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A woman in a face mask walks through a shop decorated for the Lunar New Year in Bangkok on January 24. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Opinion
by Peter T. C. Chang
Opinion
by Peter T. C. Chang

How Southeast Asia’s Chinese diaspora could play a leading role in defusing Sino-US rivalry

  • China has woken up to its historical failure to shape how the world sees it. In the battle to influence global opinion, amid the US-China trade war, the Chinese community in Southeast Asia can help bridge the gap between East and West
The row over The Wall Street Journal’sSick Man of Asia” headline was the latest in what Beijing has bemoaned as the West’s sustained smearing of China’s character. But the long Chinese history of indifference towards the outside world is partly to blame for these mischaracterisations.
With the exception of Admiral Zheng He’s short-lived maritime expeditions during the Ming dynasty, imperial China rarely ventured beyond its borders. The Middle Kingdom, however, was not devoid of foreign contact. Many from the West were drawn to the East; these sojourners, including the fabled Marco Polo, returned home bearing tales of a vibrant yet quaint civilisation.

The world outside came to know ancient China through stories penned by foreigners. Imperial China had scant interest in and made little effort to explain itself to the world.

This changed in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s historic epiphany: China could no longer afford to ignore the world. That monumental awakening turned an erstwhile reclusive, detached civilisation into an engaged, globetrotting power. And the Chinese at once encountered not merely an unfamiliar world but one with a cynical perception of China.

A history of indifference has finally caught up with the Chinese: failure to make themselves understood has resulted in a portrait, as painted by others, that is at best misinformed, if not prejudicial.

To rectify this, Beijing has launched a concerted soft-power campaign. But centuries of neglect and lack of experience in inter-civilisational engagement has made this an uphill task. Confucianism, for instance, remains a parochial Han-centric tradition.

In contrast, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have evolved into multi-ethnic, multilinguistic world religions. Until recently, mastery of the Chinese language was the sole way to access the Analects of Confucius.

China’s soft-power play: what will it take to get it just right?

Herein lies a key hurdle in Beijing’s outreach. If command of the Chinese language is required, the Sinic civilisation will remain impalpable to many. Rightly, China is adopting multilingualism, especially English, the lingua franca of the day.

But weak command of English continues to hamper Beijing’s effort to steer international discourse. In the battle to shape global opinion, China faces one major handicap: it has to compete with arch-rival US in the latter’s native tongue.

And the war to gain control of the world’s narrative is heating up. Last month, Washington imposed new restrictions on Chinese state media outlets in the US. Beijing retaliated by expelling the staff of three major US newspapers. Some of the ousted journalists were Chinese Americans, which brings us to a lead character in the “China and the world” story – overseas Chinese.
While imperial China chose to stay walled in, the Chinese people were setting sail and settling in faraway lands. Over time, these immigrants cultivated a multilingual, multireligious way of life and acquired a distinctive hyphenated Chinese voice that started to resonate with the rest of the world.

In the US, one apt example is the Harvard University-based Confucian philosopher, Tu Weiming. A pioneer in inter-civilisational dialogue, Tu’s bilingual scholarship was crucial in making an erstwhile obscure Confucianism accessible to the English-speaking world.

More broadly and importantly, the Chinese-American community, in synthesising two distinct civilisational sources, began to function as a cultural conduit between the Confucian East and the Christian West.

Why are there so few Asian-Americans in the US news media?

But with Sino-US rivalry spiralling into deeper hostility, China-related collaboration across US campuses has come under heightened scrutiny: the much-maligned Confucius Institute project was one early casualty. As fear of a return of McCarthyism spreads, any mediation efforts by Chinese-Americans now risks the suspicion of “abetting the enemy”.
Moreover, for some, the need to act as an intermediary is made redundant by their utter disdain of the Communist Party regime. Indeed, some of the most vocal critics of China today are Americans of Chinese descent.
A Chinese dragon makes its way down a street in New York’s Chinatown during a Lunar New Year’s parade in the 1970s. While imperial China remained inward looking, Chinese people settled in different parts of the world and have acquired a distinctive hyphenated Chinese voice. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In Southeast Asia, China’s rise, though stirring some concerns, is still generally perceived as a positive development. Here, members of the local Chinese community are able to maintain their long-standing role as intermediaries, bringing together their home country with their ancestral homeland.

In fact, some Western-educated Southeast Asians had a wider role: bridging the East-West divide. Wang Gungwu, a contemporary of Tu Weiming, is one such scholar. Wang’s groundbreaking research on the Chinese migration story, and his lucid English prose, opened another window through which the West could discern the East.
But unlike Tu, Wang, based at the National University of Singapore, is less affected by, and has greater latitude to objectively assess, the brewing China-US tension. To be sure, the Southeast Asian states are facing, but have thus far resisted, increasing geopolitical pressures to take sides.
Professor Wang Gungwu’s groundbreaking research on the Chinese migration story, and his lucid English prose, opened another window through which the West could discern the East. Photo: SCMP

Imperial China did not bother to tell China’s story to the world and modern China is still struggling to meet President Xi Jinping’s call to do so. It was the overseas Chinese who first acquired the acumen for this and who are now providing an alternative Chinese voice, “neither native nor foreign”, connecting China with the wider world.

Beijing had long recognised the Chinese diaspora’s historic role, and has co-opted returnees, such as Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University, to counter Western disinformation with an “authorised version” of the China story.

The Chinese state co-option marks a step up in an intensifying media war with the West. And overseas Chinese caught in the crossfire are grappling to stay above the fray. Understandably, Chinese Americans must now, more than ever, affirm their patriotism, sadly at considerable expense to their intermediary efforts.

Chinese-Americans urged to fight back to dispel cloud of suspicion in US

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Asean neutrality has secured some space for mediation. Indeed, the Chinese in Southeast Asia are strategically located, geographically and geopolitically, to bridge the East-West gap.
If members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations continue to remain impartial, they can play a mitigating role in the Sino-US rivalry. They can use their hyphenated overseas Chinese voice to help turn the page from the prevailing “Thucydides Trap” and “clash of civilisations” narrative to one of “common humanity and harmonious coexistence”.

Peter T.C. Chang is a senior lecturer at the Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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