Rethinking "Chinese Culture"
The Task for Chinese Humanities

By Stephen Owen

Let us begin by dispelling a myth: there never was a single thing called "Chinese culture," in the way we often use the term. There never was a single body of values, beliefs, and practices to be characterized, as internally coherent and consistent through time, essentially native, and impervious to outside influence. Such a notion of "Chinese culture" is a modern construction, forged in revolution and articulated against a range of other possibilities, most notably an equally recent construction called "Western culture." Sentences of the form that begin women Zhongguo ren-saying "we Chinese" have this belief or that practice (with the unstated assumption that it has always been so)-arose out of the cultural conflict with Europe and America.

The idea of "traditional" Chinese culture was a modern necessity, either to serve as an adversary to be rejected in modernization or as a nostalgic utopia forever lost. People believe in its existence as a way of thinking about themselves-what, after all, would "modernity" mean without the possibility of a "pre-modern" world? Even our term "post-modern" reinscribes the centrality of the modern, which in turn depends on some imagined unity of the past, a past which is now over for good.

We might more accurately use the term "Chinese culture" in a looser way, as a broad term to encompass the changing aggregate of cultural systems within historical China. This historical family of culture was indeed different from that of Europe and, later, of its diaspora. But when we give such provisional names of convenience to "complex systems," we cannot proceed to simple definitions or single characterizations ("The Chinese believed X"). I recall once at a conference hearing a speaker explain that "Chinese women" in the Ming and Qing had bound feet and could not go out in public; even for shopping they had to send their servants. The audience blithely accepted this. No one pointed out that those servants were also "Chinese women," but (like the vast majority of Chinese women at the time) without bound feet. A harsh practice that originally marked a particular class and ethnicity in a limited historical period was easily transformed into one of the attributes of "pre-modern Chinese culture."

Pre-modern China was a constantly changing field of contention, made up of different groups with different values. Members of each group, including the intellectual elite, could hold profoundly opposed values in different situations. The vocal communitarian might, on a different day, strongly affirm the right of the individual to follow his private whims. Each of these opposing values had a long history. And "Chinese culture," in the loose sense, is great precisely because of its complex diversity. "Chinese culture" and the "pre-modern" are fictive constructs that we seem to need, and I will use the words here, though knowing that they are illusions of unity created by distance.

I will let others speak at length on contemporary Chinese culture; at present, it is a vigorous hybrid that is increasingly compelled to define itself within an international context. In recent decades, Chinese film-makers, poets, and novelists have made some remarkable achivements; and there is every indication that those achievements will continue. I hope, then, it will not be seem contradictory if I also suggest that in the long run, contemporary Chinese culture is not an interesting subject in its own right. Transnational forces are gradually transforming it and all other national cultures into the equivalent of brand names. Individual brands are themselves of less interest than the overall system of brands and the ways in which they establish identity in relation to one another. Globalization is homogenization, with historical cultures reified and commodified to distinguish the "local" or the "brand" within the overall system. This is not a tragedy; there are losses, and there are also significant gains; but whether we like it or not, it is a fact.

To represent a local national culture within the global system is to serve as a broker or advocate in the transnational marketplace. It is to clamor for attention to one's own local product. Each country and region claims its singular importance-and East Asia has a very strong claim-but the cultural critic's attention should be properly directed to the transnational mechanisms by which importance is recognized and validated, allowed to dominate fashion for a few years, and then to be replaced by a new claimant. We should look to the system of prizes, translations, publication and distribution, and to the American university, which rewards excellence in national cultures with visits, lectures, and teaching positions. Although the PRC (which still produces true exiles) remains a partial exception, the literature of international commuting has replaced the literature of exilic diaspora as the contemporary paradigm. The jumbo jet and soon the Internet should shake us out of dead categories of thinking about nationality.

Transnational culture, which is American in form if not necessarily in location, is itself a hybrid culture-or perhaps it is better to abandon the genteel and popular plant metaphor and happily embrace the epithet that the Nazis used with contempt: ours is a "mongrel" culture and proper for an ethnically mongrel people. On one level, this culture is driven by economic and technological forces that overwhelm the intention of nations, much less of individuals. The French may attempt by legislation to prohibit English words (ironically, often Anglo-Norman words coming home) from infecting their national purity, but the battle is already lost. The nature of individual empowerment in the face of such forces is embodied in the increasing use of the computer-programming metaphor, "to tweak."

Although it appears on the surface to be purely contemporary and technological, this culture has American roots that depend on stories it tells about its past-and in this, it is like all cultures. Indeed, I think a strong argument could be made that the US is the most "traditionalist" of major powers, with arguments about liberty of speech and action, openness to immigration, or foreign policy still carried on by appeals to its eighteenth-century founding principles.

In large measure, however, the definition of the American past is changing and still up for grabs. There was a time not so long ago when the terms "New World" and "Old World" were commonly used in American cultural discourse. This, of course, was an America that understood itself in opposition to Europe. You will note that these terms are almost never used now. Instead, America often describes itself as representing that wondrously artificial construct called "Western culture."

The forging or forgery of the strange entity called "Western culture" was accomplished in no small measure in opposition to another imagined unity in which, mercifully, no one still believes-the "Oriental" or "non-Western" culture. (Africa, for all its undeniable importance, was omitted from this East-West axis of definition.) "Western culture" is as recent in origin as the idea of a unified "Chinese culture" that I mentioned earlier. Not too long ago, a work like Dante's "Divine Comedy" was considered too disgustingly Catholic to be proper reading by any but the daring intellectual few. Conservative cultural critics in the US now consider it part of an immutable canon of classics that they have decided is the very basis of our civilization.

In the American "culture wars" of the past decade, the most shocking blindness on the part of the Eurocentric upholders of "tradition" is the historical shallowness of their knowledge, how very recent their configuration of "tradition" is. European and "Western" culture have always been unstable, hybridizing. A mere four centuries ago-I tend to think on a Chinese historical scale-Irish peasants were considered barely human savages with no claim at all on "European culture." A mere seventy years ago they were considered generally unfit to be admitted to Harvard. Their descendants sit in American classrooms and are told that "Western culture" (now with some Irish folklore and poetry added) is their very own heritage.

"American culture" is not "European culture" or "Western culture"; it is still changing and growing. On this continent, we have embraced Afro-American culture as part of our national past. And there is no reason why we should not also make Chinese culture and its texts part of our heritage. The enterprise seems faintly quixotic now-but it is certainly no stranger than American students reading Dante without thinking of the opposition between Protestant and Catholic or white students studying jazz. It is not at all unlikely that a century in the future the descendant of that Irish-American student will also have a Chinese grandfather. What constitutes "our culture" is still growing.

This is the enterprise, and there is a certain compensatory fairness to it. As transnational American culture increasingly draws other national cultures into the international structures that we control, the very definition of "American" culture itself is being transformed from below.

For America, this is a historical moment like the Renaissance, when the world of Greek learning was added to the medieval Italian and Latin cultural sphere to produce a new and broader sense of what constituted "our culture." In America, the Norton anthologies play a very important role in defining the legacy of literary culture, used in advanced high school courses, colleges, and universities everywhere. The old edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, used until just a few years ago, contained nothing outside of European and American literature except for selections from the Bible. In a very real sense that constituted an earlier sense of the American cultural "world"-"Old World" and "New World"-represented by the title "World Masterpieces." The new expanded edition contains extensive selections from East Asian literature, Indian literature, Islamic literature, African literature, and even a selection of Native American literature, both pre-Columbian and oral. As happened in the Renaissance, the horizons of "our world" have suddenly grown. The depth of the transformation over just a few decades is remarkable: when the first edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces appeared in 1956, there was no discomfort with using such a title for an anthology that was entirely made up of European and American literature. When I joined the project for the revised, expanded edition in 1989, the title was an acute embarrassment.

The process of "growing American culture" is just beginning. The task for scholars of Chinese humanities in the US is not-as I so often read in applications-to "teach Americans about China's cultural heritage." Rather the task is to include the Chinese cultural heritage within a larger sense of America's cultural heritage. Today's America is not just a product of the European and African diasporas; it is also a product of the East Asian diaspora. This is another home of the Chinese people and of other East Asians who also have a historical share in China's cultural and literary past. It will be more so. And left to its own workings in a free society, human desire will guarantee that, by the twenty-second century, the biological fusion of ethnicities will keep pace with their imaginative fusion; and there will be no artifice in linking Du Fu, Dante, and Yeats as "our cultural heritage."

Just as scholars of contemporary culture should give up nationality as the adequate boundary of their studies, so teachers of pre-modern Chinese humanities must give up their protected niches of exoticism. The most common impression is that "sinology, " by which most speakers simply mean a philological approach to Chinese texts, dominates the teaching of Chinese literature. "Philology" is not a dirty word-it simply means a critical stance towards historical language. And if we think back to the Renaissance and Reformation-two periods in European history when culture was changed by a renewed interest in old texts-philology went hand in hand with intellectual transformation. But philology in itself cannot be seen as a substitute for humanistic studies.

If we take a broad view of the teaching of Chinese humanities in this country, antiquarian philology is far less common than the recycling of modern Chinese high-school commonplaces about "traditional Chinese culture." The post-May Fourth construction of "traditional Chinese culture" and its ossification in textbooks that form the basis of school curricula in the PRC and Taiwan (in this, the two are remarkably similar) is an interesting story in its own right.

This ossified icon of "tradition" serves a real (if increasingly moribund) function in China and Taiwan; transferred to the American university, it is hollow and banal.

The task for the scholar and teacher of the pre-modern Chinese humanities, both in China and in the US, is to reexamine and rethink the old texts, to reinvent "tradition" so that it links past and present. This is not to say that we should force the texts to conform to the commonplace values of the present, but rather to find the lines of thought that seem to grow out of them naturally, which still touch the present. Both in the US and in China and Taiwan, these texts are often taught and read because they "represent" the Chinese tradition (in the same way that contemporary texts are valued as "representing" contemporary China). Such an attitude traps them in the transnational marketplace of locales. This must change if these texts are to become part of our common culture.

We may be aware that Don Quixote comes from Golden Age Spain, and we may study Golden Age Spain as a necessary context for reading Don Quixote, but we do not read Don Quixote because it "represents" Golden Age Spain. The book has gone beyond nationality; it belongs to everyone; it has entered our vocabulary, even as I used the word "quixotic" earlier. Don Quixote has achieved this in multiple translations in many languages. The purist may moan at how much is lost in translation, but the book's resilience mocks such distress.

We may work toward the same with the books of the Chinese tradition. They must cease to be the special "possession" of China if they are to survive in a transnational world. We may respect the historical specificity of the origins of those books and still understand them as belonging to everyone, as Don Quixote does.

The goal is a subtle but essential inversion of attitude: we should learn about China (or learn the language) in order to better read the book, rather than reading the book to learn about China (that is, because it "represents" China). When and if that moment comes, Chinese culture will cease to be a mere petitioner for attention from the margins and will become itself a constituent part of transnational culture.