Notes on cultural exchange
Sang Ye went on a journey to a village in the mountains beyond Kunming in south-west China, in an impoverished area populated predominantly by the non-Han Chinese Yi people. A foreigner had come to the village in 1904 and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1944, working with the village people. He introduced Christianity to the village, bringing to an end the practice of human sacrifice that had been a characteristic of the traditional tree-worshipping folk religion. He established a health clinic. He built a college, run on modern educational principles, to teach theology as well as other subjects. There was no script for the Yi language and he devised a romanised script that is used to this day. When the Red Army came through in 1935, he negotiated with the then commissar Yang Shangkun (later President of China) to give the communists safe passage through the area on condition that not so much as a blade of grass would be taken from the people, a promise that was honoured. On his death, the people cut down the totem tree at the centre of their village to make a coffin for this man they believed had come to them from heaven. Ten thousand people attended the funeral and his grave became a shrine.
After the communist victory in 1949, the Party took on the trappings of local Christianity to win over the people: ‘The Party Central Committee is the shepherd and the Yi people are the sheep of its pasture.’ Later, all traces of Christianity were suppressed. In the village the Party won the two-line struggle against the foreigner’s legacy, and human sacrifice was revived until, following the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, the people realised that the socialist heaven was unattainable and returned to a grass-roots form of Christianity. By 1992, a local variation of Christianity had become the predominant faith among the Yi people in the area. The foreigner’s shrine has been rebuilt. Even when he was alive they did not know his real name. The stone reads:
The man who carried the new sun. Born 1876, arrived in China in 1904, returned to God in 1944. This gravestone does not hold his remains. The makers of this stone have lost his name but we have kept his religion.
This man has become a local spirit. His name, unknown to the people who worship his memory, is John Williams and he came from Ipswich in Queensland – possibly the first person from Ipswich to be deified. Tracking down this story, Sang Ye encountered difficulties from suspicious local officials. One old witness seemed to remember that the foreigner had come from a place called Australia, but one of the officials, hearing that Sang Ye was interested in the story because of his Australian links, said it was really Austria.
In this enduringly effective case of cultural exchange, the Australian connection has all but disappeared, suppressed or forgotten. The man who has become a god to the local people, and whose presence is physically remembered by the mature eucalypts that cover the landscape, is literally anonymous. He is as unknown in Australia as he is in China. Presumably his motives in going to China originally were not ‘Australian’ in any simple sense (although an historian of imperialist/sectarian attitudes in turn-of-the-century Ipswich might have relevant insights). ‘God loves all’ was apparently the attitude he applied to letting the Red Army of Han Chinese, traditional ethnic oppressors, pass through Yi territory. It is of little relevance to the Yi community that John Williams’s legacy comes from Australia; and since the Han Chinese-dominated People’s Republic of China actively deplores the assistance given by imperialist missionaries to primitive, superstitious minority tribes, there can be no record of John Williams’s work as a contribution to Australia–China friendship. Yet the durability of his imprint must be the envy of the many and various official cultural exchange programs that have been carried out in the twenty years of Australia–China diplomatic relations.
True cultural exchanges are about the interactions of people, of their nature often invisible and unrecorded. They are not costed or carried out according to policy guidelines. Their effects are unpredictable, sometimes even regrettable according to the values of hindsight, and it is impossible to measure what they add to how China sees Australia or the other way round. Yet the developments that happen through what people actually do provide incontrovertible evidence of cultural interaction, and, in that sense, Australia has been engaged in cultural exchange with China for a long time. From before European settlement, Chinese traders sourced trepang (haishen – sea slug, or beche de mer) from Aboriginal societies along the coasts of northern Australia.
By virtue of its size, sparse population and, apparently, abundantly exportable natural resources and primary products (wool and iron ore are the best known in China), Australia is seen as a rich land given rather unfairly to a small group of whites rendered lazy, if not slow and stupid, by the ease of their circumstances. Australia is felt not only to need people, but poses a challenge to a Chinese sense of proletarian justice, or at least a sense of what the Chinese could put to good use.
The majority of enquiries about study in Australia in the 1980s came from Shanghai, Guangdong and Fujian, outward-looking areas with a strong migration history and long historical connections with Australia. There have been misperceptions and misjudgements, of course, and many dreams have been disappointed in the process that has brought tens of thousands of young Chinese to Australia in recent years, most of them to stay. But the information sent back home, however distorted, has filled in the picture of Australia with more detail than ever before. When Prime Minister Bob Hawke wept for the dead of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, everyone in China with an interest in Australia soon knew – through Radio Australia, other foreign media reports, and Chinese word of mouth, which can operate with staggering effectiveness when it matters. The news only confirmed people in their view of Australia as a place wanting to give young Chinese the future denied them in China. In terms of creating an engaged awareness of Australia in China, and developing a host of durable ties between Australians and educated, urban mainland Chinese, the mismanaged export of education services from Australia to China has probably done as much for Australia–China relations in the long term as the millions of official aid, education, cultural and scientific dollars spent by Australian governments since 1972.
So what about official cultural exchange then? From the way its appearance followed closely on the establishment of diplomatic relations, I suspect that ‘Australia–China cultural exchange’ (wenhua jiaoliu) may be a Chinese-sponsored euphemism for what can prove to be something of a one-way traffic in terms of funding and benefits. In 1979 Foreign Affairs Minister Andrew Peacock announced the establishment of the Australia–China Council as what the Chinese might call a people’s organisation, to raise mutual awareness in the two countries, to enlarge areas of contact, and to act as a feeder to inform policy-making. Until the late 1980s almost all Australian academic, cultural and sporting exchanges with China in some way involved the council, which endeavoured to cast its net as wide as possible. Reading the council’s newsletter for the early 1980s, I am struck by the exuberant range of activities pursued and the optimistic confidence with which barriers were pushed back. Punctuated by political visits of increasing moment, from then Vice-Premier Li Xiannian (now deceased) in 1980 to the meeting between Prime Minister Bob Hawke and then Premier Zhao Ziyang (now disgraced) in 1984 and then General Secretary Hu Yaobang (now deceased) in 1985, the relationship’s growth encompassed such diverse events as the China–Australia Ampol Soccer Cup; the Entombed Warriors exhibition; ‘Mood and Moment: Australian Landscape, 1830–1930’; a joint quaternary studies project that showed Australia and China were closer together 300 million years ago; work experience in sheep handling at Haddon Rig for Chinese from Gansu; training assistance for China Daily in its infancy; the development of an enduring relationship with the National Library of China; Chinese heart specialists working with Victor Chang; Australian mountaineers climbing Everest from the Chinese side; and the first official visit by Chinese Christians (which in the positive language of the day helped expose ‘misinformation’). One early member commented that the council had an ‘unusually generous brief’ that had been ‘interpreted with imagination and some flair’.
Not all was rosy, however. Founding Chairman Geoffrey Blainey’s introduction to the 1981 annual report, a succinct model of historical sooth-saying, notes that the heartening relationship between Australia and China rests on shaky foundations. ‘A well-educated Chinese citizen knows little of Australia, except perhaps about kangaroos,’ while Australians as tourists are ‘easily exalted in and excited by lands where the liberties of the local citizens are sparse and where economic life is tightly controlled.’ He warns that the test of a relationship is not the honeymoon but how ‘setbacks and rifts’ are handled, predicting that as Chinese goods increasingly compete with ours, and China imports less of our raw materials, we shall look on China’s economic advancement differently, and that unemployment in Australia may sour the welcome to increased numbers of Chinese immigrants. His basic point is that friendship must be turned to understanding and that in Australia’s case, in a democracy, ‘that understanding … has to be widely dispersed’. It is at once a noble and a pragmatic point. In a society such as ours, policy and practice towards China are too important to be left to a small administrative elite. The general public must discuss and substantiate the issues, and on an informed basis. Hence the vision of the Australia–China Council as an organisation linking Mandarin policies to as wide a section of the community as possible.
A routine review of the council’s activities from 1978–1985 acknowledged a high degree of success, but noted that ‘its work had been relatively more successful in Australia than in China’. At the time the Council considered that academic institutions were not keeping up with the relationship. The Executive Director until 1985, Dr Jocelyn Chey, is quoted as saying, in 1984, that ‘tertiary level research, training and teaching [on China] are dangerously insufficient’. The other worry that emerged was a lack of positive co-ordination and information exchange between institutions, especially government departments.
Lack of Australian expertise, lack of coherence in co-ordinating and implementing the response to China (I use the word ‘response’ for what in the language of the day was more of an ‘approach’), and uncertainty about what difference the council was making to Australia’s presence in China, could easily be attributed to the peculiar difficulties of dealing with a China finding its way in the post-Mao years. But in his parting words as chairman, in the report for 1985–86, Professor Wang Gungwu politely turns the tables, suggesting that the problem has less to do with China than with ourselves:
We are in fact unique, no less so than China itself. And if less strikingly so, the subtle differences in Australia are often harder to grasp. Certainly our perceptions of our neighbourhood and the world are peculiar to ourselves.
Even our background of economic, cultural and strategic dependence on others is an elusive subject requiring careful study. For the future, our distinctive characteristics will be increasingly important. If we want our relationship with China to endure, we must not hesitate to tell the Chinese more about who and what we are.
In other words, we are mad buggers, and we can’t expect other people to know where we’re coming from unless we learn to translate ourselves. And to translate yourself also means learning the other language, how you look from the other fellow’s point of view.
The objectives of the Australia–China Council were reviewed again in November 1989, towards the end of what was perhaps the most difficult year for the political relationship since 1972. The new objectives signalled focus on particular priority areas, with a stronger economic emphasis than previously. The introduction to the report submitted by Chairman Gough Whitlam addresses itself to administrative matters, expressing some reservations about the grant application process. ‘Council members … noted that the grant applications received did not apparently reflect the breadth of community interest in this relationship.’ Too many applications are from academics, we are told, and too many fall outside the ‘priority areas’ defined by the council. Co-ordination with other government organisations has proceeded to the extent that a number of the council’s areas of activity have been handed over to other bodies: development of language skills, educational exchanges and cultural exchanges are finding other sponsors.
As the narrowing of the council’s areas of interest is described, the tone of enthusiasm heard in earlier reports is replaced by sobriety, even scepticism, with the council seeking projects that will make ‘a genuine [my italics] contribution to Australia–China relations’. Further frustrations are voiced later in the report as additional restrictions are laid down. Funds are not available for conference travel. Matching funding must be provided by China for projects of mutual interest. The response by companies and government bodies to the council’s training scheme has been ‘quite disappointing’ and so on. Ten years after its establishment the Australia–China Council has moved far from its original conception as a flexible and broad-based bridging organisation between government and people, and has been re-absorbed, with a diminished role to play, into the structure of government.
I wonder how much difference our cultural diplomacy has made to the way Australia is able to operate with China. Perhaps the most significant achievement is the development of a network of people – principally Australians, or people with a good understanding of the Australian context – who know China well, who are well-connected in China and who have sustained relationships with China over a long period. There is a web of personal relationships and experience that has been nurtured by public funds and by generous sharing (or at times anxious competition) among individuals caught up in a common interest, or passion, or fate. The network weaves in and out of government, but is independent, and sometimes critical, of government’s ways of working. Neither in Australia nor in China does the network have fixed political affiliation. The generational baton has been passed, so that, for example, those who were hardy students in Peking in the 1970s when Jocelyn Chey was a youthful cultural counsellor are now key mediators in different areas of the relationship, and Jocelyn Chey herself has become Australian Consul General in Hong Kong.
The basis of the network is Australian, but it has been able to pull in exceptional Chinese expertise, in Australia and in China, to give flesh and blood to its work. Examples, among many, include Professor (and former ambassador) Ross Garnaut’s research on the Chinese economy with senior economist Liu Guoguang from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences; the documentaries about interaction between Chinese and Australia by filmmaker Wang Ziyin, originally from Peking; the contribution of Peking critic Li Xianting to exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art in Australia; the work of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre, directed by Carrillo Gantner (another former cultural counsellor), in creating relationships with Chinese performing artists; and the sustained involvement with Australian literature, for more than ten years’ translation, publishing and liaison, of Hu Wenzhong, Chairman of the Australian Studies Association of China. They are instances of individual commitment, often with complex personal stories behind them, including sometimes a less than smooth relationship with the governments of the peoples whose co-existence they make more meaningful.
What I am talking about here in terms of a network of personal links is what the Chinese call guanxi, connections. It is something to be proud of that Australia has its own invisible, unquantifiable share of the huge guanxi network that is China. Australian guanxi have developed, as they have been primed, haphazardly but indispensably, by our efforts at cultural diplomacy. It is a case of, to adopt the title of a well-known book on Chinese medicine, ‘the web that has no weaver’.
Our administrative problem with how to institutionalise such links, so they exist beyond the individuals concerned, palely reflects what is almost at the core of China’s prolonged crisis, the question of how to make the transition from power vested in persons to power vested impersonally in institutions, administrative procedures, and law. To the extent that Australia’s effective presence in China is defined by a net of guanxi, we have already become a player in this transitional process too. Our cultural diplomacy has helped the web spread wider.
1992