With the recent collapse of world stock markets, many eyes are now turning in China’s direction. International personalities such as Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson consider its role as critical in the overcoming of the crisis. In the meantime, a lot of people in China think that the recent economic meltdown will give their country a historical opportunity to gain further influence on the international scene. Whether they are right or wrong in their analysis, there is now little doubt that China is soon to become the world’s first economic power: but it is still difficult to predict how the country will use its new status in its relationships with other countries. This is a subject of endless debates and speculations among strategists, politicians and economists around the world. However, I would like to tackle this issue from a less commonly addressed perspective, that of culture.

Since the 15th century and the Age of discovery, European countries have progressively expanded their cultural influence over the world by several means. Pacific or armed, convinced of their own superiority or placing cultures on an equal level, soldiers, businessmen, clergymen and scientists have spread the beliefs, norms and science of their native countries around the globe. In the meantime, they also brought back to their homelands the fruits of their discoveries, but these only affected European countries in very superficial ways, as foreign cultures were often misrepresented through the prism of exoticism.
After World War I, the United States replaced Europe as the dominant power, and achieved progressively to promote their values and all around the globe. A key to their economic success has been their capacity to export a model, an American way of life that had a wide international appeal. However, the limit of such strategy is that it has remained mostly unilateral and has been perceived in certain parts of the globe as cultural imposition, leading to growing levels of resentment against the US.

Today, as China is about to become the leading economic power of the globe, one can anticipate that its influence will penetrate other cultures to an extent never reached before – an extent that goes beyond the current western fancy for Chinese food, clothes or furniture. But it is remains difficult to imagine in which ways Chinese values and ways of thinking might penetrate and infuse other cultures in the future. For instance, can you imagine a “Chinese way of life” that could be spread worldwide through films or TV productions, and that would ensure China a strong international position in the sphere of cultural influence? Picturing this evolution requires from both Western and Chinese sides to turn their concepts and mental habits upside down.

From a Chinese perspective, the main difficulty might be to think of their culture as something that does not only have to be defended against external menaces, but also as something that can be widely shared and projected towards other countries. In the long and complicated relations between the West and the East, Western values have alternatively be seen either as a danger for Chinese culture or as a way to enrich and renew it; but in both cases, the focus of attention was always the effects of “westernization” on China: seldom has the question of China’s possible contribution to a universal culture been asked. While the country’s role on the international scene is expected to grow significantly in the near future, Chinese culture is still more often represented as something that had to be protected against external attacks than as something that could be exported and positively enrich other cultures. And there seems to be little progress made in this direction, considering the difficulty that China’s leaders have to improve the international image of their country.

Westerners also need a different mindset if they want to receive more than the most superficial aspects of Chinese culture. Historically used to occupying the dominant positions and to considering their beliefs as universal and priming on others, European and American societies have now to learn how to get rid of their ethnocentric point of view in order to receive and to learn from the other’s differences. As economical hierarchies are about to be disrupted and the cards of international power redistributed, the keys of a harmonious development in Western-Chinese relationships mainly reside in the capacity of both sides to make such mental adjustments. Provided a common will is demonstrated in this exchange, cultures can be instruments of cross-fertilization rather than mutual destruction, and cultural interpenetration between the East and the West promises to create some fascinating hybrids in the future.

(Photo by C.Phiv)

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