Rethinking the inferiority complex: Chinese opinions on Westerners’ knowledge of Chinese (1910s-1930s)

Abstract

Early 20th-century China was, it has been said, plagued by an ‘inferiority complex’, that is, the notion that Western culture was superior to the Chinese one. Consequently, many Chinese intellectuals learnt English, learnt about the West and studied abroad. Drawing upon Westerners’ manuscript collections, Chinese diaries, letters and published articles from the 1910s to the early 1930s, this paper argues that the ‘inferiority complex’ drew a line when it came to attitudes about what Westerners could know about China and its language. Pro-Western intellectuals, from famous Hu Shi to little-known students in Beijing, claimed that Westerners could never understand China and particularly not the Chinese language. When observing that many (though not all) foreigners in China did not speak Chinese, they did not identify this as a sign of imperialist arrogance, as postcolonial scholarship has done. Instead, they traced it back to a perceived Western intellectual inferiority, which contrasted with their own superior ability to learn about the West and its languages. To make this argument, they often turned Orientalist narratives about Chinese mysteriousness against Westerners, to say that China was just too mysterious for the foreigners to understand. This was an extraordinary strategy to create narratives of, however subjectively, perceived strength, not in spite of, but out of Western victimising narratives. This also serves as an intervention into debates that emphasise only the injustices of using English as the main language of communication, be it in a historical, imperialist context or in scholarship about English as a global lingua franca today.

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