The cultural relationship between China and the West, including the hypothesis of a rediscovery, does not fit neatly into the binary pattern implied by the model of Orientalism associated with post-colonial theory. Even in the era of high imperialism, the Sino-Western relationship involved complexities for which the paradigm of colonizer and colonized is too simplistic and therefore requires a theorization of a post-Orientalism. As evidence, the narrative fragment ‘The Boxer Rebellion’, by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, published posthumously in 1957, explores the psychological dynamic between a European soldier and a Chinese prisoner in order to demonstrate the immanent ambivalence of imperialism and its Orientalist categories.

China as a concept had not been put under much scrutiny and challenge until the recent postmodern and postcolonial theoretical discourse on nation and nationhood, and the radical scepticism about tradition and homogeneity. Some scholars have questioned whether China could have been a nation state before there was any nation state in Europe, and others have challenged the very notions of China and Chineseness. How do the Chinese themselves respond to such scepticism and challenge? How does one re-conceptualize China at the present time? By drawing on recent debates on such important issues, this essay tries to find some answers and offers some views from a Chinese perspective, while fully engaging Western theoretical discourses, to attempt an international dialogue and meaningful exchange.

This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis repudiates previous Eurocentric narratives of global capitalism and locates China at the center of the world economy in the early modern period up to 1800. Third, China’s revolutionary legacy (what was called ‘Maoism’) and its current ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in official parlance are considered by New Leftist theorists as a viable alternative to capitalist modernity. Fourth, universal modernity as such is regarded as a social and political imperative by the opposing camp of Neo-Liberalists as modernity is still an ‘incomplete project’ in Chinese history. Overall, such debates are efforts to chart out a cultural and theoretical landscape that does not easily fit in existing models of Western cultural studies that are often based on the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the Anglophone and Francophone world.

Global modernity refers to a moment of the breakdown of the hegemony of a Eurocentric modernity and the fragmentation into many cultural spheres of the very idea of the modern without any promise so far of how modernity might be reconstituted and some coherence restored to its claims.... On the other hand, Global Modernity as a concept is also intended to transcend the situation of which it is the product, as this very situation enables the possibility of re-envisioning modernity, rescuing it from entrapment in a vision of history dominated by Eurocentrism and imagining it differently. (Arif Dirlik, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity)1

The People’s Republic of China’s dramatic transformation has not only benefited its people, but has also led it to become a major player in the world. Here we examine how deeply perceptions of China have penetrated into the public’s perceptions in a wide variety of nations around the world – the US, 11 nations in East Asia, and 22 in Latin America. We ask a series of questions: how much do people know? How do Americans evaluate China? And how do publics in East Asia and Latin America view China’s influence in their nations and around the world? We also examine some of the ways in which perceptions vary, both across nations and within nations, such as by partisanship. In addition, we report the results of an experiment using an advertisement the PRC ran in the US to assess how successful they were in shaping public opinion about China. We conclude that our studies, and those of others, provide a strong baseline for assessing the effect of an emerging superpower on citizens around the world.

The essay discusses the public opinion surveys on the rise of China in the United States, Asia and Latin America since 2010, conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Duke University’s collaborative research team headed by the author. It examines the world public recognition of China’s growing influence, their attitudes toward China’s influence, and reactions to the ‘China Model’ and impressions of China’s political, economic, social, and cultural development. These assessments of China’s domestic issues or internal behavior show not only the amount of information and knowledge that the people in various countries know about China, but the intrinsic value judgments and ideological biases that influence their perceptions of China. The essay argues that the rise of China is a complicated phenomenon with a multifarious nature, including material dimensions, such as military power, economic development, and technological innovation, as well as ideational dimensions, such as perception, understanding, or prejudice. Public opinion, attitudes and perceptions of China’s rise are the outcome of dynamic interactions and assemblage of factors, a synergy of material interests, ideational and emotional reactions, and values, ideologies, principles, unraveling themselves against a highly volatile, precarious and contentious geopolitical backdrop, in which the interests of nation-states and individuals became all intertwined and inseparable.

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009 and the merging of the two leaders into Chairman Obamao or Comrade Maobama, which can be read as the end of ideological contrast between the two countries for the sake of creating a system of political interdependence for the 21st century, a postmodern prefiguration of a coming ChinAmerica.

The essay first describes the Chinese intellectual condition in the age of globalization and the necessity of liberal arts or humanities education, and then deals with the function of humanities education in China’s institutions of higher learning with Tsinghua University as the particular case. Since current Chinese universities are divided into three types: (1) research universities; (2) teaching-research universities; and (3) teaching-oriented universities, liberal arts education always plays an important part in students’ comprehensive schooling although in most of the research universities priority is given to science and technology. As China has a long tradition of humanities education, even long before the establishment of those Western type universities, offering humanities education to all the university students as a major educational task has never changed. Even during the Cultural Revolution when all the universities stopped teaching and research work, students and faculty members were still educated with Mao’s instructions. Along with the rapid development of Chinese economy, traditional humanities are suffering more or less. But the author argues that no matter how rapidly the Chinese economy has been developing and how well Chinese people are pursuing the so-called Chinese Dream, it is necessary to pay attention to the humanities and to offer humanities education to young students. The author also offers his reconstruction of Neo-Confucianism as an alternative discourse to various postmodern discourses in the new framework of global culture.

This article explores the national and global significance and impact of Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 summer Olympic Games. The discussion is organized into four main parts. First, I locate the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the context of wider processes of globalization; in particular, I explore how China ‘glocalized’ the Olympics, by giving the event distinctive meanings that were then experienced by global television audiences. Second, I employ the concept of ‘soft power’ to explore how, in hosting the event, China sought to advance its international influence and appeal; I introduce the concept of ‘soft disempowerment’ to examine how there may have been some negative impacts for China in staging the Olympics. Third, I discuss issues of security surrounding the Beijing Olympics, given the growing focus on such questions for sport mega-events in general following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Fourth, I outline some of the key issues regarding sporting legacies for China, following the 2008 Olympics, with particular reference to Chinese football.

In the past 30 years, teaching Chinese as a foreign/second language (TCSL/TCFL) has made great achievements in Mainland China. However, TCSL/TCFL is at a crucial point at present, and its global development in the 21st century presents us with new questions and challenges. There are many issues involved as TCSL/TCFL adapts to this rapid change from a largely domestic context to a global one. This article attempts to address such issues as the significance, challenges and strategies of TCSL/TCFL in mainland China by outlining its brief history and development since the 1950s, and calls for the establishment of an international ‘framework of reference’ for Chinese language teaching.