A Global Odyssey of Knowing China and India
----Central University of Jharkhand’s 2014 Chinese New Year Lecture
Speech by Ma
Yuge (University of Oxford, UK)
Music by Zhang Yang
(Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
13 Feb 2014, Auditorium, Central University of
Jharkhand, Ranchi, India
Growing Up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and
incredible experience is what everyone shares.
Doris Lessing, The Golden
Notebook, 1971
The encounter with the Other, with other people, has always been a
universal and fundamental experience for our species…People thus had three
choices when they encounter the Other: They could choose war, they could build
a wall around themselves, or they could enter into dialogue.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The
Other, 2005[i]
It is our great honour to come to the Central
University of Jharkhand (CUJ), and be part of your first Chinese New Year
Celebration. We would love to congratulate the Chinese Department of CUJ for
successfully organising such a wonderful Chinese New Year Celebration. We are
so amazed and proud to know that you are learning the Chinese language and the
Chinese culture in Ranchi, the emerging capital of India’s most resourceful
land. We also want to sincerely thank Mr Sandeep Biswas for facilitating the
whole programme for this lecture.
Today, we will share with you our understanding about
China and India based on our interaction with India for the past a few years. I
will speak about my study, research and newly published book that talk about
the bittersweet journey of bridging the two different cultures; my colleague
Yang will present his composed music on the same theme.
An Entangling Story between China and India
China and India are Asia’s
biggest neighbours and two of the oldest living civilisations. They have had
exchange of people, ideas and goods for centuries. However, for the past
century, China and India have frequently experienced rivalrous relations, and
have chosen different pathways in many aspects of both domestic development and
foreign policy. Those tensions and differences, despite of their increasing economic
interests, have significantly reduced the frequency and depth of their mutual communication.
My entangling story with India dates back to 2009,
when I came to India to be an MA student at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD) at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Many Chinese people asked me why I was going
to India. The university where I completed my undergraduate studies, Tsinghua
University, is one of the best universities in China. The current President of
China and his predecessor, both are alumni of my university and one third of
the graduates continue their studies in top universities in the West. Chinese
people believe that studying in ‘the more advanced and more developed countries’
can help us achieve the Chinese dream of prosperity, happiness and harmony. In
people’s minds India was not part of that group. So my decision to embark on further
postgraduate studies in India was hard for my peers to understand.
However, I did, get
some support from Professor Xue Lan, the Dean of the School of Public Policy
and Management at Tsinghua. He wrote the foreword to my newly published book Grow Up in India and mentioned how he
felt about this decision, “When Yuge told me about her idea of going to India,
I was truly thrilled. It has been quite a few years since China has embraced
the global economy, and I am glad that Chinese students have finally started
exploring the real world and the rich diversity it offers. Now that South
Asian, African and Latin American students are increasingly studying on our
campus, our own graduates are now thinking of discovering these emerging
counterparts.”
Coming to India with a Dream
I came to India with a dream - a dream which is under
a threat in the multi-polarising world.
Ever since the Chinese President Xi Jinping developed
the idea of the China Dream as one of
his key motifs, the international community, including India has been
discussing and closely watching the actual content of China’s Dream, and what
it will bring to the world. To my understanding, the China Dream is deeply
rooted in the wisdom of the Chinese civilisation: Shi Jie Da Tong - global integration. In the past 20 years, the
emergence of new economic powers is posing challenges to the existing
international order-from development, trade, energy, nuclear disarmament,
climate change, cyber security to international crime. In a multi-polar world,
it is crucial to build mutual understanding and cooperation between emerging
countries, as well as between the emerging countries and the rest of the world;
because without it, the global integration and thereupon - the effective international
cooperation essential for tackling pressing common challenges - is hard to
achieve.
However, unlike the OECD countries, which share
similarity in both economic systems and political ideologies, the emerging
countries, for example each of the BRICS, though having common economic
interests in general, has been practicing very different cultural, social and
political values. This divergence in economic interests and kinds of soft power
has created obstacles for collaboration among emerging countries and has also
challenged the realisation of global integration.
Carrying the dream of an integrated world, where multi-stakeholders
– cross-nationals, nationals, sub-nationals, and other kinds of organisations,
as well as various individuals– despite of their different backgrounds, can
equally voice and participate in global governance which brings common goods to
all human kinds, and where cross-cultural relations are built on real
understanding, instead of manipulated imagination, I went to India. I believe
that collaboration and integration is built on trust, and that trust comes from
authentic mutual understanding. While most Chinese students are looking at the
West, there is a dangerous knowledge gap about ‘the rest’. India is not only
one of the most important emerging powers, but also an unavoidable neighbour of
China. More importantly, in many ways India has taken a different pathway in
development compared to China. Facing similar challenges, the Indian experiences
may inspire China’s reflection on itself.
Before we move to the next step of the journey, I
would like to share with you a piece of music composed by Yang. When we discuss
about the journey of bridging China and India, we feel like something is difficult
to describe with only language. Then we started to try to use music to express
the unspeakable feelings gradually generated in this journey. The following
music is one of the experiments.
Where Can China meet India
Lyric and Music: Zhang Yang
Where is the sun
where is the love
where is the god
where is the way
where is the police
where is their mum
Where is the garden
where is the home
where is the shop
Where is the guru
where is the tree
where is the river
It's in your song
It's in your mind
It's in your eye
where is the change
where is the dream
where is the hope
where is the key
where is the bridge
where is the peace
It's in your mind
It's in your hand
It's in your eye
It's in your song
It's in your mind
It's in your eye
Bittersweet Journey of Knowing Each Other
As former Chinese Consul in Kolkata, Mr. Mao Siwei
recently said in an interview,[ii]India
has always been China’s teacher throughout history. It is well-known to the
world that in the early Tang Dynasty (7th Century), Xuan Zang, the famous
Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveller and translator went to India and
studied in Nalanda University for almost two decades. His writings and
translations inspired by studies of India had greatly enriched the development
of Buddhism in China. The flourishing of Buddhism, reflecting the openness and
inclusiveness of the then Asian society, witnessed China’s reaching one of the
climaxes of its civilisation – Tang Song culture.
It is also well recognised that studying in a country
is the best way of understanding it, and modern transportation has made the
journey between China and India much easier and faster compared to Xuan Zang’s
time. However, when I really encountered India, a huge country with endless
diversities, pursuing a clear route to understanding it seemed impossible. To
get deep into Indian society, the classroom is necessary but not sufficient. So
I started to learn the local language, make Indian friends, read extensively,
travel and research across the country. I wrote about conversations,
observations, questions and confusions, and published them on various media in
China. From the intensive interactions with the Chinese public that resulted, I
got to understand their growing interest to know India and at the same time, common
misunderstandings and misinterpretations that are deeply rooted.
Slowly, my publications gained more and more interesting
responses from Chinese audiences, reflecting the bittersweet process of getting
to know one another. Someone wrote to me after reading my article on the human experiences
of rapid urbanisation in Assam, “What Indians are experiencing sounds so
similar to us. Why can’t we learn from each other’s experiences and try to
avoid those tragedies in modernisation?” Someone else responded to my article
on local democracy in Tamil Nadu, “It is hard to imagine that a country with so
many poor and illiterate is really suitable for democracy. It seems that India
is trying to break this curse! I get to know more about democracy from the
Indian experience than from the West!” There are also people who do not quite agree
with my writing, for example, “I read your article about the dilemma between
economic growth and climate change in India. Obviously, China never wastes time
on such unproductive discussion. India should learn something from us.”
During my year of study in India, I tried every means
at my disposal to know about India and to look for a channel to rebuild the
mutual understanding between the two. However, the more I experienced India,
the more confused I became, because I did not have an efficient way of
combining my enriching but fragmented local experience into an insightful and
systematic understanding. Then, I was inspired by reading Journey to America, the notes of the pioneer French thinker Alexis
De Tocqueville’s 9 months stay in America from 1831 to 1832. In contrast to the
two masterpieces called Democracy in
America (1 & 2) which came out in France 3 and 8 years after that
journey, de Tocqueville’s first hand journal was fresh and original, but
fragmented. Real understanding requires not only fresh experience, but also
systematic thinking, intellectual debate, and comparative perspectives.
So after one year of studying in India, in 2010, I
went to Oxford to further my understanding and read for the MSc in Contemporary
India. In 2011, I also had the opportunity to join the Brookings Institution as
a Guest Researcher, conducting comparative research between China and India.
The next year, I came back to Oxford, and with the support from my supervisor
Professor Barbara Harriss-White and Wolfson College, my colleague Danielle de
Feo Giet and I founded the Oxford Juxtapose Project-a multi-disciplinary
platform for scholars to discuss China and India, and to promote mutual
understanding through academic and cultural innovations. [iii]
This bittersweet journey of knowing one another gives
us the courage and chance to grow up, and to realise the dream that we have
been carrying from the very beginning. Here I would like to share with you a
song, which tries to express the feeling of growing up from exploring the
unknown.
INDIAN DREAM
Lyrics: Zhang Yang, Ma Yuge
Music: Zhang Yang
Ganga, are you asleep
Have you forgotten me
Ganga, have you had a dream
I was coming to meet you
You gave me a chance to grow up
You gave my soul a place, to stay
Ganga, have you forgotten the memories we have made
Ganga, do you still continue your dream
你给我成长的力量面对未知的勇气
You lead me to the unknown, and make me brave
无数次我曾回望 陷入众人的引力
But I
used to look the way back, driven by the common
你用温热的光芒 等待着我迷途的归期
Your lights silence in warm, shed my lost and
waited for me
终于听到你的呼唤 黑夜里再次奔向你
In dream I hear the call rang, coming back
was my only last will
The heated China Debate in India
Last year, I came
back to India for field research. In the two months, I was associated with
Aspen Institute India as an Avantha International Fellow. The most impressive
part of my stay in Aspen was the heated and intensive debate about China in the
Indian policy cohort as well as among the general public. Nearly every public
event held I participated, though not directly relate to China, would develop
into a serious debate on how China will make an influence to the discussed
topic, and what India should do to engage with it.
The first two weeks
of my tenure coincidentally overlapped with the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh’s visit to China: 22-26 October 2013.Accordingly, my assignment was to
prepare the background paper for the then forthcoming Aspen China Strategic
Dialogue to be jointly held with the China Reform Forum in Beijing. To write
the paper, I went through published reports and news coverage of the
China-India relationship in different perspectives – security, economic,
military, energy, global governance, and social challenges - from China, India,
US, and the UK, in both English and Chinese, for the previous six months in
2013.This intensive reading showed that the majority of the reports did not
hold positive views about the China-India relationship. Interestingly, the two
most positive pieces of coverage on this front came from Chinese Premier Li
Keqiang’s official speech during his visit to India in May 2013, and Indian
Premier Manmohan Singh’s speech delivered in his China visit. Apart from these
two official gestures of friendliness, the distrust between the two set the
dominant tone for this relationship.
The escalating tension
in the Chinese and Indian media and think tanks to a large extend, reflects
people’s opinions towards each other. Several published surveys and academic
papers seem to buttress these negative public opinions with more solid data –in
one study conducted by Pew Research Global Attitude Project in 2013, 83% of Indians
surveyed consider China as a threat to Indian security[iv]; an
earlier piece of research published in 2011, focused on the Chinese online forum
participants, shows that90% of the studied hold negative perspectives toward
India in general.[v]
In both countries, with their different political systems, public opinions more
and more engaged in the discussion of their foreign policy. The active
engagement of the educated public, which is equipped by the flourishing usage
of the internet and social media, is no longer an easily ignored factor by the
governments in making foreign policy. Therefore the increasingly negative
public opinions among Chinese and Indians, that are largely based on lack of
mutual understanding and long-lasting distrust, are obviously not healthy for a
peaceful and prosperous China-India relationship.
People-to-people contact
Public opinion is
formed by exposure to information and discussions. Though the coverage of the
other country is emerging in both China and India, information based on
first-hand data is still limited. Analysis solely relying on second-hand
information is embedded with unknown bias and often leads to rush judgements.
To overcome this challenge, more people-to-people contact is in urgent demand.
Promoting people-to-people contact recently has got more
and more attention from both sides. During Premier Manmohan Singh’s visit to
China, I was asked by China Youth Daily
- one of the most influential Chinese newspapers to interview leaders from the
Indian industry on recent progress in China-India’s economic relationship. Mr
Tarun Das, funding trustee of Aspen India, who leads the Confederation of
Indian Industry (CII) for 40 years kindly accepted my interview request. When
asked about the perspective on the future of China-India relations, he argued
strongly:“The most important agenda is for the people of China and India to know
each other. There had been a huge information and communications gap over decades,
which has led to a lack of mutual understanding. Increased people-to-people
interaction and economic cooperation will help to address this problem.”When
this interview, titled 'China-India Relationship: the next 50 years will
be VERY DIFFERENT from the last 50 years', was published on the last day of the
Indian Premier’s visit, Oct 26 2013,[vi] this
argument on promoting people-to-people contact between the two as the key for a
brand new China-India relationship was quoted by many major media outlets in
China.
Nowadays, China-India communication is not only
limited, but also imbalanced. In 2012, 610,200 Indians visited mainland China,
while only 169,000 Chinese visited India, barely a quarter of the Indian
visitors to China.[vii]
A few years ago, the difference was even larger, when 500,000 Indians visited
China and merely 100,000 made the reverse. India’s strict visa policy is one of
the most complained reasons from the Chinese side. Apart from the policy
obstacles, further reasons lie in mentalities.
Last summer, before the trip to India, I toured China on
book launches with widely ranging Chinese audiences. We had many interesting
discussions about the complexity of Indian society, the controversial
relationship between China and India, and the bittersweet journey of getting to
know people from another culture and more about oneself as a result. I had personally always
believed that there was a yet-to-be-explored interest in knowing India, the
mysterious and unavoidable neighbour. I knew that this interest was just around
the corner. The passionate audiences full of inquiring minds exceeded my
expectations. Their criticisms and sophisticated questions surprised me but I
was conscious at the same time of the fact that their deep-rooted concerns
about the topic were not sufficiently reflected in the public and political spheres.
We, both China and
India, still have a long way to go on this front.
Our Common
Destiny
During my this stay in India, I used to take the Delhi
metro as part of my daily transport. When I crossed a tributary of the holy
Yamuna River, right beside my then residence to the nearby metro station, the
strong and stinking smell of the drying river and the accumulating garbage
floating in it made every passenger cover their nose immediately and tightly.
Moving between the two cities with equally smoky skies[viii],
Beijing and Delhi, and watching them exhaust every piece of energy to chase
each other’s pace in both developing and polluting, sometimes I would wonder:
while this fast modernising process makes human life more convenient and
efficient, will our life become more enjoyable with the disappearing animals
and biodiversity and decaying nature?
Whenever I think of this common destiny of India and
China, which is also the paradox of the whole (developing) world today, the need
for us to collaborate in tackling these challenges becomes urgently pressing. Meanwhile
I wonder whether our common destiny lays down more commonalities, instead of
differences for us to face each other and the future?
A Common Dream of China, India and the world
After 4 years of my first visit to India, my first book,
Grow Up in India based on one year of
study and research in India (2009-2010) came out coincidentally with the
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to India in late May 2013. Li wrote in his
famous speech ‘A Handshake across the Himalayas’[ix]on
his first foreign visit as Premier:
“An Asian century that people expect would not come if
China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, failed to live
in harmony and achieve common development…Our common development will benefit
people of the two countries and offer the world more and better opportunities.”
Our entangling story with India is just personal experiment
of the long process in mutual understanding between India and China, learning
from each other, and getting to know oneself more. Mutual understanding is a
continuous endeavour and a strategic investment. With this endeavour, we invest
in the solid foundation of trust-building for a great dream. An integrated
world is not only a dream of Chinese destiny, but also a dream for India, Asia
and the world.
In the end, we would love to conclude this lecture with a song. This
song is inspired by the journey of knowing the other and oneself, and the
journey of realising a dream together. I will join Yang for the singing this
time.
To be
Close to You and Freedom
Lyric: Zhang Yang (Chinese), Tsetan Dolkar (English)
Music: Zhang Yang
It might have been that I lived partly,
是我活得不够洒脱
It might be that pains make me rise higher,
还是苦难想托起我
When I look at the sunset quietly,
每当望着夕阳 低下头
I wonder if I am same as before or wiser.
我还是不是昨天的我
It seems as a moment of awakening,
梦召唤我 来到陌生的河
With a note where my pains are trickling,
虚无在音符上 得到解脱
It turned into a beautiful song
把梦想化作 美丽的歌
With forgetting all those wounds and wrong.
回头看时 曾经是那样
True there you and me,
真实的 存在着 你和我
Longing kids to be free.
向往着 自由的孩子
Could not suppress the tears welling
在黑夜里踱步
Unshackling the tied heart set free.
眼泪抑不住 夺眶而出
I am aspiring to move higher
是什么 在前方闪烁
To realise my own dreams lucidly
让我疲惫的心 挣脱枷锁
I greet this moment of awakening
受伤的做错的 醒悟的时刻
To be closed to you and freedom.
一直往前走 只为接近 你和自由
About the speakers:
Ma Yuge is DPhil
Candidate in Environmental Change Institute (ECI), University of Oxford. She is
now doing research with The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI) and the Institute
for Economic Growth (IEG) in New Delhi. Before that, she was a guest researcher
with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and Beijing (2011-2012), a
GG2022 fellow (gg2022.net), and an Avantha International Fellow 2013 with Aspen
Institute India. She is co-founder of the Oxford Juxtapose Project, which is a
multi-disciplinary platform for comparative studies on contemporary China and
India. Her first book Grow Up in India
is published in China in 2013 (the photo is the book cover).
Zhang Yang is an MPhil researcher from the School of
International Studies (SIS), Jawaharlal Nehru University. He got the MA in
Buddhist Studies from Delhi University and his Bachelor Degree in Musicology
from Capital Normal University (Beijing). He composed music with his experience
of 3 years study in India, combining the Indian musical elements, such as the
Indian traditional music instrument Sitar and Tagore's poem, as well as his
feelings about knowing the Indian civilisation. He also composes music for
Chinese ancient poems and shares the Chinese Culture with people from
other cultures. Now he is working with Ma Yuge and composing music related with
her book Grow Up in India, to explore
the meaning of growing up in a different culture and to know oneself better by
communicating with the people from the other culture through the plural ways.
The opinions expressed in this lecture are the author’s own and do not necessarily
represent the views of any of their affiliations. For any question, please
contact Ma Yuge via yuge.ma@wolfson.ox.ac.uk and horsecsc@gmail.com, and Zhang Yang via zhangyang1986@gmail.com.
[i] KAPUSCINSKI, R. (2005), Encountering the Other: The Challenge for
the 21st Century. New Perspectives Quarterly, 22: 6–13.
doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2005.00759.x
[ii]Mao Siwei on China-India Communication, sina.com (2013): http://blog.sina.com.cn/lm/c/2013-05-20/265465.shtml
[iii]Website of Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2013): https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/content/1568-problems-comparing-india-and-china
[iv]PewReserch Global Attitude Project (2013)
[v] Simon Shen (2011). Exploring the Neglected Constraints on Chindia:
Analysing the Online Chinese Perception of India and its Interaction with
China's Indian Policy. The China Quarterly, 207, pp 541-560.
doi:10.1017/S0305741011000646.
[vi]China Youth Daily (2013): http://zqb.cyol.com/html/2013-10/26/nw.D110000zgqnb_20131026_2-04.htm
[vii]Data from the Chinese and Indian Foreign Ministries
[viii]New York Times India Ink (2013): http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/you-think-the-air-in-beijing-is-bad-try-new-delhi/?_r=0
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