Billy’s Comment : Indeed, Prof. Wang’s ideas apply to Building Friendship Globally – Person to Person, People to People, as well as Country to Country.
Perceptions and relations between America and China have gone through good times and bad, depending on the geopolitical barometers. In 2001, the US intelligence plane intruded into China’s air space and got intercepted and forced down by a Chinese plane, aggravating mutual tension and sable rattling. Since then, America’s strategic pivot to the Asian-Pacific regions, the ongoing trade war, the conflict over the South China Sea and Hong Kong, and the Covid-19 crisis are now fueling the tension to a boiling point. But a moment’s reflection should quiet the horrible drumbeat: the US and China are inextricably interdependent and interconnected. All the existential anxiety about mutual threat and zero-sum game cannot diminish the prospect of the intertwined fate of the twin in the same boat. You do not have to look further than Stanford to realize how much mutual learning and joint ventures are going on between the two countries. China and US. are involved in deep partnership in many areas: economy, trade, technology, health care, supply chain, the environment, etc. A strike at the other means shooting at one’s own feet.
The destiny of America has intertwined with that of China—a record of curiosity, sympathy, and understanding. America came into being, they say, because Christophe Columbus discovered America. Actually, it was the search for sea routes to China that the explorer stumbled on the new world. At his death Columbus still believed that the American continent was Asia. An American minister wrote 400 years ago, “We people of America may be said to owe to China the discovery of our continent. I often advise my students, you come to Stanford not just to learn computer science and to embark on a tech project. You come here to build bridges between Chinese and American people. One of the most effective ways is cultural and intellectual exchange and learning from each other. Students and scholars are in a good position to carry out and fulfill that noble mission. If the governments of two countries often face off in confrontation, the people of two countries have always sympathize, connect, and befriend each other.
Sino-US cultural exchanges date back to the dawn of modern China. In 1901, Lin Shu, a well-known writer, translated Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and commented on the tragic fate of black slaves that paralleled Chinese subjugation under colonialism. Titled 黑奴吁天录 (black slaves’ outcry for justice from Heaven), the translation invests the American novel with a classical Chinese call for Heavenly justice. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted to a spoken drama by an overseas Chinese student group in Japan, headed by Li Shutong. In the Lu Xun Academy in Yan’an during the revolutionary years, George Washington, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and many other Americans were admired as heroes for building a democratic nation and modern culture. Some American even joined the ranks of Chinese fighters in the War of Resistance against Japanese invasion. In the 1960s, Chinese support of the Third World movement resonated with America’s civil rights movement, and the Martin Luther King assassination in 1968 sparked huge street demonstrations for days in Chinese streets against racism. Reading King’s “I Have a Dream” and reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech were a routine practice for English learners in China. The Chinese leadership and people understood very well what the multi-ethnic, civil rights groups in America were fighting for: minority rights, human rights, the call to end the Vietnam War, and demands for social, gender, and racial equality.
By the time Nixon visited China and the Sino-US diplomatic normalization in 1972, many Chinese began to study English the way they had studied Chairman Mao’s little red books. National and provincial radio stations broadcast English lessons day and night. I learned my first English lessons mostly by listening to Voice of America. Based on a very popular English conversation primer English 900, the lessons were broadcast from VOA’s station in Hong Kong, usually in the midnight. At the risk of being accused of listening to the “enemy” radio, I got up in the dark of night, wrapped myself up with a quilt, and listened to the lessons, almost suffocating inside. There was no headphone at that time.
By the time Nixon visited China and the Sino-US diplomatic normalization in 1972, many Chinese began to study English the way they had studied Chairman Mao’s little red books. National and provincial radio stations broadcast English lessons day and night. I learned my first English lessons mostly by listening to Voice of America. Based on a very popular English conversation primer English 900, the lessons were broadcast from VOA’s station in Hong Kong, usually in the midnight. At the risk of being accused of listening to the “enemy” radio, I got up in the dark of night, wrapped myself up with a quilt, and listened to the lessons, almost suffocating inside. There was no headphone at that time.
In my undergraduate years in Beijing Foreign Language Institute in the 1980s, things American swept through colleges and society. The English Department, the largest of all, was nicknamed “British Empire” for its capacity of the winner in sports, theater activity and other contests. But few English majors liked the Oxford or Queen English taught by British teachers. Instead, most students would favor American teachers, listen and imitate the accent of VOA. Everybody tried to sound like the Yankees. It was China’s honeymoon with America, which was an image for young people to dream and to strive for.
But America was also marred with flaws unworthy of the democratic principles. The TV series Roots, a saga of the slave trade, Africans’ journey to America, and racial exploitation and oppression in plantations, left a deep impression on me. That did not stop us from admiring America’s “power.” Watching the movie Rambo: The First Blood, we all became big fans of the macho hero played by Sylvester Stallone. But Prof. David Crook, a Canadian anthropologist and “foreign expert,” came out and put up a small poster on our classroom building to dissuade us from this deplorable mindset. We were being poisoned by imperialist ideology, he protested. Professor Cook urged us to be critical of the film, which was a propaganda of American military action in Vietnam and colonial conquest.
After graduation in the mid-1980s, most of my classmates chose to come to America to study or work. Those early birds were the envy of all.
Since then, America has presented a mixed image to the Chinese people. China, on the other hand, also has also been cast in mixed images: it is either a monstrous capitalist juggernaut or an evil Communist power. Recently the Cold War narrative of China and US. Is being updated, fueling the conflict and misperception. Academic area studies during the Cold War targeted specific geographical areas of strategic relevance to the US, presuming an authoritarian rule behind the iron curtain. This approach says, here we had democracy; over there was totalitarianism. This rigid divide blocks mutual understanding and communication and mystified people about the values and goals shared by all Chinese and Americans; it leaves people mystified as to why Chinese have long loved for Martin Luther King and held up so many Americans as champions of democracy and as icons for China.
Today, what fatally obstructs mutual understanding, sympathy, and communication is the myth of the absolute difference that divides America and China and places them in different universes. The myth declares that two countries have entirely different cultures and systems, that the difference is so huge that the two countries cannot co-exist under one eaHeaven and on planet Earth. This is a lie. The history of China-American cultural and intellectual exchange has constantly proven it to be a lie. People of both countries have always been able to understand and sympathize with each other and share certain values–as human beings and even in their distinct identity as Chinese and American. The Chinese revolutionaries admired George Washington, Martin Luther King; Chinese citizens applauded and supported America’s civil rights movement and anti-racialist movement. Chinese English learners love and appreciate a vast array of American writers, Hollywood and pop songs. Chinese consumers love myriad things American from Apple I-phone to cars. So, what is the real difference?
For people trapped in the myth, China’s lockdown and ubiquitous masks in response to the Covid-19 reflects its deeply entrenched “cultural difference” rooted in totalitarianism and conformism, which are unacceptable to freedom loving Americans. This irrational obsession with “cultural difference” is destroying the fabric of the global community and leading to more disasters and hatred, until people realize that lockdown and masks are not about Chinese culture or the American way of life. These public health measures are human and universal; they reach into a deeper and ancient core of human civilization that transcends the so-called cultural, national or political differences. It is a human civilization rooted in moral empathy, obligation, and care for your own safety and the safety of your neighbors.
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Ban Wang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004), History and Memory (Lish yu jiyi) (2004) and China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision(forthcoming 2021). He has edited 8 books on Chinese film, memory studies, Chinese studies in the US, the Chinese Revolution, socialism, and the New Left, including Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture and World Politics (2017). He has taught at SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Rutgers, East China Normal University, Yonsei, and Seoul National University.
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