Eliminating the cultural deficit

Promoting Chinese language and culture and more localized Chinese teaching can help bring about better cooperation

China has a big surplus in commercial trade with the United States but a deficit in cultural exports. The Chinese know more about the US than Americans know about China. Chinese audiences see more US movies in a year than most Americans see Chinese movies during their whole life. Chinese college student enrollment in US colleges for the 2012-13 school year increased 21 percent to almost 235,000 students, while only one-tenth of the number or 24,000 American students studied in China during the same period.

I call this a cultural deficit. Confucius Institutes have been set up to eliminate cultural deficits by promoting Chinese language and culture, supporting localized Chinese teaching internationally, and facilitating cultural exchanges. Set up in 2004, there are more than 400 Confucius Institutes in some 100 countries. According to Xu Lin, head of the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban), the number will reach 500 with 1.5 million registered students in 2015. More than 10,000 professional teachers and volunteers from China have been sent to the overseas Confucius Institutes and classrooms to date.

With a similar purpose but in an opposite direction, I have taken American students to study Chinese language and culture in China. For 12 times since 1992, I have taken my students from Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, to China to master the Chinese language and culture.

I will take another group of students to study at Shanghai's Tongji University this fall. These students will focus intensely on their Chinese language classes, building upon what they have been studying at Carleton, and complement their language studies with Chinese culture such as taichi, Chinese cooking, painting and calligraphy, as well as cultural exploration assignments from the south to the north. Chinese civilization of 5,000 years will be an important area of their study. Only a program that meshes Mandarin studies with an emphasis on history and culture can truly help expand the foundation for a wise and acceptable generation.

I believe it is the mission of our generation to build bridges between the East and the West, and eliminating the deficit in cultural exchanges is vital for two-way traffic on this bridge. When I see our students studying in Chinese classrooms, walking Chinese streets, climbing the Great Wall and talking to the local people in Chinese, I see this deficit being reduced.

The places where two phenomena meet are the most beautiful. When mountains and plains meet, the mountains look immense. When the ocean and land meet, the ocean seems vast. It is a most glorious painting of the shoreline or the foot of the mountain; where the ancient and the modern meet; where the East and the West meet and clash.

I grew up in China but have spent much of the last 30 years in the US. Every time I return to China, it is like another life revisited. When I see my students in my home country, I feel the reality of that world, and I am fascinated by their observations and perspective. Their comments and thoughts should be interesting for Westerners and Chinese too because they represent one world and another.

People always admire Marco Polo as the greatest world traveler, but his followers are no less significant. Their observations are no less fresh. Their challenges are no less serious. And their comments are no less historically significant.

The author is Burton and Lily Levin Professor at Carleton College in Minnesota.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 05/16/2014 page9)