which new discourses, new problems and new opportunities emerge in the present. The editors are to be congratulated on this book, which offers an insightful blend of theory and empirical research. The fascinating and wide-ranging account of the status and functions of English in China today provided by Lo Bianco, Orton and Gao in China and English is essential reading for everyone interested in English in the Chinese context and in the wide range of educational and intercultural issues associated with the continuing story of English in China.

While much attention is paid in certain circles to the rising power of China, little is known about the critical impact on both the Chinese people and the rest of the world of the country's language policy, in particular China's domestication of English and its increasing efforts to spread its language and culture worldwide. What dynamics has it brought about? How are identities negotiated with the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language at the collective/national and individual levels? And how do such identities affect China's interaction with the rest of the world? This book is therefore a timely contribution to addressing these important questions.

China and English

Globalisation and the Dilemmas of Identity

Multilingual Matters

Contents

Intercultural Encounters and Deep Cultural Beliefs

JOSEPH LO BIANCO

Introduction

Although it now looks decidedly redundant, the most recent grand claim for human universalism, Francis Fukuyama's (1992) triumphant declaration that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of centrally planned state economies represented 'the end of history', underscores a distinctively Western universalism relevant to the global expansion of English, and especially its penetration into the institutional life of China. Fukuyama's belief that Western liberal democracy was the final form of human governance and that capitalist market economics the most reasonable and efficient mode of ordering economic life proclaims both economic–political virtues but also cultural and ideological ones. More recently, Headley has called the human rights and democracy elements of Western universalism the Europeanization of the World (2008).

Some trace of this can be found in the universalistic inclination in Western political practice since ancient times, most dramatically in the year 212 and the Edict of Caracalla, granting all free men admission to Roman citizenship (Pagden, 2008: 99), which is part of 2500 years of often tense interaction between various manifestations of the cultural 'West' and the cultural 'East'. This chapter discusses culture and identity issues arising from mass English learning in China in reference to such questions of universalism and particularism around three deep beliefs: capitalism, Christianity and Confucianism. As China domesticates English, enshrining a historically unprecedented level of linguistic accommodation and appropriation, this chapter looks to an older civilisational encounter between the West and China, a period much more richly reciprocal than is often supposed. The chapter pursues a line of questioning on these three big Cs as a kind of exploration of difference, a feature of exchanges between the interpreters of civilisation in China and various Western powers. If global English today does presage a world civic community as many suppose, it is preceded by an ancient history in which few people have doubted the deep cultural and ideological consequences of language learning.

Changing China

In his speculation about China's future, former Time magazine reporter David Aikman (2005) claims that over the next three decades up to 30% of China's population will become Christian, with many of China's cultural and political leaders espousing Christian principles. He imagines an 'Augustinian' impact on China's foreign relations, asking whether 'the Chinese dragon' will be 'tamed by ... the Christian lamb?' (Aikman, 2005: 292). Apparently believing that restraint, justice and reason have characterised the foreign policies of 'the two Anglo Saxon' empires, Aikman supposes that these virtues, derived from St. Augustine's fourth-century treatise City of God, will be transferred to Christianised China. What this implies about the millennial Chinese state, which some consider 'the most open, flexible, fair, and sophisticated system of government' (Leys, 1997: xxvii), is controversial to say the least.

Whether Aikman's conversion calculation is empirically tenable cannot be assessed, nor would that affect the main point of its inclusion here, nor is it my purpose to examine or critique his biases – other than to mention Spence's (1998) survey of the never-ending Western dreams projected onto Chinese realities. Aikman, however, opens a door onto the ignored but central role of belief in relations between China and the West. Contemporary secularism makes understanding religion- and belief-based international relations difficult and strange, and yet religion was fundamental to Western political and social history from the 313 Edict of Milan and Emperor Constantine's Christian conversion to the 1500-year tortuous process of separation of Church and State that followed. During this long period, cultural and imperial China 'met' cultural and imperial Europe frequently, often under religious guise, a mode of encounter continued in China's relations with America and its Protestant missions from the 19th century.

This chapter addresses religion–belief encounters of the 17th and 18th centuries because these differ from current relations in crucial ways. While all intercultural meetings contain curiosity, comparison, admiration and repudiation, this pre-industrial and pre-colonial encounter is a veritable phase of comparative civilisation, remarkable for the intensity of its focus on deep cultural beliefs. Despite being well documented it is rarely cited today, perhaps because few English speakers were involved and because in contemporary secular scholarship religion-based interculturalism is more condemned than studied.

Three substantial overviews address relations between China and the West over large sweeps of time. Jonathan Spence (1998) calls these encounters 'sightings', David Mungello (1999) 'borrowings' and Harry Gelber (2007) 'relationships'. Spence discusses 48 'sightings' over 700 years, from the problematical Polo in 1253 to the celebrated Calvino in 1985. Mungello's time frame is more restricted but his treatment is more detailed and reciprocal, discussing states, individuals and institutions engaged in mutual influence analysed from multiple perspectives. Gelber's volume is the most extensive: a narrative spanning more than three millennia of relations between 'the dragon and the foreign devils'.

Separate or Linked?

Aikman reflects a school of thought linking Christianity, liberalism and capitalism as locomotives of scientific and technological history. The most recent instalment, Rodney Stark's Victory of Reason (2006), accounts for European global pre-eminence by its 'faith in reason' attributed to Christian rational theology. On this account, capitalism was invented on medieval monastic estates, but was stifled by absolutist monarchies in France and Spain threatened by independent wealth, flourishing only in the independent Italian city republics. Here a new merchant citizenship emerged, producing responsive states, generating wealth, fuelling the Renaissance, secular humanism and modern science.

When squashed by foreign invasion this commercial civic culture had already been introduced to northern Europe and England, from whose fertile base science, capitalism and personal freedoms were transported to North America by Puritan émigrés, there yielding the individualism, capitalist success and political triumph of contemporary America. This meta-narrative of personal and political liberty associates economic and technological advancement with a facilitative commitment to reason derived from Christianity, establishing an ancient authorisation for capitalism and American ascendancy. Although overturning the timing and location of capitalism's origins espoused by sociologist of modernity Max Weber, the narrative retains his famous claim of religious propulsion underlying capitalism through a spirit of deferred consumption and belief in linear worldly progress. Historians of large-scale social and economic change, such as Fernand Braudel, Carlo Cipolla and Henri Pirenne, also locate essential elements of capitalism and its enabling conditions of relative liberalism in the pre-Reformation period. But, like Aikman, Stark invokes the centrality of Christianity, claiming that Chinese scholars share his view. He declines to explain how his thesis is not scrambled by a China, atheist and communist, adopting capitalist market economics while adopting neither religion nor democracy.

China's rise has given birth to re-interpretive literature, including polemical Sino-triumphalism (Hobson, 2004) resembling the Western triumphalism it excoriates (Duchesne, 2006). More considered exposes of Euro-centric historiography (Blaut, 2000; Frank, 1998), however, provide evidence of interdependent economic development, rather than discrete and separated centres of commercial civilisation, even when the accounts assume Western economic pre-eminence (Landes, 1998). The interdependency thesis has multiple origins. Early in the 20th century land-mass interdependency was proposed repeatedly in the voluminous Tibeto-Indian-Western Chinese historical researches of Italy's pre-eminent 'oriental' scholar Giuseppe Tucci, who coined the term Eurasia to account for interlinked commercial and cultural developments. Tucci even posited a coherent historical unity across the vast Eurasian landmass (Tucci, 1958).

Du (1996, 2000) offers a contemporary version from Chinese standpoints. Addressing the 1990s assertion of unique 'Asian values' by Singapore's Lee Kuan-Yew to explain Asian economic success, Du takes a multi-civilisation approach to account for modernity and proposes Confucian humanism 'as the basic value system underlying East Asian political economy' (2000: 258). While repudiating the implied excusing of authoritarianism in the 'Asian values' movement, Du's explorations identify a process of 'creative adaptation' in Eastern projects of modernity and in struggles against colonialism, both Western and Asian (1996). This creative adaptation offers future 'transformative potential' for the recovery of Confucian traditions by 'cultural China', and in this way Du also makes faith, belief and spirit central to projects of economic modernisation.

This chapter shifts Du's idea of 'creative adaptation' towards 'motivated adaptation' to write an account of interculturalism differing from technical–descriptive anthropology and from the position-taken approach characteristic of West-critical post-colonialism. It is acknowledged that the former promises a de-centring stance when researching human differences and the latter critiques the self-serving character of some Western scholarship on historical progress. However, the first is inappropriate because the present work is based on secondary sources rather than original fieldwork, and the second overcorrects and becomes guilty of the deficiencies it condemns.

Protagonists

The present discussion is of a series of meetings between Ming and Qing elites with various European entities: national states, monarchies, counter-reformation religious orders and many individuals. At the centre are the Jesuit missions. This diverse array of interests and agents suggests that the totalised West is a term of limited coherence that demands deconstruction; in some ways the term China also obfuscates persistent internal differences. Both categories assume cohesion, sequence, continuity and stability of worldview and cultural norms that deserve problematisation, something that can only be noted rather than pursued here.

Temple, synagogue and mosque

Eurasia in Jesuit garb was not an anomaly. In a 'detour' via synagogue, mosque and temple, Zürcher (1994) assembles archaeological and documentary evidence for ancient examples of accommodation and interaction in projects of seeking souls. Each of several marginal religions entering Chinese space had to negotiate the wulun, the five social relations of Confucianism, and the interpretation of sacrificial rites indigenous to Chinese traditions.

Citing Jewish passages inscribed on steles from a synagogue courtyard at Kaifeng dated 1489, 1512 and 1663, Zürcher shows how these try to reconcile Chinese observances and introduced doctrines, noting differences, analogies and precedents. Memorial inscriptions express Judaism in Confucian terms, making links to China's most distant past in which Adam is identified with Pan Gu (Shan hai jing), a mythical being whose dead body was transformed into heaven and earth, and with Fu Xi and Yu, saintly rulers of the highest antiquity.

Noticing the different, calibrating distances, seeking analogies or identifying incommensurability are intercultural processes also pursued by Islam and Buddhism in what Zürcher calls a pattern of 'conciliation and adaptation'. Also preceding the Jesuits were two Christian arrivals on Chinese cultural terrain who also engaged in 'conciliation and adaptation': Syriac Nestorians in the middle of the first millennium and Italian Franciscans in the early 12th century.

Ricci and the Catholics

Counter-reformation Catholics were the main religious explorers between 1500 and 1800. The intensity of their engagement remains unequalled in Chinese–Western interaction for the close proximity of foreigners to elite Chinese cultural life, especially with the astronomical, calendrical and literary activity of the imperial court. The first Protestant missionary Robert Morrison was present in China only from 1807 when '... westerners again knocked on the door of China. This time ... with gunboats as well as the bible' (Xu, 2001: 449).

Among the Jesuits, Matteo Ricci (Li Madou, 1552–1610), 'Perhaps the most brilliant of a group ... characterised by brilliance' (Mungello, 1977: 12), looms large because he established the paradigm within which the engagement proceeded. Eminent China historian Jonathan Spence (1994) has written: 'From the first moment I went to China as a student, the one Chinese name of a Westerner that I found recognized by everyone was Li Madou ... To say that I was interested in Li Madou evoked smiles and nods all over China ... [he] has a kind of special resonance in the hearts of the Chinese even now in the 1990s ...' (Spence, 1994: 16). Ricci failed to convert a Chinese Emperor but he '.... converted the historians', including the towering British figure of Chinese science and civilisation studies, Joseph Needham, who described Ricci as 'one of the most remarkable and brilliant men in history' (Cummins, 1993: 2).

Some readings criticise the Jesuits as prefiguring European expansion or as manipulative dissemblers, but few deny their sincere admiration of China. Several developed a fused identity containing Confucian, Christian, European and Chinese elements, encapsulated in verse as self-and-other mutuality in Ricci's famous Treaty on Friendship (Ricci, 1595/2003), a text in which, through friendships, individuals fuse identities and swear obligations of assistance, forging synthetic categories that transcend differences (Mignini, 2003b). This Chinese text is perhaps his most recognised work today (Bollettino I; Ricci, 1598–2003; Cronin, 1999). Despite China's '... political-cultural antipathy to organized religion' (Uhalley & Wu, 2001: 3), identified as early as the Tang dynasty (Witek, 2001), organised religion and trade have been characteristic modalities of its encounter with non-China.

Churching China

The Portuguese Francis Xavier (1506–1552), 'pioneer of all missionaries in Asia' (Young, 1983: 9), devised a distinctive approach to Japan and China premised on learning 'native customs and rites' to meet another culture 'on its own terms' (1983: 9). Xavier, apparently astonished by Japanese 'reverence for reason' and 'European superiority in science', was affected by a Japanese challenge that if Christianity really were the 'one true religion' surely the 'intelligent Chinese' would have known, giving Chinese conversion a specifically charged importance.

Xavier died before entering China but on his entry Ricci discovered a fundamental error in Xavier's plan of targeting the imperial court. Unlike Buddhist Japan, the prevailing intellectual system at the late Ming Chinese court was neo-Confucianism, a synthesis of Confucianism, religious Daoism and sinified Buddhism (Bresciani, 2001; De Bary, 1991a, 1991b; Tucci, 1922; Xu, 2001). Xavier's immediate successor Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) became the architect of the Jesuits' mission philosophy; believing that East Asians were 'gente bianca', white people, with cultures equal to those of Europe, he bequeathed the mission its initial ethos (Mungello, 1977). For well over a century the Jesuits represented the bulk of intellectual exchange between China and the West. They were not simply priests bent on conversion, but also highly educated men skilled in abstract reasoning, literature and poetry, science and mathematics, technology and mapmaking, languages and music (Mignini, 2003a). Although they became useful in the service of imperial governance, the long duration of their presence in China, and the depth of their influence, made them vulnerable to alienation from their source institutions and to resentment from rival groups among their hosts.

What reflections for interculturalism and cross-cultural studies can be drawn from peculiar, extensive and early encounters such as these? This question will be addressed through a Controversy and the approach of motivated adaptation.