This is the tenth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that give a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. Ever wondered what it's like to teach and research in mainland China? Find out by reading this guest contribution by Peter Finocchiaro, who is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow (a position equivalent to TT assistant professor) in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University.
Thanks to Helen and Marcus and everyone who has contributed already to this series. I've thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to learn about how philosophy is faring in other parts of the world. I hope I can help others do the same by saying a few things about philosophy in mainland China.
Let's start by acknowledging the obvious: I'm not a Chinese national. I'm an American who has been working in China for all of 15 months. My experience is therefore limited and unrepresentative of that of a typical Chinese academic, being tinted especially by the fact that I am a 外国人 (foreigner). But I will do my best to speak to both my own experiences and the broader state of philosophy in China.
Academic philosophy in China is big and it is growing. Philosophy departments often have dozens of faculty members with large budgets to spend on development. In contrast to the state of academic philosophy in the United States, this growth is helped, rather than hindered, by changes in government spending. That being said, some philosophy departments feel more like a collection of mini-departments organized by research areas. Of those, two tend to be the biggest and most influential: Marxist philosophy and Chinese philosophy. But “foreign philosophy” is growing.
My own university, Wuhan University, is a good case in point. Before 2015, our department’s foreign philosophy faculty were all Chinese nationals, many of them western-trained. The department has since aggressively recruited western-trained philosophers who are themselves westerners. Over the course of four years, the department recruited 14 foreigners, 7 of them as professors and 7 of them as post-docs. This rapid growth has the support of the university’s administration: it recently designated our department a “model department” for internationalization and has awarded it even more money to continue the process. With this support, we've been able to not only hire more people but also finance pretty much anything we foreigners can organize, including colloquium series, research workshops, international conferences, and summer school programs for our students. We're in a very fortunate situation.
Why the university and the Chinese government invests so much in the growth of philosophy (and internationalization more broadly) is, of course, a complicated sociological question. But I think a major piece of the answer has to do with university rankings. China's push to be a major world leader includes a push to be a major world educator. Currently, this push puts mainland universities in competition with other Chinese universities (especially in places like Hong Kong) as well as neighboring Asian countries like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. Because Chinese mainland universities were, for obvious reasons, comparatively late to join the race, they are eager to make up for lost ground. Academic philosophers are a comparatively efficient investment. We don't require expensive research labs. Heck, nowadays we barely even require libraries!
As a result, my job at Wuhan University is in many respects similar to that of a tenure-track philosopher at a major research university in the United States. I teach a 2/2 mix of undergraduate and graduate courses. I write papers. I go to talks. I do some small amount of service work. All of this I do in English. (The department actually has quite a number of long meetings. To my embarrassment, though, my poor Chinese is used to excuse me from most of those.)
Similar as it may be, my job also has Chinese characteristics. A few times a week I'll encounter a cultural difference that vividly reminds me of the fact that I'm in China. One example of this is what I call the impromptu commentary. I love these. After some talks – though typically not the “foreign philosophy” talks – when it is time for the audience to ask questions, no one will raise their hand. Instead, after an appropriate amount of time has passed, the senior figure in the audience will stand and face the audience to provide their own summary of and commentary on the talk. These impromptu commentaries are often quite long. But if there is time after they have finished, more junior figures will proceed to ask their own questions.
I feel these cultural differences most forcefully in my teaching. Students here are, on the whole, smart and diligent and eager to learn. The educational culture they are familiar with, though, is one where they spend many hours passively listening to professors lecture. Compared to my experiences teaching in the United States, I've had to work much harder to encourage my students to ask questions and engage in discussions. This is exacerbated by the very real cultural sensitivity to saving and losing face. To ask a question that suggests you don't understand what was said is to risk a loss of face. (The face that is lost is not necessarily that of the student; such a question may also suggest that the instructor – me – failed to properly explain the material.) Similarly, I've struggled to get students to clearly distinguish between points of agreement and disagreement. In the course of a typical discussion, students will often respond to each other by first saying “I agree” and then saying something that very clearly does not agree with what the first student said.
Struggles aside, I find teaching here to be the most fulfilling part of my job. About half of my students are philosophy majors concentrating on international philosophy. They're extremely passionate about the material and many of them aspire to continue their studies at Anglophone graduate programs. But sometimes I see their English language skills get in the way of that passion. It really bums me out when that happens. To put my naivety on full display, before moving to China I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which English can be a barrier of entry to the international philosophical community. (I probably still don't fully appreciate it.) China has a population of over 1.4 billion. For entirely contingent reasons, they do not have equal access to Anglophone philosophy, and vice versa. That should change. I know whatever I do is barely a drop in the bucket. But this is the sort of thing that I remind myself of when I'm missing home.
On the whole, though, I do enjoy my life in mainland China. Wuhan University is located in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. It's located in Central China, and has a climate that I would describe as similar to that of northern Florida. (Wuhan used to be called one of the Three Furnaces of China.) Wuhan is a major city, even by Chinese standards, with a population somewhere around 9 million. It's also an ancient city; its location at the intersection of the Han River and the Yangtze River made it an ideal hub for trade and transportation for thousands of years, as it remains today. The food here is spicy, delicious, and cheap. The public transport system is well-developed, albeit crowded. There is even a craft brewery just a few minutes walk from campus that has the most beautiful looking wheat beer I've ever seen anywhere in the world.
Unlike cities like Beijing and Shanghai, Wuhan is not yet a major international city. It's therefore nearly impossible to get by on English alone. As an American with only an elementary grasp of the Chinese language, that reality makes my life here more complicated. Phone translation apps help a lot. So, too, does the philosophy department. Its administrative staff and student employees help us foreigners with all manner of academic and non-academic stuff. They're really good at their job. Without them, this explosion of foreign philosophy wouldn't be possible.
Wuhan is also quite polluted. Like elsewhere in China, you shouldn't drink its tap water unless you boil it first. The air quality is also quite poor. Everyone I know has an air purifier at home. Most people also wear pollution masks when the air quality is especially bad. In this respect, the winters here are much worse than the summers. There's a large lake near my apartment that I like to walk along. (If you visit, you really should check it out!) In the summer, you can easily see what's on the other side of the lake. In the winter, though, looking across the lake is like looking into a hazy, polluted, void.
There's a topic I haven't said anything about yet. There's a lot I could say. But for now I'll limit myself to just a few paragraphs.
When I talk to people about my job at Wuhan University, they almost always ask me about freedom of speech and academic freedom. It's okay. As I said before, I'm a 外国人. The reality of my situation does not really compare to that of a Chinese national. Some topics are messy – like, for example, what’s currently going on to my south. When I took the job, I did sign a document for the human resources department that affirmed my support of the One-China policy and my intention to respect the laws and sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China. I’ve nevertheless also had frank conversations about those topics with students, colleagues, and other foreigners. People have opinions here and they do share them with each other.
I’ve also never felt the need to change the content of my courses to conform with expectations. To be fair, my areas are not the primary areas of concern – I teach “politically removed” topics in metaphysics, language, and science. My foreign political philosophy colleagues have told me similar things, but they do tend to keep their discussions fairly abstract. I’m less worried about this topic so far as research is concerned. The university and the government care most about the quality and quantity of our publications; the content of those publications is mostly irrelevant.
The Great Firewall is not impenetrable, but it does slow me down. I watch less Netflix here than I do back home. I have to switch on and off to switch access between Google scholar and the university library. My Dropbox doesn't sync across my devices as reliably as I would like. In addition, during some times of the year my unfiltered access to the internet becomes less reliable. On a few occasions that’s resulted in me being temporarily cut off from my Gmail and American social media accounts. I’m not a fan of all that.
I am, though, a fan of the institutional support that academic philosophy receives in China. Philosophy is already a major part of the Chinese educational tradition. That tradition is now becoming increasingly international. If my impression is correct, this is a trend that will continue. It’s also a trend that I am happy to be a part of.
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