China, Foreign Policy and the Language Fetish

Research jobs regarding China policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and the Rand Corporation all shared one criterion: fluency in Mandarin.

This is interesting. Assuming this is a valid requirement, one must look a bit deeper into the assumption. That is, if one is fluent in Mandarin, then automatically, and especially given the collective linguistic retardation of 95% of all Americans (after all, why speak other languages when the States are sooo important?), linguistic capability is a significant plus. This is especially true when so many Americans who travel abroad think that they do not need to speak any language other than English because the States are the center of the globe.

However, there is a caveat. For those Euro-Americans (that means Americans of European descent, though white-Americans are so used to being just "American" and everyone else is othered) who do study Chinese, a few characteristics emerge.

1) Euro-Americans who study Mandarin tend to fetishize it. That means, even if they are receiving a Ph.D. in some field of Chinese Studies, they concentrate so intently and intensely on acquiring Mandarin skills (speech and written) that they spend absolutely no time developing critical thinking skills.

2) The result being that many non-Chinese Ph.D. students graduate brag about their linguistic skills (i.e. accent, ability to replicate calligraphic characters, to name a few) to the detriment of any significant substantive research, which tends to be very conservative.

3) That means that those who focus on acquiring linguistic skills have not explored different ways of thinking about material in Chinese. They simply replicate the same old methodologies: translate the material, take all the historical signifiers mentioned in the text as actual fact, situate those "facts" (rather than metaphors and didactic signifiers) in a historical landscape, and VOILA! A new translation that has been completely misconstrued is added to our fount of "knowledge" about Chinese history.

4) Which means, finally, that what we know about China: its history, its religion, its women, has been tinged by that initial linguistic fetishization.

Foreign policy think tanks should reconsider the absolute requirement of linguistic fluency for those who have Ph.D.'s in East Asian fields, but who also demonstrate an ability to think critically, creatively, and especially in this day of lemmings, individually.