English Lessons

Xi Jinping does his best Qianlong imitation: The Soybean is Everything, part V

The author gets in over his head

Part I. Part II. Part III. Part IV.

On September 21, a prominent Chinese university announced it was dropping a requirement that graduates pass an English-language competency test. As reported by CNN, the news was embraced by Chinese nationalists who have long been offended at policies pushing English fluency at all levels of the educational system. The story quoted one online commenter’s response:

“English is important, but as China develops, English is no longer that important,” said a Weibo post from a nationalist influencer with 6 million online followers after the university’s announcement.

“It should be the turn for foreigners to learn Chinese,” the influencer said.

The nationalist position is not without some merit. The international primacy of the English language is a legacy of British imperialism and American cultural, economic and technological hegemony. While it is a great privilege to be born a native speaker, in those parts of Asia where Englishmen historically ran amok the use of English is also a daily reminder of gunboat diplomacy, extraterritorial concessions, missionary arrogance and the white man’s burden. And yes, of course, foreigners should learn Chinese.

But the change in policy on English is taking place in the context of other developments that tell a darker story. In recent years, China has imposed new limits on international access to Chinese academic and technological databases, significantly increased restrictions on journalism, and cracked down on companies that specialize in online English tutoring. At the same time the number of Americans studying Chinese in China has absolutely cratered (from an estimated 15,000 in 2009 to 350 today!). The signal is consistent: under Xi Jinping, China is returning to a state of self-imposed isolation and autarky.

James Flint would feel at home in 2023. The goal of mutual comprehension is more distant than ever.

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The lives of Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton remind us of the vital importance of languages and translation in our understanding of other cultures, and the value of the years of study that allow us to listen, empathize, and understand when others speak and to explain ourselves to them. It is only with this knowledge of other cultures that together we can build a future for the interconnected world that we live in today.

Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire

The Perils of Interpreting is a marvelous book. Through a close study of two interpreters who were part of the first British diplomatic mission to China, the famous Macartney embassy in 1793, Harrison brings fresh color to the much told story of how Britain and China’s relationship progressed from mutual incomprehension into disastrous war. Taken simply as individual tales, the life-stories of Li Zibiao, a native of northwest China who converted to Catholicism and studied Latin and Greek and Hebrew in Naples, Italy for years before ending up an interpreter for the Macartney embassy, and George Thomas Staunton, who was only 12 years old when he first impressed the Qianlong emperor with a rudimentary ability to converse in Chinese, are astonishing.

But as with James Flint, whose ghost hovers over every chapter of The Perils of Interpreting, the ability of Li and Staunton to transcend language barriers was hardly an unalloyed good.

.... [B]y the early years of the nineteenth century the position of people with the skills needed to interpret became increasingly dangerous. Staunton became a famous translator of Chinese and a banker for the British trade with China, but after the British naval occupation of Macao in 1808 two of his close Chinese friends were sent into exile, and he himself had to flee when the Jiaqing emperor, Qianlong’s successor, began to threaten him personally. Jiaqing also cracked down hard on Catholicism as a foreign religion, driving Li into hiding and expelling the last of the European missionaries who had worked for the court since the arrival of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. When in 1838 Lin Zexu, who was both intelligent and keen to discover more about the British, arrived to take charge in Canton with a policy on opium that was based largely on available written Chinese sources, he sometimes seemed to know even less than the Qianlong emperor had done. As a result he precipitated a war that many Chinese who had lived overseas or worked with the foreigners in the city must have known could not be won.

Harrison makes the argument that if China’s rulers had consulted those who, like Lin Zibiao, understood the true strength of the British Empire in the middle of the 19th century, they might have been able to avoid provoking a devastating war. I find this hypothesis unconvincing. As Harrison herself notes in one of her most enlightening, (and distressing) observations, the British in the mid-19th century had changed significantly from the Macartney era fifty years early; their experience ruling India had made them more racist.

What had changed were British attitudes to race and class: Macartney and his retinue had been delighted to meet people whom they recognized as gentlemen and had paid little attention to impoverished bargemen. Now the English saw Eastern poverty and nakedness, and their scientists focused on racial markers. Staunton came to the depressing conclusion that they were so prejudiced that not even seeing things with their own eyes could shake them.

Prejudice combined with greed backed up by technological superiority? One way or another, the British were going to force the issue. Perhaps history would have been different if, back in the days of James Flint, Qianlong had started preparing for a showdown. But by the 1840s, it’s hard to see how the Qing could have staved off the inevitable. The capitalist incentives pushing global trade were just too powerful.

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I almost had my own James Flint moment in the 1980s. I was an English teacher in Taipei, doing my best to equip the children of Taiwan’s surging middle class with the necessary skills for thriving in an age of globalization. Some time around the fall of 1986 or the spring of 1987 I was approached, through intermediaries, by members of Taiwan’s underground opposition press. They were looking for Americans who would be willing to publically distribute their newspaper on the campus of a local university. The theory being that the KMT government would be less likely to crack down on foreigners than native Taiwanese.

Passing out the papers was illegal. Taiwan was still under martial law and the opposition press was banned. Just five or ten years earlier it would have been foolhardy for me to engage in such a stunt. But in 1986 change was coming. (Martial law ended in July 1987.) I didn’t feel like it was that big of a risk and I was no fan of the KMT, so I agreed, and as the photograph that introduces this post testifies, I seem to have had a pretty good time sticking it to the man that afternoon.

Within 24 hours police visited my apartment and I was ordered to report to the visa renewal office to have my papers reviewed. I was sure I was about to be deported, but in the end all I had to suffer through was a lecture from a bureaucrat advising me that, as a guest of the country, it was in my best interest not to get involved in local politics.

Compared to James Flint, I got off easy, in no small part due to the comparative privileges accorded American citizens at the peak of U.S. global power in the 1980s and British traders during Qianlong’s China. But in 2023, I wouldn’t dream of doing anything similar to what I did in Taiwan in the streets of contemporary Hong Kong or Chengdu or Shanghai. Xi Jinping’s China accords no privilege to the West, which may at least partially explain why so few Americans are studying Chinese in China today.

In the current climate, those foreigners who can communicate in Chinese are again considered dangerous, but not so in much in the sense that James Flint might have been -- as aliens threatening to crack the code of Confucian civilization -- but more as contaminating vectors threatening to infect China with “Western values” like human rights, civil society, or a free press.

All things, by the way, that Taiwanese society celebrates. I am convinced that one of the key factors driving Xi Jinping’s obsession with crushing Taiwanese independence is his determination to excise, once and for all, the stain of Western values on Chinese civilization. I can’t take any credit for it, but those kids I taught in the 1980s have built something truly remarkable in Taiwan. And they’ve done it by embracing the world, rather than pushing it away.

Taiwan’s government, incidentally, has announced an explicit goal of becoming a fully bilingual nation by 2030. 

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In 1793, George Macartney explained his embassy’s goals to one of Qianlong’s top ministers, writes Harrison, by declaring “that the object of the British was ‘the extension of commerce for the general benefit of mankind.’” Perhaps he believed that. But by that point the East India Company had already been importing opium into China for twenty years, and it is very difficult to explain the opium trade in any way that redounds to the general benefit of anyone besides the drug dealers who were pushing the product.

The fact remains, however, that over the last 40 years, “the extension of commerce” between China and the outside world via trade has been of enormous benefit to China. The perceived merits of learning English may rise and fall depending on shifts in policy, but the importance of trade to the Chinese economy is fundamental.

If we focus only on bilateral trade between China and its largest trading partner, the United States, in 2022, we see that China exported $562.9 billion dollars worth of goods to the U.S. and imported $195.5 billion.

And within those imports, the single largest trade item, in terms of dollars, was $17.9 billion worth of soybeans.

Despite the best efforts of Qianlong and Xi Jinping to control or limit the terms of interaction between China and the West, the intermingling between disparate cultures could hardly be more intimate: on a simply massive scale, American farmers are growing soybeans to feed Chinese pigs which are then eaten by Chinese diners.

When James Flint and Samuel Bowen were hatching their scheme to grow soybeans in Georgia, they could hardly have imagined that one day, the biggest market for American soybeans would be the country that first domesticated the plant.

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