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Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation:

Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural

perspective

ZONGJIE WU

With the modernization of Chinese society, beginning in the early-20th century, the Chi- nese language has experienced a fundamental change that has transformed Chinese peda- gogic practices. Modern Chinese discourses, whether of social or scientific practices or on China’s intellectual heritage, are largely articulated in westernized discourses that have been normalized as China’s own. This study explores the cultural differences of linguistic world-views on knowledge and education between the East and the West, and then examines the impact of the cultural transformation of pedagogic discourse on education in modern China. Two ‘classroom’ texts, a dialogue between Confucius and his student and an excerpt from a contemporary Chinese lesson, are analysed in the philosophical perspective of language. This study asks what kind of pedagogy is embraced by a lan- guage traditionally without abstract designations such as ‘liberty’, ‘madness’, ‘politics’, ‘freedom’, and ‘feudalism’, ideas essential to the western tradition of pursuing truth. The interest is the recovery of the indigenous identity of Chinese pedagogic discourse where language serves to name the unspeakable and strives to withdraw itself to complete for- getfulness. What remains in terms of emptiness of symbolic meaning is the essence of pedagogic intelligibility.

Keywords: pedagogic discourse; interpretation; Confucius; cultural transforma- tion; Chinese language

Since the advent of the modernity in China, in the early-20th century, the Chinese language has experienced a fundamental change, which has transformed the mode of the Chinese people’s social life. As Lackner et al. (2001: 2) put it, ‘[w]ithin less than one hundred years, the Chi- nese language absorbed, or indeed “devoured”, the nomenclatures of the most diverse branches of Western knowledge’. Modern Chinese dis- courses, whether of social or scientific practices or China’s intellectual and cultural heritage, are largely articulated in westernized forms that

Zongjie Wu is a professor of linguistics and language education in the School of International Studies,

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310058, PR China; e-mail: [email protected]. His

interests centre on cultural studies of pedagogic discourse, teacher development, practitioner research,

and the critical ethnography of Chinese traditional discourse. A common thread that runs through his

work is a philosophical perspective on the relationships of being, knowing, and naming in the context

of cultural dialogue between the East and West.

J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2011, VOL. 43, NO. 5, 569–590

Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online � 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2011.577812

have been normalized as their own. In stating this, I am not only refer- ring to the fact that modern Chinese language has embraced new terms translated from the West as well as appropriating syntactical structures for assimilating the particularities of Western-derived notions, but, more importantly, to the fact that the ways of doing things with words have been fundamentally changed (cf. Chuang 2007). Discursive practices in law, media, education, government, management, business, organization, etc. are, to a large degree, ‘translated’ or imagined from the West (Liu 1995).

The transformation of pedagogic discourse is perhaps the most per- vasive: the Western educational system that accompanied Western knowledge became the only legitimate system of study and schooling. Confucianism as a form of pedagogy was thoroughly marginalized. The discourse of modern epistemology—in terms of ways of looking, valu- ing, and thinking—dominates most Chinese academic circles. The superiority of modern epistemology is so accepted that even those who wish to affirm the traditional discourse feel it necessary to justify them- selves by showing how the Chinese world-views contained the seeds of modernity even before the advent of the West (cf. Zhang 2009). The tradition could be affirmed only insofar as it already had modern ele- ments.

With the distance created by the history and space, people lose the memory of when, where, and for what reasons such a discourse was imported or imagined, and what social forces enacted such a process. The Chinese people may take it for granted that the language they speak and write is the language of their own, without being aware that others’ dis- course has taken on a fundamental and deep significance in the formation of Chinese social life. As Bakhtin (1981: 342) put it:

Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth—but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behav- iour; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persua- sive discourse.

For many people education in the Chinese context is thought to be very different from the Western, with Chinese students characterized as dependent and silent, teachers as authorities and being ‘all-knowing’, and learning being directed to memorization and literary interpretation (Har- vey 1985, Biggs 1996, Cortazzi and Jin 1999, Kim 2009). In contrast with the Western educational tradition, where students are encouraged to develop analytical and speculative abilities by engaging in disputation and interaction, in the Confucian heritage ‘the education systems are mainly oriented towards conserving knowledge, and the learning approach fos- tered emphasizes the reproductive ability of students’ (Ballard and Clan- chy 1991: 11). This is usually thought to be the heritage of the Chinese traditional culture, especially that of Confucius, where education con- sisted primarily of rote memorization of the classics and students were usually required to demonstrate the ability of text interpretation rather than challenging a particular premise. This pattern of learning has been

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interpreted as a way to construct a hierarchical authoritative order of soci- ety. Merson (1990: 86) comments that the purpose of the scholar class was to create ‘bureaucratic generalists familiar with an accepted ethical outlook and body of knowledge, not with the growth of knowledge or with academic specialization’.

Rhetoric blaming the Confucian heritage for educational failure in China continues to be commonplace. Nonetheless, many people also observe a paradox in the Chinese behaviour seen as ‘rote learning’. Thus, Watkins and Biggs (2001: 277) admit that ‘teachers in Chinese class- rooms produce positive learning outcomes under conditions that Western researchers would regard as most unpromising’. Saravanamuthu (2008; see also Saravanamuthu and Tinker 2008) notes in his reviews that inter- national comparison of educational performance reveals that students from Confucian-heritage cultures tend to outperform Western students. Xu et al. (2007; 2009) find Chinese students who were brought up in a context where education tends to be rigid, knowledge-oriented, teacher- centred, and even harmful to learning turned out to be very successful in English-speaking environments. The contradictions have triggered interest in Chinese learners’ deep learning process in terms of their mode of inquiry and interpretation.

It may be envisaged that contemporary Chinese pedagogy, including the pedagogies of many eastern Asian countries, is the result of a cultural interaction embedding ‘modern’ Western epistemology into a ‘traditional’ Eastern framework. Such a process of cultural hybridization is usually seen as inevitable—as well as desirable to the progress of education. How- ever, the crucial point underlining the discourse hybridization is the disso- lution of cultural diversity, whereby the ancient vision of Confucian pedagogy becomes lost in the name of progress and integration, which poses a threat to cultural plurality. How can we recover the authentic meanings of Chinese pedagogy in its indigenous tradition? What is the cultural mixture that creates either ‘problems’ or ‘merits’ in the Confu- cian-heritage education as we see it, or assume we see it?

To embark on an investigation of these questions, I undertake a criti- cal discourse analysis of pedagogic texts from both the Chinese classics and the contemporary classroom (Fairclough 2003). I assume that the mode and the structure of discourse at a given time and in a given culture render its deep concerns with pedagogy: what counts as ‘knowledge’; what occurs as learning; and what kinds of pedagogic process it presumes and fosters (Cazden 2001). The cultural uniqueness of pedagogy is revealed in the analysis of discourse.

I select two pieces of ‘classroom’ text for analysis, one a short dialogue between Confucius and his student and the other an excerpt of classroom transcription from a contemporary language lesson teaching Chinese clas- sics. I try not to explore the text from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, to avoid making a comparison of the ‘quality’ of the classrooms. I want to place them in the historical contexts where peda- gogy comes into play in discourses the speakers may not be aware of. The investigation is not an empirical one, but an analytical ethnography in the philosophical perspective of language.

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Interpretation towards growth and autonomy

First I present a text illustrating a dialogue between Confucius and a stu- dent which I read and analyse as ‘ordinary’ classroom discourse rather than as words of wisdom or ideas. In doing so, the characteristics of Con- fucian pedagogic discourse emerge and spark an inquiry into questions such as: What is the pedagogic vision unveiled and organized in the dia- logue? How do patterns of interaction affect what counts as knowledge and what occurs as learning? and At what level of interpretation does the meaning-making process occur within the pedagogic discourse?

子贡曰: “贫而无谄, 富而无骄, 何如?”子曰:“可也; 未若贫而乐, 富而好礼者也。”子贡曰:“hh诗ii云: ‘如切如磋, 如琢如磨’, 其斯之谓与?”子曰:“赐也, 始可与言hh诗ii已矣, 告诸往而知来者”

Tsze-kung said, ‘What do you pronounce concerning the poor man who does not flatter, and the rich man who is not proud?’ The Master replied, ‘They will do; but they are not equal to him who, although poor, is yet cheerful, and to him who, although rich, loves the rules of propriety’. Tsze- kung replied, ‘It is said in the Odes, “As you cut and then file, as you carve and then polish”. The meaning is the same, I apprehend, as that which you have just expressed’. The Master said, ‘Tsze, I can begin to talk about the Odes. I told you one point, and you knew its proper sequence’. (Analects 1: 15; translation modified)

One of the distinctive features of modern classrooms is the pedagogic pattern that follows the Initiate–Respond–Evaluation (IRE) procedure (Cazden 2001). The pattern gets teachers through their lessons and allows the accomplishment of goals—the assimilation of prescribed infor- mation and ideas which have a value of right or wrong—and defines learners as the unknowing and the teacher as the knowing. In ways that are different from modern pedagogic discourse dominated by IRE pat- terns, it is the student rather than the teacher who initiates the inquiry in Confucius’ discourse. Throughout the Analects, Confucius is unwilling to take the initiative to ask students questions. It is usually the student who should have something to say before the teacher can think of advising, or not advising, him or her. Confucius offers the following expression of his principles of teaching:

I never enlighten anyone who has not been driven into being fen (愤) or who has not got into being fei (悱). When I have pointed out one corner of a square to anyone and he does not come back with the other three, I will not point it out to him a second time. (Analects 7: 8)

In this brief statement, Confucius indicates a vision of autonomy, a prerequisite for teaching with understanding and articulation. The Chinese character fen (愤) describes the inner frenzy when one’s heart gets deeply touched. This character is not a semantic representation of a particular mood, but an image to make sense holistically of a student moving towards understanding. With understanding so pre-occupied in students’ hearts, they become eager to search for a language to

572 Z. WU

articulate it. This is the moment when the teacher can help. The char- acter fei (悱) describes the facial expression when a person stammers to put understandings into words. Fen and fei here together portray a lear- ner’s status of knowing and commitment, ‘a fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception’, so attuned in heart that it opens itself only through body and action in a way that makes manifest who he or she is, and where he or she is moving to.

What the student has already understood and the struggle for its lin- guistic articulation make up the pedagogic possibility in the embodied readiness of fen and fei. In Student Tsze-kung’s question, we sense his current moment of engagement (‘the poor man who yet does not flatter’) and his fore-sight (‘the poor man is yet cheerful’) that he wants to catch with the help of the teacher’s words. As Confucius says, ‘Learn as if you could not reach your object, and were always fearing also lest you should lose it’ (学如不及，犹恐失之, Analects, 8: 17). ‘Object’ is a word added by the translator. In the original text, what you want to catch is open for any interpretation. It is a ‘fore-sight’. For Confucius, a teacher’s capacity for teaching is not that he or she is clever and more knowledgeable than his or her students; rather it is the interpretive capacity to detect the horizon of a learner’s fore-sight or pre-understanding, and to offer a language to help the learner to hear for himself or herself the articulation of what calls in this particular pedagogic engagement. I could perhaps use Heidegger’s (1968: 8, 15) expressions ‘to let learn’ to comment on the pedagogic interaction between Confucius and his student:

Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teach- ing calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning ... The teacher is far ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they—he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices.

My second question to the Analects asks what counts as learning, and what kind of learning process the dialogue presumes or fosters. Tsze- kung’s response to Confucius is not merely to accept what his teacher told him, nor to know better what a Junzi (noble man, 君子) means, but to engage in a further inquiry into the process of becoming a Junzi. Tsze- kung quotes a stanza from the Book of Odes

4 to reveal his understanding

of how to become a Junzi, as described in his question: ‘“As you cut and then file, as you carve and then polish”. The meaning is the same, I apprehend, as that which you have just expressed’. The poem is a descrip- tion of an elegant and accomplished minister and his successive steps of self-cultivation. His way of learning could be conceived as a model of cul- tivation for the attainment of self-accomplishments. Nevertheless what is significant in the poetic description is perhaps the ‘hollowness’ inside the words,

5 which can only be revealed in the totality of a person’s (here

Tsze-kung’s) movement towards understanding and becoming.

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It was with Tsze-kung’s commitment to this poetic revelation that Confucius was given a pedagogic opportunity for teaching the Odes. ‘With one like Tsze, I can begin to talk about the Odes. I told him one point, and he knew its proper sequence’. Confucius notices the moment of Tsze-kung’s awareness of the relationships between thought, language, and poetry. The speech of Tao is by nature poetic, rather than proposi- tional; as Heidegger (1975: 74) holds, the voice of thought must be poetic because poetry is the saying of truth, the saying of the unconcealedness of beings. ‘The Odes serve to stimulate the mind. They may be used for purposes of self-contemplation’ (Analects 17: 9). Zhang (2009: 107) com- ments on this that xing (兴, being inspired) rather than being indoctri- nated is the key to the existential generation of meanings. Poetry plays a primordial role in the way of ‘becoming and happening’. Therefore, Con- fucius said to his son, ‘If you do not learn the Odes, you will not know how to speak’ (不学诗，无以言, Analects 16: 13).

We may recognize that the process of learning is not to absorb new ideas. To learn is to know the way of growing. ‘Growing’ means polish- ing, carving, transforming, and becoming. The ultimate purpose for learn- ing is to become a better polished person (junzi) for the enhancement of the quality-of-life in the world. Thus, a poor man who does not flatter ‘polishes’ himself to the status of being a poor man, yet with happiness. What Confucius offers is not a new idea, or even a new concept of Junzi; rather it is a handover of a learning opportunity whereby students can make sense of their lives insofar as a current status of Junzi grows towards the next thing unarticulated in the soil out of which they are becoming.

My third aspect of inquiry is the epistemological question about peda- gogical interaction. Pedagogic dialogue should not be seen as something made up of various patterns of questions and answers. Pedagogic dialogue at its deep level is an encounter of interpretations wherein ‘what is said remains unsaid’ (Heidegger, quoted in Standish 2002: 151). In response to what Confucius said about a Junzi, Tsze-kung returned with his inter- pretation of what was unsaid by Confucius: the value of poetic language for articulating one’s understanding of how to become a Junzi. Doing so unfolds a new phase of inquiry into the possibility of teaching the Odes. Only when a student knows how to engage into the interaction of inter- pretations, or a revealing of what is unsaid, can she or he be taught. Con- fucius was hopeful as a result of Tsze-kung’s reply because he was offered a pedagogic opportunity—first laid down by himself as a signpost, and then being established in its full course by the student—whereby both of them can learn from each other. As Confucius remarks, ‘When I have pointed out one corner of a square to anyone and he does not come back with the other three, I will not point it out to him a second time’ (举一隅不以三隅反，则不复也, Analects 7: 8).

Corner (yu, 隅), an image to hold understanding holistically grounded in the nameless, points to a possibility of pedagogic engagement. By hold- ing it up as an elucidation, Confucius invites learners into the opening of enlightenment whereby learners can in turn respond with the other three corners of a square. In Tsze-kung’s reply by quoting a stanza of poem, we notice how the three ‘corners’ of interpretations are simultaneously

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returned and established: his awareness of the gap for self-cultivation; his understanding of how to fill the gap in terms of incessant self-polishing (ru zuo ru mo, 如琢如磨); and his way of using poetic language to articu- late his interpretation. With the horizons of interpretation so established, teachers and learners engage themselves in a heart-to-heart rather than a word-to-word dialogue so that they can mutually constitute and illumi- nate the world of learning with four corners.

To sum up, in the Confucian perspective knowledge is not a set of propositions about truth, but a situated intuitive insight that goes beyond the propositional representation. Learning is a process of incessant modi- fication of self, undertaken for the attainment of enlightenment and hap- piness. And the role of teaching is to detect the horizon of student readiness and make it a handover of a learning opportunity. Pedagogy as a heart-to-heart encounter of inter-subjective interpretation is activated by words in order to exercise the power of interpretation of the living. For this reason language must be kept to a minimum so that understanding and interpretation can prevail. Long arguments and rigorous definition were considered to be unhelpful; they were seen as limiting, and under- mining the value of discourse.

In the Chinese tradition, simplicity, poeticity, and indirectness are conceived of as the necessities for conveying the deepest meanings—and this cannot be done otherwise (Jullien 2000: 141). The Chinese classics generally take the form of brief conversations, short axioms, verses, sto- ries, etc., rather than complicated arguments. For example, the Analects of Confucius, a book which has greatly influenced Chinese thought, consists exclusively of short aphorisms and brief dialogues. A verse consisting of merely four characters (for instance, 君子不器, ‘The gentleman is no ves- sel’) might guide a person for the whole life. It is the genre, the style of speaking, or the contour of thought, that makes the Analects a great work within Chinese civilization. For thousands of years, it has served as the source of meanings that plunges generations of Chinese people into ‘the sea of interpretation’ (Clark 2006: 109). In a similar way, Tao Te Jing, a book which initiated the whole Taoist philosophical tradition, has only � 6000 words. Feng (1952: 14) contends that Chinese philosophical con- cepts and teachings are highly ‘suggestive and creative’, providing signifi- cant flexibility, which in turn leaves enough room for situated meaning to be grasped personally. In a word, the ultimate function of Confucian lan- guage is heuristic—creating a space for situated understanding rather than presenting a conscious thesis of its own. Language is a tool to make the world intelligible, a signpost to show us the Way (Tao).

6 The language–

world relation is that between language and action, not that between lan- guage and objects (Hansen 1992: 139). As soon as one gains access to what is unsaid, one can forget the exterior of propositional expressions.

Cultural transformation of Chinese pedagogic discourse

My analysis of a pedagogic dialogue of Confucius is not merely for the purpose of recovering the meaning of the past, but for shedding light on

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the present. What we see in the Analects is a pedagogic vision completely different from what modern people normally assume to be the Confucian heritage of pedagogy. However, Chinese pedagogic discourse, since its encounter with the West, has undergone a fundamental transformation in its cultural connotation and linguistic exactitude (Wang 1999, Guo and Hu 2003, Wen 2006). What we see in today’s classroom, even when the task is the teaching of Chinese traditions, has become a part of modernity enterprise bringing interpretation to representation, knowing to the enclosed relation of signifier and signified.

The transcripts that follow come from a demonstration lesson given by one of the best middle-school teachers in China. It is a language-arts lesson that accommodates the learning of Chinese classics. The text, writ- ten in Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), is about a child genius having his talents wasted in the absence of an appropriate education. The composi- tion of the text itself was not influenced by any Western discourse.

In the classroom excerpts the teacher encourages students to explore the meaning of the text. I think this is a good lesson which fosters collab- orative learning and creative discussion. Nevertheless my interest is not in the ‘quality’ of lesson, but in the discourse, the grammatical totality by which the whole mass of contemporary Chinese literacy texts are pro- duced: ‘For the word to be able to say what it says, it must belong to a grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamen- tal, and determining’ (Foucault 2002: 306). I ask what kind of pedagogic discourse is deployed and what meanings are decoded in a lesson which is presumably to teach Chinese classics.

师: 王安石, 北宋著名的政治家, 思想家和文学家, 字介甫, 晚号半山, 唐宋八大家之–。. . .本文采用随笔的形式而写, 借–件事来抒发作者的感情或阐明某种观点。下面我们就一起来学习这篇文章。

Teacher: Wang Anshi, known as one of the eight élites of the Tang and Song literary traditions, was a politician, philosopher, and litterateur of his time. ... This essay in our textbook is written by him to tell a story which sets out his attitudes, feelings, or particular opinion. Now let’s look into this essay.

[学生大声齐读]

[The students read the text loudly in chorus.]

师: 你们在自读过程中有遇到困难吗? 或者有什么新的发现? 提出来大家交流。

Teacher: Do you have any difficulty in reading this on your own? Or does anything sound new to you which you would like to share with the class to initiate some discussion?

生: 我们小组不知道’稍稍宾客其父’的’宾客’为什么要译成’当宾客对待’。

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Student: The problem with our group comes from the sentence, shao shao bin ke [guest] qi fu [father], and we don’t understand why the noun bin ke [guest] is translated as dang bin ke dui dai [treat ... like a guest].

师: 这个问题很有价值, 有谁能给他们帮忙吗?

Teacher: Good question, who can help?

生: 因为 ‘宾客’是名词, 当’宾客’是动词。这和’不耻下问’的’耻’ 的翻译是–样的。

Student: Because bin ke here is used as a verb rather than a noun, which is the same as the usage of chi in the phrase bu chi xia wen.

师[带头鼓掌]: 很好, 我们读书就是要学会举–反三, 要学会积累, 要学会用已经学过的知识来解决未知的知识, 按孔子的话来讲叫做. . .?

Teacher [applauding]: Very good! A good student is the one who can ‘return three corners out of one’ [i.e. draw inferences from one instance] and accu- mulate learned knowledge to deal with unknown knowledge, which, accord- ing to Confucius, can be described as ...?

生: [齐答] ‘温故而知新, 可以为师矣’。

Students: [Answering in chorus] He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher.

师: 只有这样才能真正地把知识化成自己的能力。这篇课文还有很多类似的用法, 个组的同学找得又多又准。

Teacher: Great, this defines the proper path to reach the essence of knowl- edge and by doing so we truly transform the knowledge into an ability of our own. There are many other similar usages up for grabs in this essay. Let’s see which group can find them in a correct and efficient way.

The dialogue is oriented to interpreting the text in terms of linguistic knowledge and its representation. For Confucius interpretation operates in the horizon of the lived world where something already understood becomes unveiled in the manner of ‘fei’ (悱) and ‘fen’ (愤). Representation establishes itself by a codified and normative system; instead of opening up the world as transparent entities, representation ‘reproduces thought in its exactitude’ (Foucault 2002: 86). Signs of concepts and their internal coherences determine the intelligibility of the world.

Since China met the West, these signs of concepts gradually appeared in Chinese pedagogic discourse, and eventually became a pedagogic inter- pretive framework according to which the lived world, including Chinese classics, is analysed, classified, ordered into consciousness, and related as objects of the discourse framework. Thus, we see from the excerpt that

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the author of the text is interpreted in terms of particular categories of authority, such as politician, philosopher, and litterateur, and his words are interpreted as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so forth. By acts of nomi- nation (e.g. ‘Wang Anshi ... was a politician’), the relation of the author to the value and power these terms constitute is established. Within it, a representation which contains nothing but propositions, ideas, or pure thoughts is articulated according to a system of Western linguistic terms. Thus, instead of interpreting the author as a person, a totality of being, with his own words, the students recognize him with the titles modern people assign to him, and the particular connotations, ‘attitudes, feelings, and opinions’ these titles make students think of. These words make up a kaleidoscopic flux through which this Chinese classic is rendered visible and intelligible.

The pedagogic analysis of the text proceeds with an analysis of the logic, propositions, grammar, functions, or an ‘axis of simultaneity’, a self-enclosed system in which how different ‘elements fit together’ is con- structed as the only object of learning (de Saussure 1983 80, 113). For instance, ‘bin ke here is used as a verb rather than a noun, which is the same as the usage of chi in the phrase bu chi xia wen’. The analytical terms invented for describing the structure of Western languages are assimilated into the Chinese pedagogic framework (Wang 1999, Yu 2001). Using such terms to teach and learn the classics is to know with precision the perception of the terms and their signification—which, according to de Saussure’s (1974) linguistic theory, arises from the inter- nal relations of the signifier and the signified. This marks a fundamental shift in linguistic worldview.

In the ancient Chinese philosophy of language, the Chinese character and its signification essentially illuminate an image (‘symbolic resem- blances of things’) rather than represent the world as propositions estab- lished within a system of signs (Gu 2004).

7 For instance, Wang Bi (226–

249 CE), in his discussion of the relationship between xiang (image), yi (thought), and yan (language), has the following statement:

The image is that which brings out the thought; language is that which elu- cidates the image. To fully express ideas, nothing is more effective than images; to fully convey an image nothing can excel language. Language is born of images; therefore, one can observe images by following language. Images are born of thought; therefore, one can observe thought by tracing images. Thought is fully conveyed through images; images are made explicit through language. (quoted in Gu 2004: 473)

Wang Bi thus argues with his paraphrase of Zhuangzi’s (369–298 BCE) words that:

[H]e who forgets the images is the one who obtains the idea; he who for- gets words is the one who obtains the images. Getting the original thought depends on forgetting images; getting images rests on forgetting words. (quoted in Gu 2004: 476)

Language is a propositional representation of images, whereas an image is a holistic grasp of meaning which itself has to be forgotten in

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order to have the meaning felt only in one’s heart. The pedagogic func- tion of discourse is to help people to grasp the essence of meaning in their hearts in the process of forgetting language first and images thereafter. The differences of linguistic worldview between classical China and the modern West might be illustrated as in Table 1.

However, as shown in the transcript, the way the teacher analyses the text using the terms such as ‘verb’, ‘noun’, and their grammatical function is to bring the meaning of the Chinese classics to the representation (the signifier and the signified) rather than to return the meaning back to life and the world. The study of classics is no longer to engage students with an inquiry into their lives with the help of the text but rather to create an object of knowledge in terms of grammar, propositions, and the syn- chronic relation of linguistic elements, which are derived from the Euro- pean language system (cf. Wang 1999: 59, Yu 2001: 16). Pedagogy as a heart-to-heart dialogue of interpretations is thus reduced to the acceler- ated awareness of theoretical concepts and their functions, drawn from disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, physics, etc.

For Confucius, learning is a constant modification of self by day-to- day engagement towards a Junzi (good person), a process of gradually becoming shining but silent. However, a discourse that constitutes today’s pedagogic practice is dominated by the concept of learning as accumula- tion of representational language, which makes learning a process of col- lecting facts and propositions—as many as possible. For the Chinese ancients, the purpose of memorizing the classics is to catch spiritual enlightenment (xin zhu shen ming, 心主神明) by removing the shadow of language. Memorization is to make language ready for decoding meaning in everyday life. What is memorized is not the ideas, facts, theses, or truths, but the nets, the traps which have to be fore-taken, fore-grasped so that the fish and rabbits could be caught. Once a rabbit is caught, the trap is forgotten. Forgetfulness is the only reason that students have to memorize. The premise appears to be a paradox, but is clearly explained by Laozi (2003: 143) in the opening stanza of Tao De Jing:

Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making. And naming that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming. The nameless is the fatal beginnings of everything that is happening, While that which is named is their mother.

As soon as the language makes the world imaginable and intelligible in its living context, words become redundant. However, when a language

Table 1. Philosophic view of language in classical China and the ‘modern’ West.

Classical China ‘Modern’ West Linguistic view Sense-making Linguistic view Sense-making

image seeing signifier referencing language interpreting signified differentiating meaning as

understanding forgetting meaning as signification conceptualising

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has been transformed into a relation of a signifier and a signified, the rela- tion of cause and effect, interpretation and learning is made possible ‘only through the actual rarity of statements’ (Foucault 1972: 120). The memo- rization of language is no longer for its ancient use of uncovering the inef- fable, the secrets of life, but to grasp the illusion, the false consciousness residing entirely in the signification of signs.

In the classroom excerpt, the Analects were constantly quoted by both the teacher and students to express the pedagogic principle of accumulat- ing knowledge from old to new in a functional mode of application:

Teacher: A good student is the one who can ‘return three corners out of one’ [i.e. draw inferences from one instance] and accumulate learned knowledge to deal with unknown knowledge, which according to Confu- cius, can be described as ...?

Students [answering in chorus]: ‘He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher’.

Here Confucius’s words no longer serve as a text activating interpreta- tion, reflection, and heterogeneous practices but are a corpus of knowl- edge that pre-supposes the same way of looking at knowledge, the same analysis of teaching and learning, and the same system of transcribing as we believe in the fashionable statements about education of the predomi- nant pedagogic discourse. In short, Chinese language, no matter whether contemporary or classical, is transformed into a discourse assimilating epistemological propositions and weighing the ‘value’ of epistemological statements. A student’s capacity for discourse assimilation in a correct and efficient way is regarded as a capability developed through the study of Chinese classics. As the teacher states:

Great, this defines the proper path to reach the essence of knowledge and by doing so we truly transform the knowledge into an ability of our own. There are many other similar usages up for grabs in this essay. Let’s see which group can find them in a correct and efficient way.

Today’s China is witnessing a flourishing new wave of classical study, particularly Confucianism, resulting in the development of Guoxue (i.e. national studies) as a form of knowledge infiltrating fields like philosophy, history, literature, linguistics, etc. that belong to the discursive formation of the West. What this development reveals is the limited discourse space in which Chinese classics are talked about as ‘the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation’ (Foucault 1972: 107). As Li (2006: 567) comments:

Confucianism has become nothing more than a subject of research, or at most a kind of accessory to the development of modern fields of study. Confucianism as a form of knowledge is a product of the development of Confucianism, and completely differs from Confucianism as a subject of research for various disciplines in the modern academic system. Traditional Confucianism as a form of knowledge is a consistent and developing living system. Yet in the contemporary Chinese social and academic context, it becomes a broken tradition.

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Some questions arise from the analysis that might serve as signposts for further discussion: How has the traditional pedagogic discourse been discontinued, transformed, and re-emerged? What is the historical process by which the contemporary discourse has been deployed? What are the historical forces that enact the whole process of cultural transformation? What can we hope for in recovering the language of the ancients?

East meets West in the battle of language

In the mid-19th century, and at western gunpoint, China was forced to open its doors. Subsequently, China has undergone an extraordinary change in its social structure. Its cultural tradition gradually collapsed in the processes of modernization and rationalization. The transformation takes the form of emerging blocks of historical discourse that is present and othering, but is disguised as the discourse of progress and continuity (Wu 2009).

There are four transformations of Chinese educational discourse accompanied by a series of political events:

� the early cultural interactions between East and West with the intro- duction of Japanese westernized schools in the 1910s;

� the 4 May 1919 Movement that completely abandoned the Confu- cian tradition based upon interpretive readings of classics within western curriculum systems;

� the influence of the Soviet Union’s political/revolutionary ideology on Chinese education after the 1949; and

� the impact of standardization driven by the force of globalization.

Each epoch of transformation represents an epistemological break with China’s tradition, and brought about a degree of Western conscious- ness of modernity. Eventually, the other’s discourse took on a fundamen- tal and deep significance in the formation of the Chinese curriculum system. A genealogical account of the emergent discourses as ‘breaks’ and ‘discontinuities’ (Foucault 1996) may assist in securing a better under- standing of the cultural transformation of Chinese pedagogic discourse.

At the time of late-Qing dynasty, when China first encountered the West, Chinese pedagogy was still practised within its own discourse, not yet affected by the ‘modern’ epistemology of the West. After China’s defeat in the two Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) there was great concern about the superiority of Western culture, and fierce debate about how to respond. In the early-1860s, when the ‘self-strengthening’ cam- paign started, rhetorical constructions such as ‘Chinese substance versus Western function’, ‘To learn from others and then compete with them’, and ‘Historiographical revolution’ emerged in response to the national cri- sis that resulted from the intrusion of the West into China. In justifying the conservation of Chinese culture, reformers adopted the ‘Ti-Yong dichotomy’ (‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and western learning for practical application’), attempting to bring together Chinese

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and Western cultures into a whole, and securing China’s survival in the precariously changing world (Kwong 1993). At that time, Western learn- ing was regarded as illusive, fragmented, and intractable and treated by early Chinese educational reformers as only marginal to the Confucian ‘kingly’ way (see Aleni 1965).

The Tongwen Academy (Tongwen guan; 同文馆), the earliest official educational institution influenced by the West as well as the earliest for- eign-language school, was set up under the principle of the Ti-Yong dichotomy. Taking the curriculum as an example, at that period a foreign language was not regarded as a subject or a major, or an object of knowl- edge, but as an ‘otherness’ which represents the aggregation of western instrumental knowledge, including physics, mathematics, international law, economics, geography, etc. Chinese classics were taught as the ‘soul and action of the Sage’ (Chang 1900).

China’s defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) seemed to demonstrate how successful westernization had been in Japan and thus symbolized the ‘degeneration’ and ‘backwardness’ of Chinese traditional culture. In 1902, a modern educational system, greatly influ- enced by the West but modelled upon that of Japan, was inaugurated. In 1905, the throne endorsed a memorial which ordered that the civil service examination system (keju; 科举)—that had lasted for 1300 years—be dis- continued. Nevertheless, the education minister, Sun Jianai, in a state- ment relating to the objectives of the projected Peking University, made it clear that students would be required to immerse themselves in ‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application’. It was this stress on the co-existence of Western with indige- nous culture that imbued the historical spirit of the intercultural curricu- lum.

The 4 May Movement of 1919 marked a radical break with Chinese traditional culture. Scholars like Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, and Hu Shi, who had had both Chinese classical and Western educational experience initiated a revolt against Confucian culture, which was condemned as the major obstacle to modernity (Hayhoe 2006). They called for the creation of a ‘new’ Chinese culture based on western stan- dards, especially democracy and science. The replacement of classical Chinese with vernacular language (bai hua wen; 白话文) not only appro- priated the syntactical structure of Chinese for assimilating the particulari- ties of Western-derived notions, but also determined the very bases of Chinese ideological inter-relations with the world (Wu 2005). By drawing upon modern Western notions such as democracy, feudalism, nation, and so on, a Chinese discourse of modernity was imagined and translated, in part in order to resist Western hegemony (Liu 1995). To build ‘Chinese’ educational theories, many western books on education, curriculum and pedagogy, mostly from the US, were translated, appropriated, and local- ized (see Zhang and Zhong 2003: 260–263).

The third wave of discontinuity and transformation of Chinese educa- tional culture emerged after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. China modelled itself after the former Soviet Union and built a highly centralized educational system, following the principles of the

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planned economy by way of a calculative planning that converted people into economic forces (cf. see Popkewitz 2008). A government-run educa- tional system was established with structures for decision-making for all curriculum issues from syllabi, textbooks, teaching plans, principles of teaching methods, and the preparation of teachers for classroom imple- mentation (Zhang and Zhong 2003). Under the political pressure of the revolutionary zealousness, the multiplicity of knowledge was rewritten into the single perspective of Marxism. Kairov’s (1952) book, Pedagogy, con- ceptually rooted in European rationalism, was translated into Chinese and regarded as the authority (Hayhoe 2006: 330). Forms of intellectual work that did not conform to the desired ideology, whether from the west or the Chinese tradition, were sidelined or abandoned. This tendency accel- erated during the Cultural Revolution to such an extreme extent that all cultural artefacts, historical reserves, and educational institutions, includ- ing much of China’s thousands of years of heritage, were demolished in the battle against the Western bourgeois, Russian revisionism, and Chinese feudalism. This grass-roots movement, aimed at ‘great democracy’ and destruction of oppressive cultural norms, ended up with disillusionment and puzzlement. However, despite its nativist undertones, the Cultural Revolution itself ‘claimed final ideological authority not from indigenous roots but from the West’s Karl Marx’, a single and culturally purified dis- cursive practice which adopts an empiricist position to see history as con- tinuity of progressive evolution (Huang 2000: 15).

The Cultural Revolution invited the Chinese people to reflect criti- cally on the metaphysical notions of ‘socialism’, ‘democracy’, ‘culture’, and ‘knowledge’. The historical shift from Maoist ideology to Deng Xia- oping’s pragmatism

8 represents the turning point. Regardless of ideolo-

gies of socialism or capitalism, the Chinese people returned to a search for intuitive insights towards social solutions. Deng’s famous remarks which laid down the keystone of his opening policy, ‘Don’t argue (bu zheng lun; 不争论)’; ‘Whatever colour a cat is, so long as it can catch a mouse, it is a good cat’ (heimao baimao zhuazhu laoshu jiushi haomao; 黑猫白猫抓住老鼠就是好猫), reflects a critical attitude to reason and repre- sentation.

The Chinese people learned a bitter lesson from the discourse of ‘rea- sons’. However, when they awakened, they found themselves surrounded by a new wave of strange language brought by the forces of globalization. They will have to continue the assimilation process. Since the 1980s, a positivist discourse with a calculative mode of thinking has been imported into Chinese educational research, and has made a great impact on the shaping of students’ souls (Wu 2004). This, in part, was promoted and consolidated by the national entrance examination system, which was restored in 1977, and is recognized to be as prestigious as the system of the Imperial Examination (keju; 科举). In the early-1980s, a model of standardized examination with mainly multiple-choice questions was introduced into China, first in English language following the US model of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), and then in other subjects (Yu 2001: 16). Immediately the cultural alliance of Western epis- temology of objectivity and the Eastern imperial device of justice exerted

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pervasive power to shape a meaning of talents—inscribed through rules and standards to calculate the space of learning and its imagined outcome (Popkewitz 2008).

The genealogical account of the cultural transformation of Chinese education reveals the roots of the present, the historical deployment of contemporary discourse, and the discursive formation of the cultural rela- tionships between China and the West. The roots of Chinese pedagogic discourse and its transformational tendencies are presented in Table 2.

In Chinese traditional learning, students were guided to memorize classics, which were treated not as ideas or facts but as ‘fish traps’ or ‘rab- bit snares’ in order to catch meaning in daily life. Language functioned as a signpost to make the world intelligible, which is always situated, particu- lar, and heuristic. This echoes with the philosopher Zhuangzi’s (4th cen- tury, BCE) saying that, ‘Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words’. However, for the last 150 years, the Chinese characters have been transformed into various concepts derived from the West as the result of ‘abstract designation’ and ‘derivation’ (Foucault 2002: 114– 127). Those words that were absent in the traditional pedagogy, for instance ‘grammar’, ‘ideas’, ‘knowledge’, ‘ideology’, ‘economy’, ‘democ- racy’, ‘religion’, etc., fill today’s Chinese texts. Most of the terms were formulated in such a way that two characters that originally stand for con- crete actions or things such as Zhi (know) and Shi (discriminate) are com- bined together to represent a western notion of idea (knowledge). Such a combination twists both the meaning of the original Chinese character and the meaning of the corresponding western word. When education has become overwhelmingly dominated by an alien but powerful language which does not make sense either in students’ lives or in their traditions, they struggle fiercely with the texts which maintain meanings only in a referential totality. Hence, reading, hearing, and memorizing language become the predominant way to make the language, and themselves, intelligible. Such a mode of reading leads people to the belief that every- thing is within their reach by reading, and every text can be understood by way of a concentration on the language. This is precisely the character- istic mode of contemporary Chinese education, which is often described as ‘the Confucian heritage’. It is misleading to ascribe such a mode of education to China’s own cultural tradition. I cannot conceive of Chinese students who have no faculty or tradition being able to play a game crea- tively; rather they lack the sorts of language for them to do so, a language that belongs to their life and can be used for thinking and showing under- standing.

The danger in such a superficial reading is that it can equip students physically and superficially, but destroy their situated understanding, which is essential to the maintenance of the balance of the power of rea- son and the power of nature. When China develops the capacity to lead the world in science and economics, scholars must understand what their ancestors already understood: walk cautiously along the Way (Tao) or cosmic order, which nobody has any reason to conquer. To be able to do so, they must regain the language of thinking, the language of Tao. Such

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a language is pointing to the nameless. What is said purports what cannot be said.

Conclusion: On the way to recovering the name of Tao

Today many Chinese people embark on the difficult mission of trying to recover the authentic mode of Chinese traditional life. This authenticity cannot be discovered in a Chinese language that has already been hybrid- ized and has lost its transparency and capacity of knowing. The first step to rescue education from the cultural domination of propositions is to find the Way (Tao) back to an authentic language, and to render audible once more the voices which are buried in the deep horizon of the traditional landscape. For the same reason people who are on the Way to language have to, first of all, disturb the words they are speaking, denounce the grammatical habits of their own thinking, and resist the demands of the language ‘under the dictatorship of the public realm’ (Heidegger 1996).

Heidegger, in his later works, explores the way to authentic language, by referring to language as ‘the house of Being’ (Heidegger 1971, 1996). For Heidegger, to rethink the essence of language we must attempt to ‘bring language as language to language’. This means to bring the essence of language to itself, to speak in language its own essence. This language does not serve for communicating as a tool or as an instrument of domi- nation over nature or beings:

But the essence of language is not exhausted by the fact of its being a means of communication. With this determination we do not meet with its authentic essence; rather, only one consequence of its essence it set forth. Language is not only a piece of equipment that man possesses alongside many others. Instead, it is language alone that first provides the possibility of standing amidst the openness of entities. Only where there is language is there world. (quoted in Lafont 2000: 90)

I understand ‘authentic language’ as being not only capable of making differences, but, more importantly, bringing the differences into dialogue

Table 2. Transformation of Chinese pedagogic discourse.

Roots of Chinese pedagogic discourse Transformational tendencies

Language to be memorized for catching meaning

Ideas to be created through language

Pursuing heuristic and holistic meaning Pursuing realistic, metaphorical and atomistic meaning

Sign as a pedagogic signpost Sign as referential system Understanding to be articulated Emptiness to be filled Interpretation Representation Situated insight Decontextualized knowledge Meaning-making Spoon-feeding Evolving, transforming, becoming Accumulation of facts Modifications of self Absorbing information

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and unity. ‘Our Dasein is sustained by dialogue and its unity’ (Lafont 2000: 90). To be able to reach agreement about something, language must be previously and already shared on the basis of what we agree in ‘forms of life’ (Wittgenstein 2001). In other words, what is expressed in language must have already been claimed by what cannot be said. Lan- guage thus serves a world-disclosing function: ‘language happens authen- tically as ... a world appears’. In this world-disclosing function, language renders the world not as a conception or a systematic clarification but ‘as a way of givenness of entities’, and meanwhile ‘language makes accessible entities as a whole. That is to say, it has a holistic structure’ (Heidegger; quoted in Lafont 2000: 89). Language has no capacity to represent the essence of life. Life exists in the nameless. Language merely brings the unspoken world into view, and leads us back to the place of living silently. Living properly is the a priori condition that can bring proper knowing. One of the Confucian sayings records:

知止而后有定, 定而后能靜, 靜而后能安, 安而后能慮, 慮而后能得。物有本末, 事有終, 知所先後, 則近道矣。(大学1: 2)

The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then deter- mined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to. To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful thinking, and that thinking will be followed by the attainment of the desired knowledge. Things have their root and their branches. Affairs have their end and their beginning. To know what is first and what is last will lead near to what is taught in the Great Learning. (Confucius 1971: 356–357; translation modified)

Concealed in the sayings is a truth about the Tao of Great Learn- ing—the way from being, understanding, and naming rather in the oppo- site, for the harmonization of living, knowing, and speaking (Wu 2004, Wu 2006). It is a historical task to find a language for a Chinese educa- tion that is trapped in the battle between East and West. When our life is heading towards modernization, and when globalization is unifying the world and our mode of living, what language can we hope for? This is a question for further investigation.

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by Zhejiang University 985 Project funded by the National Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation of China. The author would like to thank many anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. All references from the Analects are taken from Confucius (1971) unless otherwise noted. This translation, and others, have been reviewed and, where appropriate, revised by Professor Liang Cheng of East China Normal University.

586 Z. WU

2. Confucius (2000). The two pinyin and Chinese terms in the Chinese original text replace the English translation.

3. I use Heidegger’s terms, fore-having as such to clarify Confucius’ terms of fen and fei. ‘In every case this interpretation is grounded in something we have in advance—in a fore-having. Anything understood which is held in our fore-having and towards which we set our sights “foresightedly”, becomes conceptualizable through the interpreta- tion’ (Heidegger 1962: 191).

4. The Book of Odes, or the Book of Poetry, contains some of the oldest Chinese poems, and is regarded as containing the wisdom of the past. It is said to have been compiled by Confucius himself, who edited some 305 poems out of 3000, as texts for instruction.

5. Lao Zi defines ‘hollowness’ in his statement, ‘Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their hollowness, that their use depends’.

6. I take a view of language by complementing different schools of Chinese thoughts, especially Taoism and Confucianism. I agree with Hall (1996: 704) that no matter how great the differences within traditional Chinese culture, judged from the Western perspective or contemporary dominant Chinese epistemology ‘they belong to essen- tially the same family’ (cf. Kang 2004). As a matter of fact, the development of Chi- nese thought has a long tradition of ‘complementing Confucianism and Taoism’ (ru dao hu ji; 儒道互济) (Zhang 1999, Liu 2004). Wang Bi (226–249 CE), whose view of language is rooted in Taoism, explores a substantial understanding of Taoism that was consistent with Confucianism. When he was asked why Confucius was unwilling to talk about non-being (wu, nameless, nothingness), in contrast with Lao Zi who expounded upon it endlessly. He explains:

The Sage [i.e. Confucius] embodied non-being, so he also knew that it could not be explained in words. Thus he did not talk about it. Master Lao, by contrast, operated on the level of being [you]. This is why he constantly discussed non-being; he had to, for what he said about it always fell short. (see Lynn 1994: 11)

The concept of Tao is deeply associated with non-being (wu) and held in common by all Chinese thoughts (Weber 1951: 180), which is the linking point that brings them together.

7. Saussure analyses the linguistic sign into an interdependent entity of the signifier and the signified. The meaning of the sign depends on the identification of a particular signifier with a particular signified. The signified stands for the abstract concept and signifier the word that refers to the signified. The arbitrary nature of the sign indicates what unites the word with its meaning is based on purely arbitrary grounds. Such a linguistic view represents one of the dominant linguistic worldviews following Western academic tradition.

8. Deng Xiaoping was de facto leader of China from 1979 until his death in 1997.

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