Time now to hone powers in positive way that will add value to human civilisation
Goh Sui Noi Senior Writer
Top Hong Kong-born news magazine editor Yau Lop Poon, 58, went to university in Taiwan in the 1960s at a time when many of his counterparts were doing so.
This was not only because Taiwan was a place where Chinese culture was flourishing, with some of the best writers in the Chinese language living there, but also because mainland China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.
“Hong Kong students who wanted to study anything related to China would go to Taiwan,” he told The Sunday Times.
Indeed, from 1949 to the 1980s, because of the Cold War, China had a confrontational relationship with other Chinese societies such as those in Taiwan and South-east Asia, he noted. Because of this, in places like Taiwan and much of South-east Asia, travel to communist China was either banned or highly controlled. Mainland Chinese were also restricted from travelling overseas. There was little communication between the Chinese in China and those living in the far-flung corners of the world.
All this has changed since China’s opening up and reforms in the late 1970s. Travel restrictions out of and into China were mostly lifted in the 1980s and 1990s.
Mr Yau, who is editor-in-chief of Yazhou Zhoukan – an international Chinese weekly magazine published out of Hong Kong – recalled at a forum yesterday that its 1987 inaugural issue had as its cover story Taiwan’s lifting of a ban on travel to the mainland. For the first time since 1949, the Taiwanese were allowed to travel to their hometowns to visit relatives.
“We put on the cover a photo of Taiwanese and Chinese people hugging each other and in tears, which left a deep impression,” he told the audience in his talk on the soft power of Chinese societies. The talk was organised by Lianhe Zaobao as part of its 85th anniversary celebrations.
That was the momentous start of a burgeoning interaction between mainland Chinese and diaspora Chinese that has expanded from familial exchanges into the economic arena and, in recent years, into the cultural field.
Influencing others
This synergistic interaction has created conditions for the development of Chinese soft power globally, Mr Yau suggested. He spoke about soft power in terms of influencing people without coercion, in subtle ways through economic and cultural aspects. Soft power is a term first coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye to describe the ability to “influence others to get them to do what you want” by attracting or co-opting them so that “they want what you want”.
Within China, the society is undergoing change as a result of economic development and the advent of the information age, noted Mr Yau.
The commercialisation of Chinese society, as a result of economic development, has led to the rule of law in China, as business activities require the signing of and adherence to contracts. It has also opened up the world to Chinese business people, as even small entrepreneurs find themselves doing business with people in places as far away and remote as Romania and South Africa. Mr Yau related how one Chinese businessman got his son to learn Romanian because he was doing business with the Romanians.
The need to look at bottom lines has also meant that people are focused on quantification. They look at GDP and other economic indicators. There is no room for ideology or political discourse in such a situation.
One result of engaging in business and being plugged into the globalised world: a melting away of old boundaries, whether legal, political or geographical.
The Internet and the cellphone have revolutionised the way Chinese people communicate and share information – there are 220 million Chinese netizens, the largest number in the world, and 500 million cellphone users. These afford a platform for the Chinese to discuss and debate relatively freely on issues, and for Chinese from all over the world to interact, Mr Yau noted.
Greater openness
In the new atmosphere of greater openness, as the communist ideology loses traction and old taboos fall away, Chinese intellectuals are beginning to rediscover old conventional wisdoms, such as Confucianism, and giving them a modern interpretation. He pointed to Yu Dan and Yi Zhongtian, popular writers of Chinese philosophy and history books, as examples.
From the outside, overseas Chinese societies are influencing China in subtle ways. Mr Yau singled out Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao as an example, pointing to the five million page views daily from mainland Chinese readers that its online website receives.
He added that Taiwan’s democratic process was also attracting the attention of the Chinese.
When Chinese tourists start visiting Taiwan from next month, he said, they would see that the mass mobilisation of people at large election rallies does not lead to chaos, as they fear. (Beijing and Taipei are set to start direct weekend flights next month and will allow more Chinese tourists to visit the island.)
The small numbers of Chinese tourists who now visit Taiwan remain in their rooms in the evenings to watch political talk shows on TV where commentators and callers criticise the government without fear, he noted.
The many Chinese tourists going to Hong Kong got to taste the freedom of the press that they did not have back home.
It is perhaps with this possibility of influencing China and Chinese societies in mind that Mr Yau chose to return to Hong Kong in 1990 after several years of studying and working in the United States.
“The mission of a journalist is not only to cover the world; sometimes you have to change the world,’’ he told The Sunday Times. He added that while working in Chinese-language newspapers in the US, he was not in the mainstream and therefore had limited influence in society.
After Taiwan, where he worked for a time at the mass-circulation China Times, he had gone on to the well-known New School of Social Research in New York to study for a master’s degree in economics. He then worked as a researcher at Berkeley University before returning to journalism.
He finds greater gratification working in Hong Kong at the international magazine, he said.
Building a new power
In recent times, he has written a lot on China’s soft power and how the creative powers of the Chinese diaspora have converged in the building of this soft power.
An example he pointed out to The Sunday Times was the highly successful movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which brought together Taiwanese director Lee Ang, Hong Kong producer Bill Kong and ethnic Chinese actors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia.
He noted too that gongfu movies were made popular worldwide by Chinese-American Bruce Lee, Hong Konger Jackie Chan and China-born Jet Li. Novelist Ha Jin, writing in the English language but with many of his stories set in China, has won acclaim for his books.
Each of these Chinese may hold different passports, but they hold the same spiritual visa because they share the same cultural DNA, he maintained.
The question now is how to move this soft power in the direction in which it would become a positive force that contributes to human civilisation.
Mr Yau acknowledged that in the pluralism of Chinese societies worldwide, there would be those who would display aggressive nationalism, whether on the Internet or in the streets.
But the global Chinese soft power that he envisaged would not be a narrow-minded, crusading, self-righteous nationalism or a weapon to coerce others into submission. Rather, it would be to add value to human civilisation.
After 100 years of working hard to solve its own problems and struggling to modernise itself, the Chinese world can perhaps now think about what contribution it can make to the rest of the world, he said.
suinoi@sph.com.sg
Zuraidah Ibrahim’s column and The Ex-Pat Files are held over.
In recent times, (Mr Yau) has written a lot on China’s soft power and how the creative powers of the Chinese diaspora have converged in the building of this soft power. An example he pointed out was the highly successful movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which brought together Taiwanese director Lee Ang, Hong Kong producer Bill Kong and ethnic Chinese actors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia.
Courtesy of The Straits Times, June 08, 2008