China reveres foreign degrees more than its own diplomas

By Thorsten Pattberg
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, May 6, 2014
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'China experts'

Ironically, this is even true for the so-called “China experts.”

Henry Kissinger (USA), Helmut Schmidt (Germany), and Hans Kung (Switzerland) are self-declared and respected global authorities on China — none of them speaks a single sentence of Chinese.

Strikingly, even the West’s most famed sinologists that I know of have not mastered the Chinese language, let alone earned a Chinese education.

As our university administration in the UK used to say: “You can spend twenty years in China and recite all the Classics if you want, but it won’t earn you a degree from a Western university in Chinese Studies.”

If Western expatriates spoke Chinese and lived like the locals, they would eventually be treated like them, with horrible consequences for the entire Western mission. They would jeopardize their entitlement to higher salaries, expat perks, and Western exclusiveness. Western peers would find the natural order endangered and quickly eject those “spies” or “cultural traitors.”

In the West, again, the complete opposite is true: the value of foreigners increases precisely in proportion to their willingness to be “assimilated.”

Assimilation will bring respect, status, and higher salary.

I cannot stress this often enough: Western leaders like US President Barack Obama pledge to double the number of American (exchange) students to China, but he isn’t sending them to become Chinese. For the West, there is only one direction of world history: from the West to the East.

Germany is a strong case in point. Nothing has changed since Gottfried Leibniz, the first German philosopher, and Christian Wolff, the first German “China expert,” romantically endorsed Chinese culture, yet, under scrutiny they were ignorant of Chinese characters, lacked any Chinese acquaintance, and had never set foot on Asia.

The Germans are now tens of thousands in China, praising the culture if they must; however judging from their actions there’s little reciprocity.

On the contrary, the Europeans, in fierce competition with other powers, want to earn money, but have neither a strategy nor an iota of a wish to learn anything Chinese. They want China to become like the West — that’s why they are here. There is no plan B.

The Chinese are incredibly studious and have a world-class education... alas, they still don’t believe it.

Remember this, in a healthy and developed society the following order prevails: First you value your home-grown talents, and then those foreigners who want to learn from you; followed by distant foreigners who are somewhat innocent.

Only as a last resort should you reward those individuals who chose to abandon your culture.

In China it is the opposite.

Thorsten Pattberg, PhD, Peking University, is a former research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University and the author of “The East-West Dichotomy. Pattberg can be contacted at pattberg@pku.edu.cn.

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