Examine the key points of the readings. Provide your personal experience/interest/observation to connect to and respond to those key points.

Write a short response to the assigned readings, usually between 250 and 400 words. In response papers, you should highlight and critically examine the key points of the readings. Provide your personal experience/interest/observation to connect to and respond to those key points. Use Chicago style when you cite works. Must be original, do not use chatgpt

Requirements: between 250-400 words.

Chapter Title: The Culture of Cultures Book Title: China in the World Book Subtitle: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization Book Author(s): Jennifer Hubbert Published by: University of Hawai’i Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7r427x.5JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsUniversity of Hawai’i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to China in the WorldThis content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

24CHAPTER 2The Culture of CulturesIn September 2014, at Hanban’s first global Confucius Institute Day and in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the CI pro-gram, the vice president of China’s State Council read aloud a letter from President Xi Jinping expressing Xi’s appreciation for the CIs’ “tireless efforts for world peace and international cooperation” and central role in disseminating cultural knowledge about China throughout the world (cited in Ding 2014).1 According to Xinhua News, more than four hundred school principals, university deans, and various agencies and institutions from more than one hundred countries around the world had also sent congratulatory letters in honor of the day.2 In contrast to this celebration of what Hanban (2014, 2) labeled the “solidarity and influence of the Confucius Institute big family,” just a day earlier, on the other side of the world, the University of Chicago had announced that it was terminating its agreement with Hanban and closing the Confucius Institute located on its campus. This followed a petition signed earlier in the year by more than one hun-dred faculty members objecting to the “political constraints on free speech and belief” they believed to be occurring in the CI Chinese language class-room (Leavenworth 2014).3 US news reporting on the decision in Chicago referred to the reading of Xi’s letter at the Beijing event and bolstered the perception of China’s political repression by noting that foreign reporters had not been invited or permitted to attend the celebration (Leavenworth 2014).The coincidence and cross-referencing of these two events reinforce a global experience in which both the production and consumption of power function within the realm and language of culture.4 Whereas President Xi invoked Chinese culture as an essential national resource, within the US This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 25context, that same Chinese culture, in the configuration of foreign language programs, was viewed as a threat to liberal education.5 Both the events also revealed how one’s relationship to this culture emerged as a form of empowerment, in one case as a potential means of directing global politics and in the other as a potential means of promoting moral authority.6 And deploying culture in the interest of national power, sovereignty, and moral authority is indeed the objective of soft power. Yet, perhaps because Chinese officials have been so forthright about efforts to instrumentalize culture as a form of patriotic ritual and render it profitable to the production of power, few studies of China’s soft power engagements have taken seriously the type of culture CIs promote or the role it plays in policy formation, imple-mentation, and outcomes, instead more commonly dismissing it as simply poorly disguised propaganda to increase China’s national power.7 This chapter embraces these interstices, scrutinizing the implications of the CI use and configuration of culture for understanding China’s perceptions of its place in the world. Precisely because the CIs have adopted culture as a central tool in the production of soft power, understanding what counts as culture and why it is defined as such, how the government deploys it as an instrument of state power, and why policy targets or representatives of the state them-selves may or may not challenge the meanings ascribed to it provides new insight into how China assesses its assets and shortcomings and its position in global hierarchies of power.Any argument about culture confronts enduring debates over its definition and capaciousness. While popular vernacular conceptions of cul-ture frequently configure it as a dichotomy of “popular” culture and “high” culture—current trends versus opera, for example—anthropological con-ceptions offer a more expansive understanding of culture that, despite skep-ticism over its potential to reify human practice and fall prey to cultural determinism, includes these material manifestations but also that “complex whole” (Tylor [1871] 1920, 1), of tangled, messy, and inconsistent human behaviors, philosophies, meanings, and symbolic systems.8 Among the most important of these symbolic systems, many anthropologists would argue, is that of language, clearly a prominently positioned form of culture in the Confucius Institutes. Language as a form of cultural power is explored at greater length in chapter 3. Also left to later chapters are the central ways in which the cultural behaviors, philosophies, meanings, and symbolic systems of policy targets run roughshod over China’s attempts to use culture to the end of national power and sovereignty. This chapter addresses “official” CI This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

26 Chapter 2culture—what I have come to call patriotic state culture and is more simply often referred to in CI materials and conversations as “traditional” culture—that complex and sometimes paradoxical fusion of Confucian thought, elite material culture, and popular folk art that the language programs and the CCP have advocated as representative of China’s contemporary signifi-cance. The chapter begins with a discussion of the official state rejection of Maoist forms of revolutionary culture through the embrace of traditional forms of cultural belonging and examines how they are constituted in recent soft power projects such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo. It then explores how the CIs’ invocation of Confucius, specifically, as a cultural model is rooted in the production of national identity and China’s rise to power. Throughout, the chapter interrogates why this particular amalgamation of ideals and practices has arisen as a politically sponsored paean to national value, who benefits from it, and what it discounts and conceals through its production.Culture as a Patriotic State RitualThe salience of culture in China’s soft power engagements reflects the specific historical context of China’s own state-society relations, in which the state has long invoked culture as central to the practices and values of ruling. During the imperial era, for instance, citizens seeking positions in the government sat for an arduous exam that was based upon the Confucian classics and com-mentary on this oeuvre, and the comprehensiveness and ferocity with which Mao Zedong exploited culture as a mechanism of power remain legendary. Despite the various post-Mao administrations’ more recent rejection of both the “feudalism” of the imperial era and the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolu-tion, they, too, have continued to deploy Chinese culture as a form of patriotic ritual. If anything, the PRC president from 2002 to 2012, Hu Jintao, declared, “Culture has become a more and more important source of national cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength,” making it therefore incumbent upon China, he argued, to “enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country to better guarantee the people’s basic cultural rights and interests” (Hu 2007).What Counts as CultureWhile space precludes an extended discussion of the Maoist era’s manipulation and deployment of culture in the interest of state politics, the maneuverings remain central to an understanding of similar operations in the contemporary This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 27era, for that culture Mao sought to destroy is precisely what current admin-istrations have sought to elevate seemingly to the level of state religion.9 Mao set the stage for his cultural policy early in his rise to power in a 1942 series of talks in Yan’an, a city in north-central China controlled by com-munist forces prior to their gaining hegemony over the remainder of geopo-litical China in 1949. Codifying the role of culture in concrete and visual terms, Mao proclaimed, “In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people, there are various fronts, among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy . . . the army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy” (Mao 1967, 69). Mao declared that art and literature were to “serve the people” through reflecting the common citizens’ lived experi-ences and inspiring them to foment revolution and promote socialism.10 This policy regarding appropriate art and literature was part of a broader state strategy of cultural control that, at its most dogmatic and violent dur-ing the Cultural Revolution, promulgated the destruction of the “four olds”: old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture (including ideologies, practices, and material culture deemed “Confucian”). While this movement prompted some relatively benign reforms, such as replacing existing store and street names with more revolutionary ones, it also inspired the rampant destruction of classical Chinese temples, libraries, artworks, furniture, and many other “old” objects and edifices to the end of reformulating Chinese culture to align more closely with communist ideology.11Even though political reformers abandoned many of Mao’s more radi-cal policies after his death, much of Mao’s notion of the intended role and importance of culture as an instrument of governance and national identity continues to flourish. As Liu Kang (2012) has noted, this has especially been the case since the technocratic administrations of the immediate post-Mao era gave way to a series of leaders determined to augment cultural production by increasing educational and research funds as a strategy for wielding and augmenting power. Indeed, President Xi, in language decidedly and perhaps somewhat unnervingly reminiscent of Mao’s Yan’an talks, has recently proclaimed a “Confidence Doctrine,” declaring that “confidence in our culture” is as essential to the political well-being of the Chinese state as faith in China’s communist political system, and committing the state to efforts to “consolidate the confidence in Chinese culture and use art to inspire . . . serve and praise the people” (quoted in Chen 2016).This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

28 Chapter 2What is this “culture” in which Xi has expressed such confidence? China’s current focus lauds and promotes, as did its predecessor, a highly circum-scribed vision of culture. In 2004, which was decreed the “Jia Shen Cultural Declaration Year,” a group of “Seventy-Two Prominent Scholars in the Field of Chinese Culture” put forth a “cultural declaration” that formalized the gen-eral constitution of this Chinese culture in the official realm (Chang 2016, 115–116). The term jia shen refers literally to the traditional naming system of the Chinese lunar calendar and figuratively to an idiosyncratic array of trad-itional cultural practices and ideologies that have become the central compon-ent of the CCP’s broader promotion of culture as a mechanism of governance. The declaration asserted the “dignity and humanistic spirit of the East” and, in a break with Mao’s cultural policies, promoted the same “traditional” Chinese culture (including Confucianism) that the Cultural Revolution had targeted for destruction as a contemporary model for ameliorating the trou-bles that beset the modern world (Chang 2016, 115; Guo-qiang Liu 2012). In public addresses, then premier Wen Jiabao and then president Hu Jintao urged the promotion of traditional Chinese culture to heighten the nation’s reputation in the global arena, and the declaration was followed by a series of official and popular projects and movements intended to encourage classical Chinese studies and the revival of Confucianism.12 Over the next decade, for example, the Ministry of Education revised the textbooks used in the nation’s schools to feature traditional Chinese culture, and the CCP began to hold related study sessions for officials. This promotion of traditional/patriotic state culture also emerged as the most common strategy for China’s soft power initiatives, including the Confucius Institutes.13Rather than attempt to destroy the four olds, as did the Mao regime, recent political regimes in China have promulgated their own version. To this end, they have defined the culture of this millennia-old civilization as a set of globally recognizable ideologies and practices that draw upon Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions and material objects and applications from its long history of art, culinary practices, and architectural production. In this configuration, traditional Chinese material culture includes such arts as calligraphy, cuisine, opera, literature, and brush painting and such archaeological and architectural wonders as the terra-cotta warriors, the Great Wall, the Potala Palace, and the Forbidden City in addition to more common architectural examples such as temples and courtyard housing. The cultural practices defined as epitomizing this civilization include martial arts, drinking tea, and making dumplings, among many others. Accordingly, This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 29these are also the material products and artistic practices that dominate Confucius Institute projections of culture, where Chinese language instruc-tion is inevitably accompanied by exposure to China’s cultural glories and historical ideologies, from lessons on Beijing opera to documentaries on Ming dynasty art forms and classroom texts replete with images of China’s vast system of temples and historical architectural splendors.14 As we shall see in coming chapters, students in the CIs and CCs I observed attended presentations by kung fu artists from China and enacted Chinese culture through practicing their hands at calligraphy, painting opera masks, and dressing up in elaborate Qing dynasty costumes. Ideologically, traditional Chinese culture is expressed in these soft power campaigns most often through the Confucian concepts of benevolence, filial piety, peace, and harmony. Together, these images, ideals, and practices present the Chinese nation as historically stable, artistically rich, community and family oriented, and peace loving. Indeed, the CI logo incorporates a white dove, a common Western symbol of peace, whose wings encircle the globe and which is meant to suggest a peaceful Confucian tradition that offers a very different visual image than the ubiquitous fire-breathing dragon that is often chosen to represent China by Western media, and to vastly different effect.15Five Thousand Years of Civilization at the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai ExpoChinese state promotion of this anodyne traditional culture as a patriotic mechanism of image management can be readily seen in two of the state’s most prominent soft power projects, the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai world’s fair. As one student remarked to me about the Chinese culture and history featured at the 2008 Olympics, “This is how China is different from the world. This is the biggest fortune China can give to the world.” Indeed, this gift to humanity was made explicit in the slogan on the T-shirts worn by volunteers at an Olympics-related conference I attended in Beijing: “The world gives us 16 days, we give back to the world 5,000 years.” Culture was one of the official themes of the 2008 Olympics, and presentations of Chinese traditional culture graced nearly every aspect of the games, from the accompanying cultural festivals and opening cere-mony to the architectural styles of exhibits and design of official logos. And culture was the dominant discursive medium through which Olympic orga-nizers asserted China’s national identity and attempted to magnify and reproduce its splendor on the global stage offered by the Olympics.This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

30 Chapter 2Through offering this “gift to the world,” Olympic organizers hoped to make Chinese traditional culture relevant to contemporary life and pressing international concerns. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics offers a well-analyzed example of these essentialized customs and cultural forms and how they have been invoked in China’s soft power endeavors as a mechanism for cultural governance, what Elizabeth Perry defines as the strategic “deployment of cultural symbols as an instrument of political authority” (2013, 2). From LED-lit reproductions of brush-painted scrolls and inventive paeans to early literacy, to the weaving of Confucian aphorisms throughout a variety of scenes, the ceremony invoked a cultural background that both located historical China in the forefront of cultural innovation and positioned contemporary China as the logical culmination of Chinese culture’s moral and political values and practices. Less well-known are other distinctive ways in which the Olympics provided a venue for this cul-tural governance, including, for example, the publicizing and marketing of traditional Chinese products called laozihao, which some Beijing residents described to me as the “essence of Chinese culture” and deemed important because they “represent [China’s] history and culture.”16 These laozihao ranged from Beijing roast duck and mandarin-style clothing to dumplings and Chinese medicine and were described in Olympic ad campaigns and by one of my interviewees as “business cards” for the nation-state. As one Beijing graduate student explained to me, “They remind us of cultural China, [that] people respect history and their ancestors. Through the Olympics, China will take this opportunity to express its culture, history, tradition, and modernization to the world. We are very proud of this.”17During the time of the Olympics, as I analyzed China’s use of laozihao and other forms of culture broadcast by the Olympics, it became clear that official patronage of traditional culture was intended not only to inspire domestic pride and hence reinforce national identity but also to address China’s position in the global order: laozihao brokered not only China’s cultural essence but also its potential for garnering a larger share of the worldwide commodity market. As the previously quoted graduate student also noted, “These precious products can help with China’s economic develop-ment and bring China economic profit.” Through such soft power endeavors, Charlotte Bruckermann notes, “culture” in China has become “heralded as an untapped resource to be excavated, appropriated, and marketed for profit” (2016, 189). Yet “pride” here derives not only from market endeavors but also through an identifiable and specific linkage of historical grandeur, captured This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 31and fostered so thoroughly during the Olympics, with a capitalist modernity and proffered as an alternative to its homogenizing demands.The 2010 Shanghai world’s fair offered a similar and massive example of how the Chinese state has deployed traditional culture for the purpose of wielding soft power, in this case by offering Chinese culture as a solution to some of the world’s most intractable environmental problems. The China-specific exhibits at the expo—the biggest (5.28 square kilometers), most visited (73 million attendees), and most expensive ($45 billion) world’s fair in history—repeatedly alluded to Chinese philosophical, aesthetic, and mythological traditions and histories to attest to China’s current and future exceptionalism (Hubbert 2015, 2017). These exhibits and the built environ-ment both offered seemingly endless examples of these messages, from a monumental central pavilion that replicated the shape of an imperial-era vessel used to make offerings to the gods to promotional films that linked Confucian wisdom to appropriate development and multicultural diversity.The expo, like the Olympics, sought to promote core values of tra-ditional Chinese culture, in this case specifically by promoting select cul-tural ideals as the answer to the environmental devastation wrought upon the globe by decades of industrialization, resource extraction, and urban-ization. Throughout the Chinese exhibits, references to Chinese traditional culture posed ideal-type portrayals of how it could offer a model and guide for a less destructive relationship between humans and nature.18 These por-trayals most commonly referred to the Confucian concepts of tianren heyi, the unity between humans and nature, and hexie, or harmony. Among these, the urban utopias section of the Urban Future Pavilion offered hexie as the path to ecological sustainability, albeit without providing specific examples. And against a backdrop of images of the highly urbanized city, a movie about Shanghai in the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion stressed the need for humans to be “in balance with nature, in harmony.” Visitor com-ments likewise often drew upon these concepts. As we meandered through an exhibit that chronicled the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake, for example, one visitor described the disaster to me as an example of “the earth telling us that we are not following the ideals of tianren heyi.”19 “People and heaven are the same,” she explained. “We cannot take too much from nature. We have to live in harmony [hexie] with nature.” And as another visitor sum-marized the message of these exhibits, “Tianren heyi is the most important philosophy for these problems. If we are good to the environment, it will treat us better.”This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

32 Chapter 2Motivations and ExclusionsThis schematic representation of culture offers a prime example of what William Callahan labels the “new orientalism” employed by China to jus-tify its rise to global power (2012, 50). The term implies both a reification of culture and a form of discursive power, or a “complex hegemony,” as Edward Said put it (1978, 5), that seeks to convince its subjects of the legit-imacy and fertility of its rule. As such, and to comprehend the challenges to “culture” that inhabit the CI landscape, it is valuable to understand both the motivations behind the comprehensive promotion of culture as a form of power and what forms of culture remain outside the wake of its formi-dable path.As these Olympics and expo examples demonstrate, the Chinese gov-ernment has been strategic about what it promotes as culture as it attempts to leverage that culture to close the gap between its global economic power and its global welcome. Even as China has emerged on the global stage as an economic powerhouse, its political ideals and practices have rarely been consistent objects of global admiration, particularly in the West. Given the CCP’s perhaps implicit recognition that its political ideology has little currency in a largely postcommunist global system (Fallows 2016), its soft power efforts to influence global opinion positively have largely avoided references to its political system and practices and—even as policy makers insist that contemporary Chinese culture also has soft power value (d’Hooghe 2011, 25)—have focused almost entirely on traditional Chinese culture.20 The traditional culture packaged in China’s soft power projects is presented as having endured for thousands of years, as outwardly apolitical, and as genuinely “Chinese,”21 and is specifically designed to ignore less positive moments and aspects of Chinese history, politics, and culture (Jian Wang 2011b, 6).22 After all, who could argue with the value of learning about calligraphy, the Great Wall, respect for one’s elders, or family orien-tation? This strategy presents China as a vast but united nation, with diver-sity but without dissent, struggle, or, above all, contentious politics.23 Tiananmen Square appears solely as a central tourist attraction, Tibet and Taiwan as integral provinces of a harmonious nation, and Xinjiang as a source of natural resources and example of the nation’s religious pluralism.Ingrid d’Hooghe argues that while China’s leaders promote certain forms of national culture as the predominant source of global soft power, they simultaneously engage in crackdowns on other forms of culture con-sidered to be subversive, even if those forms of culture “dazzle the world” This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 33(2011, 25) and might as a result be effective tools of soft power.24 These include, for example, a new generation of artists, filmmakers, writers, and other cultural actors whose works have won global acclaim for both their artistry and their resistance to a disempowering state. As d’Hooghe sug-gests, many of these artists face domestic denunciation by Chinese officials who do not regard them as positive examples of public diplomacy, instead disparaging Nobel Prize winners as derivative and critiquing Oscar winners as pandering to Western audiences.The diversity that does exist in these representations arrives in as select a form as the broader official cultural history that contains it. Minority culture, for example, is rarely included in China’s soft power productions other than as different sartorial practices and architecture, or is invoked to highlight China’s officially endorsed multiculturalism. The inclusion of the Tibetan Potala Palace in these iconic representations sheds light not only on the expansive definition of what exactly the CCP is trying to promote as constituting Chinese essence, since the original occupants would not necessarily have considered themselves Chinese, but also on China’s efforts to suggest the nation as inclusive and welcoming. Minorities took the stage during the Olympic opening ceremony when Han children, dressed in domestically recognizable minority clothing, marched in formation across the arena toward a massive flag, ending their promenade by handing con-trol over to members of the People’s Liberation Army. At the Shanghai Expo, portrayals of diversity constructed similar hierarchies of power with minority “victims” of the 2008 earthquake shown thanking their CCP Han “saviors” for providing them with a new modernity following the devastation of natural disaster (Hubbert 2017).Scholars have hypothesized a broad range of explanations for the pro-motion of these patriotic forms of culture invoked in China’s soft power endeavors, vacillating between the most cynical of rationalizations and the more sympathetic. One explanation for the mobilization of this particular amalgamation of culture concerns the disenfranchisement that was a response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and to the more general decline in beliefs in communism and socialism in China. Linda Walton, for example, argues that through promoting “public identification with unifying cul-tural symbols” (2017, 6) the government sought to both quell dissent and instill a domestic identity with a vaunted heritage as a form of national uniqueness. Such recognizable cultural traditions provide what Jeremy Page calls “a fresh source of legitimacy [for the state] by reinventing the party as This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

34 Chapter 2inheritor and savior of a 5,000-year-old civilization” (Page 2015). Others have similarly argued that the “traditional” nationalism assembled through these cultural symbols provided new foundations of political legitimacy for the state, tying the CCP less to specifically repressive acts such as in 1989 and more to a rapid Western-style modernization and economic growth that has led to “money worship” and a consequent “moral vacuum” (Zheng 1999, 71). The jia shen declaration, mentioned earlier, which helped to formalize traditional culture as a form of national identity, was in part motivated by a desire to neutralize what the government considered to be the negative influences of these modernization practices (Guo-qiang Liu 2012).Alongside these more domestically oriented rationales for the promo-tion of traditional culture rests a more globally situated explanation and strategy, the hope for which was described by President Hu Jintao: “If a country has an admirable culture and ideological system, other countries will tend to follow it. . . . It does not have to use its hard power which is expensive and less efficient” (cited in Glaser and Murphy 2009, 12). Numerous state officials have explicitly argued that China’s cultural legacy offers a legitimate model for international relations and globalization, and thus insight into how culture is deployed can also illuminate the workings of international relations, particularly throughout East Asia, where the CCP is increasingly claiming a leadership role based upon a shared common cul-tural legacy. The ideologies and philosophies summoned through these traditional cultural symbols resonate with historical approaches to global diplomacy, drawing upon classical Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Mencius, and Sun Tzu, who envisioned ideal-type politics as a “harmonious” rather than an ineluctably competitive process (Hayden 2012, 171; Zhang 2010).25 As such, this suggests a manner through which both Chinese domestic and global citizens might be encouraged to envision China as in possession of understandings and practices of global engagement that chal-lenge what Isaac Kamola calls an “asymmetrical political economy of knowledge production” in which North America and Europe dominate how the world is understood (2013, 41). The “Confucian” values that are part of this package of traditional culture promoted in China’s soft power packages, as discussed later in this chapter, are also touted globally as a source of the family orientation, educational proficiency, and business acumen and are often understood to have engendered East Asia’s economic growth “miracle” and to provide a moral force linking China to the rest of East Asia (Niquet 2012; Ong 1999). Dirlik (1995) argues that within a perceived This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 35Confucian realm of engagement, Japan and South Korea may thus be thought of not only as competing economic “tigers” but also as compatible and like-minded “alternative capitalisms” of common cultural heritage and descent.26 This allows the Chinese government to promote a supposedly “Asian” version of modernity to its geopolitical neighbors as a counter-weight to Western power (Dirlik 1995).Even if, as Heather Schmidt argues, China’s soft power focus on trad-itional culture purposely detracts from the nation’s contemporary problems (2014, 356), its discursive protestations to diversity reinforce the structural disenfranchisement of national minorities, and its “official culture” is pro-moted in the interests of state legitimacy, dismissing these soft power cul-tural forms as purely propaganda fails to grasp or illuminate the specific ways in which the state deploys them as a rationale for political behavior and consequently diminishes the diagnostic possibilities for analyzing soft power culture as a guide for both global and domestic engagements with the state. Furthermore, understanding this culture solely as indoctrination ignores that culture is always contested and unstable, including the official culture presented in these soft power endeavors. As discussed later in this chapter, even Confucius himself, despite his global renown and a massive export of the eponymous institutions, is not universally lauded in China. Accordingly, understanding ways in which official patriotic culture is some-times challenged by the very representatives of the state who promote it can help us better understand the nature of the state as a governing institution and its relations with the society it governs.27 As we shall see, soft power policy targets also often actively respond to culture in ways that shape state-society relations and that reveal how the production of soft power is rarely linear, one-directional, or uncontested. To assume otherwise, that these soft power efforts convert automatically into authority, is to assume a totali-tarian model of power that rarely obtains in practice.Why Confucius? Branding and Cultural IdealsThe most widely recognized embodiment of this traditional culture is undoubtedly Confucius, who is arguably China’s most famous historical figure and whose writings have profoundly influenced Chinese society and those of its Asian neighbors. This alone may seem enough to explain why Hanban officials decided to name their government-sponsored Chinese culture and language institutes after him.28 When, however, one considers that Confucius was also ferociously vilified as the “arch-villain of feudalism” This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36 Chapter 2during the Mao years (Murray 2009, 264), remains a sometimes contentious symbolic figure within contemporary China, and is rarely even referred to in CI classrooms, the question of why Hanban chose Confucius as the eponymous symbol becomes a more evident one.The embrace and sponsorship of Confucian philosophy by China’s rul-ing regimes has had an uneven history, despite global perceptions of the sage as an incontrovertible symbol of China and Chineseness. During Confu-cius’s lifetime, in the sixth century BCE, his philosophy was largely ignored by rulers, many of whom feared his critiques of their political practices and sought to undermine his authority. Confucius Institute texts have high-lighted the forms of adversity Confucius encountered in his life, particularly during his travels though China to spread his philosophy and advice, and compared them to China’s current efforts to modernize. The comparisons these hagiographic stories make with contemporary China are clearly meant to symbolize the current nation’s own ability to persevere and eventually triumph over hardship and disparagement. China Today, a government-sponsored monthly magazine directed toward a global audience, has accord-ingly labeled the contemporary Confucius Institute program an “ambassador” projecting China to the world and has compared it to its namesake, who left his home to travel around the country, suffering hardships, promoting his philosophy, and seeking new political opportunities (Dong 2014). The “revival” of Confucius is not therefore of a Confucianism that had lapsed because of popular apathy or a lack of historical memory but rather of a culture destroyed by earlier deliberate government campaigns against it.Confucian ideals began to flourish in earnest during the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) and gained particular and lasting prominence in the Tang dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE). China’s civil service exams testing can-didates’ knowledge of the Confucian classics were instituted during the Tang dynasty and remained in place as the route to official positions and prominence into the early part of the twentieth century. And, although Confucian political regimes in China showed little interest in global explor-ation and political conquest through trade and other forms of exchange, Confucianism as a moral philosophy and guideline for governance spread throughout East Asia and created a zone of cultural familiarity that, as many scholars have argued, has continued through the present era. Confucius Institute historical materials often mention this cultural spread of Confucian ideology to elevate China to the position of “natural” leader of a diverse group of nation-states with a presumed common cultural heritage and concomitant This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 37development goals and values. Similarly, CI history texts and documenta-ries celebrate these historical periods of cosmopolitan effervescence as pre-cursors to China’s current economic and cultural blossoming, utilizing Confucius as a cultural reference to high points in Chinese history that the materials assess as having characteristics in common with today.Despite the high regard in which Confucius and Confucian ideals had been held for centuries in China and throughout Asia, China’s shift to com-munism in the twentieth century led China’s leaders to reject the highly hierarchal and patriarchal Confucian model of society and governance. Confucius’s ideas, Mao proclaimed in 1951, were “not democratic” and “lacked a spirit of self-criticism.” “There is a good bit of the work-style of the bully in Confucius,” Mao charged, and “something of a fascistic flavor” (cited in Kau and Leung 1986, 401). Through the years of his rule, Mao continued to denounce the “feudalism” he associated with Confucianism, most vociferously and mercilessly during the “Criticize Lin, Criticize Con-fucius” campaign, when fervent cadres and Red Guards destroyed Confucian temples, vilified scholars, and sought to rid China of remnants of Chinese culture associated with Confucian values and practices.29Yet Confucius has been making a comeback as a cultural icon in post-Mao China, despite this relatively recent period of anti-Confucian fervor. In the 1990s, the state began to launch Confucian education campaigns in which newspaper articles and public billboards praised the attributes of “Confucian values,” which they commonly defined as filial piety, loyalty, education, industriousness, and thrift.30 Two decades later, Confucius has become a ubiquitous figure in the Chinese cultural and political land-scape.31 Television shows feature popular university professors explaining his philosophy in laical terms, and books about Confucianism that read like how-to manuals for living the good life line the shelves at the nation’s largest bookstores. Ching-Ching Ni reports, for instance, that when Beijing professor Yu Dan “turned dusty old Confucian teachings into a Chinese version of ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul,’ ” her book outsold Harry Potter (2007). An elaborate state-sponsored biographical film about Confucius’s life starring Hong Kong’s Chow Yun-Fat filled theaters in the summer of 2010, and in 2011 a thirty-one-foot, seventeen-ton bronze statue of Confu-cius was installed in the sacred civic space of Tiananmen Square, literally staring down upon Mao’s mausoleum. Parents can now opt to send their young children to Confucian kindergartens or Camp Confucius summer activities; for the older crowd, some businessmen are adding “Confucian This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

38 Chapter 2entrepreneur” to the list of titles under their names on their business cards (Yao 2011). President Xi himself frequently dots his political speeches with references to Confucian classics and was the first communist leader to attend celebrations in honor of the sage’s birthday (Page 2015). The state has also invested millions in the renovation of Confucius’s hometown of Qufu in Shandong Province, now included as a stop on the high-speed train between Beijing and Shanghai.China’s massive soft power campaigns have similarly promoted Confucius as the essence of Chinese traditional culture and model for global progress. In addition to providing the name for the Confucius Institutes, the Confucian notion of harmony exemplified in the phrase he er bu tong, meaning harmony without uniformity, took center stage at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where, for instance, the torch relay was dubbed the “Journey of Harmony.” Similarly, at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, each section of Harmonious China, the three-screen film that was the main attraction at the central Chinese national pavilion, opened with a quote attributed to Confucius, and numerous references to his philosophies were included in pavilions across the massive fairgrounds.32The reasons behind the current revitalization of Confucius are numer-ous, multifaceted, and rarely agreed upon. When I lived in southwest China from 1994 to 1995, Communist Party appeals to Confucianism steadily began to gain prominence, often accompanied by reference to economic (capitalist) success stories of more authoritarian states such as Singapore as evidence of the inherent worth of the Confucian system and the Chinese cultural heritage.33 Yet, despite these ostensibly positive invocations, many of the more skeptical Chinese citizens I interviewed then viewed the party’s about-face regarding Confucius as an attempt to instill a sense of blind obedience in the population and fill the vacuum left by the demise of faith in the ideologies of socialism, not as homage to an “authentic Confucian philosophy.”34 Rather than see such efforts as an example of China’s con-tinued search for a tiyong (Chinese essence and Western practical use) form of modernity, they perceived the government’s promotion of Confucius as an implicit recognition that its Maoist revolutionary philosophies were bankrupt and that the state was merely blindly searching for an alternative ideological system to shore up its rapidly diminishing moral authority, espe-cially in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.In recent years, scholarship on the origins and rationales for the Con-fucian revival has expanded beyond this cynical explanation, sometimes This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 39retaining a dose of skepticism and at others seeing an indigenous logic that preempts an explanatory reduction to state legitimacy. Daniel Bell sees the official revival of Confucianism as a conscious attempt to fill the moral vacuum left by the rejection of Maoist forms of socialism but also sees legit-imate “advantages” for the state in its promotion of such values as harmony, filial piety, and unity that continue to resonate with the broader population (2006). Dirlik’s assessment of the Confucian renaissance suggests that it has been employed globally as a postcolonial discursive critique that both asserts a powerful and common East Asian identity and also glorifies “Orientalized subjectivities as a universal model for emulation” (Dirlik 1995, 231).35 Scholars in China are more likely to assess the revival as a constructive foundation for moral endeavor, whether seeing Confucian philosophy as a basis for thinking through relationships between family, filial piety, and economic modernization or as a foundation for augmenting psychological well-being (Bell 2009).36These diverse explanations for the growing ubiquity of Confucius express clearly that the contemporary revitalization of Confucius’s legacy has not been without controversy, demonstrating the potentially fragile nature of any cultural campaign that has received such extensive state back-ing. Indeed, the expensive state-funded biopic about Confucius mentioned earlier met with widespread critical disapproval in China. According to one blogger, “Chinese people tend to feel that the theme of the movie and the thoughts of Confucius are so old-fashioned and pedantic that they do not fit into China’s current social needs” (Chen 2010)—although the film’s dis-appointing reception was undoubtedly also affected by the government’s decision to pull the popular Avatar from theaters to accommodate the two-plus-hour Confucius. And four months following its installation, the statue of Confucius in Tiananmen Square, which the Shanghai Daily called “the government’s most visible endorsement yet of the ancient sage, and, selec-tively, his teachings” (Chang 2011), was suddenly removed in the dark of night, without comment by either the sculptor or government officials (Jacobs 2011), giving expression to how the state itself is not a monolithic entity and how Confucius—as an embodiment of Chinese values—even among officials has yet to achieve full approval.37As these controversies over the Confucian revival also reveal, China’s citizenry, even those who are political agents of the state—like those of other countries targeted by its soft power initiatives—cannot be depended upon to consume state propaganda in an uncritical manner, even with This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

40 Chapter 2massive investment on the part of the government. Even certain high-level Chinese political insiders, according to a Wall Street Journal article, have viewed President Xi Jinping’s proclivity to quote Confucius and attendance at the birthday celebration for Confucius as a cynical and reactive attempt to “inoculate Chinese people against the spread of Western political ideas of individual freedom and democracy” (Page 2015) rather than as a proac-tive engagement with historical cultural assets. At the same time, while Chinese state officials are willing to invoke Confucius on a regular basis, they remain unwilling to address the complex history of his thought and obfuscate the contradictions of the Confucian ethos over the centuries (Lee 2010, 276). While Confucian ideals of benevolence and moderation may be meant to suggest a nonaggressive international relations policy to global China watchers, when domestic dissidents are routinely jailed and migrant laborer housing torn down in the interests of “safety” and the “China Dream,” the obfuscations of the contradictions of history and present become readily apparent.38The placement and hasty removal of the statue of Confucius perhaps best illustrates Confucius’s currently controversial position in contempor-ary China.39 Post-1949 Chinese history achieves its most authoritative form in the physical space of Tiananmen Square, a tightly controlled political space of great symbolic importance.40 The monuments in the square—the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, the Great Hall of the People, the National Museum of China, a gigantic obelisk dedicated to the martyrs of the Chinese Revolution, and, of course, the famous portrait of the Great Helmsman himself above the Gate of Heavenly Peace—recount and celebrate a tale emblazoned in the name of a hall in the national museum: “The Triumph of the Revolution and the Establishment of Socialism.” The decision that Confucius, a figure so lambasted during the period of high socialism, warranted recognition in this hallowed political space unmistakably reflected a conscious effort to reformulate the contemporary narrative of the nation-state. That the statue’s life in the square was so truncated concomitantly reflects a fragmented state internally at odds with itself, its agents engaged in ongoing contests over questions of definition and value. It also reflects that the “Confucius” of the CIs, and the traditional culture promoted therein, may be more subject to question by policy targets, makers, and implementers than is typically assumed.These domestic Chinese controversies over Confucius are certainly not raised in the CI classrooms themselves, and in fact the sage is a far less This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 41prominent component of the institutes’ curriculum and programming than their name would suggest. Although Confucian philosophy has much of value to say about education, governance, and social harmony, in practice the CIs have very little to do with Confucius. While the walls of the class-rooms I visited were frequently adorned with images of Confucius, the quotations above their whiteboards were ironically just as frequently from twentieth-century chairman Mao Zedong as they were from the sixth- century BCE sage. Similarly, the Chinese culture that students encountered in classroom lessons, texts, and activities was more often in the generic form of Beijing opera masks, food, and red lanterns than of Confucian philosophical thought.When Confucius did come up in the classroom or on Hanban-sponsored study tours, the references most typically pointed to his potential global value as a guide to social health or idealized him as a model of China’s cultural values. One classroom video that I viewed alongside students, for example, discussed how this “great wise man” had been born into poverty and advocated tolerance for others. And when discussing such Chinese cul-tural traditions as reverence and care for the elderly and valuing education, CI teachers would occasionally attribute these practices to China’s Confucian history and value structure. On study tours to China, a statue of Confucius greeted us at the entrance to the school where we stayed in Beijing, and the introductory lecture addressed the importance of social order, good government, and filial piety in Confucian thought. When I asked one of the teachers about Confucius’s relevance to the CI mission, she answered, “I am glad you asked that question. As you know, the main purpose of establishing the Confucius Institute is not doing research or offering courses on Confucius or his philosophy. But we name the institution after this guy because we are proud of him as a great educator and philosopher in China’s history. We believe he will have an impact on the development of human society.” Thus, despite the relative absence of Confucius in the CI classroom, this teacher’s response underscores an underlying assumption of soft power efforts—that they will help non-Chinese understand that because China’s Confucian tradition stresses harmony, diversity, and social order, the nation’s current rise to power will be a peaceful and globally responsible process marked by the same practices and values. By also offer-ing Confucius as a model for global harmony, CIs deploy Confucius not only to address perceptions of China as a threat but also to position China as a global leader.This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

42 Chapter 2One might also arguably conclude that the general absence of discus-sions about Confucius in the CI classrooms stemmed at least in part from a lack of knowledge on the part of the teachers. According to those I inter-viewed, little of their Confucius Institute teacher training involved the study of or strategies for teaching about Confucius. According to one teacher, outside of some “lectures on Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, there was not much that was related.” Another could recall only a single reference to Confucius on the exams teachers are required to take prior to being selected as CI instructors: a true-or-false question that asked, “Confucius had many exceptional ideas about education, such as: Man follows earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Way, the Way follows nature.” The correct answer, she informed me, was false, not because Confucius did not have exceptional ideas about education, but because this particular adage does not originate in Confucian writings. In contrast, most of the required exams were about pedagogy or what one Confucius Institute teacher described as “psychological” tests to see if the teacher candidates were prepared to withstand the hardships of being far from home, family, and friends.Whether intentional on Hanban’s part or not, this limited instruction in Confucius’s life and philosophy also made it less likely that controversies over Confucian thought itself and over the state-sponsored promotion of Confucius that might reveal rifts in government unity and the government’s relations with its citizens would find their way into CI classrooms, thus concealing the paradox of the government’s promotion of “Confucian” values and its unwillingness to implement them. Although the textual and visual representations in lessons about Confucius presented by teachers in the classrooms or by tour guides or lecturers during the Chinese Bridge sum-mer program in China were highly scripted, the few occasions I observed where those speakers went off script and inserted their own interpretations exposed gaps between the government’s promotion of Confucian values and its willingness to implement them. A visit to Beijing’s Confucius Temple, for example, provoked a cynical response about China’s educational system from our tour guide. While the official temple chaperone lauded Confucius for his commitment to education, our CI guide explained that Confucian temples are visited mainly by high school students and their parents pray-ing to Confucius for a good score on the national college entrance exam. “Everything in China,” the guide offered somewhat morosely, is “deter-mined by that score,” hinting not at harmony but at an educational system This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Culture of Cultures 43that favors the urban elite over their rural counterparts, and the rich over the poor, and that is a feared source of tremendous stress and discontent among students of all walks of life.41 Likewise, a lecturer in Beijing, explaining the importance of the Confucian concept of harmony to good governance, segued into a brief aside about the Chinese government’s unwillingness to allow free speech, hinting that this so-called harmony was achieved only through repression. These examples suggest that Confucius may be a more useful symbol for soft power purposes when the meaning of his contribu-tions to Chinese and world culture can be so circumscribed. Surely, there are also aspects of Confucian philosophy, such as its hierarchical gender relations and stress on harmony over a more dialectical approach to change, that many Westerners might find no more attractive than the strict com-munism of the Maoist era. Whether naming the institutes for Confucius has had any impact at all on the efficacy of CIs as a form of soft power has been a matter of debate among scholars. While Sheng Ding and Robert Saunders (2006) argue that the numerical increase in CIs around the world reveals that the Chinese language programs have increased China’s influence abroad, Ren Zhe reasons that CIs’ ostensible focus on traditional culture—they are Confucius institutes after all—has little attraction for younger people, and as such they play only a limited role as a mechanism for augmenting China’s soft power potential (Zhe 2010). By noting that language and culture programs called “Mao Institutes” would have lacked global appeal, the Economist seems to insinuate that the naming process was less a result of the applic-ability of Confucian values to contemporary life than a consequence of China’s limited options for promoting itself (Economist 2015). Nonetheless, naming the institutes after Confucius clearly draws attention to the cultural elements of China and to its long and storied past, thus distracting atten-tion from its role as a current world power, and promotes and spreads a culturally prestigious character intended to supplant Mao as China’s best-known symbol of national politics.Yet some have argued that none of this matters a great deal, claiming that the CIs’ invocation of Confucius operates more like a brand than a philosophy (Starr 2009) or merely constitutes an “admission that commu-nism lacks pulling power” (Economist 2009; see also Brady 2012). The Economist has referred to CIs as an “international franchise” (Economist 2006), and Hanban officials themselves acknowledge that they view the name of the language programs as a brand. According to Hanban vice This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

44 Chapter 2chair Chen Jinyu, “With regard to the operation of Confucian Institutes, brand name means quality; brand name means returns. Those who enjoy more brand names will enjoy higher popularity, reputation, more social influence, and will therefore be able to generate more support from local communities” (quoted in Starr 2009, 69). While such discussions of brand-ing conjure a more cynical market approach and have led some critics to dismiss CI cultural productions as either hackneyed marketing schemes or essentialized protestations of Chinese exceptionalism, this book argues that these evocations of traditional Chinese culture can productively be seen as an attempt to stake claims to value in a world dominated discursively by Western ideologies and practices and as a form of globalization that appeals to cul-tural ideologies valued across cultures and history.42 To fully understand the cultural arrangements and intended political functions of the CI program, it posits, we must take seriously their implications for China’s perceptions of its place in the world. The ethnographic examination of the CIs as a Chinese soft power endeavor to win the hearts and minds of global citizens in the following chapters moves into the actual space of policy engagement to uncover how the cultures of production and the cultures of consumption mutually construct and influence relations between nation-states and their contestations over globalization, modernity, and the global order.This content downloaded from 138.202.129.105 on Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:50:12 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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