Fighting the wrong war

During Holy Week, my wife and I went to the Confucius Institute at the University of Minnesota’s China Centre. They were giving away all the books at the Resource Centre there, because the Confucius Institute was shutting down. We made out, if you’ll pardon the vulgarism, like bandits.

My ‘haul’ consisted of several volumes of Shi Nai’an’s Water Margin. Pu Songling’s Strange Tales. Selected works of Lu Xun. Selected plays of Guan Hanqing. The Scholars by Wu Jingzi. The Tea Road by Martha Avery. Tibet Transformed by Israel Epstein. A volume on international neo-Confucianism. A study on Daoist practice in modern China. And a lot more. We left with – no exaggeration here – probably about eight hundred dollars’ worth of books, free of charge; a veritable library of Sinological texts. So my complaint here may sound more than a bit hypocritical, or like biting the hand that feeds me.

Why did this happen? Well, the rehearsed answer I got was that ‘it’s complicated’.

Part of the situation, though, is not particularly complicated. Capitol Hill, Langley and Foggy Bottom have declared CIs a security threat, and are making sure that legally, no institution hosting a CI can get fœderal funding for a flagship programme. Now, the University has a very large and very profitable flagship programme, for which they want to retain federal support, and so I find it hard to blame the university for the closure of the Confucius Institute. The University is making the only possible rational choice from an œconomic perspective. But that can’t erase or excuse the bigotry of the new fœderal policy in the first place. The closure of the resource centre is more than a tragœdy. It’s a disgrace. The resources, both Chinese and English, on offer at the Confucius Institute were available, both to a broad student body, and to the broader community for academic purposes. Now they’re disappearing into the hands of private enthusiasts like me.

The cross-section of the books I listed here give an indication of the contents. Drama. Literary classics. Arts and crafts. Scholarly output. Respectable journals. Reference materials. Even a couple of taijiquan and qigong manuals. The fœderal government is forcing academies to choose between keeping resources like these, at low cost, available to all students and friends of the university – or keeping the broad, diverse body of students they gain as a result of having a flagship programme. This is a Sophie’s choice put to universities between their international students and their international reference materials aimed at a broader audience.

The government will insist, of course, that it is merely targetting an arm of the Chinese government. And the ever-dutiful and ever-docile mainstream media (with Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post being – predictably enough – the most cringingly, nauseatingly obsequious in this regard) will line up to drive that point home. Even so, it’s very difficult not to see the closure of the Confucius Institutes as part of a broader campaign to vilify Chinese culture as a whole for domestic political purposes. As a scholar and lover of that culture, I deplore this trend utterly, even if I have benefitted from it personally in this specific instance.

It’s also hard not to see this closure as connected to a broader and growing animus against Asian people (particularly students) as well – an animus which includes targetted crime and violence against Asian-Americans nationally, not just in academia. On the national stage, one of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, Andrew Yang, has even touched on this issue as one of particular importance with his ‘one generation away’ comment. As the husband of an Asian immigrant woman, and as the father of two hapa children who will be part of that generation, yes, I naturally view this trend with no small degree of concern.

Not least: as an Orthodox Christian, too, I’m committed utterly and completely to the Patristic conviction that each human person – that is, not just the individual, but the whole person including all the messy cultural-linguistic-historical baggage – is a unique and unrepeatable icon of the Divine. Chinese people bear the stamp of God upon them, as my wife and son and daughter remind me time and again, every single day. Not only that, but I am convinced that Saint Thomas was truly right to tread out from his Gate along the eastward road in pursuit of the Great Commission; and the shining example of General Guo Ziyi stands as a great testament to his as-yet-unfinished work. To my gentle Orthodox Christian readers: remember that Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, whose feast we celebrated just this past Tuesday, was a fierce and tireless advocate of immigrant rights and solidarity over-against the nativist bigotry of Archbishop John Ireland et alia. He was of course also an advocate of what is now called ‘respectability politics’, but that’s a different discussion.

In any event, regardless of what the Chinese government does, the current intellectual and political forces at work in American government and society – targetting Chinese culture, targetting Chinese students, targetting Asian people generally as enemies – must be resisted in their totality, regardless of whatever guise they adopt. The motives and actions of the Chinese government – which, by the way, does not get everything right and does not always act justly – are not relevant to this question. The proximate sources of America’s fears about Asia and about Chinese people specifically are related to the stresses on our market-capitalist œconomy, our addiction to cheap gadgetry and the size of ‘their’ population. In a more distant sense, America’s fear of Asia is rooted in a Machiavellian neo-pagan and Whig-historical mythos opposing the virtuous republican West to the wicked, decadent and despotic East. All of this should be enough to tell you that these intellectual and political forces are not of Christ, but instead those of His enemy. We need to not get caught up fighting the wrong war; China is not the enemy we need to worry about.