[Article] China’s long but stuttering history of studying Southasia

Originally published in Himal Southasia on 28th February 2024

The unveiling in Shanghai of a bust of Rabindranath Tagore, one of the symbols of cultural exchange between China and Southasia in the 20th century. Despite centuries of studying Southasian languages, literatures and cultures, China’s scholarship has not kept up with the country’s ambitions in the region. Photo: IMAGO / Xinhua

China’s long but stuttering history of studying Southasia

A lack of primary research and fieldwork has hindered China’s understanding of the region

Author: Aneka Rebecca Rajbhandari, Raunab Singh Khatri

More than 1500 years ago, a sailboat carrying merchants, goods and a monk in his seventies was caught in a rainstorm in the Indian Ocean, soon followed by a hurricane. The monk, who was then in his seventies, held tightly to the Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures he was carrying. He was Faxian, also known as Fa-Hein, the Chinese traveller and translator who studied and travelled for 14 years in many regions south of the Himalaya, covering much of what is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and west, north and central India. Faxian eventually made it home to serve his initial purpose: bringing a stronger foundation, monastic regulation, and context to Buddhism in China.

Faxian spent the remaining decade of his life translating Buddhist scriptures such as the Mahasangha-vinaya and Mahaparinirvana-sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese. He also wrote A Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, his account in Chinese of travelling the treacherous land routes west and south of China to present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka before returning via Southeast Asia by sea. This became the first travel record in China about Central Asia, Southasia and Southeast Asia. Faxian’s contribution to the study of Southasia through Buddhist learning and travel observation paved the way for future Chinese travellers like Xuanzang, the seventh-century monk whose records inspired the popular 16th-century novel Journey to the West, and Wang Xuance, a diplomat of the Tang Dynasty. Thus, the foundation of Southasian studies in China was set in a religious context, with India at the centre.

Following these early beginnings, the Southasian presence in China can be traced through cultural exchanges that have produced some historical landmarks. In the 13th century, the artisan Araniko, born in the Kathmandu Valley, constructed the White Dagoba which is situated inside the Miaoying temple in Beijing, which stands today as the last remaining Yuan-dynasty architectural structure in the Chinese capital. Also in Beijing, the Yonghegong Lama Temple, built under the Qing Dynasty, houses an 18-metre-high statue of the Maitreya Buddha carved out of a single piece of white sandalwood that the seventh Dalai Lama gifted to the emperor Qianlong. The Five Pagoda Temple, built in the city in the 15th century, draws inspiration from the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya. Some Chinese scholars say that Hinduism reached its peak in China in the city of Quanzhou during the Yuan dynasty, and we can still find well-preserved idols of Vishnu and Laxmi in the city’s Kaiyuan Temple. This is a testament to early maritime trade exchanges between southern China and southern India.

However, China’s long history of studying Southasia, first through India and then other parts of the Subcontinent too, has not fostered deep inter-connections even though Chinese history and culture did not develop in complete isolation from Southasia, as is evident in the many significant cultural exchanges across the Himalaya. Chinese scholars have critically examined Southasian languages and literature for decades, and more recently have looked towards the region for its own economic development. Yet, too many scholars of Southasia in China rely on second-hand research, leading to a recycling of theories and arguments instead of new paths in the understanding of the region in all its complexity. 

India through Tagore

Despite significant people-to people-exchanges, it wasn’t until the transition between the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China in the first quarter of the 20th century that academic research on Southasian culture was formally established in China. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s made Chinese society welcoming toward new and progressive concepts. Moreover, in the early Republic of China, what was previously a religion-based study of Southasia was redefined in terms of the region’s literature, art and history. Cai Yuanpei, a liberal educator and revolutionary who was the president of Peking University from 1916 to 1926, instituted new courses that included one on Indian philosophy by Liang Shuming. Liang was the first professor of Buddhism to work in a Chinese university and his course was the first in Southasian thought and culture to be taught at such an institution.

It was in this time of free thought that the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore visited China. Tagore’s works influenced Chinese contemporary literature in a big way. Upon his first visit, in 1924, the renowned Chinese scholars Hu Shi and Liang Qichao paid him tribute. Joining an ancient name for China in India, which is Zhendan, and the Subcontinent’s name in ancient Chinese, which is Tianzhu, Liang presented Tagore with a new name – Zhu Zhendan. Earlier, in 1915, after Tagore won the Nobel Prize in literature, Chen Duxiu, a Chinese revolutionary and one of the founders of the Communist Party of China, translated his poetry collection Gitanjali into Chinese. The Chinese literarymagazine New Youth published this translation. Upon Tagore’s second visit, in 1928, the Chinese writer and translator Xu Dishan translated and published his Bengali folktales, which became the earliest Southasian literary folk stories to be available in Chinese.

The Tagore translations paved the way for contemporary Southasian literary studies in China. Xu went on to publish China’s first research monograph on the history of Indian literature in 1930. Even now, Tagore remains an influential figure representing Southasian literature in China, holding sway over entire sections in many bookstores and being the subject of 16-week university courses.

Even as Chinese discourse on Southasia was reconceived, moving from religious contexts to a new perspective through a linguistic and literary lens, Southasian studies in China largely centred on Indian studies for many years. Formal teaching of Hindi began as early as in 1942, when the National College of Oriental Studies was established in Chenggong county, in Yunnan province, offering courses in the language as well as in Indian history and religion. In 1946, Peking University established its Department of Oriental Languages and Literature. Ji Xianlin, a highly reputed Indologist who had studied Sanskrit and Pali in Germany, was hired as the department’s director. Sanskrit and Pali became the earliest Southasian language majors to be introduced. This formally marked the establishment of Southasian studies as a discipline in China. 

Some of the major works to come out of these universities during this period included translations of the Ramayana and of Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala, allowing Chinese people to cross the language barrier to engage with these popular stories from the Subcontinent. Ji expanded the discipline by publishing academic works such as the History of the Cultural Interaction between India and China and A Brief History of India. Another renowned Indologist, Jin Kemu, who joined Peking University as a professor in 1948, translated Kalidasa’s Meghaduta and published History of Sanskrit Literature and History of Friendship between the People of China and India. These works served as inspiration for several other important translations into Chinese, like that of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in 1956 and of the Panchatantra in 1959. The impact of these translations was profound – Kalidasa’s translated plays, for instance, were performed at China’s Youth Art Theatre in 1957.

Widening interests

China underwent significant political overhaul after Peking University opened its Department of Oriental Languages and Literature, including a civil war and Mao Zedong’s establishment of the People’s Republic of China. It is perhaps due to this that the first batch of undergraduates majoring in Sanskrit and Pali were enrolled at Peking University only in 1960. Most of these students went on to pursue academic careers. Jiang Zhongxin, who became one of the first scholars to study Sanskrit manuscripts in Tibet, and Huang Baosheng, who assisted in the translation of the Mahabharata and contributed to the study of Sanskrit poetics, became celebrated scholars from this first batch.  

Numerous universities have since established centres for Indian studies before turning them into Southasia centres. For example, Sichuan University established an Indian studies office in 1964 before renaming it the Institute of South Asian Studies in 1978. Shenzhen University began a centre of Indian studies in 1984 and formally established it as a research centre in 2005. At present, there are around 30 universities in China that offer curricula on Southasia, the majority of which are invested in the study of Indology. A well-known research body, the Pangu Think Tank, published an article in 2017 arguing for the need to set up research centres on India in China to help compare China’s own reform and development process with that of another emerging economy.

Jia Yan, an assistant professor of Hindi at Peking University, argues that despite rising interest in studying other Southasian countries, the most significant attention is still given to Indian studies. Courses in Southasian studies at Peking University now include Indian religion, Indian history, Indian culture and the history of Indian literature, as well as the current state of Southasia, China–Southasia cultural exchange and selected works of Tagore. Hindi is now taught at the undergraduate level in 13 Chinese universities, which is the highest number for any Southasian language major.

Liwen, a PhD candidate in Sanskrit from the University of Toronto, who majored in Sanskrit and Hindi at Peking University, said that the languages offered for study, like Hindi and Urdu, have an important role in shaping Chinese students’ perspectives of Southasia as a whole. Unlike studying Sanskrit, which is perceived to focus on ancient times, studying Hindi is thought to offer something more contemporary, with a focus on society, political science and international relations. The curriculum on Southasian studies in China is largely targeted towards international relations and geo-politics, where India holds a formidable influence. Chinese students shape their perceptions of the Southasia region’s politics and society primarily through the study of Hindi and Indian studies.

Other Southasian countries have only gained significant attention in Chinese universities in the last fifteen years or so. Universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu now have Nepal and Pakistan study centres, and Chongqing Normal University has a Sri Lanka study centre. The first Nepal study centre in China was opened in 2014, at the Hebei University of Economics and Business. The Pakistan study centre at Fudan University was established in 2009. With an escalation in border tensions between India and China since 2020, there has been an accompanying diversification of academic interest as well. Gao Liang, an assistant researcher at Sichuan University in Chengdu, said that “as far as publication of academic results is concerned, due to characteristics of [the] international-relations discipline, the reality that must be acknowledged is that issues related to India and Pakistan are more likely to arouse the interest of journal editors. This, in turn, leads researchers to choose a smaller country’s research more carefully when choosing research topics.”

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has expanded China’s involvement across much of Southasia, has also accelerated the country’s efforts to understand the region through numerous country-specific research centres. According to Jia, the assistant professor of Hindi at Peking University, there are currently two academic societies – the Chinese Association for South Asian Studies and China Association for South Asian Languages – responsible for enriching the study of the languages of Southasia and promoting more interdisciplinary studies.

Most of the people we spoke to agreed that it is difficult to make rigid distinctions when studying the different countries of Southasia. “Given the dynamic exchanges between Southasian countries both in history and present, it can hardly be said that one phenomenon is exclusively ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Nepali’,” Jia said. “It always has relations or resonances in a different country in the region.

Field restrictions

Fieldwork is an integral part of encouraging primary research that can build nuanced understanding between two countries. Chinese researchers’ over-reliance on secondary sources on Southasia from various media prevent a better understanding of the region.

Rising tensions between China and India since December 2020 have already posed major challenges, including the denial of visas to Chinese researchers looking to do fieldwork in India. Even though Chinese researchers face fewer impediments to fieldwork in other Southasian countries, they still rely heavily on secondary reports such as news articles and prior research from the West. This, along with language deficits among Chinese researchers, results in little original and nuanced understanding but instead more conformity to existing discourse that relies on state media or government reports to frame narratives.

The lack of fieldwork has been observed and criticised by senior Chinese academics. Li Xiguang, a professor at Tsinghua University, undertook fieldwork with his students in Bangladesh to better understand the BRI. Speaking to a writer for the university’s paper in 2016, he stressed teachers’ duty to use field study to teach researchers and students how to understand the real world.

The BRI not only brought with it a surge of demand for policy research in strategic areas of study concerning China and Southasian countries, it also encouraged many Chinese researchers studying other geographies to divert their attention to Southasia. The result was that a large number of researchers switched focus to Southasia late in their careers, without having a solid understanding of the region. Hu Shisheng, of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, describes this using the Chinese idiom “becoming a monk late in life.” The lack of foundation contributes to the recycling of material instead of the generation of fresh ideas and advances in the field. 

India’s rise as a major economic and political actor in the 21st century has also led Chinese scholars to start  discourse on how the rise of China and India affects regional and international systems. In 2022, China’s ministry of education and its committee on academic degrees jointly listed area studies as a “first-level discipline”, with a focus on Southasia as a regional discipline. Chinese academics started studying Southasia at roughly the same time as other regions like Southeast Asia. Yet, in comparison, China’s study of Southasia has had limited success in effectively bridging cultural and societal divides between the two regions. Ji, of Peking University, called Southasia studies a “cold study” in that most Chinese publishers did not take an interest in it. Hu, of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, described Southasia as a weak area of interaction for China in its neighbourhood.

To enable an environment for constructive criticism on research topics and methodologies, and to finally develop a more nuanced understanding of Southasia’s, China must emphasise primary research and fieldwork.

Correction: This story earlier mistakenly described Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali as a novel rather than a poetry collection. Himal Southasian regrets the error.

Note from The Araniko Project:

This article was originally published in Himal Southasia. Link to original article: https://www.himalmag.com/culture/china-southasia-studies-history-tagore-india-scholarship