A seemingly inevitable part of doing a teaching exchange like the one I'm doing in Nanjing is the "cultural exchange" session. These are standard fare for study abroad programs as well. They always follow a similar logic and pattern. The underlying notion is that contact, interction, familiarity and understanding beget international cooperation and prevent hostility. This is, in fact, the very core of the Fulbright Program that I'm about to begin. The idea is not without basis. Gordon Allport's studies in social psychology in the late 1950s suggest that contact between different groups improves perception and feelings about an "other." One of my mentors, Peter Hays Gries, has explored this idea within the context of U.S.-China relations. There's a lot to be said for the power of one-to-one interactions between people to improve the state of geopolitical relationships.
We talk about being a "cultural ambassador" when abroad. What we talk less about is how difficult this is. On Thursday night, I was asked to speak to a bunch of pre-freshman year students at Nanjing University who are going to take part in the 2+2 program that will have them spend two years in China, and two years studying in America at OU. I was told the students wanted to ask questions about America. And quickly, "ask questions about America" turned into "hear you give a lecture about America." At first, I was a bit baffled. How do you encapsulate the culture of any country, let alone one as diverse and enormous as the United States into a presentation? What kind of things do you need to say? The topic seems imposibly large. And yet, I found myself drawing up a brief intro to college life in the U.S. slide deck, hoping to (at a bare minimum) hit some highlight about the University of Oklahoma, and hope that it would suffice.
Such "soft power" cultural exchanges may seem to some like a mere exchange of platitudes about mutual understanding and cooperation. In fact, I've heard people express this exact view before; that such activities are meaningless. I find that opinion to be incredibly cynical. I'm not so naive as to think that these events can be world-shaking on a mass level. Nor do I believe that after we have these types of programs, we can all leave the room feeling that "we're all just the same, deep down." Cultural differences will always persist, but I think that events like these provide a blueprint for how to handle them. Beyond all of that, while I know that programs like this won't completely reorient the course of U.S.-China relations, I do think that they can have a profound effect interpersonally, and can truly change the outlook of individuals on both sides. I feel like that may be something more tangible (and dare I say more important?) than high-level diplomacy.
And I'm not alone. On a recent episode of the excellent Sinica Podcast on current affairs in China, The Huffington Post's China correspondant (and my former Princeton in Beijing classmate), Matt Sheehan, noted that on high-level diplomatic and geostrategic issues, it's sometimes hard to "see where the rubber meets the road," and suggested that the area where "China-U.S. relations is actually happening" is through a much more local kind of interaction: Chinese investment in American citites, Chinese students coming to American universities, etc. It's a pretty spot on take. At the ground level, it's a lot easier to see the interactions that are meaningful for sustaining bilateral ties. Education is most certainly a crucial component of this program of local-level interaction, especially the old cultural-exchange dog and pony show.
But as anyone who's been to one of these things can tell you, they're really hard to pull off well. My classmates from the Spring 2008 SIT Yunnan program will all remember our cultural exchange program. We were told me needed to talk about American college life. And we tried to put together a program that could cover the highlights of American culture. It was hit and miss, mostly because it's such a huge task. Our Chinese counterparts basically just put on a talent show. In retrospect, it definitely seems like the way to go.
So, on Thursday night I felt a little awkward standing in front of almost 30 freshmen to be at Nanjing University. What nobody tells you about being a "cultural ambassador" in such a public way is how weighty and clunky the whole thing can feel. I fought the urge (or maybe just the tendency?) to turn into an anthropomorphic episode of Schoolhouse Rock! and start overly explaining America in a simplistic way that these kids would no doubt find patronizing. I went through the presentation in a mish-mash of English and Chinese, feeling like I must be giving the most bizarre picture of the United States to these kids. Because my presentation focused on what it's like to be an undergrad at OU (something which I, by the way, don't really understand, having not done it myself), the picture of America that was being given must have felt very odd: a land full of college football, Mexican food, and lacking parking spaces (Hey, they asked about transportation on campus, so I told 'em). Things seemed to be going awkwardly. I wasn't sure how much anyone was getting out of this event, but then we got to the Q&A. And the questions got really, really, good. And interesting. And very earnest.
"What kinds of things should we avoid talking about with Americans?"
"Do American students make friends with international exchange students?"
"Is there any racism towards Chinese students at your school?"
"How is the American classroom setting different from China?"
These are a smattering of the kinds of questions I was getting. What I think is most interesting about them is that they forced me to look at my own country through the eyes of someone who had never been there. This may sound like a cliche. But try it. My experience with the cultural exchange program has previously been like a checkbox of things that I feel I have to mention to meet the criteria for describing my country in some perfunctory way. What I think was most interesting about Thursday night was the way in which I ended up re-visiting and relearning some things about my own country in order to give an honest picture of it to people who'd never been there before. Subverting the whole "cultural exchange" program paradigm forced me to really think about what America was, and invited me to look at it again, this time from a perspective of distance, and earnest curiosity. It's a strange (and I think, valuable) thing to experience.
In any case, it certainly does make it a lot easier for me to think about where the rubber meets the road in bilateral ties. And if the lion's share of relationship building between the two countries really does occur at a level that enables a similar kind of thoughtfulness, and self-reflection, then so much the better. For us. For China. For the world.