Bo Seo, The Australian
Image from article, with caption: The Tsinghua University campus in Beijing where students take Australian studies courses and puzzle over the large population of kangaroos.
“There are too many kangaroos in Australia.”
Anywhere in Australia, the statement would be nothing out of the ordinary. But spoken by a student here, at Tsinghua University’s bustling campus in Beijing, the words take on a transporting quality. They take me to a place that feels not quite like home.
I am sitting in on Wang Jinghui’s class, Exploring Australia. Since the course doubles as English language practice for most of its 120 enrollees, Wang usually declines to speak first. She opens each class with student presentations on a common theme.
Today, the theme is the Australian environment, and we begin with the kangaroos.
When the last of the presenters concludes, Wang steers the discussion. What starts as a basic informational discussion of Australian fauna and flora transforms into something altogether more complex.
Wang points her students “to see the interaction between the colonial settlers’ idea of beauty and the native, indigenous beauty”. The next hour weaves from James Cook’s descriptions of Australia to contemporary debates about Uluru/Ayers Rock.
Wang concludes: “The story of Australian multiculturalism is embedded in a history of its natural resources.”
I am no longer just observing the discussion. My hands are scribbling notes, and my mind is racing.
Back home in Australia, the backlash against Chinese influence on Australian universities, and against Confucius Institutes as its incarnation, rages on. The controversy has largely overshadowed the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China.
This localised dispute cannot be understood separately from its context: the resistance against perceived Chinese interference in Australian politics.
But, sitting in a university classroom, it is easy to see why the stakes feel especially high. This is the frontier of learning. Talk of knowledge and truth abounds.
Amid all the scrutiny on Australia, it bears noting that Australia also has a presence in Chinese universities. As our senior officials escalate their calls for forms of Chinese soft power that embrace “openness and freedom”, we ought to look at what we practise abroad.
The Australian presence on Chinese university campuses can be divided into two groups: academics and students.
First, there are academics who conduct research and teach classes on Australia. The overwhelming majority of these Australian studies scholars are Chinese. They hold appointments in foreign language or foreign studies departments, and administer their university’s Australian studies centre. In most universities, the centre is little more than an office or two and a modest library.
It has more or less been this way since 1981. Back then the “Gang of Nine”, scholars chosen by China’s Ministry of Education to study abroad in Australia, returned to China and began to establish Australian studies centres.
There are now 36 such centres across China. They receive support from the Australia-China Council, the Australian government body tasked with promoting people-to-people relations with China. The support consists mainly of funding for Chinese academics to study in Australia.
Greg McCarthy, chair and professor of Australia studies at Peking University, emphasises that in this funding arrangement, “the Australian studies centres are completely independent. They don’t report to the Australia-China Council, or to the Foundation for Australian Studies in China, or to me.”
The other major group that contributes to the Australian presence on Chinese university campuses is Australian international students.
The hallmark Australian government initiative in this regard is the New Colombo Plan. The NCP, a signature initiative of the Abbott government, awards scholarships and grants to Australian undergraduates to study and undertake internships in the Indo-Pacific.
I spoke to three present and former New Colombo scholars, Chloe Dempsey, Sholto Douglas and Piero Craney, who are deeply engaged in work and university life in China.
Douglas, an engineering and commerce student from Sydney, explains that, on top of his coursework on machine learning, “four times a week I have language practice … which is like a second set of classes. I also have fencing training at a local club and with the university team.”
As with international students generally, the New Colombo scholars’ integration into Chinese university life is incomplete. The three I spoke to estimate that they spend 15 per cent to 25 per cent of their social time with local Chinese, and the rest with other international students.
But they emphasise that they have had important experiences, from volunteering to internships, that have been fully immersive.
The Australian government traditionally has been reluctant to describe its efforts to sustain its presence in Chinese universities as “soft power”.
Despite this, the concept has been formative of this aspect of Australian foreign policy and remains the best lens through which to understand it.
Soft power, theorised by Joseph Nye of the Harvard Kennedy School in the US, refers to a country’s ability to obtain its desired outcomes, not through coercion or payment but through attraction: “getting others to want the outcomes you want”.
When I interviewed him in Beijing, Nye listed three potential bases for attraction: benignness, competence and values.
At its best, the Australian outreach in Chinese universities tries to secure these bases of attraction.
First, it relies on the assumption that learning about Australia and interacting with Australians makes us seem more benign.
“After taking my class, many more students choose to study in Australia as exchange students,” Wang says. “It’s human psychology. When you’re familiar with something or someone, you feel friendlier towards it. The place has become a friend to you.”
Second, scholars and students help reverse negative perceptions of Australia that damage our reputation as a successful nation.
Craney, a law and international studies student based at Tsinghua University, says Chinese students express to him “reservations about whether Australians are welcoming to foreigners and whether Australian universities are too easy to get into”.
“I place a personal responsibility on myself to challenge these misconceptions, and the New Colombo Plan provides the avenues to do that,” he adds.
Third, the Australian presence in Chinese universities may promote awareness of Australian values that may be attractive to local Chinese, whether they view our values as shared or even as superior. McCarthy provides examples of both. On the one hand, “reading the novels of Thomas Keneally, and watching the film adaptations, provides an immediate link, not just to Australia but with a shared humanness”.
On the other hand, McCarthy explains that he is frequently called on to lecture on Australian multiculturalism because “here, Australia seems to have solved an issue that the Chinese think they can learn from”.
Academics and students achieve these results with few instructions from the Australian government.
McCarthy says the ACC and FASIC impose no additional “soft power test” on research they support, and they assume the “propagation of values naturally follows from the research”.
Dempsey, an arts law student from Perth, says she feels a personal responsibility to help promote the Australia-China relationship. But she recalls little about soft power during her time as a New Colombo scholar.
“NCP doesn’t push soft power on us, apart from saying: ‘You’re an ambassador and don’t stuff it up,’ ” she says.
In Australia, we have been reluctant traditionally to embrace the term soft power. Last year’s foreign policy white paper, which dedicates its last chapter to “partnerships and soft power”, is a positive turn towards direct engagement.
But government bodies such as the Australia-China Council still favour more oblique references to “enhancing understanding”.
There may be two explanations for our reluctance about soft power. The first is that the overuse of the term soft power to describe any non-military strategy has diluted and confused it.
Another, which may be more applicable to Australia, is that the term has been made politically toxic by its connection to Chinese initiatives such as the Confucius Institutes.
Nye says China’s miscalculation with its Confucius Institutes has come from not allowing civil society to play a part in generating soft power.
“When you skew results, you create suspicions and those suspicions undermine your credibility,” he says. “What you eventually get is a backlash.
“The government can play an important role in soft power,” he adds, “but it has to learn the lessons of leading from behind.”
In Australia, we may have taken the lesson too far. For fear of appearing too aggressive in our public diplomacy [JB emphasis], our politics shies away from open discussions of soft power.
McCarthy suggests: “There is no truly concerted effort to develop what you would call soft power. We don’t really like to use the term.”
Meanwhile, growing numbers of nations are recognising the importance of soft power and are investing in it.
At the 19th party congress last year, the Chinese Communist Party constitutionally enshrined the goal of enhancing Chinese soft power.
Nye emphasises that such a strategy may be especially important for middle powers such as Australia, as they need to “economise on carrots and sticks”.
“If you can attract, you can spend less on either coercion or funding, and apply a force multiplier to what you do spend,” he says.
If one of the dangers facing China comes from resentment owing to an overly aggressive strategy, the danger facing Australia is obscurity owing to an overly passive strategy.
Most Australian universities will have a Chinese studies department and most Australian people will have to pay some attention to China.
Meanwhile, Australian studies centres in Chinese universities are facing an uphill battle.
Back at Tsinghua, Wang tells me about the struggle scholars face in convincing their departments of the usefulness of Australian studies. She does not know why a country with resources will not “invest in becoming better understood”.
She takes her views from ancient Chinese wisdom that says: “If you are wretched, focus on yourself. If you are rich or capable enough, teach others.”
Bo Seo is an Australian graduate student at Tsinghua University.
No comments:
Post a Comment