{"id":29946,"date":"2022-09-27T06:35:25","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T20:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?p=29946"},"modified":"2023-07-17T15:00:14","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T05:00:14","slug":"a-language-lesson-for-new-zealand-chinese-language-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/journal\/a-language-lesson-for-new-zealand-chinese-language-week\/","title":{"rendered":"A Language Lesson for New Zealand Chinese Language Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jottings in New Sinology\u00a0<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

China Heritage<\/em> marks New Zealand Chinese Language Week 2022 (25 September-1 October 2022) by reprinting a poem and a series of tweets by Chris Tse<\/a>, New Zealand’s poet laureate (2022-2024), as well as a report by Eda Tang for Stuff News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Many independent-minded Chinese writers and critics refer to the Xi Jinping decade (2012-2022) as an era of ‘draconian Qin-style rule’ \u79e6\u5236 Q\u00edn zh\u00ec<\/em>. ‘Qin’ is a reference to the rule of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China’s inaugural dynasty that lasted from 221 to 206 BCE. Excoriated for over two millennia, the Qin finally found a champion in Mao Zedong. He praised Qin’s relentless efforts to unify, modify and standardise life within its borders. Xi Jinping has inherited Mao’s obsession with the Qin and its mania for homogenisation (see\u00a0\u2018The Spectre of Prince Han Fei in Xi Jinping\u2019s China\u2019<\/a>, China Heritage<\/em>, 6 May 2021).<\/p>\n

During the Xi Jinping decade, long-debated issues related to ethnic differences within China’s borders, language, culture and identity have been resolved in a manner that favours what could be dubbed the Macdonaldisation of Chinese civilisation. Xi’s cookie-cutter approach is also applied to the global Chinese world.<\/p>\n

In You Should Look Back<\/a>, the introduction to our series\u00a0Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium<\/em><\/a>, we announced that:<\/p>\n

This series and its predecessors offer an extended commentary on contemporary China; they are also a personal meditation cum memoir related to the wonder and perplexity elicited by a lifelong involvement with that country, its peoples and their cultures. In the process we reflect on how a grand and vastly\u00a0populous nation-civilisation that enjoys both global reach and significance has, under Xi Jinping and his aging Red Guard generation, been reduced to a pusillanimous scale. Official China has been whittled down to the size of the ego of the Sole Leader, \u4e00\u5c0a y\u012b z\u016bn<\/i>, and the circumscribed vision of the Chinese Communist Party. Vibrant Other Chinas<\/a>, however, flourish regardless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No matter how grandiloquent the claims or bombastic the pronouncements issuing out of Beijing, a dolorous reality is undeniable: as the country enjoys levels of wealth and achievement unique in the history of the People\u2019s Republic, a cabal of Party leaders and their intellectual courtiers assert that it is their prerogative to determine and define what China is, what being Chinese means (and can mean), as well as what the legitimate aspirations, languages, histories, thoughts and the state of being of all Chinese peoples should be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For those who live in a global Chinese world long nurtured by the riches of Taiwan and Hong Kong, a Mainland revived during the decades of economic reform and the creativity of a plethora of Chinese diasporic communities, it is a tragedy of immense proportions that a clutch of rigid, nay-saying bureaucrats thus holds sway and that it arrogates to itself the power to legislate and police the borders of what by all rights should be a cacophonous multiverse of Chinese possibility. By imposing an educational regime that, to quote Xi Jinping, \u2018grabs them in the cradle\u2019 \u5f9e\u5a03\u5a03\u6293\u8d77, by creating a censorious media monolith that spews forth a carefully curated \u2018China Story\u2019 and by pursuing a \u2018chilly war\u2019 internationally with the encouragement of battalions of online vigilantes, the Party continues to terraform China and create a monotonous landscape. All of this is aided and abetted by a sharp-edged new phase in a century-long contestation with the United States and the Western world.<\/p>\n

Although Xi Jinping\u2019s enterprise builds on the twisted legacy of the Mao era and the darkest aspirations of the Deng-Jiang-Hu reform decades, it is obvious that his Empire of Tedium is also the handiwork of willing multitudes who travail at the behest of one man and the party-state-army that he dominates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

I began my formal study of Chinese \u2014 the modern and literary languages, history, literature, culture and thought \u2014 at the age of seventeen. Prior to that high-school classmates, including Australian-born Chinese friends who spoke Cantonese, Hokkien or both, along with ethnically Chinese exchange students from Singapore and Malaysia had already given me a sense of Sinophone linguistic and cultural (not to mention culinary) diversity.<\/p>\n

My initial university mentors were a Belgian, who delivered the main language lectures, and a Russian who had grown up in Beijing\/Beiping. She was a peerless tutor who invigilated over pronunciation and our study of syntax. Advanced Chinese was taught by a Mainland-born Taiwanese literary scholar, a Hong Kong Cantonese speaker and a former Manchu noble from Old Peking. Our survey course in literature, which covered the Shang to the Qing, was the province of a classically trained American Chinese Catholic nun from a ancient Jiangnan lineage who also happened to be \u00a0an expert in Neo-Confucian thought. Our Classical Chinese instruction was initially overseen by a scholar from a Han Bannerman \u6f22\u8ecd family and then by an Australian Jew known for his translation of\u00a0Mencius<\/em> into Hebrew. In our final year our main lecturer, whose focus was Tang and Song prose and poetry, happened to be\u00a0an internationally famous literary sojourner and artist who had grown up in Jiangxi province. (See In Memoriam<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In their disparate ways these teachers introduced us to the overlapping nature and geopolitical diversity of \u570b\u8a9e gu\u00f3y\u01d4,<\/em>\u00a0\u83ef\u8a9e hu\u00e1y\u01d4\u00a0<\/em>and \u666e\u901a\u8a71 p\u01d4t\u014dnghu\u00e0<\/em>. They also drilled us in the daunting thicket of romanisation systems, from Wade-Giles and Gwoyeu Romatzyh<\/em>\u00a0to Hanyu Pinyin<\/em>. Through readings selected from newspapers, literary journals and esteemed works of literature, we encountered first the more stately Republican-era forms of Chinese, then Hong Kong pop culture and advertising ‘brogue’ and, finally, the kind of mainland Newspeak featured in the pages of Red Flag<\/em> \u7d05\u65d7 H\u00f3ng q\u00ed<\/em>, the theoretical organ of the Communist Party that was renamed Fact Seeking<\/em> \u6c42\u662f Qi\u00fa sh\u00ec\u00a0<\/em>in 1988.<\/p>\n

By studying classical and literary Chinese we were enjoyed an overview of the numerous forms and genres of the written language from the pre-Qin to the late-Qing. Even as undergraduates we came to appreciate what I would later call the ‘Chinese multiverse’. After some years studying in Shanghai and Shenyang during the dying days of Maoism, I worked in Hong Kong and ended up having a fifteen-year part-time career as a writer of Chinese essays \u2014 \u5c0f\u54c1\u3001\u96dc\u6587\u3001\u96a8\u611f \u2014\u00a0in that unique city.<\/p>\n

Throughout my fifty-year ‘life in Chinese’ I have been sorely aware that the natural proclivity and unnatural policies of the China’s Communists are aimed at making sure that ‘everyone is allowed to be different, but in exactly the same way.’<\/p>\n

\u2014 Geremie R. Barm\u00e9
\nEditor, China Heritage<\/em>
\n27 September 2022<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n

A New Sinology, or a more profound and humanly rich engagement with China and the Chinese world, is not a study of an exotic, or increasingly familiar Other. It is an approach that also constitutes a concerted attempt to include China as integral to the idea of a shared humanity in all of its contradictory, unsettling as well as inspiring complexity. It is a study, an engagement, an internalization that enriches the possibilities of our own condition. \u2026 Nor is this merely an engagement in one direction. For to talk of some divide, some chasm that has to be bridged or crossed, is to accept too easily the belief that difference predominantly creates barriers and distances. It also limits us unnecessarily to the idea that studying about China, learning its languages, cultures and thought systems is to limit ourselves to being interpreters of a ‘correct’ view of what China and Chineseness is. While such linguistic and cultural translation is essential for the growth of all peoples, our engagement with China is not merely that of sophisticated interpreters equipped through dint of hard work and long years of study with some privileged insider knowledge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 from Geremie R. Barm\u00e9, ‘China’s Promise’<\/a>
\nThe China Beat<\/em>, 20 January 2010<\/div>\n\n

***<\/p>\n

Further Reading:<\/strong><\/p>\n