Towards Global Cooperation
in Area Studies

Colin Mackerras

Keywords: area studies, Chinese studies, interdisciplinarity, cooperation, China, language, culture

Introduction

This article focuses on policy/method rather than primary research. It poses the question: how best to study and understand the world’s great civilizations?  It answers that interdisciplinary area studies that includes language, culture, history, economy and society constitute a better approach than a pure disciplinary method. Though it covers various countries, it takes China as the main case study. While recognizing that all peoples try to understand those outside their own civilization, the focus adopted here is primarily on the West.

The other main argument the article proposes is that cooperation is a much better way to conduct international affairs than competition. In some ways, that might seem obvious. However, the world today, and in many other eras, shows examples where particular nations take pride in showcasing the opposite, namely competing rather than cooperating.

There will be some appeal to personal experience in this article. Specifically, I have had extensive experience in teaching, both in my home country Australia and in China. While realizing that there are many people with attachments to their own and another country, I believe it legitimate to use this experience as the basis for some ideas about the nature of how people from one civilization might go about understanding and appreciating the lives and experiences of those from another.

In Australia, I was a professor in a school dedicated entirely or largely to the study of East and Southeast Asia. In that capacity I helped set up a course in Asian studies in the mid-1970s. From 1974 to 2004, I regularly taught or helped teach courses in Chinese history, literature, contemporary China. I also researched China before and during that time.

In China I taught English at what was then the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (now the Beijing Foreign Studies University) from 1964 to 1966. I returned many times to China, especially Beijing, to teach, research and attend conferences, and even as a tourist. My main period of teaching in China was after I retired in Australia. On an almost annual basis from 2005 to 2019, I taught courses at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and Renmin University of China. One of my main concentrations was teaching about Australia in Australian studies centres, especially those at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and Renmin University.

Area Versus Disciplinary Studies

To study the world and important trends in it, two models have been prevalent in Western universities: area studies and disciplinary studies. Area studies focus on particular parts of the world, while disciplinary studies begin from the study of disciplines such as international relations, economics, anthropology and demography. Although the two do not necessarily compete, indeed can help each other greatly, different institutions and scholars tend to emphasize one at the expense of the other. There is a very clear reason for this: area studies necessitate the study of language, while disciplinary studies tend to be comparative.

In the period since World War II, Western universities have tended to move away from area studies and towards disciplinary studies. They have put a lighter emphasis on language learning but a greater on comparative studies of the situation in various countries.

Initially, the traditional disciplines received more emphasis in university courses, such as economics, anthropology and demography. However, later three particular kinds of study, which were like disciplines and could readily be equated to them, became more prominent. These were business studies, women’s studies and ethnic studies.

Business studies is highly related to economics, but more oriented to carrying on actual exchange with people. Of course, the idea of women’s and ethnic equality is not new, especially in the socialist world. In China, the study of the ethnic minorities has been of great significance since the 1950s and before. In the West, gender and race studies expanded greatly in the wake of the radical surge that resulted from the Vietnam War and the opening up to China from the 1970s.

All these three have become politicized. Many consider business studies as of great utility in gaining useful employment that can help relations among countries. Gender studies has been a driver towards the idea that women should not only enjoy equal opportunity, but also equal outcome, including in positions of power. In the case of ethnic or race studies, these are tightly related to the process in the West, especially the United States, of pushing to improve the social status of non-white citizens, and especially in allocating positions of power to them.

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[For full text, please see the Collected Works on Country and Area Studies, 2022]