Zhang Yongle, "The Harm of Studying Abroad"

Zhang Yongle, “The Harm of Studying Abroad”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Zhang Yongle is Associate Professor at the Beijing University School of Law, and a rising member of China’s New Left.  He shares many of the views of Jiang Shigong 强世功 (b. 1969), his better-known colleague at the same law school.[2]  The text translated here, written in 2008, has nothing to do with Zhang’s academic work, but instead reflects changing attitudes among younger Chinese intellectuals concerning the value of Western ideas and the experience of studying abroad. 
 
Zhang, who earned his Ph.D. at UCLA, argues that studying abroad—which is practically de rigueur for any ambitious Chinese student or scholar—is not only over-rated but actually harmful.  His arguments are a mixed-bag, some of which are offered perhaps in jest; for instance, Zhang observes that he did not visit bookstores frequently in the United States because books were too expensive, and that this bad habit persisted even after his return to China.  His overall tone, however, is suggestive of the arrogance and impatience with the outside world that increasingly characterizes Chinese intellectual discourse in the wake of China’s rise.  Zhang argues, in a nutshell, that studying abroad is a lonely and useless baptism of fire in which rote learning takes pride of place and where foreign languages are a barrier to self-understanding and communication with others. 
 
Zhang is surely right that doing an advanced degree in a foreign language is a challenge involving at times a loss of autonomy and a loss of status.  More interesting is the overall tone of the text, which comes close to saying that the experience is a waste of time.  This is not only because study abroad involves rote learning of someone else’s knowledge, but because China is the place to be.  As Zhang puts it: 
 
“If you live abroad for a long time, you will miss many theoretically interesting things happening in China.  Society in the West has been settled for hundreds of years, and not that much that is really new occurs.  But China is entering a new era, full of potential.” 
 
In other words, the opportunity cost of studying abroad is simply too great.
 
Should we read such bluster as cover for an ongoing identity crisis?  Or as a burgeoning confidence heralding the arrive of China’s empire?
 
My thanks to Alex Li for sending me this and other texts!
 
Translation

Before going to the US in 2002, I wound up stuck in Beijing for half a year because I was refused a visa.  Even if I had no idea what future was waiting for me, I simply decided not to work and not to make money, and spent my days with friends, reading books and talking about ideas.  One day, I was in doctoral student Ke Xiaogang’s 柯小刚[3] (b. 1972) dorm room with another friend, Xu Xiaohong 徐晓宏 (b. 1978),[4] discussing Heidigger’s Letter on Humanism.  Ke Xiaogang was paying attention and chiming in with comments from time to time, but there was another student, who had come back from the US, and who was listening at first but then fell asleep and started quietly snoring.  The three of us looked at one another, doing our best not to break out laughing, and we all immediately thought of the story from the Analects:  “Zai Yu was in bed in the daytime.  The Master said, ‘A piece of rotten wood cannot be carved, nor can a wall of dried dung be troweled.  As far as Yu is concerned, what is the use of condemning him?’”[5]  This was one of the few instances where the Master cursed someone, and it was perfect for this situation!

From that day forward I was ungenerously predisposed to my snoring classmate.  At least until I had spent three or four years in the States, when I discovered that my thoughts had turned upside down, and that I now thought instead that “sleeping in the daytime is fine, and there’s no shame in snoring.”  I had come back to China twice, each time bringing two big suitcases full of books, but at the end of the two- or three-month vacation, I found that I had hardly touched them.  What did I do with my time?  I traveled around, goofed off, saw friends and family.  It was really boring, but I didn’t think about my books, because once I settled down to read I would fall asleep.  Another change was that, before going abroad, I had always liked going to bookstores, and would buy any book that appealed to me.  But after going abroad, I was no longer interested in bookstores, and would leave as soon as I entered, because I had absolutely no interest in buying anything.  When I saw Ke Xiaogang and my other friends who were still hanging out together all day long, enthusiastically discussing the fate of Chinese thought, etc., etc., I felt like they were doing something worthwhile and serious, not like me, who was just loafing around.  But when I tried to join them, I found that I really wasn’t into the discussion, and I just felt like nodding off.

And so it was that the Master’s cruel curse came to be applied to me.  And when I sought out the reason for my laziness, I decided it was because I had studied abroad.  Today people all know about the advantages of studying abroad, but they don’t know about the disadvantages, which are too many to mention.  I list a few below:

First, you have no time.  You read a lot but there’s no time to think.  Taking the University of California system as an example, there are three semesters a year, ten weeks to each semester.  If you are taking classes, then you have to read a great deal.  You read really quickly, discuss really quickly, turn in your papers really quickly.  The things you think about are decided by your professors, and you follow their lead as you develop your thoughts instead of asking yourself what questions you developed from your reading or what link it might produce with your own background.  So you just do your best to chew the cud and digest the material.  And if you actually learn something, it is transplanted out of nothing and remains attached to its origin rather than sinking roots or sprouting branches.  When study is nothing but rote learning, who doesn’t lose their appetite?

Second, if you start out like this, your curiosity and your spirit of exploration naturally diminish.  If you are wearing yourself out every day, you naturally embrace the spirit of “minimalism,” in which you do as little as possible, and once you’ve finished something you go to sleep, loathe to take the initiative on your own to explore anything else.

Third, the school library is pretty good, and you can find pretty much anything you want.  But buying books in the bookstores is too expensive, so you don’t buy them.  For this reason you stop going to bookstores.  Of course, it makes no difference if you don’t go to bookstores in the US, but if you bring this habit back with you, it means that you don’t go to bookstores in China [here and elsewhere, Zhang refers to China as 国朝, the “reigning dynasty”] either.

Fourth, life is dry and boring, you don’t have friends or family, and you can’t sit around every day talking about the meaning of life.  With time, you wind up really lonely, which makes you appreciate the vitality of life in China.  When you come back, you’re like a bird let out of a cage, and your only urge is to fly.  Who wants to study?  Too bad.

Fifth, trying to think in a foreign language is like trying to scratch an itch through your boots, and your knowledge level declines considerably.  I believe that people are at their most intelligent when thinking in their native language; when thinking in a foreign language, even if your level is pretty good, your ability is still considerably diminished.  This is not only a question of IQ.  Heidigger said:  Language is the home of existence, and we can only explore existence through language.  When speaking in a foreign language you cannot communicate true feelings, which means that there is always a certain distance between what is spoken and what is understood—you can’t really get to people.  Even worse is that, the longer you speak a foreign language, the less appreciation you have for your own native language, which means that even if you go back to thinking in your native tongue, your appreciation is not as great as before.  To my mind, this is the greatest of the harms of studying abroad.  This harm means that for those who study abroad, the depth and penetration of their theoretical imagination is greatly reduced.  If in academic terms we are completely adequate, but in human terms cannot move people, then what’s the point of studying abroad?

Sixth, if you live abroad for a long time, you will miss many theoretically interesting things happening in China.  Society in the West has been settled for hundreds of years, and not that much that is really new occurs.  But China is entering a new era, full of potential.  Theorists think about reality, and reality is nothing other than the sum of potentials.  For many things, if you are not present, then it is very difficult to feel how potentials might develop, and how to transform these potentials into reality in the face of particular circumstances.  Theory needs to have a sense of the present, otherwise it will lose its necessary penetration.

Seventh, and not to be ignored, is that academic norms can limit your thought.  Scholarly disciplines in Europe and the US are divided up very precisely, and very often an expert only needs to know two or three things to secure his livelihood.  In addition, everyone’s concerns are based on their own living situations.  Many of those who study abroad choose what they are going to study based on the logic of their life situations, sometimes picking something that no one else has ever done in the hopes that this will guarantee them a living.  This kind of logic is of course understandable.  But as China’s history enters a new era, a different kind of virtue may be required.  To think more about your job and less about the contribution you can make to your country, is another kind of harm.


Eighth, because of various difficulties abroad, you wind up feeling rebellious, and spend your days arguing with foreigners.  You sing the praises of whatever it is that your enemy opposes, and you oppose whatever your enemy praises.  You feel like you’re independent and autonomous, but in fact you are following others, because once you’re outside of other people’s frame of reference, what you praise and oppose no longer has any internal value.

I believe that all those who have studied abroad have experienced these harms.  We can of course comfort ourselves in saying “if you want to be good at your work, you must first sharpen your tools.”  Studying abroad is a way of refining your tools, and though there are many inconveniences on the road, at the end your sharpened sword will be prepared to draw blood.  In fact, this is just what we tell ourselves to feel better, because we have seen many whose swords are not sharp or are even worthless.

Of course, these disadvantages coexist with advantages:  such as opening your horizons, obtaining training in critical thinking, learning other languages, etc., etc.  But because today people worship the West, they often see only the advantages, and do not see the harm.  Among my friends, Xiaogang understands the harm.  He studied for several years in Germany, and while his studies went well, he always keenly felt an absence of intellectual freedom, and decided that he preferred to let go of the opportunity to do a PhD in Germany and to return to do one at Beijing University.  I admire his decisiveness.  I know myself to be an ordinary person, and am not as resolute as he is.

In the past, Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929) studied in Europe and the US, and said to future students who would study abroad:  “If we study abroad today, it is so that in the future we will no longer have to.”  I completely agree with this.  My sole desire is that when future generations come of age, they will inherit a mature academic tradition, and will not have to travel such long distances and endure these various discomforts.
 
Notes

 [1] 章永乐, “留学之害,” published under the pseudonym 海裔 in 2008, available online at http://www.xinfajia.net/12130.html .

[2] A sample of Zhang’s work is available on his Guanchazhe web page; see https://www.guancha.cn/ZhangYongLe , and he has published a substantial  review, in English, of Wang Hui’s The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, see https://newleftreview.org/issues/II62/articles/yongle-zhang-the-future-of-the-past.  For translations of Jiang Shigong’s work, see https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html , and https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-empire-and-world-order.html .

[3] Translator's note:  Now a professor at Tongji University 同济大学.

[4] Translator's note:  Now a researcher at Beijing University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Research Institute 人文社会科学研究院.

[5] Translator's note:  See https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/the-analects.pdf , p. 62.