The West Does not Exist in the West: Chinese Construed West and Its Impact on Chinese-Western Relations in Higher Education

Abstract

The way we approach and understand an idea is cultural-bound. This is especially true in intercultural communication. Ever since China’s door was burst open by Western powers in the late Qing dynasty, China has been struggling to manage her relations with the West with great difficulty. A fundamental reason for such difficulty is that the relationship, although touching upon various social dimensions such as trade and education, is essentially civilizational. Due to the strikingly different modes of thinking, neither side has found it to be easy to manage the relationship. With an epistemology of all-under-heaven, the West does not exist in the West for Chinese thinkers. Rather, the West is something either at the periphery or at the centre. Unlike their Western counterparts who rely on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward “Other” to claim to be universal, the Chinese focus on self-rectification to strive to move closer to the centre. Acknowledging their peripheral position during modern times while the West at the centre, the Chinese practice self-rectification to simulate the West. The West is therefore not geographically Western, but at the centre of the Chinese selfhood. No matter Western or Eastern, Chinese or foreign, there have only been two positions: centre and periphery, instead of West or East. Such mind-set has had profound impact on how the Chinese perceive Australia. This paper discusses the imagined West in contemporary China. It interrogates some of China’s intellectual discourses on West to provide a perspective from within China and examines its impact on Chinese international relations with the Western world in higher education.