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‘Going out’ culturally: another perspective on China’s global impact

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In Brief

China places culture at the forefront of policy: it is an essential component of political arrangements and should be thought of as an abbreviated term for the complex of history, institutions and social relationships that come down from the past.

Culture is far from a decoration on the fringe of public affairs.  

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General Secretary Hu Jintao’s declaration in 2011 of the Party’s intent to ‘construct a cultural great power’ underlines the enduring importance of cultural policy in China. This new orientation will take a place at the top of the policy pyramid, setting the terms for a stream of policies and measures that will issue from it.

Hu’s directive underscores the special status of wenhua (culture) in the Chinese worldview, illustrating its use as a powerful political operator. First, wenhua encapsulates ‘us-ness’ — national identity as a condensed image of who ‘we’ are and wish to be. In China, the state protects and nurtures this image, taking over the role played by religious faith in other societies. Culture is, by the same token, a source of political legitimacy. Second, intimately related to this is the concept of wenhua as an ethical watershed — the source of the values dividing the civilised from the barbarian. Finally, wenhua is inescapably a channel of political control. The Party, being legitimate, shows this by fostering and directing culture in the national interest.

Contemporary Chinese culture is a tapestry woven of many threads: Confucianism once reserved for the ruling elite; centralised organisation inherited from the planned economy era; market-based values (e.g. consumerism and luxury shopping) emerging from more recent reforms. Together, they come to terms uneasily with China’s overnight promotion to global player after the financial crisis.

China’s focus on becoming a great cultural power must be seen against the backdrop of this sudden elevation on the world stage. It answers a profound need among many Chinese over the last century and more to be definitively respected as a civilisation.

This is an understandable aspiration. But in ‘going out’ into the complex modern world, China must overcome barriers imposed by language and political culture. Its quest to become a culturally great nation is at loggerheads with an ingrained assumption: that culture is a one-way street. Interaction between cultures, rather than isolation behind national boundaries, is the norm.

While China’s cultural aspirations must be treated with respect, respect alone is insufficient. Taking cultural politics seriously will require dealing with a series of challenges in which the stakes are high and the rules of the game are at odds with Australian experience.

The global dealings of Chinese-invested enterprises reflect and transmit — albeit imperfectly — the environment from which they arose, embodying as well official criteria of identity, unity and legitimacy. Creating global public goods and other outcomes that overlap with the interests of a broad international audience is difficult to do effectively while remaining within this official frame of reference.

Chinese firms also act as conveyors of learning about the outside world, feeding this knowledge back into China. There are constituencies in China who favour Chinese enterprises learning how to operate as transparent institutions under the rule of law and international regulation. And there are analysts who voice fears that without this experience of international regulation, the deficiencies of domestic institutions will become even worse, seriously weakening institutional learning processes in China itself.

Australia is in the frontline of China’s external impact, and cannot afford to be oblivious to the powerful forces that transmit China’s domestic arrangements increasingly to the outside world. In coming to terms with this, Australia must begin by taking China’s cultural frames of reference seriously.

This will be helped, not hindered, by stepping up Australia’s own cultural awareness. China will appreciate and respond to an Australia which takes its own cultural power seriously. But culture must be read as shorthand for institutions and conceptual frameworks, often involving power, and not confined to the arts.

Australia’s major trading partner is culturally unique, even in the Asian context, because of its political and institutional history. Australia’s success in relating to China will be a key index of its achievements in the regional theatre in the Asian century.

Philippa Jones is Managing Director at China Policy, a Beijing-based research and advisory company.

This is an abridged version of China Policy’s submission to the white paper on Australia in the Asian Century, available here.

This post is part of the series on the Asian Century which feeds into the Australian government White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century.

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