The U.S. and China：The Vital Need for Intercultural Communication

Wenshan Jia, Ph. D., Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Chapman University 

Originally recently published at http://www.ocregister.com/articles/china-508685-communication-chinese.html

It is widely acknowledged by experts and non-experts alike that the relationship between the United States and China is probably the most complex, most volatile, yet most important international connection of our time.  We recently heard three respected experts address this topic at Chapman University during our Richard Watson Asian Studies Distinguished Speakers Series, funded by the Kay Family Foundation and hosted by Chapman’s Asian Studies Minor program.  Two leading diplomats – J. Stapleton Roy, former U.S. ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, and Michael Armacost, former U.S. ambassador to Japan – were part of the series, along with one of the world’s leading scholars of Confucian classics, Roger T. Ames of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  I was privileged, as founder and former director of the Asian Studies Minor and principal investigator of the Richard Watson Series, to hear these great speakers and to invite them to visit and teach my intercultural communication classes and interact with my students here at Chapman.

While highlighting the hurdles ahead in the U.S.-China relationship, they all pointed to a growing need for Americans and Chinese to improve communication. Ambassador Roy emphasized the need for more Americans to study the Chinese language and culture. He argued that Americans who are able to speak Chinese with their Chinese counterparts will be able not only to understand the many nuances of Chinese culture and society, which are often lost when only English is spoken, but also will be exposed to topics and issues that the Chinese only talk about when they speak their native tongue.  Ambassador Armacost, addressing the U.S.-China relationship, made two suggestions:

1. American candidates for public office and American public officials should stop using campaign rhetoric and should learn to adopt interculturally mindful messages when their remarks are directed toward the global or foreign audience.
2. The current structure of the whole range of dialogues established between the American and Chinese governments is too complicated and ritualistic, resulting in little real effect on improving a genuine understanding between the two. He suggested that such a structure be streamlined and simplified for ease and depth in open-ended communication between the two counterparts.

Last but not least, Professor Ames, from the perspectives of comparative philosophy and intercultural philosophy, highlighted the need for Americans to study Chinese classics to better illuminate the understanding of today’s China and its future trajectory.  He pointed out that China’s effort to rehabilitate its own ancient cultural tradition after the Cultural Revolution and marketization is a contribution to world peace.

Together, these distinguished speakers have been aware of the U.S. communication deficit on the in the U.S.-China relationship.  They also called for a paradigmatic shift in China studies, from the political economy lens to the culture/communication lens.  They are not alone in articulating this vision. Several years ago, the Obama Administration announced the “100,000 Strong Initiative” which planned to send 100,000 American students to study in China in the next few years. Just last April, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwartzman established a Chinese version of the Rhodes Scholarship called the Schwartzman Scholarship, a $300 million endowment to Tsinghua University in Beijing.

As a scholar of intercultural communication in the East-West context with a focus on U.S.-China communication, I am pleased to see the formation of this multidisciplinary consensus. However, for a more sustained U.S.-China relationship, such initiatives, while useful, are still insufficient to meet the demands of the future.  To be compatible with the 300 million Chinese（a quarter of the Chinese population）who speak fluent English, the U.S. needs to train about 80 million Americans to speak fluent Chinese.  Nixon and Carter joined hand-in-hand with Deng Xiaoping in kicking off the English learning movement in China in the late 1970s, in which I myself was a participant. It is high time that a similar movement here in the U.S., encouraging Chinese language, culture and communication studies, was initiated to reduce this soft power deficit -- which is no less, if not more, harmful to America than a trade deficit.

Forget about the awkward term “Chimerica,” created by Niall Ferguson to demonstrate the financial interdependence between the U.S. and China. U.S.-China interdependence is far more comprehensive than financial.  It consists of global peace, security, prosperity and many other dimensions. The U.S.-China relationship can be better described as that of a conjoined twin. Any negative interaction between the two would bring mutual harm; any mindful interaction would result in peace of mind for both.  Peaceful co-existence, mutual understanding and mutual adaptation, co-existence and co-evolution（to use Henry Kissinger’s term）seem to be the least costly and most realistic means and goals of a manageable U.S.-China relationship.

No place in the US seems to have better understood this than Orange County, the home town of former President Richard Nixon.  Nixon is historically remembered as a strategic believer in and initiator of the project of transforming the U.S.-China relationship from mutual enmity and isolation to mutual friendship and partnership by diplomatic contact and communication. This May – 41 years after Richard Nixon’s 1972 historic trip to China – Christopher Nixon Cox, grandson of Richard Nixon, is leading a 40-member delegation from the Nixon Foundation to retrace his grandfather’s 1972 historic trip to China. This trip will hopefully be remembered as another historic step in the history of the U.S.-China relationship, rekindling Nixon’s doctrine of diplomatic communication for peace and prosperity.  And perhaps this trip will initiate a different kind of transformation of the U.S.-China relationship – from mutual suspicion and distrust to mutual understanding, adaptation, collaboration and evolution via full, comprehensive and effective intercultural communication at both the governmental and civic levels.

Originally this report was recently published at http://www.ocregister.com/articles/china-508685-communication-chinese.htm