Oxford can play a bigger role in reflecting change

Rana Mitter, director of the Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre, says it wants to reflect the modern diversity of China. [Photo/China Daily]

Greater need for a better understanding exists due to bigger economic, geopolitical importance of China in the world, says leading academic

Rana Mitter, director of the new Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre, believes China should now be seen as a plural noun rather than as a singular noun.

He hopes the center, now Europe's biggest and which opened on Sept 8, will reflect that modern diversity of the country.

"China is a whole diversity of different things in terms of culture, identity and direction," he says.

"Asking questions like 'Is China going to do x, y or z?' is so often wrong because there are so many different Chinas. Not just one."

Mitter, 45, was speaking in the lobby of the Regent Hotel in central Beijing. He was on a trip to the Far East, which also took in a visit to Singapore, just before returning to the UK for the launch.

He believes one of the roles of the 21-million-pound ($33.7 million; 26.2 million euros) center - of which 10 million pounds was donated by Hong Kong billionaire Dickson Poon - on the grounds of St Hugh's College at Oxford, will be to make clear that China is very much a living place and not some static entity mired in its history.

"I hope our center will be at the forefront of breaking down and reinterpreting this idea that China, unlike any other country, is supposed to be a fixed and unchanging place. This is clearly not the case.

"There is so much nonsense written and spoken about China's past, in particular, by people who don't necessarily have an understanding of the complexity and richness of the way China has developed over time."

Mitter, unassuming despite rapidly emerging as one of the world's leading Sinologists, says the launch of the Oxford center comes at a "historic moment" - when there has never been a greater need for a better understanding of China since the expertise available in the field of Sinology lags behind the fast rise of the country.

"China has become tremendously important economically and geopolitically but the level of understanding about China in the world outside of China itself is still quite limited.

"China centers are becoming more common phenomena on different continents around the world, including Africa and South America, but there are only a small number of places that can provide that depth of interpretation and I think Oxford is one of that small group."

Mitter was in China for the Beijing International Book Fair to attend the launch of the Chinese edition of his highly acclaimed book China's War With Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival, which he had to fit in with last-minute preparations for the opening of the center.

"Directing the China center is a very full-on experience with the setting up of the new building and bringing all my colleagues and students together. I haven't been doing it all personally but I have had to make sure it was all happening and that all the boxes were ticked."

In addition to his academic role, Mitter is also a well-known broadcaster in the UK, presenting Night Waves, an arts program on BBC Radio 3, where he branches out well beyond Sinology to interview famous writers, artists, film directors and other leading figures.

The son of two university lecturers who came to the UK from West Bengal, India, in the early 1960s, he was good at languages at school but only stumbled into Chinese at Cambridge.

"I wish I could say I did it with a particular vision and decided to get in early but that wasn't the case. When I began to think about studying Chinese in the late 1980s, it was Japan that was rising and not China," he says.

After studying as a Kennedy scholar at Harvard as well as at Cambridge, where he went on to do a doctorate in modern Chinese history, he pursued an academic career, teaching at Oxford for nearly two decades.

The author of other books on China, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle With the Modern World and Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, he became director of the Oxford China center officially last year.

Mitter insists the center is building on Oxford's strong links with China that go back centuries.

The first Chinese books came to the university's Bodleian Library 400 years ago. At the end of the 17th century, Shen Fuzong, a Qing mandarin and the first recorded Chinese person to visit the UK, famously went to the library to catalogue the books.

"We have one of the very largest collections of Chinese books and materials in Europe. We are outdone in numbers by the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, but their collection is the whole of Germany's and not that of a single academic institution."

He points out that although the China center is a modern institution, poring over dusty old Chinese scrolls would not be regarded as part of its past.

In fact, one of Oxford's most recent major academic breakthroughs was the rediscovery of the so-called Selden map, which had come into possession of the Bodleian in 1659 but had lain in a drawer for a couple of centuries.

"It has become tremendously important in present day debates about China. If (China) has been perceived as a land power only but this map proved that in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) it was also a sizeable maritime power as well."