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...