China Studies booms across world since 2000s
Overseas Chinese Studies Book Series published over the past three decades Photo: FILE
Chen Su, East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of California, and Wang Chengzhi, Chinese Studies Librarian from C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University, researched English-language journals overseas concerning China Studies based on Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. As of 2009, the directory included 125 China Studies journals, 54 of which were added between 2000 and 2009, accounting for roughly 49 percent of new journals about Asian studies during the same period.
The two scholars also included findings from the Global Online Bibliographic Information (GOBI) database, which listed 2,710 monographs about Chinese Studies. The figure is 1.46 times of those on Japanese studies and 7.53 times of those on Korean studies. These figures indicate a real boom in China Studies internationally, which can be interpreted by four trends.
Trends
First, the production of China-related knowledge is becoming increasingly popular across the globe. Initially, China and its neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam were engaged in Chinese Studies. After the Jesuits came to China at the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), knowledge production about China took place in a few European and American countries, namely France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, the Netherlands and Sweden.
After the reform and opening up, particularly during the 21st century, South Africa, Brazil, Egypt, Kazakhstan and other countries in high numbers have successively established centers for China Studies. The discipline began to flourish outside the Western world.
In 2014, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism established the Visiting Program for Young Sinologists. As of 2019, the program had attracted 551 young sinologists from 103 countries who have reached remarkable academic achievements and gained social influence in the field of China Studies. There is no doubt that countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and Russia remain the mainstay of overseas China Studies. The field, however, has expanded its scope beyond these countries, moving towards a form of globalized study.
A second trend which is shaping the field, is that ethnic Chinese scholars have become a supportive force for overseas Chinese Studies. Around the turn of the 20th century, Chinese scholars such as Ge Kunhua(1838-1882) and Mei Guangdi(1890-1945) taught Chinese and engaged in Sinology in European and American universities, but these scholars represented a tiny number of cases.
Since the 21st century, universities in Western countries have been vying to hire cohorts of ethnically Chinese scholars with Chinese cultural backgrounds and doctorates in Sinology, especially those from the Chinese mainland. Yale University professor Kang-i Sun Chang said that the structure of the East Asian departments in American universities has undergone enormous changes over the past decade. The proportion of ethnic Chinese professors is increasing, so is their discourse.
The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature has 17 authors, of which eight are ethnic Chinese Sinologists. In my recent search of the Cambridge Books Online database using “China” as a keyword, I found out that Cambridge University Press had published 288 works on China Studies since 2015. After name checks, 64 books were written by scholars with Chinese ethnic and cultural backgrounds, another 11 books by multiple authors included at least one ethnic Chinese scholar. The results reflect a new trend where overseas Chinese Studies have begun to rely on scholars from Asian countries.
A third trend is that the field of overseas China Studies now has a strong focus on contemporary China. Since World War II, the research emphasis has shifted from traditional China to contemporary China. After the 21st century, studies of traditional China dramatically declined while studies of contemporary China began to take the center stage. In recent years, contemporary Chinese practice elevates as a crucial issue in overseas China Studies.
In 2012, after President Xi Jinping proposed and explained the Chinese dream, the term became a hot topic in international media and academic circles. In 2013, the “Belt and Road” initiative, after being put forward and implemented, turned into a buzzword in overseas China Studies. Yuan Luxia and Wang Dan from China Foreign Language Publishing Administration searched “One Belt, One Road” “Silk Road” “Maritime Silk Road” as keywords on the Amazon website in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and other languages, and found out that more than 900 “Belt and Road” themed books were published between 2013 and 2017. China’s influence on the world has never been more comprehensive and profound than it is today, which explains why contemporary Chinese practice is increasingly popular in Overseas Chinese Studies in recent years.
The fourth and final trend has to do with disciplinarity, which is to say China Studies has become pertinent to a wide range of disciplines. For a long time, Chinese Studies were not applied to reality. The study of China represented intellectual pursuits of scholars who built upon their interests in heterogeneous cultures. Therefore, the field was isolated from modern disciplines for a long time. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, especially the rise of the Cold War, area studies took form, aiming at understanding China, especially contemporary China, thoroughly. In the context of globalization and Chinese development, a scholar dedicated to humanistic research probably cannot propose convincing theories if his or her theoretical framework fails to accommodate or explain the Chinese experience.
As a result, issues and phenomena in China have become hot topics for overseas academia. Scholars turned their attention from area studies to disciplinary studies. Xu Hong, head of the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted a quantitative analysis of 30 American universities’ 1,336 dissertations concerning China Studies, produced between 2004 and 2009. The results showed that these dissertations fell into 111 disciplines, most of which were humanities and social sciences, but other disciplines also took part, such as nursing, public health, medicine, environment, engineering, geology and geography.
Today, most overseas scholars in this field study Chinese topics within their disciplines. Lately, cross-disciplinary studies have become a label for overseas China Studies. Due to the involvement of the social sciences, the field of overseas China Studies can adopt numerous emerging methodologies.
Shortcomings
It is important to note that overseas Chinese Studies are essentially foreign studies because a scholar’s problem awareness, research routes and methods intimately relate to the academic context, political background and standpoints of the country where they live. Hence, these scholars’ research on China can be flawed.
In his 2020 thesis, Young-tsu Wong, a professor of Asian History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University listed the top six deficiencies that haunt overseas research on Chinese history, based on case studies. These deficiencies were namely: outrageous misreading, severe misinterpretation, absurd conceptual distortion, unconscious disparity, biographies with false accounts of facts, and distortion of historical facts with concealed intentions. Fundamentally speaking, these problems come from authors’ inability to put aside their existing consciousness, perspectives and standpoints, and their surface-level understanding of Chinese society and culture.
In my view, the biggest problem is that overseas China Studies lack an awareness of the larger whole. China is not only a great civilization but also a large country undergoing rapid development and transformation. Facing such a complex country, China Studies needs to adopt an integrated view. If not, cases of bias, misunderstanding and even distortion will be inevitable.
As China Studies are wedded to disciplines, there is also growing knowledge fragmentation. Indeed, this trend has enormously broadened and deepened academic understanding of China’s past and present. However, the excessive practice of this trend has increasingly restricted China Studies, preventing those in the field from getting a more comprehensive and precise picture of China. As early as the 1960s, Frederick W. Mote put forward the case for the integrity of Sinology, holding that “its function is indispensable, for only the larger vision can sustain the integrating capacity of the mind.” It is quite tough to obtain this form of integrity, but it is essential to deepen China Studies and comprehend the country in an accurate and comprehensive way.
Wu Yuanyuan is a professor from the Research Center for Overseas China Studies at East China Normal University.
Edited by MA YUHONG