Li, Cheng. (Ed.).(2005). Bridging minds across the Pacific: U.S.-China educational exchanges, 1978-2003. Reviewed by Zhang Jingning, Arizona State University

Li, Cheng. (Ed.).(2005). Bridging minds across the Pacific: U.S.-China educational exchanges, 1978-2003. New York: Lexington Books. $ 75.00 (Hardcover)   ISBN 0-7391-0994-4 $ 25.95 (Paperback)   ISBN 0-7391-0995-2 Reviewed by Zhang Jingning Arizona State University May 11, 2006 Bridging minds across the Pacific: U.S.-China educational exchanges, is a product of an international conference held at Fudan University in November 2003. Most of the 10 chapters of the book investigate the benefits and problems brought about by U.S.-China educational exchanges over the past 25 years. Chapter 1 lays the analytic framework for the whole book and chapter 2 provides a historical perspective on the eclectic foreign influences on higher education in the Republican Era (1927-1949). The following eight chapters are concerned with more recent U.S. and China exchange activities that include U.S scholarly organizations and study in China programs, Chinese western-educated returnees, disciplinary development, administrative-system reform, “world-class” universities, and higher education in Hong Kong. The book is dedicated to celebrating the hard-achieved harmonious bilateral relations and drastic growth in cultural-political communication between two of the world’s largest countries. Chapters 1, 3 and 7 showcase China’s integration into the international community and the gradual improvement of U.S.-China relations, which were devastated during the McCarthy Era. The resumption of relations, however, was not without some discord. As some researchers have long observed, a structured order persisted in cultural as well as political, economic and military encounters. Products, power, and influence all flowed disproportionately from the developed to developing countries (cf. Galtung, 1971; Phillipson, 2000). The remaining seven chapters, implicitly or explicitly, call attention to China’s lesser position in the world order and offer some solutions for its lower status. These topics are presented with fresh insight by the authors into the new social-historical contexts of globalization and China’s opening to the world. The introductory chapter provides a conceptual framework that serves as a basis for the chapters that follow. Cheng Li outlines international relations since the 1960s, which he partitions into four developmental stages: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and educational-cultural globalization. Li maintains that in the age of realism, the world’s political leaders sought to protect their respective national economic and military competitiveness by preventing the free flow of ideas, technology, and human resources across national borders. The age of liberalism was marked by the aggressive global promotion of western liberal democratic ideas in less developed countries, the ultimate triumph of which was regarded as the end of history. In the succeeding age of constructivism, political leaders recognized that peace and harmony were based on inter-subjective understanding and internationally shared norms and values. Educational exchanges between different countries were not only necessary but also inevitable in the coming educational-cultural globalization age, though not without political agendas behind them. Mary Brown Bullock vividly illustrates the theoretical trajectory from realism to globalization in Chapter 3, by providing a chronicle of the historical activities of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the Peoples Republic of China (CSCPRC). The author, former director of this U.S. non-governmental scholarly organization, fills the chapter with facts and anecdotes that were previously unattainable. In its earliest years, CSCPRC was only able to facilitate exchange tours on tip-toes between the natural scientists of the two countries. By the 1990s, however, a full range of programs and collaborations was carried out. The U.S.-China scholarly ties grew stronger regardless of whether the political climate was blowing hot or cold. In Chapter 7, Hongying Wang presents three case studies dealing with the changes in administrative laws, the civil service system and professional training programs. She concludes that the administrative system in contemporary China has been less subject to the whims and dictates of the Party and powerful persons and more responsive to the rule-of-law, transparent procedures, and professionalism. One strength of Wang’s chapter is her recognition of the limitations of the impact-respondent paradigm, which tended to view China as an inactive vacuum in which external influences had great impact (Harnett, 1998). In addition to international forces, Wang argues that tensions within Chinese society—particularly those between the authoritarian politics and the maturation of a liberal market economy—play an important role in driving the administrative system to evolve and transform itself. The linear view of history and the celebration of the diffusionist perspective are challenged by the fact that inequalities persist in international relations. Yang (2002) pointed out that international educational exchanges were marked by the one-way flow of students from the Southern to North Hemisphere and of ideas, technology and cultural influences the other way around. The same phenomenon is given attention in chapter 8, where Fei-Ling Wang tries to offer a model of faculty-led English programs that could attract U.S. students to study about China in China. These programs were successful in the sense that a certain number of U.S. students did stay in China for a significant period of time as part of their college education. The questions left unanswered in this chapter, are how significant is the number of American students and duration of time they stayed when compared to the escalating number of Chinese students who go to the U.S. each year. The question also remains as to what is behind the unbalanced exchanges and what else should have been done to reverse the disproportional flow of cultural influences and power. The long-standing problem of the hierarchical global order is further reflected in the development of Chinese social sciences. International Relations (IR) Studies is a relatively new discipline that owes much to the exchange programs with the U.S. in its nascent years. This topic is explored in chapter 6 by Shiping Zheng, who observes that IR Studies in China involve a great deal of translation and introduction of western theories but fail to result in innovations. According to Zheng, Chinese IR Studies suffer from a “student complex” that resulted in a generation of IR scholars who tend to speak in a borrowed discourse and are judged by the international community solely for their language skills and ability to use Chinese sources (p. 148). Zheng’s chapter, however, treats the reader to a lengthy listing of recent publications on IR research in China, acutely pointing out the severe situation Chinese social sciences face today. The neglect of research from within China, as well as sweeping cultural influences from without, render the Chinese social sciences vulnerable and marginalized. The case of Chinese IR studies raises the question of how hegemonic foreign influences should be received, Sinified and returned to the West? One example of local culture offsetting colonial hegemonic power was found in former colonial countries’ borrowing and returning English through their colonial history. Writers in countries like India and Singapore wrote in an English that was mixed with many characteristics of the writers’ local languages. They “estranged English in the eyes of its proprietors” and struck a blow to the Western World “on behalf of their gagged and humiliated ancestors (Talib, 2002, p. 100).” The successful cases of colonial language have strong implications for the social science discourses in China. Two parallel chapters offer an ideal version of cultural synthesis, the blending of the best elements of western and Chinese cultures, as a solution to the inequality in cross-cultural encounters on the development of higher education. Chapter 2 deals with the Republican Era and Chapter 10 with the current situation. . Chapter 2 contrasts the early years of Beijing University and Fudan University. Ruth Hayhoe maintains that these two universities differed in curricula, students, faculty roles and academic freedom because they had different sources of influence. The former was influenced by European Kantism and the latter by American pragmatism. She further argues that American pragmatism is more in line with the Chinese philosophical tradition and can serve as a conjunction through which Confucianism might flow into mainstream social thought. The blending of Western and Eastern philosophies might solve the difficulties of the western liberal democratic tradition that over stressed individualism. Chapter 10 cautions that the building of world-class universities in China can not be a short-term process with quantifiable goals. Capital investments in universities and the number of publications alone can not guarantee building a Harvard in China. Similarly, centuries of western history and academic tradition can not be replicated in China. Moreover, the strengths of Chinese tradition would be needlessly abandoned with the uncritical adoption of western ideas and practices. Chinese universities would thus become indistinguishable from western universities, regardless of whether they achieve so-called “world-class” status. According to Kathryn Mohrman, the ideal Chinese university should be a creative blend of the best of the East and West. The stewards of higher education, both at the beginning and at the end of 20th century advocated promoting equal East-West partnership in educational and cultural transactions between China and the West. Ever since the tumultuous 1840s in China, generations of intellectuals and scholars have looked on the preservation or revitalization of the indigenous Chinese culture as a way of thwarting the imperialist/hegemonic foreign cultural influence. This was the case for the “self-strengtheners” and “constitutionalists of the late Qing as well as for the neo-Confucians and recent advocates of the internationalization of higher education in the Post-1978 era (see Yang, 2002). Historically, the cultural encounters that the Chinese university system has faced are contextualized in a structured world order, with China positioned at the lesser end of cultural production (Galtung, 1971; Miyoshi, 1998). Thus, the goal of cultural synthesis, in which there is a blending of foreign and Chinese models that acknowledge and build on Chinese strengths, whereby Chinese social sciences can contribute to western cultures, remains an idealist, and distant goal. Harnett (1998), for example, analyzed Cai Yuanpei’s efforts in building Beijing University in the 1920s. Harnett argues that “Cai’s brand of syncretism was not an equal partnership between China and the west because China was already quite westernized by the second decade of the new century, and the idea that the West would become Sinified was difficult to imagine [both in China and the West] (p.91).” Three chapters in Li’s collection examine issues related to western educated returnees in China. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze the social-demographic features and status of western educated returnees in the People’s Republic of China’s higher education system. Quantitative and survey methods are employed. In Chapter 4, for example, Cheng Li constructs two databases on the social-demographic features of western educated Chinese by using the faculty directories of each university’s website. Li’s approach illustrates how the Internet can be a source and tool for social science research on returnees in China. In Chapter 9, Hong Kongs demonstrates how Chinese traditions can serve as a bridge between China and the outside world for the transnational professoriate. These studies confirm that the returnees possess “transnational capital,” that is, international knowledge and linkages acquired overseas that are not readily available in China (Chapter 5). This knowledge allows for scholars and social scientists in China to be more innovative and able to promote acceptable changes and reforms in China (Chapter 9). The authors of these chapters capture the magnitude and diversity of the recent tidal wave of returnees and conclude that the “brain drain” effect may be reversing. The problems highlighted by chapters 4 and 5, however, are the conflicts between the Chinese trained professionals and the foreign educated returnees. These two groups had completely different perceptions of how western educated people should act and be rewarded. One problem the foreign educated returnees face is alienation from Chinese indigenous culture. As early as the first quarter of the 20th century, returnees were often criticized for being like foreigners in thought and habits and largely out of touch with native Chinese thought and feeling (The League of Nations Mission of Educational Experts, 1932). Today, the degree of alienation among returnees is much less than what their forerunners confronted 80 years ago. What persists, however, is the question of how much of the returnees' “transnational capital” should be valued when compare with the indigenous Chinese knowledge they seem to have lost. Yang (2002), however, criticizes this view and maintains that the domestic needs of less developed countries like China and their integration into the world modern university system are not incompatible (p.79). The transnational knowledge the returnees bring back, as these chapters and Yang’s views concur, have been invaluable for China’s development, both historically and currently. Li’s book demonstrates that the promises and problems associated with U.S.-China educational exchanges are not new. They have been recurrent themes in Chinese modern history ever since the 1840s. Li’s volume, however, reinterprets the old themes within the subtlety and complexity of new historical contexts. The last 25 years have been marked by economic and cultural globalization in the international arena and rapid economic development within Chinese territory. The reforms and changes that have taken place within China, as are reflected in the administrative system reforms, can be viewed within the context of the growing influence of transnational economic blocs, an effect which has been compounded by the decline of state intervention and control. Within this context, the strategy of following the international norms became an imperative for countries like China, which were seeking to be integrated into the international community. However, local bulwarks such as nationalism and the strength of national culture have influenced how the trend toward internationalism has been accepted and how it has progressed. Most of the chapters of Li’s collection provide insight into university development and into the role of returnees confronting competition in the face of both local and global forces. The authors of this book are not lamenting, like many “center-periphery” theorists that the less developed “third world” countries are being set up as long-term losers in the structured world order (Samoff, 1999). Nor are they naively optimistic in believing that China possesses all the advantages, despite being a latecomer to modernization (Levy, 1972). Li’s book recognizes the difficulty China faces in preserving its subject position in the face of the sweeping tide of economic and cultural globalization. On a positive note, Li’s volume shows that there is hope for China to challenge the existing “new world order” while retaining its self-identity as a developing country (Liu, 1998). The book reinterprets many of the important topics that are of importance to investigators of contemporary Chinese society and its efforts at modernization. Given the breadth of topics and wealth of information it covered, Li’s book serves as good source for students and scholars in education, IR Studies, and other relevant areas. References Galtung, J. (1971). A structural theory of imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 8 (2), 81-117. Hartnett, R. A. (1998). The saga of Chinese higher education from the Tongzhi Restoration to Tiananmen Square: Revolution and Reform. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Levy, M. J., Jr. (1972). Modernization: Latercomers and survivors. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Liu, K. (1998). Is there an alternative to (Capitalist) globalization? The debate about modernity in China. In F. Jameson, & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 164-190). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miyoshi, M. (1998). “Globalization,” culture and the university. In F. Jameson, & M.Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization (pp. 247-272). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Phillipson, R. (2000). English in the new world order: Variations on a theme of linguistic imperialism and “World” English. In T. Ricento (Ed.), Ideology, politics and language policies: Focus on English (pp. 87-106). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Samoff, J. (1999). Institutionalizing international influence. In R. Arnove, & C. A. Torres (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectic of the Global and the local (pp. 51-90). New York: Rowman & Littlefield publishers, Inc. The League of Nations Mission of Educational Experts. (1932). The reorganization of Education in China. Paris: League of Nations Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. Yang, R. (2002). The third delight: The internationalization of higher education in China. New York: Rutledge. About the Reviewer Zhang Jingning is a doctoral student in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University. Her research interest is in the historical evolution and current reforms of Chinese higher education. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.