Why do Foreigners Need to Get Chinese Names before They Study Chinese?
really has become a trend among foreigners keen on tapping the
economic opportunities in China. Multinationals are seeking employees
with knowledge of Chinese culture, language, and society to further
expand in the Chinese market, making Chinese the desired foreign
language when competing for employment in the corporate sector. Of
course, for China, such a trend is also economically helpful by
itself. Rich foreigners, taking advantage of low costs in China, come
to study in Chinese universities and in the process, spend freely on
local services and products.
Yet, amid a generally positive environment for developing a profitable
Chinese education industry, the methods with which Chinese are taught
to foreigners here, at least from the perspective of a Chinese raised
abroad, seem quite discomforting. With universities completely
controlled by the government, the Chinese education curriculum here
continues to hold strong underlying political messages of
condescending professing Chinese superiority in traditional culture
and economic development.
the political intention here is twofold: (1) to systematically create
a class of pro-PRC foreigners that can potentially help speak for the
PRC in their respective countries, and (2) to show Chinese citizens
that despite being culturally backward (as I stated in the last post),
China can still maintain its national pride in the face of wealthy
foreign powers. To further execute such intentions, the government
even invested in "Confucian Institutes" in foreign countries "to
promote Chinese soft power" (in reality, organs of propaganda
dissemination little known to the general population).
Perhaps the biggest single act in the condescension shown in Chinese
education is the often inescapable requirement that foreign students
of Chinese obtain a Chinese name at registration or first day of class
(it actually occurs in Chinese classes at Yale too, btw). Seems
harmless at first glance, the ridiculousness of such act is pretty
clear when one considers that Chinese students of English were never
at any point required to have an English/Western name (although many
voluntarily take up one, an issue I already discussed in the past).
Yes, it does facilitate communication between the students and Chinese
people who have little understanding of foreign languages, and it may
even represent a half-hearted symbol of cultural integration, but the
reality is that enforcing something of this sort is precisely the
reason why Chinese can never elevate itself from an ethnic language to
a language of global communication like English. A business language,
as I stated in previous posts, requires a separation of the language
as a tool of communication from the cultural environment from which it
developed.
The government's effort to instill Chinese cultural superiority within
the context of language learning can help foreigners understand
Chinese mentality from a business sense, but will ultimately cause
them to hate the self-patronizing and "ideologically masturbating" (or
as the Chinese netizens say, "意婬") attitude of the Chinese. They
would force themselves to use Chinese for business but will never see
Chinese or China to be something that they can ever be truly
interested in becoming a part of (in contrast to all the Chinese
students who glue themselves to foreign TV programs, movies, and etc
just to "speak like an American/French/Japanese/Korean...).
Looking at such a grim situation, the Chinese government should
realize that both of their intentions in controlling the mental state
of foreign students have completely failed. At the end of all that
proselytizing, the foreign students have come to see the government as
more and more of a nuisance hindering the healthy development of
modern Chinese culture. Witnessing the government's effort in
suppressing individual thought through talking to locals (who often
also tend to badmouth their government), it is hardly believable that
any of them can ever become pro-PRC through language study in China.
It should be noted that plenty of these foreigners also cite interest
in Chinese culture as the main reason for studying, but those are,
after all, the insignificant minority. With the CCP relentlessly
destroying traditional values and cultural relics for the past
decades, it is hard to see why anyone actually interested in Chinese
culture to come here instead to going to Taiwan. The universities in
China, far from their self-proclaimed greatness in cultural immersion,
have little offer their foreign students besides cheap alcohol, cheap
food, and cheap sex. Well, may be those things are what the foreigner
ultimately came to get in China....
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