This week on Sinica, I sit down in Beijing with Tim Clissold. If you read one book about doing business in China in the 2000s, there’s a fair chance it was his Mr. China, the self-aware, admirably self-deprecating tragicomedy about standing between some $400 million of Wall Street money and twenty Chinese joint ventures that weren’t going to plan. He followed it with Chinese Rules, and for years since he’s worked mostly as a mediator between Chinese companies and the foreign investors who’ve fallen out with them. He’s a visiting fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been living, working, and thinking in and about China for nearly forty years.
But that isn’t why he’s here. For twenty years Tim has been pursuing what I’ve taken to calling his Great Enterprise — his 大业 dàyè — a new A-level in Chinese Civilisation for British schools, modeled on the existing A-level in Classical Civilisation and taught entirely in English, no Mandarin required. He’s assembled a syllabus with a dozen of Britain’s leading sinologists, lined up ten vice chancellors, the chairs of some of the country’s biggest companies, and the money to pay for it. The Department for Education’s answer has so far been no. The campaign is the subject of his forthcoming, self-published book, Teach the People: How to Narrow the Knowledge Gap between China and the West, whose premise is that the Chinese know far more about us than we know about them, and that the gap is now a matter of national security. We test that premise, and then we talk about what closing it would actually look like. Along the way Tim is generous enough to cite my essay The Great Reckoning, which he says shaped the book’s historical frame.
03:44 – Evidence of the knowledge gap
09:18 – Is this more than the ordinary incuriosity of the bigger party? Late Qing parallels, and an energy transition the West willfully ceded
14:49 – What was the West’s Second Opium War?
19:35 – Feng Guifen, the Self-Strengthening Movement, and the reciprocal questions the West should be asking itself
23:12 – The A66 and the Romans: twenty years to widen eighteen miles, a generation that can’t build wealth by working, and Hobbes as a forgotten Western strand
26:41 – Inverting tǐ-yòng: Western values as essence, Chinese methods for use, and whether you can have the electro-state without the party-state
30:40 – Mínzú: nation or race? Nine dictionaries, eight professors, a running battle with the FT, and the Stalin-to-Hitler op-ed that followed
34:42 – The Woodward Scale: a tongue-in-cheek measure of China sentiment, and why knowing China ought to unite hawks and doves
38:34 – The Great Enterprise: why Mandarin alone is pushing water uphill, collapsing language A-levels, native speakers taking all the A’s, and the Classical Civilisation model
43:34 – Nick Gibb’s no, ten merry-go-round ministers, a chairman’s letter to the prime minister, a 272-page curriculum review that never mentions China, and “that’s in the particular”
48:38 – Mind-enhancing and useful: would the A-level matter if China were no threat?
55:55 – Who can say yes? Pockets in Whitehall, a British Tóngwénguǎn, Guan Zhong’s hundred-year horizon, and what a China-literate Britain would decide differently — from Mingyang to Huawei
Paying It Forward
Morrison Cleaver, Beijing-based policy analyst at the China-Britain Business Council — Cambridge Chinese Studies, Yenching Scholar, still in his twenties, and one of the very few Brits of his generation who actually studied Chinese at university. Tim calls him a trailblazer. He’s also the man who lent me his copy of Teach the People so I could read it ahead of this conversation.
Recommendations
Tim: Bleak House by Charles Dickens — the story of an interminable lawsuit that outlives its litigants and ruins plaintiff and defendant alike; deliberately hard to follow, Tim suspects, because the joke is on us. He’s also just read Middlemarch for the first time and loved it. (I’ll always put in a word for Middlemarch — it’s the second time Bleak House has been recommended on this show, so it goes to the top of my list.)
Kaiser: Two novels by Mohsin Hamid, who’s become a friend through the Georgetown Global Dialogues. The Reluctant Fundamentalist — a short, semi-autobiographical novel told entirely as one side of a conversation in a Lahore café, by a Princeton-educated Pakistani who once understood America intimately. And Exit West, a very different and perhaps braver book about a young couple fleeing a city coming apart, in a world where doors open onto Mykonos and north London and an unrecognizable Marin County. Mohsin, I owe you a Chinese novel.
