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Week 2: How We can Define (and Limit) our Cultural Identity to National Identity

By Janet

I’m a college teacher in the U.S. and I got to know Zhang and Ming, who are Chinese, when they were doing their master’s course together. I found that Zhang talked a lot both in and out of class about Confucianism and how it was the basis of Chinese culture. We soon got into an ongoing discussion about what teachers and students could be expected to do in his university English classes. He said that because of Confucianism, just as it was impolite for children to question their parents, it was impolite for students to question their teachers. This meant that all sorts of things which happened in classrooms in the West, like discovery learning and classroom discussions, were culturally inappropriate in China.

As the master’s course progressed, I noticed that Zhang was getting increasingly unhappy. I asked Ming what Zhang’s problem was. He explained that some people found it more difficult than others to cope with being in a foreign environment. I had noticed that Zhang was very silent when there was a class discussion, and I asked Ming if this was to do with Confucianism. Ming said that this was certainly a factor; but when I told him what Zhang had told me about students having to obey their teachers in China, Ming said that this was not strictly true—that he knew lots of teachers who were prepared to be engaged in discussion by their students, that students were certainly not always prepared to submit to teachers who would not listen to them, and that in modern China many parents no longer held the sort of authority that Zhang was talking about. I told him that this shocked me because it was not just from Zhang that I had heard about this. There were many books she had read about Chinese culture which reported how it was bound by Confucianism. There were also two other people on the course who said that all the Chinese people they had met said the same thing. Ming said that there were different ways of looking at this. On the one hand, it cannot be denied that Confucianism has been a very powerful influence on Chinese society for thousands of years. On the other hand, not everyone has to be bound by this influence; and different people can be influenced in different ways with different Chinese cultural identities but still be from China.

I then read an article which said that people in a foreign environment tend to exaggerate their own cultural identity. When I put this idea to Ming he agreed and said that he had seen some American people in China who had seemed far more ‘American’ than anyone he had seen here. Surely was it not the case that all people drew more heavily on certain cultural elements of their identity when they felt culturally threatened by strange behaviour.

Source: Holliday, A., Hyde, M., and Kullman, J. (2004) Intercultural communication: an advanced resource book. London: Routledge

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