From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict — all tied to energy supplies — that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

* A brewing war between Sudan and South Sudan: On April 10th, forces from the newly independent state of South Sudan occupied the oil center of Heglig, a town granted to Sudan as part of a peace settlement that allowed the southerners to secede in 2011.  The northerners, based in Khartoum, then mobilized their own forces and drove the South Sudanese out of Heglig.  Fighting has since erupted all along the contested border between the two countries, accompanied by air strikes on towns in South Sudan.  Although the fighting has not yet reached the level of a full-scale war, international efforts to negotiate a cease-fire and a peaceful resolution to the dispute have yet to meet with success.

This conflict is being fueled by many factors, including economic disparities between the two Sudans and an abiding animosity between the southerners (who are mostly black Africans and Christians or animists) and the northerners (mostly Arabs and Muslims).  But oil — and the revenues produced by oil — remains at the heart of the matter.  When Sudan was divided in 2011, the most prolific oil fields wound up in the south, while the only pipeline capable of transporting the south’s oil to international markets (and thus generating revenue) remained in the hands of the northerners.  They have been demanding exceptionally high “transit fees” — $32-$36 per barrel compared to the common rate of $1 per barrel — for the privilege of bringing the South’s oil to market.  When the southerners refused to accept such rates, the northerners confiscated money they had already collected from the south’s oil exports, its only significant source of funds.  In response, the southerners stopped producing oil altogether and, it appears, launched their military action against the north.  The situation remains explosive.

* Naval clash in the South China Sea: On April 7th, a Philippine naval warship, the 378-foot Gregorio del Pilar, arrived at Scarborough Shoal, a small island in the South China Sea, and detained eight Chinese fishing boats anchored there, accusing them of illegal fishing activities in Filipino sovereign waters.  China promptly sent two naval vessels of its own to the area, claiming that the Gregorio del Pilar was harassing Chinese ships in Chinese, not Filipino waters.  The fishing boats were eventually allowed to depart without further incident and tensions have eased somewhat.  However, neither side has displayed any inclination to surrender its claim to the island, and both sides continue to deploy warships in the contested area.

As in Sudan, multiple factors are driving this clash, but energy is the dominant motive.  The South China Sea is thought to harbor large deposits of oil and natural gas, and all the countries that encircle it, including China and the Philippines, want to exploit these reserves.  Manila claims a 200-nautical mile “exclusive economic zone” stretching into the South China Sea from its western shores, an area it calls the West Philippine Sea; Filipino companies say they have found large natural gas reserves in this area and have announced plans to begin exploiting them.  Claiming the many small islands that dot the South China Sea (including Scarborough Shoal) as its own, Beijing has asserted sovereignty over the entire region, including the waters claimed by Manila; it, too, has announced plans to drill in the area.  Despite years of talks, no solution has yet been found to the dispute and further clashes are likely.

* Egypt cuts off the natural gas flow to Israel: On April 22nd, the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company informed Israeli energy officials that they were “terminating the gas and purchase agreement” under which Egypt had been supplying gas to Israel.  This followed months of demonstrations in Cairo by the youthful protestors who succeeded in deposing autocrat Hosni Mubarak and are now seeking a more independent Egyptian foreign policy — one less beholden to the United States and Israel.  It also followed scores of attacks on the pipelines carrying the gas across the Negev Desert to Israel, which the Egyptian military has seemed powerless to prevent.

Ostensibly, the decision was taken in response to a dispute over Israeli payments for Egyptian gas, but all parties involved have interpreted it as part of a drive by Egypt’s new government to demonstrate greater distance from the ousted Mubarak regime and his (U.S.-encouraged) policy of cooperation with Israel.  The Egyptian-Israeli gas link was one of the most significant outcomes of the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries, and its annulment clearly signals a period of greater discord; it may also cause energy shortages in Israel, especially during peak summer demand periods.  On a larger scale, the cutoff suggests a new inclination to use energy (or its denial) as a form of political warfare and coercion.

* Argentina seizes YPF: On April 16th, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced that her government would seize a majority stake in YPF, the nation’s largest oil company.  Under President Kirchner’s plans, which she detailed on national television, the government would take a 51% controlling stake in YPF, which is now majority-owned by Spain’s largest corporation, the energy firm Repsol YPF.  The seizure of its Argentinean subsidiary is seen in Madrid (and other European capitals) as a major threat that must now be combated.  Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel García Margallo, said that Kirchner’s move “broke the climate of cordiality and friendship that presided over relations between Spain and Argentina.”  Several days later, in what is reported to be only the first of several retaliatory steps, Spain announced that it would stop importing biofuels from Argentina, its principal supplier — a trade worth nearly $1 billion a year to the Argentineans.
As in the other conflicts, this clash is driven by many urges, including a powerful strain of nationalism stretching back to the Peronist era, along with Kirchner’s apparent desire to boost her standing in the polls.  Just as important, however, is Argentina’s urge to derive greater economic and political benefit from its energy reserves, which include the world’s third-largest deposits of shale gas.  While long-term rival Brazil is gaining immense power and prestige from the development of its offshore “pre-salt” petroleum reserves, Argentina has seen its energy production languish.  Repsol may not be to blame for this, but many Argentineans evidently believe that, with YPF under government control, it will now be possible to accelerate development of the country’s energy endowment, possibly in collaboration with a more aggressive foreign partner like BP or ExxonMobil.

* Argentina re-ignites the Falklands crisis: At an April 15th-16th Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia — the one at which U.S. Secret Service agents were caught fraternizing with prostitutes — Argentina sought fresh hemispheric condemnation of Britain’s continued occupation of the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentineans).  It won strong support from every country present save (predictably) Canada and the United States.  Argentina, which says the islands are part of its sovereign territory, has been raising this issue ever since it lost a war over the Falklands in 1982, but has recently stepped up its campaign on several fronts — denouncing London in numerous international venues and preventing British cruise ships that visit the Falklands from docking in Argentinean harbors.  The British have responded by beefing up their military forces in the region and warning the Argentineans to avoid any rash moves.

When Argentina and the U.K. fought their war over the Falklands, little was at stake save national pride, the stature of the country’s respective leaders (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vs. an unpopular military junta), and a few sparsely populated islands.  Since then, the stakes have risen immeasurably as a result of recent seismic surveys of the waters surrounding the islands that indicated the existence of massive deposits of oil and natural gas.  Several UK-based energy firms, including Desire Petroleum and Rockhopper Exploration, have begun off-shore drilling in the area and have reported promising discoveries.  Desperate to duplicate Brazil’s success in the development of offshore oil and gas, Argentina claims the discoveries lie in its sovereign territory and that the drilling there is illegal; the British, of course, insist that it’s their territory.  No one knows how this simmering potential crisis will unfold, but a replay of the 1982 war — this time over energy — is hardly out of the question.

* U.S. forces mobilize for war with Iran: Throughout the winter and early spring, it appeared that an armed clash of some sort pitting Iran against Israel and/or the United States was almost inevitable.  Neither side seemed prepared to back down on key demands, especially on Iran’s nuclear program, and any talk of a compromise solution was deemed unrealistic.  Today, however, the risk of war has diminished somewhat — at least through this election year in the U.S. — as talks have finally gotten under way between the major powers and Iran, and as both have adopted (slightly) more accommodating stances.  In addition, U.S. officials have been tamping down war talk and figures in the Israeli military and intelligence communities have spoken out against rash military actions.  However, the Iranians continue to enrich uranium, and leaders on all sides say they are fully prepared to employ force if the peace talks fail.

For the Iranians, this means blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which one-third of the world’s tradable oil passes every day.  The U.S., for its part, has insisted that it will keep the Strait open and, if necessary, eliminate Iranian nuclear capabilities.  Whether to intimidate Iran, prepare for the real thing, or possibly both, the U.S. has been building up its military capabilities in the Persian Gulf area, deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups in the neighborhood along with an assortment of air and amphibious-assault capabilities.

One can debate the extent to which Washington’s long-running feud with Iran is driven by oil, but there is no question that the current crisis bears heavily on global oil supply prospects, both through Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for forthcoming sanctions on Iranian oil exports, and the likelihood that any air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities will lead to the same thing.  Either way, the U.S. military would undoubtedly assume the lead role in destroying Iranian military capabilities and restoring oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the energy-driven crisis that just won’t go away.

How Energy Drives the World

All of these disputes have one thing in common: the conviction of ruling elites around the world that the possession of energy assets — especially oil and gas deposits — is essential to prop up national wealth, power, and prestige.

This is hardly a new phenomenon.  Early in the last century, Winston Churchill was perhaps the first prominent leader to appreciate the strategic importance of oil.  As First Lord of the Admiralty, he converted British warships from coal to oil and then persuaded the cabinet to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum (now BP).  The pursuit of energy supplies for both industry and war-fighting played a major role in the diplomacy of the period between the World Wars, as well as in the strategic planning of the Axis powers during World War II.  It also explains America’s long-term drive to remain the dominant power in the Persian Gulf that culminated in the first Gulf War of 1990-91 and its inevitable sequel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The years since World War II have seen a variety of changes in the energy industry, including a shift in many areas from private to state ownership of oil and natural gas reserves.  By and large, however, the industry has been able to deliver ever-increasing quantities of fuel to satisfy the ever-growing needs of a globalizing economy and an expanding, rapidly urbanizing world population.  So long as supplies were abundant and prices remained relatively affordable, energy consumers around the world, including most governments, were largely content with the existing system of collaboration among private and state-owned energy leviathans.

But that energy equation is changing ominously as the challenge of fueling the planet grows more difficult.  Many of the giant oil and gas fields that quenched the world’s energy thirst in years past are being depleted at a rapid pace.  The new fields being brought on line to take their place are, on average, smaller and harder to exploit.  Many of the most promising new sources of energy — like Brazil’s “pre-salt” petroleum reserves deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, Canadian tar sands, and American shale gas — require the utilization of sophisticated and costly technologies.  Though global energy supplies are continuing to grow, they are doing so at a slower pace than in the past and are continually falling short of demand.  All this adds to the upward pressure on prices, causing anxiety among countries lacking adequate domestic reserves (and joy among those with an abundance).

The world has long been bifurcated between energy-surplus and energy-deficit states, with the former deriving enormous political and economic advantages from their privileged condition and the latter struggling mightily to escape their subordinate position.  Now, that bifurcation is looking more like a chasm.  In such a global environment, friction and conflict over oil and gas reserves — leading to energy conflicts of all sorts — is only likely to increase.

Looking, again, at April’s six energy disputes, one can see clear evidence of these underlying forces in every case.  South Sudan is desperate to sell its oil in order to acquire the income needed to kick-start its economy; Sudan, on the other hand, resents the loss of oil revenues it controlled when the nation was still united, and appears no less determined to keep as much of the South’s oil money as it can for itself.  China and the Philippines both want the right to develop oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea, and even if the deposits around Scarborough Shoal prove meager, China is unwilling to back down in any localized dispute that might undermine its claim to sovereignty over the entire region.

Egypt, although not a major energy producer, clearly seeks to employ its oil and gas supplies for maximum political and economic advantage — an approach sure to be copied by other small and mid-sized suppliers.  Israel, heavily dependent on imports for its energy, must now turn elsewhere for vital supplies or accelerate the development of disputed, newly discovered offshore gas fields, a move that could provoke fresh conflict with Lebanon, which says they lie in its own territorial waters.  And Argentina, jealous of Brazil’s growing clout, appears determined to extract greater advantage from its own energy resources, even if this means inflaming tensions with Spain and Great Britain.

And these are just some of the countries involved in significant disputes over energy.  Any clash with Iran — whatever the motivation — is bound to jeopardize the petroleum supply of every oil-importing country, sparking a major international crisis with unforeseeable consequences.  China’s determination to control its offshore hydrocarbon reserves has pushed it into conflict with other countries with offshore claims in the South China Sea, and into a similar dispute with Japan in the East China Sea.  Energy-related disputes of this sort can also be found in the Caspian Sea and in globally warming, increasingly ice-free Arctic regions.

The seeds of energy conflicts and war sprouting in so many places simultaneously suggest that we are entering a new period in which key state actors will be more inclined to employ force — or the threat of force — to gain control over valuable deposits of oil and natural gas.  In other words, we’re now on a planet heading into energy overdrive.

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Now, after nearly a month, ships from the two nations have refused to budge from the waters surrounding the shoal, while populists back home have whipped up a nationalist frenzy.

In the Philippines, the office of the president declared that it was unilaterally renaming the disputed land, “Panatag Shoal.” (Chinese call it Huangyan Island.) In China, a video went viral on Wednesday showing a TV anchor pronouncing — falsely — that the Philippines is “Chinese territory,” and that China “has unquestionable sovereignty” over the island nation. Meanwhile, a major general wrote an op-ed urging the Chinese navy to smash the Philippines “with both fists” next time, generating 174,000 responses — the majority of them supportive.

This scuffle is merely one of dozens of overlapping, contradictory claims for territory in the South China Sea, where the nations of Southeast Asia are facing off against an increasingly assertive China — and against one another.

“China certainly shares much of the blame for the current standoff. Its claims to the South China Sea, based on limited historical evidence, do not provide a significant basis to make sweeping, unilateral assertions,” says Andrew Billo of the Asia Society.

Where does the US fit into this toxic brew of jingoism, nationalism, and disputed territory? Its strategic shift to the Pacific, geopolitical rivalry with China, and alliance with the Philippines have inescapably drawn American interests to the Asian hotspot.

In early May, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined America’s emerging priorities in the South China Sea: freedom of navigation, unimpeded commerce, maintenance of peace and stability, and respect for international law.

Beyond that, the sea plays an enormously valuable role as the international highway of global trade. Half of all the world’s intercontinental goods pass through the South China Sea, amounting to $1.2 trillion in trade with the US every year, according to a January report from the Center for New American Security. And its untapped energy resources are vast: 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and as much as 130 billion barrels of oil are estimated to lie undiscovered beneath the seabed.

“The geostrategic significance of the South China Sea is difficult to overstate,” the authors of the CNAS report write. “The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans.” Yet, they note, American interests in the region “are increasingly at risk” due to “the economic and military rise of China and concerns about its willingness to uphold existing legal norms.”

Taking any overt action to defend those interests would set off alarm bells in China. Last month, after Americans posted 4,500 personnel to the Philippines — coincidentally during the April standoff over Scarborough Shoal — Chinese critics blasted the US for “meddling” in regional affairs.

Since then, the US has exercised caution, refusing to take sides in the dispute, even as Manila requested support.

Complicating matters further is the difficulty of weighing the validity of the competing claims.

Since the 1940s, Chinese maps have included a “9-dash line” that encircles nearly all of the South China Sea; Beijing has yet to explain what the line means. Vietnam has meanwhile ramped up its naval power, while proceeding to sell oil rights in disputed territory to Western companies. Belatedly, the Philippines has become more forceful in asserting its exclusive rights to areas — such as Scarborough Shoal — that Chinese fisherman have visited for generations.

Even if they looked to the United Nations for resolution, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Seas has no power to settle disputes over sovereignty. And while diplomacy stalls, fishermen and civilian ships from each country are taking matters into their own hands.

“We’re now running a risk of an accident or confrontation arising from lack of clear instructions on how to behave,” says Carlyle Thayer, professor emeritus at the Australian Defence Force Academy. “The South China Sea is like a bathtub: When you put more ships in it, there’s going to be a collision.”

While efforts are underway in ASEAN, the regional association, to create a binding “Code of Conduct” on the seas, it has proved too feeble to stand up against Chinese pressure. “Some nervous nellies in ASEAN don’t want to confront China,” says Thayer.

So where does that leave the US? In the awkward position of being the final backstop against China, while simultaneously trying to maintain an appearance of neutrality. That means honoring its military commitments to the Philippines, Thayer says, while stopping short of endorsing its allies’ assertion of territorial rights.

“The US should continue backing the Philippines,” says Thayer. “That’s the weak reed, and if China breaks the Philippines, it will affect other countries’ claims.”

Other experts say that America’s main focus should be on guaranteeing the freedom of global trade routes, while leaving the mess of sorting out sovereignty to the states themselves.

“The US should take a step back from the issue,” says Billo of the Asian Society, “It has made its point with respect to its support for a key ally, and the region as a whole, but ultimately it is in the US interest to have regional stability and not allow the conflict to escalate further.”

Over email, curator Herb Tam explained the exhibition’s philosophy and themes. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the show’s photography.

Where did you get the idea for this exhibition, and why did you choose to put it together now?

The idea for the show came from exploring our collection and noticing how varied and idiosyncratic the photographs in our collection are. Looking at them made me think of the enthusiasm for photography that a lot of Chinese have, and how there’s a stereotype of Chinese as crass tourists constantly taking pictures of ourselves in foreign places. There’s been a growing interest in China and Chinese culture lately, and I wanted to show the Chinese perspective on the idea of America — how we actually see this country, how we picture it now that China is rising, and as America’s global position has become more precarious.

What do these photographs tell us about the Chinese-American experience?

These photos show a palpable tension between the spaces we inhabit and our own understanding of ourselves (identity) — that we’re still in the process of figuring out how we exist here as we move further and further away from urban Chinatowns.

In terms of photography, what types of themes, subjects and situations is the “Chinese lens” most sensitive to?

I tried to cover a range of photographic themes, but one motif that stands out is the automobile, and to me this is an apt symbol of America’s ethos of social mobility and a Chinese sense of class consciousness. New cars represented a step taken towards the American dream, and there are a lot of snapshots in our collection of people posed in front of their gleaming new cars.

To give us some sense of the range of the exhibition, can you describe two photos that sit at opposite extremes in terms of what the show covers?

First of all, there are photographs of poetic absurdity, like Yan Deng’s photograph of two young men with their dress shirts and pants on backwards and their backs facing towards the camera on a generic-looking suburban street [slide 9]. Then contrast that with a photograph from our collection of an unknown couple, probably from the ’50s, standing awkwardly in front of what looks to be their new suburban home [slide 3]. There’s a narrative in the connection between those photographs that speaks to the hopes and idealism of Chinese people as they began moving into the suburbs — and then the realization after a while that the suburban space in America is not just idyllic, but may also be threatening and absurd.

What are the most significant changes you notice in the style or content of the photographs over time? What are the most significant continuities?

Chinese artists who use photography now don’t seem as likely to photograph “about” their cultural identity as they were in the ’80s, when someone like Tseng Kwong Chi was photographing himself in Mao suits in various American tourist locales. Talking about one’s struggles with ethnicity fell out of favor, and we see it in how Chinese artists have photographed themselves in relation to their spaces. Artists don’t take oppositional positions now; in general they are more critically concerned with forms, subjects and processes of art-making.

It was important to me that the artists and photographers, as a group, reflected the diverse backgrounds of Chinese in America. Julie Quon grew up in New York’s Chinatown her whole life; her family is Cantonese. Arthur Ou and Amy Yao were born in Taiwan and grew up in California. Hai Zhang and Yan Deng were new immigrants coming over for college and career opportunities (Zhang decided to stay in America; Deng moved back to Beijing after studying at Parsons The New School for Design). Chien An Yuan and Wing Young Huie were born in and have grown up in the middle of the country. We also feature artists who visit America, but who haven’t established roots here, like Jiajia Zhang, who lives in Switzerland. This shows that the Chinese experience here isn’t a singular one, but that it’s multidimensional and ever evolving.

“America Through a Chinese Lens” will be on display at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York City, from April 26 through Sept. 10, 2012.

View the slide show

But electronics industry insiders caution against celebrating a labor victory too soon.

It will only be a matter of time, they say, before contract suppliers simply shift operations to cheaper Asian destinations and replace hundreds of thousands of Chinese jobs with robots.

“It’s just cost efficiencies. Like any other company they’re trying to cut costs,” said John L’Epagnol, a managing partner of Goldhawk International, which marries Western buyers with Chinese factories.

“The increased labor demands will continue to push them into places like Vietnam or further into automation,” he said, adding that he’s been seeing “a lot more automation taking place,” even before Foxconn’s announcement.

The pressure on Apple and its key manufacturer has been particularly intense since May 2010, when labor activists claimed that at least 14 Chinese workers committed suicide at the strictly regimented plants.

Since the suicide revelations, there have been reports about illegal overtime hours, cramped dorm rooms, employee blacklists, shadowy security personnel and a weird corporate culture built around Foxconn founder Terry Guo, who owns a $30 million castle in the Czech Republic and counts 13th century Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan as his personal hero.

But insiders say that this latest round of pressure applied to Foxconn — which makes about 50 percent of global electronics and has a market capitalization equal to its 10 closest competitors — came about through its close ties to Apple, which first overtook Exxon as the world’s most valuable company in August last year.

The Taipei-based company — which also counts Sony, Nokia, Dell, Nintendo and Motorola among its clients — had already increased workers’ wages by 16 to 25 percent in February.

“The main reason Foxconn is under such a bright microscope is because it’s a foreign company and it works with Apple. Actually, for what it does, it has some of the highest wages in the industry and treats its workers much better than local Chinese outfits,” said L’Epagnol.

But critics claim that Foxconn, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Hon Hai electronics company, is also under scrutiny because it dominates the global electronics supply chain and is a litmus test for industry-wide labor practices.

Where Foxconn goes, its competitors are likely to follow. So, the question is, where will Foxconn go?

“Robots and automation are definitely increasing trends. So are Foxconn’s moves into central China where labor costs are lower [than coastal China],” said Ying-dah Wong, a Taiwanese labor activist.

“They want the cheapest possible labor while escaping the most basic labor laws. That’s why you will see them connive with dictators and autocratic governments in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, so they can ensure their interests are always protected,” Wong added.

Foxconn has factories operating in Hungary, Mexico, India, Malaysia, Brazil and Vietnam. It’s the largest exporter in the Czech Republic. But it may be the communist state to the south of China that becomes the biggest recipient of the company’s “largess.”

The minimum wage in Vietnam is about $85 per month, a figure that’s substantially lower than Shenzhen’s $207. Guo, Foxconn’s founder, was also reportedly so impressed after meeting Vietnam’s president and other top brass that he offered to increase his $80 million investment in hardscrabble Bac Ninh province to $5 billion, sprinkled throughout the country.

“Communist and other autocratic countries just want jobs. It is as much a security and social order issue as it is an economic issue,” says Ying.

As for the iRobots, global industrial robot sales surged by 18 percent in 2011. Foxconn alone said it will produce 300,000 robots by next year, and 1 million by 2014. If all goes according to plan, an estimated 500,000 of Foxconn’s 1 million Chinese jobs will soon be obsolete.

In an email to GlobalPost, a Foxconn representative confirmed the move toward technology, but downplayed any potential negative impact. “Automation is playing an increasingly important role in our operations as our manufacturing processes and the products we produce become more sophisticated. This development is allowing many of our employees to move up the value chain,” the emailed statement read.

However, the International Federation of Robotics predicts that China will be the top robot market by 2014, and labor activists fear that if major companies like Foxconn set a precedent, millions of jobs in developing countries will be lost.

“Foxconn sets the pattern for others in the industry. Rising wages are a good thing for Chinese workers, the Chinese economy and the global economy, but only as long as productivity improves in tandem with wages,” said Chang-hee Lee of the U.N.-backed International Labor Organization.

But while much is made of the responsibility contract suppliers have in the developing world’s labor food chain, others aren’t so convinced.

“People don’t understand that companies like Apple drive these practices. Our margins are super, super low. They come in and say: ‘We want this produced. We want this many units. We want them delivered by this time. And this is what we are going to give you. If you can’t do it, someone else will,’” said a price analyst at a Foxconn rival who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The days of bidding or putting quotes up with these big American companies are long gone,” he said.

Foxconn declined GlobalPost’s repeated interview requests.

Yes. I recently asked some school kids, “If you had the opportunity to go to China today, what do you think you would see?” One of the students said there would be a lot of lanterns everywhere, a lot of red, and a lot of dragons. I thought, “Wow. If this kid stepped into Shanghai in 2012, he would really be bowled over.” A lot of people in the U.S. and other countries have a very narrow, stereotypical idea about what China is. It’s really important for Americans to understand that China is an incredibly diverse and even multicultural society. It is not a monolith, it is not isolated from the rest of the world, and there is, at the end of the day, no easy definition of what it means to be Chinese or China.

There has been an explosion of interest in Chinese language learning in the U.S. – how many people are actually learning it?

That’s a question many people would like to know the answer to. It’s rather hard to pinpoint. The best data we have says that at university level there are more than 60,000 and a similar number at K-12 level. So it’s at least 120,000 students. That’s not a very large number, but it does represent a 200 percent increase over a four- to five-year period, so the growth is just exponential. And those numbers are a couple of years old, so I would say that by now there are at least 150,000 Americans in formal Chinese language programs, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Why do people want to learn it? Is it because China is going to be – or is – an economic powerhouse?

I think it is as simple as that. Most schools, school districts and universities have a Chinese program because parents want their children to be offered the opportunity to learn it. It’s almost exclusively driven by economic interest: “What can I learn to get a better job? What can I learn to make me more marketable in this global world I’m going to graduate into?” It’s interesting to me because I have studied and taught both Chinese and Japanese. I started learning both languages in the early 1990s, and I saw the flip-flop. In 1991 it was Japanese that was the language of the future, that MBA students and law students wanted to learn. It was a way to get a leg up and be ready for a more global future in which Japan would be dominant. Now the shift is towards Chinese.

We posted an article on The Browser recently about which language is the best to learn after English. The author, Robert Lane Greene, was skeptical about the value of learning Chinese, for the same reason that learning Japanese didn’t take off – the written script is too unwieldy.

Chinese as a dominant world language does have a huge challenge in that the written language is so difficult and time-consuming to learn. However, if you look at the younger generation of American businesspeople in China, I’m struck by how many of them are able to function in Chinese in a business or professional situation compared with 10 or 15 years ago. English has a lot of advantages in terms of its utility and its penetration in education systems around the world. I don’t think Chinese is going to replace English overnight. But if people really want to have access to this country that is becoming a fact of our lives, and more and more influential in the world, they will need to learn to engage Chinese people on their own terms and in their own language.

Let’s get into this broader view of China by way of your book selection. Your first choice is “The Languages of China” by Robert Ramsey.

This book is an extremely exciting account of what Ramsey calls “China as a linguistic region.” He talks not just about the Chinese language but about all the various languages that are spoken within the territory of what we now call the People’s Republic of China, as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong and other places. He discusses not just Mandarin Chinese and related languages like Cantonese or Shanghainese but also languages like Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur, and, in the south, Zhuang and other Tai languages.

It’s a wonderful history of Chinese dialectology, where these languages are spoken and how they developed. It’s also about the development of Mandarin as an official language. What’s most fascinating to me is how he brings in the languages of what he calls “the Chinese and their neighbours” – Manchurians, Mongolians, Tibetans. He talks about expanding our definition of what China is, and he broadens our view of what it means to think about China linguistically. If you look at a Chinese banknote, you will see a number of languages written on that currency: Chinese, but also Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang, four of the largest minority languages spoken in China. This book does a wonderful job of opening up the vision of China as a very diverse place.

For people who don’t know much about Chinese, the history of Mandarin is pretty fascinating also, isn’t it?

That’s another thing I like about the book. It gets into the history of Mandarin and shows you that, in a sense, it is no one’s native language. Mandarin is an artificial construct that developed over time so that people in various regions of China could communicate with each other. There’s always a debate in China about where the most standard Mandarin is spoken. Is it in the northeast? Is it in Beijing? At the end of the day, standard Mandarin is an artificial language which no one speaks as their native tongue. Almost every Chinese person is to some degree multilingual, or at least bilingual. If they live in the northeast or Beijing, what they speak with friends and family will be very close to Mandarin. If they live in the south, it might be quite different. Mandarin in itself is a lingua franca that was created over time as a common language for the whole country.

Your next book is “The Sextants of Beijing” by Joanna Waley-Cohen. The classic story of China’s relationship to the outside world is that of George Macartney’s 1793 mission from Britain to China’s imperial court. Emperor Qianlong, rather than embracing this chance to trade with the West, told Lord Macartney he wasn’t interested in his trinkets. Waley-Cohen argues that China was much more open and engaged in the world than this stereotype suggests.

This book carries on the same theme as Robert Ramsey’s but deals more with history. It’s important for people to know that China has long been connected in very integral ways to the rest of the world. Influences from Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia have long been accommodated or assimilated into Chinese culture. Most people know about the encounter with the West that started in the 17th and 18th centuries and ramped up in the 19th and early 20th century. But China had an earlier journey to the West, particularly around the time of the Tang dynasty – from the seventh to 10th centuries – when India became an important cultural force in China.

Buddhism came to China around this time, and for the first time China had to confront psychologically, intellectually and culturally a civilisation that it could not dismiss as barbaric and assert the superiority of Chinese culture over. In Buddhism, the Chinese found a highly complex and attractive philosophical, religious and psychological system that dealt with questions which native traditions like Confucianism and Daoism did not deal with. It dealt with metaphysical questions, questions of suffering, and existential questions. What does it mean to exist in the world? Why do we suffer? How do we overcome suffering? How do we think about the experiences that we are having in the world?

Waley-Cohen’s book is a very accessible introduction to this history. It focuses mostly on the Macartney mission onwards, looking at the Jesuits and the Opium Wars for the most part. But it also suggests that during the Tang dynasty there was an incredible cosmopolitanism in Chinese culture. And going back even further into the archaeological evidence, increasingly scholars are coming to understand that Chinese civilisation does not originate from a single point. There are at least four or five different cultural regions that are identified as proto-Chinese. What we now identify as Chinese culture really comes out of the long history of these multiple traditions, unravelling over centuries and indeed millennia.

Whether you’re an outside observer or a Chinese historian, you may at times try to define something that is uniquely or purely Chinese. But the more you look at Chinese history, the more you realise that the definition of what China is evolves over time. That definition is never completely pure – it’s always brought together from a mixture of different cultures. I love books that problematise the notion of what it means to be Chinese, or what we mean when we say China. It’s a relatively short book and very accessible, but it looks at the grand sweep of history from the origins of Chinese civilisation to the post-Mao era.

Are you closer to an answer to what it means to be Chinese?

Just like what it means to be American or Japanese or French, there are multiple answers and definitions. But it’s clear that throughout history territories which were once not considered Chinese – whose people were seen as barbarian – became Chinese over time, by adopting the Chinese language, dress, customs, philosophies and so on. Being Chinese meant being able to use chopsticks, speak Chinese, wear the proper clothes and talk about Confucianism. In that sense, people who were not racially or ethnically Chinese could in time become Chinese. This is quite unique. In Japan and Korea, ethnic and racial definitions of what it means to be Japanese or Korean are very strong. But China has such huge diversity, and is such a huge swath of territory, that to become Chinese really means to adopt Chinese culture.

Your third choice is the tales and parables of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi [called "Wandering on the Way"], translated by Victor Mair.

There are a number of important texts that form the core of the Daoist tradition. The most famous one, and the earliest, is Laozi’s “Tao Te Ching,” which is very short but suggests a lot. The second most important is what this book is a translation of. In Chinese it’s called “Zhuangzi,” supposedly written by a man named Zhuang Zhou, and it is one of the most playful texts you’ll ever read. It’s not philosophy in the way Plato or Aristotle did it, it’s very literary and, although written in prose, wonderfully poetic. Although written in a very early period of Chinese history, the fourth century BCE, in a way it’s post-modern. It questions all the things that we take for granted.

Give me some examples.

There is a very famous passage in which the author dreams he is a butterfly, and he doesn’t really know whether he is a man dreaming he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is a man. It’s a poetic image that is designed to question our accepted view of reality. There’s also the story of the frog in the well, who can’t see the great big complicated world outside because he only knows the well. Or the story of insects that only live for one season, so will only know summer and never understand the concept of the cold. There’s a lot in the book about relativism, perspective and ways of looking at the world. Zhuang Zhou challenges and problematizes our conventional notions of reality every step of the way. He asks: Why do we make these kind of assumptions about the world?

How does Daoism as a religion – if that’s the right word – relate to this book?

There is a religion that became identified with the Daoist tradition. This book is incorporated into that tradition to a certain degree, but it is really quite separate from what eventually becomes the Daoist religious tradition – which is tied up with things like alchemy, longevity and so on. To me, this book is more of a polemical attack on an emerging Confucian orthodoxy. In addition to subverting our accepted views of reality, it challenges the idea that the social world and political life is most important, as it is for the Confucians.

There’s a wonderful story in the book about Zhuang Zhou being asked to take up an official post by the king of a nearby state. The king’s ministers say: “We’ve heard of your wisdom, we want you to become an adviser to the ruler of our state.” Zhuang Zhou replies: “I have heard there is a dead turtle that the king cherishes and is kept in a gold box, wrapped in the finest silks. Do you think this turtle would be happier sitting up there on the emperor’s throne or dragging his tail through the mud with the other turtles?” The ministers scratch their head and Zhuang Zhou says: “I prefer to just drag my tail through the mud.” He suggests that there is a deeper and more fundamental reality and experience of life than the order, harmony and social duty and responsibility that Confucians value – this book is a wonderfully playful attack on that.

Why did you choose this book for the purposes of our topic?

In China, Confucianism has been the orthodoxy, so when most people learn about Chinese culture it’s through a Confucian lens. For many scholars and political figures throughout history, Confucianism has become the definition of what it means to be Chinese – you follow these rituals and you read these texts. Zhuangzi represents an alternative tradition within Chinese thought. When I visit Chinese schools, some of them seem to me incredibly militant. Students live in a very authoritarian school system where they are made to memorise a lot of facts, and recite poetry and ancient texts. I’ve always thought that these schools could use a little less Confucius and a little more Zhuangzi.

Do you tell them that?

I don’t dare! But Zhuangzi does offer the idea that there is a natural order to things, and that the Confucians were trying to change or regulate the natural order of the universe. The Confucians would say they were harmonizing with the universe by building an orderly society. The Daoists would say the Confucians were creating a very artificial and authoritarian society, whereas people should be free to follow their natural instincts and not follow a rule book in meeting challenges, but just go with the flow.

Zhuang Zhou has wonderful stories about artisans – for example, a butcher who can cut through animals missing all the bones because he is not focusing on the technique or thinking about what he’s doing. By just acting naturally, he’s able to follow the natural patterns and lines within the animal, and cut through it in almost magical ways. Again, it’s incredibly post-modern. He says we don’t need to have elaborately defined and structured rituals of performance that regulate Confucian society, we can just feel it and go with our instincts. That’s a wonderful thing to discover in a society which often wears a Confucian gown, and puts a Confucian spin on almost everything that it does.

Let’s move onto Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman,” a short story he published in 1918. Lu Xun was a fan of the Russian writer Gogol, which is why he chose the same title for his own story. But first you had better remind us who Lu Xun is.

Lu Xun is venerated as the first modern Chinese writer. I have a book of his stories in Chinese sitting on my shelf right now, titled “The Father of Modern Chinese Literature.” He uses vernacular language, writes in the tradition of realistic fiction and grapples with the problems of his day. Like many Chinese students and scholars of that period, Lu Xun first went to study overseas in Japan, where he was a medical student during the time of the Russo-Japanese War.

In a wonderful introduction to one of his collections, he writes about his time in Japan. One day, at the end of class, the professor brought in some slides of the war. Lu Xun saw a picture of two or three Chinese who had been taken by the Japanese, accused of being spies for the Russians and were about to be beheaded. This was a turning point for him, sitting in this classroom in Japan, looking at pictures of his countrymen being humiliated. What he noticed was not so much the people who were going to be executed but the crowd of Chinese people standing around gawking at them. This inspired in Lu Xun a revolutionary fervour that what he needed to do was not become a doctor and cure the body, but become a writer and cure China’s soul.

He started to write incredibly scathing stories, attacking the existing feudalistic, Confucian social system that China had had up to that point. For “Diary of a Madman” he did borrow the title from Gogol but it’s a completely different animal to Gogol’s story, which is fanciful and light. Lu Xun’s story is really dark. It’s about someone who seems to be a madman, seeing cannibalism everywhere. He looks at ancient Confucian texts and sees the words “Eat People!” emerging between the lines. Lu Xun was using cannibalism as a metaphor for the dog-eat-dog world of Confucianism, in which there were very rigid hierarchies – an aristocratic class of scholars at the top of society, and then a huge underclass that did not enjoy many privileges or freedom, or material wealth or comfort. So Lu Xun is a revolutionary figure who really transforms Chinese literature.

His most famous story, which is also translated in this collection, is “The True Story of Ah–Q”. Ah-Q is a fascinating caricature of the Chinese national character – he gets into fights with people and finds ways to win what he calls a “psychological” victory. Even though someone beats him into the ground, he thinks he’s superior, his older brother, more educated, more intelligent. You mentioned the British Macartney mission earlier. Ah-Q is doing the same thing that the Chinese were at that time, which is to say they are superior to the barbarians. But at the end of the day, the British had bigger guns and were able to dominate China. Lu Xun is one of the first figures to take aim at traditional Chinese society and try to liberate China by curing its soul.

Your last book is the 18th century Chinese novel “The Story of the Stone.”

Like Lu Xun for the modern literary tradition, if you ask scholars – or most people in China – for the greatest novel in the classical tradition, there are generally four novels of the Ming and Qing that are venerated. This is the most recent. It’s a very long and complex novel, and hard to summarise. For me, in the literary tradition of the whole world, this book along with two others – “The Tale of Genji” from Japan in the 11th century, and Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” from France in the 20th century – are the three works in which the experience of reading the novel is genuinely an experience. It becomes a world in which you can live and get lost. As you read through each chapter it feels like you are going through what the characters are going through.

Like Lu Xun but in a very different way, this book is critical of the social world and the Confucian tradition that informs it. It’s about Confucianism and its discontents. The story is of a young man by the name of Jia Baoyu, who comes from a great family which is on the decline. He is just about the most un-Confucian person you can imagine. He’s effeminate, he associates largely with women, he’s not very good at fulfilling his social duties, he’s not a very good student of the Confucian classics. His head is full of poetry and beauty, and the clothing and fragrances of his female cousins, but he is confronted with a social world in which what you really need to do is study hard to become a Confucian official. That is the hardest thing for him to do, to fit in with this society and be a success in the way his family wants him to be. It’s about people living in a society and not quite fitting in.

The book is also a wonderful way to discover what are called the three traditions in China: Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It’s infused with all three of these traditions working themselves out. There’s a lot of Buddhist influence, in terms of defining a world which is a fleeting illusion we want to transcend. Jia Baoyu goes through all of these experiences in his life, but he eventually makes good. As happens in a lot in Chinese literature, he comes out at the top of the imperial exam and is given a great imperial post. But he ends up giving it all up to become a monk. That is a great paradigm in East Asian literature – at the point that you achieve the greatest success, you realise that this world of attainment and achievement is really quite empty. Then you long for something deeper, renounce your success, material goods and education, and become, in this case, a Buddhist monk.

Isn’t there a love story in there as well?

There is. He falls in love very deeply with a cousin of his, Lin Daiyu, who is a very sickly, frail girl. The whole book has an interesting frame. Jia Baoyu starts out as a magical stone in a metaphysical realm that comes down to earth. Lin Daiyu is the descendant of a flower that also comes out of this dream world into what is often referred to in the book as “the red dust” of the human world. She’s not really ready to live in this world, and dies very young from weakness. That’s kind of an aesthetic in East Asian literature – women whose beauty is in their delicateness and fragility. She actually dies because Jia Baoyu is tricked into marrying another cousin of his, who is a more Confucian picture of what the good wife should be – social, capable, robust, energetic, someone who can take care of her husband. But Jia Baoyu doesn’t want that, he wants the frail cousin. The choice is forced upon him to reject his desires and do what his family wants him to, which is to marry the more socially acceptable woman.

In the English-speaking world it seems like we read our own country’s literature, and then there are foreign language authors whom almost everyone has read or at least heard of, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But I wouldn’t even know what the Asian equivalents are. “War and Peace” is a household name, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who has heard of “The Story of the Stone.”

It’s more commonly known as “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” and it’s sometimes translated as “The Dream of the Red Mansions.” It is very much the “War and Peace” of China, just as “The Tale of Genji” is the “War and Peace” of Japan. This book, “The Tale of Genji” and another book written in Korea in the 17th century called “The Cloud Dream of the Nine,” are actually very interesting to look at together. They all have male characters who are not of this world – they’re somewhat frail, somewhat connected to a transcendent or metaphysical world, and they all end up becoming monks and looking for something more important.

“The Story of the Stone” is wonderful to look at in this larger East Asian context, because it shows the way people thought about the world in terms of these same traditions – Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Confucianism told people how to live in the social world and how to live with each other. Daoism asked: “How do I live with nature, with my environment?” Buddhism brought something else when it came into East Asia heavily in the 7th and 8th centuries, the question: “How do I live with myself, with my emotions, my despair, my fear, my pain, my sadness?” These books do a wonderful job of showing why those three traditions all had to come together for people in East Asia to have a comprehensive view and experience of the world in which they were living.

Given these universal themes, why do you think these Asian books are less well known in the West than the Russian classics are? Is it because the culture is just so different?

I think a lot of it has to do with the history of translation. There are a lot more translations of “War and Peace” than there are for “The Story of the Stone.” At this stage, there just hasn’t been enough of a history of translation of Chinese literature into English. Chinese writers are much less known than their Russian counterparts, who were participating in a more European tradition. But it’s really about the lack of translations. This translation of “The Story of the Stone” by David Hawkes and John Minford is definitely the most complete and the best one that’s currently available, but I think it could be improved. Many of the great works of Chinese literature have now been translated, but probably not as well as some of the great Russian writers have been. I hope that’s something we’re going to see change in the near future.

This interview has been edited for length.