The Decoding China Dictionary

A new dictionary of international relations terms seeks to illustrate how key political words mean different things to Chinese and Western policy makers. It makes for essential foreign policy reading, writes Nicholas Dynon.

Rolling off the virtual press in early March and just in time for the National People’s Congress and the 14th Five Year Plan is The Decoding China Dictionary, a guide to understanding the Chinese meaning of key terms in international relations and development cooperation.

Published by the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and co-authored by a group of China specialists, the dictionary tackles a selection of frequently used terms that mean very different things when used by China and EU states, both how they are defined and their underlying political priorities and values.

“Does China mean the same as the West when talking about democracy, cooperation, or human rights? We explain these and 12 more core terms of international relations,” stated contributor Marina Rudyak, a China scholar at Heidelberg University, in a recent tweet.

“The intended users of the dictionary are policy-makers and institutions in Europe who are engaged in dialogue and exchanges with China,” wrote editors Malin Oud and Katja Drinhausen in an introduction to the dictionary. “It is our hope that this dictionary will serve as a point of reference for strategy development and communication with Chinese counterparts.

New Zealand needs to up its game

The dictionary’s editors point out that Europe’s recognition of China’s rise to global-power status “has not been matched by much investment in knowledge about the country.” The numbers of students taking Chinese languages or area studies at European universities are falling, and there has been no growth in the number of European diplomats and policy-makers proficient in Chinese.

It’s a problem that also afflicts New Zealand. Several years ago, former Executive Director of the New Zealand China Council Pat English stated, “there are only two students learning Chinese for every $1 million of our exports to China, compared to 63 for French. Just 4,218 New Zealand secondary students studied Chinese in 2014, compared to more than 20,000 who studied French.

A 2018 report prepared for the New Zealand China Council by Professor Martin East of the University of Auckland noted there had been improvement. He identified strong growth in students studying Chinese, but that the growth slowed in secondary school.

“Growth is evident in both the numbers of students taking Chinese and the number of schools offering Chinese”, he stated, which supported the assertion made at that time that Chinese had become the most popular language taught in New Zealand primary/intermediate schools.”

Chinese is a challenging language to learn for a range of linguistic reasons, and rates of student attrition are significant. Very few continue Mandarin studies on to university, and fewer still ever gain the competence to engage with the language at the deep level needed to interpret the complex policy concepts that inform Beijing’s terminological cannon.

Managed out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the China Capable Public Sector (CCPS) programme is an initiative to develop a China-savvy New Zealand public sector.

The CCPS’s China Capable Public Sector Masterclass, a fiveday programme facilitated by the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre (NZCCRC), is recognised as an essential programme for developing New Zealand public sector capability.

The masterclass will convene this year on 12-16 April, 16-20 August and 1-5 November, and will feature Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé as a keynote speaker. Barmé developed the idea of ‘New Sinology’ as a model for studying China, a model that stresses the importance of the ability to read, write and speak Chinese for true China literacy.

But how well positioned is New Zealand’s policy making ecosystem in terms of true China literacy? Is the bench deep enough to provide for a multitude of China-literate voices to meaningfully debate and develop good China-focused policy independent from our betterresourced allies and strategic partners?

“That expertise is needed more than ever,” assert the dictionary’s editors. “Chinese ideas are increasingly making their way into UN documents, where international norms and principles such as the rule of law, human rights and democracy are imbued with new meaning and “Chinese characteristics”.

Changing meaning

According to editors Malin Oud and Katja Drinhausen, any of the concepts discussed in the dictionary filtered into the Chinese official CCP language in the decades of ‘reform and opening’ that commenced in 1979. In the 1980s and 90s there was a prevailing sense among Western commentators that reform and opening would lead to a convergence of values.

“When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, it was hoped that a further convergence of values and systems would occur. And indeed, the term human rights was introduced in the Chinese Constitution in 2004, hailed as a new era of constitutional rights protection. Democracy, freedom and the rule of law are now part of the canon of core socialist values being promoted under Xi Jinping.”

“At the same time, these concepts have undergone a major revamp to make them compatible with the CCP’s political and ideological system. Under Xi, measures to define and safeguard a Chinese value system not reliant on liberal ideas have intensified.”

As the dictionary’s editors point out, Chinese officials are now told to guard against constitutional democracy, universal values and civil society in their liberal sense, and that liberal or “Western” values are a threat to China’s unity and political stability.

According to Oud and Drinhausen, China’s rise in a multipolar world means increasing competition over international values and standards.

“The rules-based world order and multilateralism rely on a global consensus on what the norms underpinning the international system entail. When the meaning of terms like the rule of law, human rights, democracy and sovereignty become blurred, international norms are undermined.”

“To enable informed engagement with their Chinese counterparts, European actors need to be able to understand the official Chinese meaning of frequently invoked concepts and key terms in international relations and development cooperation.”

For the same reason, The Decoding China Dictionary would be a worthwhile addition to New Zealand Government foreign policy reading lists.