MUSSE

Professor Antonia Finnane of the School of Historical Studies is interested in the social history and material culture of China over the last 500 years. She has published articles and books in on Chinese urban history, with particular reference to Yangzhou; on the history of clothing and fashion in China; and on the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai. Her current research concerns consumption in late imperial China, with a particular focus on shops and shopping.

As part of the Festival of Ideas, a panel of China specialists were asked to address the question of Australia’s ‘special relationship’ with China, to consider whether Australia should be focusing more on relations with Beijing than with Washington, and to comment on whether China’s development is likely to take place without expansionism. This is the slightly edited text of Professor Finnane’s comments.

In my lifetime, we seem to have travelled a long way from a time when Australia refused to recognise the People’s Republic of China of to a point where it can be asked, apparently seriously, whether Australia should be looking to Beijing rather than to Washington as its significant other.

Eleven years ago, international relations specialist Stuart Harris wrote a small book called “Will China Divide Australia and the US?” He concluded that “the US link, above all other Australian relationships, is based on strong community attachments to the US, its people, its democratic values and its political ideals. The compatibility of economic systems and similarity of international objectives reinforce this.”

Eleven years is a long time, but it’s hard to see that Harris’s observation then doesn’t hold today. In 2005, after the Howard government had sent troops to Iraq in face of massive domestic disapproval, 70 per cent of Australians still felt that ANZUS alliance was important to Australia. With the onset of the financial crisis, the world’s media were quick to claim that America was on the way down and out; a new world order was about to be realised: China’s time had come. But in Australia, the keen interest in Barack Obama’s election showed a strength of identification with the US and its history that would be difficult to match with reference to any other country.

It even seems doubtful to me that Australia has any sort of ‘special relationship’ with China. In Beijing, Australia seems just one of a crowd of supplicants, one of a queue of countries knocking at the door. As trading partners with China, for example, the US, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany are all more important than Australia.

The question about Australia’s relations with China should perhaps be put in another way. Given China’s emergence as a world economic power on which Australia will for the foreseeable future be dependent for its own continued economic well-being and growth, should we be satisfied with the current state of our relationship with China? How is this relationship constituted? And on what grounds are we to judge how well it is going? Here I comment on two strands of the relationship: the press, and student movements between Australia and China, with some observations on a related issue: Asia literacy in Australia.

Both these strands are bound up with the economic relationship between the two countries. Clearly trade is the sine qua non of Australia-PRC relations, pre-dating diplomatic relations by many years. From the perspective of the trade relationship, we can see that China is already expanding well beyond its own frontiers, establishing a presence in Australia, as in many other countries, through investment, diplomacy and strength of numbers. In a globalizing world, it is valid to view this expansionism as normatively benign, though we are at an early stage still of what is likely to be an extended historical process.

Some of China’s expansion is what Joshua Kurlantzick has called a “charm offensive” - propaganda, aid, cultural activities, people to people relations. Confucius Institutes, for instance, are regarded as a major instance of the exercise of soft power and not infrequently attract negative reporting.

There are no doubt good reasons for negative reporting of some aspects of Australia’s engagement with China, but the general tone of press reports also suggests there’s actually something a little bit awry in this engagement, or at least in local perceptions of it.

Australia has some excellent China journalists, including The Australian’s Rowan Callick and Fairfax’s John Garnaut. It seems to me, however, that newspaper commentary from within Australia is often slightly off-target, gets it just a bit wrong. Crikey.com did a good job exposing this in The Australian’s reporting of Helen Liu’s alleged contacts with the Chinese military. Among the pieces of evidence The Australian offered was (and I quote from Crikey): “Ms Liu — or Madame Liu, as News Ltd publications inexplicably call her — is from Shandong, and ‘Shandong is famous as a source of senior soldiers in China’.” Added Crikey: “Lucky she’s not from Szechuan, famous for its ducks.”

I’m waiting now for Crikey to do a job on reportage of our Chinese-speaking Prime Minister, or, (to paraphrase Crikey,) “our mandarin-speaking Prime Minister as the Australian press inexplicably terms him.” In real life, I don’t know anyone who speaks “mandarin”, especially not “fluent mandarin”, which sounds too oily for words.

Why don’t journalists just say he speaks Chinese? Is it newspaper policy? Is it because he looks like a “mandarin”? Or are they really confused as to what Chinese is? Do they think mandarin is like Javanese, an elite minority language? Do they wish, perhaps, to avoid offending the Cantonese? Whatever the case, it is often reads like a sneer.

In The Australian this week, Luke Slattery made a typically back-handed reference when he wrote: “All power to Kevin Rudd for his mastery of Mandarin, but he has been the beneficiary of untold hours of taxpayer-funded tuition.” This damning with faint praise combined with a thinly-veiled resentment encapsulates a minor theme in the Australian press during the Rudd ascendancy.

I am picking here just on minor symptoms of a lack of understanding, or more correctly lack of empathy with things Chinese, which if apparent in the press is certain to be a feature of society more broadly. To anticipate a later point, it seems unlikely to me that a journalist who had studied Chinese would have produced reports such as these.

Although China has been getting a bit of a bad press here, Australia has a nice image in China. For whatever reason, when you say you’re Australian, people in China tend to say what a beautiful country it is, and how clean the air is. This “clean air” is symptomatic of what draws Chinese to Australia – often defined as life-style (as in, “students who chose Australia first as their overseas destination are making a life-style choice”). So let me turn to another important aspect of our relationship with China: education.

Australia is one of the top overseas education markets for Chinese students, rivalling the USA and the UK, with around 40,000 university students at the present time and around 100,000 students counting all sectors. The returned students, and indeed the ones who don’t return, those who gain permanent residence, provide the foundations of day-to-day Australia-China relations. They’re the ones who develop import-export businesses, who get jobs in institutions dealing with both countries, and who have a vested interest in developing and maintaining bilateral ties at every level. We underestimate their importance at our cost. Australian citizen Shi Zhengrong is the stand-out illustration here: Ph.D. from UNSW, an Australian citizen, but engaged in exporting solar technology to Australia from China rather than vice versa.

What is the experience of Chinese students here? By and large, they seem to have a hard time: they’re young, they struggle with the language, and the academic demands are unusually challenging. The returned students, however, think well of Australia. Judging by websites and alumni groups, the hard times fade into the past, leaving them with fond memories. They tend to like the Australian laobaixing, the common people, whom they find good-tempered and generous.

Importantly, Australia provides them experiences that they take home. Let me give just one example from the internet, a 2005 blog by someone from the Judicatory Bureau of Xiamen studying at the School of Management at the ANU. He began his report with a paragraph on the environment in daily life: public toilets, separation of garbage, paper recycling, and water conservation. He went on to talk about museums, noting they were mostly free entry (China has now gone down that path), and that without exception they all had programs directed at children. A third topic was public transport, which he noted had a couple of characteristics: the buses were always on time, they had an efficient swipe-card system, and they were never over-crowded. (We can tell he wasn’t living in Melbourne.) My point here is that this returned student came from the government sector in Xiamen, and was taking back not only impressions but models of how things operated here. He was a significant agent of cultural transfer.

This is all heartening, and a sign that Australia is doing some things well by being itself.

But blithely being ourselves can have opportunity costs. Chinese students, and more broadly Chinese institutions, seems to have little knowledge Australian science, technology and medical research. I think this must be because relatively little knowledge of Australia is available in Chinese. Our universities, which have so many Chinese students, rarely have Chinese web-sites. We may ask whether this matters, since so many students come anyway – but the information on which they base their choices is often happenstance, poorly understood, and conveyed along the grape-vine via Chinese blogs rather than directly. Parents cannot read the English-language sites of Australian schools and universities, and very often senior officials and university personnel cannot read them either – or at least they can’t do so quickly and efficiently.

At Australian functions I have attended in China, the major address to participants is usually translated into Chinese, but most other aspects of the presentation – brochures, multi-media, question and answer sessions – are in English. And these presentations are aimed at interesting Chinese individuals and institutions in Australia! I have asked myself how Australians would respond to a comparable Chinese-language presentation? Imagine the meaninglessness of a Chinese-language presentation to you if you don’t speak Chinese and you’ll get the picture.

All this points to a lack of depth in language capacity in the Australian workforce and brings me to the “idea” part of this presentation. China is a work in progress, as Professor Wang Gungwu suggested in his keynote speech on Thursday, and it takes an effort to keep up with it. During the Howard years, Australia lost ground in this respect. A few days ago on ABC Radio, Griffith University’s Michael Wesley, incoming director of the Lowy Institute, spoke about Australia being left behind in Asian language acquisition. And indeed, a decade ago, the UK was noticeably weak in Chinese studies while in recent years it has been pouring resources into this area. In the USA, prior to the onset of the global financial crisis, every tiny college was advertising for lecturers in Chinese studies. American students are still pouring into China for language training. Australian students merely trickle.

In the years that the UK was beginning to invest strongly in Chinese studies, the Howard government put an end to the funding of Asian language teaching introduced under Paul Keating, and deprived public universities of support to a point where Arts faculties – which house language and areas studies subjects – have been struggling to survive.

Language learning is in a state of on-going crisis. The Australian Academy of the Humanities has just released a report showing that between 90 and 95 per cent% of university students take no foreign language as a subject.

Between 2005 and 2007 the teaching of Asian languages declined nationally, beginners’ Indonesian by 41.3 per cent. Indonesian language teaching used to be the pride of the country, and Indonesian studies one of Australia’s great, recognised strengths internationally. Is Indonesia going to go away?

Earlier this year, Victoria University announced not the expansion but the closure of its Chinese teaching program. At Melbourne, indeed in the very building where this Festival of Ideas is being held, staff numbers in Asian Studies have been reduced to almost half of what they were two years ago. Important languages such as Indonesian and Arabic are attracting too few students to “pay their way” according to funding formulae.

Where are the policies, the recruitment strategies, the funds, the vision, the ambition for our country to take a forward role in our region, to talk the Asian talk?

In fact, worry about underperformance in Asian languages and studies is currentl;y evident in Australia. Michael Wesley’s comments, referred to above, were made in the context of a report issued by Griffith University’s Asia Institute, calling for an 11.3 billion dollar project to help Australia make up for the lost ground Asian languages acquisition. A few weeks ago The Australian reported a new alliance of entrepreneurs formed to campaign for Asian literacy.

Haven’t we heard all this before somewhere? Indeed we have. Indeed we have.

I am reminded of a speech by President Hu Jintao in December last year, when he urged party members and officials not to waver, not to take it easy, and bu zheteng. This last term, which made the audience laugh because of its informality, left translators stumped. What’s a neat English phrase to translate a term meaning ‘stay focused on the goal and don’t keep vainly trying out new things‘?

In the context of Australia-China relations, bu zheteng is a handy word. For decades now, Australians have been rediscovering the importance of Asia and coming up with a bright idea: learn Asian languages and learn about Asian societies. It’s a good idea. Let’s keep it. Let’s apply it. Let’s bu zheteng.