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Opinion | Fewer Westerners in China is bad for China — but worse for the West

  • In a soft power shift, the West is losing its goodwill grass-roots influence in China while China’s influence grows
  • More Chinese are going to the West to study and understand it – and returning

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Visitors outside the Palace Museum at the Forbidden City in Beijing on August 13, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg
In his regular column in the Post, David Dodwell sometimes refers to a time in his youth when he serendipitously went to Pakistan and taught in a tribal area there in 1968. It was a life-changing event for him.
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I’ve heard similar stories. One is from a former student. Decades ago, he briefly taught English in a remote area in Nepal and that also had a profound impact on his life. He admitted he was not qualified to teach, and thought at the time the area was so poor in so many ways that English seemed the last thing those students needed.

I also met English teachers in China many years ago, employed solely because they were from the West. They acknowledged they weren’t good at teaching but all loved the experience. Most did not plan to teach for long. After one or two years, they moved on to other places and careers.

These stories used to be about personal experience and growth. But the recent development of Westerners leaving China puts those in a different perspective. Perhaps a shift in soft power dynamics between China and the West is happening right before our eyes?

For a long time, the West represented a superior culture in its scientific advancement, economic strength and enlightenment ideals. The English language has an undisputed dominance worldwide. All these factors enabled people like Dodwell to go to less developed places as volunteers or backpackers, take a temporary teaching job, and then move on, whereas the reverse is unimaginable.

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Although only briefly, they embraced a tougher living environment, interacted with local people and made new friends. Whether they realised it or not, this sojourn made them goodwill grass-roots ambassadors of the West, bringing different concepts and cultural practices to people much less privileged.

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