Jing Tsu: ‘The days of armchair scholarship are over if you’re studying China’

When I meet Jing Tsu, I carry with me one burning question: in the midst of a great power conflict, what is the role of cultural understanding?

Tsu is an ideal lunch partner to discuss this with: as a Taiwanese-American scholar of Chinese literature, who interprets and explains the country for an English-speaking audience, she describes herself as “sitting in the eye of the storm”. “The days of armchair scholarship are over if you’re studying China. We can’t afford to do that at a time of extreme polarisation like this,” she adds.

In a recent video to launch a series of public lectures at Yale, where she is a professor, Tsu describes three cliched narratives about China: “big China, bad China, crazy China”. “That’s what we need to shift to really understand what’s happening,” she says, adding that such narratives “sensationalise China as something exceptional rather than another rising power looking for staying power”.

Returning to the UK after six years of reporting in China, I, like Tsu, get frustrated by the misperceptions of the Chinese government I encounter in the west, like the idea that it is all-seeing and all-powerful (it’s often internally siloed and uncoordinated). But I also get frustrated by the way many of my Chinese relatives and contemporaries view the west, and I’m alarmed by the increasing fervour of Chinese attacks on reporters.

So as I walk into Toklas, an airy Mediterranean restaurant off the Strand in central London, I am hoping to meet a kindred spirit. Tsu, dressed in a sleek white zip-up jacket and powder-blue top, is standing by the table with the calmness of a natural observer. And when we sit down, before I am able to mention Xi Jinping or Joe Biden, she gets in the first question: “So, what’s your story?”

I’ve been asked similar questions countless times by strangers who expect a one-way explanation. But between two immigrants, the question is an invitation to share. I tell her my story (parents from mainland China, moved to the UK for graduate study, took a four-year-old me with them) because I know she will tell me hers.

Jing Tsu was born in Taiwan, where she was, by her own description, an “awful” pupil. She went to primary school in the late 1970s, when Taiwan was still under the martial law of the Kuomintang government that had fled the mainland after losing the civil war in 1949.

The teachers thought I didn’t have a sense of shame or humiliation. They called me ‘female tiger’

She and her classmates had to wear their hair parted down the middle, cropped to within 2cm below ear lobes that could not be pierced. Tsu flouted the strict uniform rules and refused to do her homework, preferring to run around outside after class. Punishment didn’t bother her. “I was tomboyish. The teachers thought I didn’t have a sense of shame or humiliation. They called me ‘female tiger’,” she recalls.

Tsu’s mother Sue worried about her rebellious daughter. In 1983, when Tsu was nine, Sue took her children to the US, and they settled in a small town in New Mexico. Sue arrived with no English and little money and brought her children up as a single mother — Tsu’s father remained in Taiwan. She separated them from the rest of the community: she didn’t want them to become too Americanised.

Formerly a teacher, Sue designed an “experimental” curriculum for her children, teaching poetry, calligraphy, and essay-writing in Chinese. She drove them three and a half hours to the nearest city, Albuquerque, for piano lessons every Sunday.

“We really grew up together,” Tsu says of her and her mother; they discovered American society at the same time.

We’ve been relaying stories seamlessly for half an hour when I suggest we look at the menu.

We order starters: an endive salad, salted almonds, lemon-punchy marinated anchovies, slivers of cured Culaccia ham. When they come, we share them. I consider how my grandparents would see a typical London meal out: you emigrated to the west, worked hard, in order to get ripped off at restaurants where each person only eats one dish? A Chinese meal is measured by the number of dishes, which are all shared.

Although that is only my experience of Chineseness; Tsu tracks the languages and literatures of the Chinese diaspora, spread across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. “You can endlessly debate the question of what is Chineseness. But it’s really a rabbit hole. It’s as diverse as the world population,” she says.

Tsu says she chose the field of literature “because it’s a backstage pass to everything you want to know without the liability of being a journalist or social scientist”. Her approach lets her range across a huge breadth of disciplines, particularly politics and history. Her recent book, Kingdom of Characters, tells the history of nation-building in modern China through the way its written language was recreated for the age of global communication.

You can endlessly debate the question of what is Chineseness. But it’s as diverse as the world population

Her previous books encompass Chinese nationalism and “literary governance”, the name she gives for the process by which certain groups claim “native speaker” status, or compete for privileged access to the essence of a language and culture. This is a particularly contested process for a language that encompasses many scripts and sounds: the traditional Chinese script of Taiwan, the simplified Chinese script of mainland China, the standard Mandarin tongue invented by Beijing bureaucrats to unify China in the 1950s, and the many dialects of Chinese.

Studying disputes over language has taken Tsu to the root of China’s deepest power struggles, via protests in Hong Kong over the preservation of Cantonese, or the erasure of mother tongues such as Uyghur or Mongolian in the Chinese Communist party’s language policy.

Tsu became interested in Chinese identities during her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, at the height of the 1990s American culture wars around racial identity. “The debates around multiculturalism mostly featured African-American scholars, and they made me wonder, does Asian-American identity fit into that blueprint for talking about race in the US?” 

Although the history of Chinese immigration into the US is little discussed in schools, Tsu points out that the influx of Chinese labourers into American plantations, railroads and gold mines from the 1840s onwards led to the first ever federal restrictions on immigration.

That “yellow peril” era was followed by a century and a half in which Chinese-Americans faded from the political spotlight, other than sometimes being held up as a “model minority” by commentators in order to deny the existence of racism towards African-Americans. “In many ways, the Chinese question has remained unresolved,” Tsu says.

Now US-China rivalry has thrust the Chinese-American diaspora back into the public eye, with accusations of tech espionage and split loyalties. “[It] forces together two issues that are rarely considered together: how America looks at race domestically and how it deals with an adversary internationally,” Tsu says.

“The truth is that immigration has always been a challenge in American society, which prides itself in diversity but worries when it sees diversity as a weak link in national security,” she explains. She quotes Wang Huning, top strategist to President Xi, who upon visiting the US as a scholar in the late 1980s remarked that racial discrimination sat at the core of American society’s many contradictions.

In response to repeated criticism over misconduct and racial profiling, in early 2022 the Department of Justice at least nominally closed a programme called the China Initiative, to prosecute suspected Chinese spies. It caught some, but caused huge collateral damage for academics of Chinese heritage; the department continues to prosecute similar cases.

The China Initiative “reminds us of the darker moments where America pointed its spear inward at some of its own people . . . as under McCarthyism during [the] cold war”, Tsu says. Those targets of the 1950s “Red Scare” included scientists who “took their talent right back to China and helped build that country into what it is today”, she adds.

Our main dishes arrive: crispy pan-fried brill for me, roast guinea fowl for Tsu. Buying groceries at the local Chinese supermarket was an integral part of my childhood, I tell her; Tsu recalls loving her mother’s Taiwanese meals of crab roe and vermicelli, but feeling so shameful about eating them in front of her peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich classmates that she once threw her whole lunch in a bin.

“The immigrant experience made me think about human resilience, what we’re willing to do to survive. I have no doubt that’s how I came to understand Chinese nationalism, which has its origins in the idea of failure,” Tsu says.

She offers me some bites of her guinea fowl, which comes with a garnish of thinly sliced, surprisingly crunchy persimmon. The taste makes Tsu think of her father and her eating the squishy overripe fruit over a rubbish bin in their old kitchen in Taiwan; it makes me think of how my father misses the treacly northern Chinese persimmons of his homeland.

“There are grounds for the narrative of victimisation,” Tsu continues. China was divided up by British, American, European and Russian colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Those were real moments of humiliation. But what you do with the narrative, the afterlife of that moment, becomes incredibly important. China has always been concerned about extinction, falling behind, being eliminated.” This discourse about national collapse persisted for decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

“China has this way of embracing its past failure and defeat, to craft it into a very empowering and nationalistic narrative. Being restored to greatness, or redeemed from a fallen status, is a much more powerful story than having always been great, which is kind of the American story,” Tsu says.

China has been a diligent understudy of the west for more than two centuries now . . . the west does not know China nearly as well

But the rise of China as the world’s second-largest economy, global trade hub and authoritarian superpower has brought it into confrontation with the US, which sees it as an existential threat. I ask Tsu how she sees her project of bridging cultures in a time of divergence.

“I think it’s very important to understand China from the inside, how it evolved, before you decide what to do with it . . . China has been a diligent understudy of the west for more than two centuries now. And it always strikes me that the west does not know China nearly as well.

“Understanding is kind of a bad word these days, because you don’t want to sympathise with your enemy. But empathising means that you actually know how they think.”

I share with Tsu my own concern: that humanising and explaining China to the west does not change the underlying economic and political factors that increasingly bring it into confrontations.

“It does seem like cultural understanding is too soft a tool,” Tsu says. “Cultural understanding is not intended to solve a moment of crisis. It is meant to defuse and to pre-empt moments of crisis, like the one that we’re in now. You set yourself up perfectly for the next conflict if you defer this process of cultural understanding, which has to be built over time.”

I press her: is she a materialist, in the sense of believing that economics underpins everything, and culture is simply the layer on top? “I think it’s actually what fills out all the gaps through all the layers,” Tsu replies. “Literature is that very flexible but encompassing lens that fills out what economics or politics don’t tell us.”

She recalls reporting from the Beijing winter Olympics in February 2022 as NBC’s cultural commentator. “Everyone wants to see China as totalitarian. I saw Chinese people: girls in hazmat suits posing for selfies. They see the machine; I see the cogs in the machine.

“I agree with you though, that we could get to know each other and, at the end of the day, I still don’t like you. There’s always a knuckle of power behind everything,” she adds.

Tsu has been immersing herself in security studies lately, taking courses on the law of the sea, reading US military white papers on the Arctic, revisiting classical Chinese texts on military strategy, and war gaming a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with a Washington think tank. (Of the last of these, she says that all sides would be happy with slowing things down.)

“Comparative literature is about the question: how do we think of opposites? The US and China think of one another as diametrically opposed, but they’ve never been more alike,” Tsu says. “Security studies is about: when do we assert our differences as absolute, and when do we see ourselves in one another? And if we can do the latter, we can settle into an era of competition without the mudslinging.”

Tsu has “enormous respect” for the work of the National Committee on US-China Relations to promote engagement between the two countries, and became a director last year. The committee was started in the 1960s, at which time it was only able to keep a trickle of scientific exchanges going. Yet even those limited dialogues created “memories that people still refer to now. It creates trust that nothing else can replace,” says Tsu. The committee later arranged the Chinese table tennis team’s visit to the US in 1972, after Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in the same year.

Tsu complains that she is often asked by people in Washington to explain ancient Chinese ideas such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “Would you explain American politics with reference to Socrates? Of course not. So why would you think of China as being frozen in time?”

Millennial Chinese writers have grown up in the country’s most open period in history, she continues. “Contemporary Chinese fiction is about so many things,” such as urban alienation, or growing up in the rust-belt north-east. “But what readers want is the Cultural Revolution.” I ask her for a novel recommendation: she suggests Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age, recently translated into English, which is about the Cultural Revolution but also about memories of sex and the basic human need to feel.

What would she like to see happen next? “China has to let people like you — journalists — and other scholars back in. And the US needs to rely on expertise that isn’t just national security policy-driven. We need a 360 view on China. To weave long-term, deep knowledge with near-term plans.”

I have to skip dessert to catch a train to Brussels, to talk to European policymakers about their concerns over supply-chain dependencies on China. But we agree to schedule a catch-up call. In the intervening time, protests erupt across China demanding an end to the country’s zero-Covid policy. On the phone, Tsu tells me that the question of how cultural understanding matters in a time of geopolitical confrontation lingered in her mind for a long time.

“Could we have anticipated the protests?” she asks. “We need to understand what people are experiencing. How do young people think about their future? How do they escape reality, what kind of video games do they turn to? What are they looking for? All these finer issues, of what makes a society, falls out of the purview of policymakers.”

Yuan Yang is the FT’s Europe-China correspondent

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