China blend: the cultural hybrids bridging the world
p. 369-372
Texte intégral
December2015
1
“My husband is French; I’ve lived in the United States. My family is Chinese and still lives in China; I work in France with Europeans, Chinese and Americans. I am swept up in a multicultural whirlwind. How can I ground myself in order not to be swamped by other people, to be able to make my own contribution?”
2This is the central question for Qinghua Xu-Pionchon, who has always sought to be the mistress of her destiny. A New York lawyer, who appended her original family name to that of her husband, she went on hunger strike during the Chinese student revolt in 1989. She left shortly afterwards to study in the United States, where she gained citizenship. In 2002, she decided to settle in France.
During the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, 2008 drummers welcomed visitors.

© 2008 / Tim Hipps, U.S. Army, released in the public domain.
3Qinghua Xu-Pionchon’s job as head of the China Business Unit of EY puts her at the forefront of globalization. Thoughtfully, she looks back at her own journey:
“You grope around in the dark, knocking here and there, and then one day you see the light. It’s a process, with an end-point… I want to connect people and cultures, make and re-make deals–although not only in business. I want to bring people together, enrich their lives, make a difference.”
4Navigating between cultures amounts to a journey through one’s identity that is unique to each individual in which some common traits emerge and that sketch the figure of the “cultural hybrid’. That is a person engaged in a process of transformation, who moves between different cultures with ease and familiarity. In so doing, he retains a sense of his authentic self, and–to varying degrees–claims this cultural complexity as a key component of his identity.
The National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square offers a dual narrative of the encounter between China and the rest of the world.

© 2015 / A. Garrigue.
5In its encounters with the world, China has become a breeding ground for the cultural hybridity that globalization engenders, especially in the fields of business and education. Some figures highlight the phenomenon:
- 10million mainland Chinese passport holders are living abroad;
- 650,000 foreigners are living in China with residence permits;
- More than 3million mainland Chinesehave studied abroad since the opening of China in 1979. Half of them have returned;
- 375,000 foreign students from 203 countriesare studying in the People’s Republic of China.
6Cultural hybrids range from world famous figures to anonymous line managers. Some are Chinese mainlanders, some are from the Chinese diaspora now working in China; some are foreigners from all over the world working or studying in China. Some–a minority–are biological hybrids born to mixedcouples, some became hybridized through work or education.
7They are both the products and the mirrors of the societies in which they develop. Beyond their individual stories, they offer a prism through which to observe the evolution of societies that are going though deep transformations.
Fractal and dynamic approach
8Understanding cultural hybridity requires a double approach. A fractal approach allows us to observe the relationship between the individual and the whole, zooming in on the details of these people’s lives and then pulling back to inspect the context. A dynamic approach offers a three-dimensional model. On the time line, the journeys that these people take can be plotted as spirals, moving back and forth between two axes, Culture A and Culture B. As they grapple with their own complexity and that of their environment, torn between their multiple allegiances and different senses of belonging, they evolve. Some embrace this dynamic and are spurred on by it, whilst others lose themselves, sucked into the whirlwind that Qinghua Xu-Pionchon escaped by putting her cultural hybridity at the heart of her identity. Like her, many have an impact at a collective level on both Chinese society and China’s role in globalization.
The business of hybridization
9Business is an immense laboratory through which to look more closely at the encounter between China and the rest of the world.
10When China opened its economy up to the world with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1979, there were few cultural hybrids but they became the “movers and shakers” of China’s transformation. Their numbers grew with China’s economic development while the ground for cultural hybridization was becoming more fertile as both foreign firms in China and Chinese companies expanding abroad had to manage the diversity of their employees.
11Chinese and foreigners have been caught in the whirlpool of globalization which China is driving and being driven by. Companies either encourage this kind of transformation or they shy away from it. Businesses create cultural hybrids and cultural hybrids create businesses.
School and university, crucibles of hybridity
12For many of this new breed, hybridity is not something that they learn as adults at work, it starts early at school. Student exchanges between China and the rest of the world have increased many fold. In this fertile ground for cultural hybridity four forces are at play:
13Parents, who want to help their child compete in the global job market competition.
14The students themselves who through their exposure to different languages and cultures literally rewire their neurological pathways.
15Educational institutions that are caught between a drive to internationalize and the fear of losing their traditional ethos while transmitting knowledge and values.
16Society grappling with the transformations that globalisation imposes.
Whose future is it anyway?
17Cultural hybridsare engaged in a creative dynamic. While working on their personal construction, if they embrace their cultural hybridity, they can play the role of bridges between cultures, often with innovative traits. They become avant-garde pioneers in many different fields, from applied scientific research to the world of luxury fashion. In social sciences or socio-political innovation, however, they are increasingly unwelcome.
Courted yet shunned: cultural hybrids seek a home in China
18A visit to the National History Museum on Tiananmen Square offers a double narrative. “Ancient China” which recognizes the fruitful interplay between China and the rest of the world, and “the Road to Rejuvenation” which promotes a Chinese identity based on the myth of an ethnic Han nation built in the face of western and Japanese oppression under the leadership of the Communist Party.
19In this very public window the official Chinese script seems unwilling to acknowledge or even give a name to cultural hybridity. That is also reflected in the contradictions between two very different images that China has given of itself recently.
20During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games, 2008 drummers were beating out their welcome while a slogan was displayed around the Bird’s Neststadium: “Friends have come from afar, how happy we are” (有朋自远访来, 不亦乐乎).
21That open tone has changed since 2013, set by what is now known as “Document9”, issued by the ruling Communist Party, that identified seven political “perils”, including “universal values”, and called on Party members to strengthen their resistance to “infiltration” by outside ideas. Cultural hybridity is not the “Chinese dream “of the Xi Jinping administration.
22But this is not only due to politics. It is indeed hard to find words in Chinese to talk about cultural hybridity. Huo Datong, a psychoanalyst from Chengdu, suggests that “in the same way that in the analytical cure, the person frees himself and addresses his problems through words, a society needs to be able to put things into words, to have the words to look at itself”.
China as a magnifying glass
23China is also a magnifying glass for cultural hybridity as a universal phenomenon, at the heart of our contemporary globalized world.
24But it is hard to embrace. It creates contradictory tensions that can generate anxiety and a sense of alienation in individuals. In groups, these tensions can strengthen circles of belonging and lead to exclusion. It can terrorize individuals and generate terrorism in societies.
25Born from the experience of dealing with complexity, cultural hybridity is the transformation of one’s identity, involving the physical modification of the human brain so as to better manage that complexity. Collectively it might allow us to co-create modernity.
26In China, as elsewhere, cultural hybrids are a vanguard: they shine a new light, the same light that Qinhua Xu Pionchon sought for so long and that she now embodies.
Auteur
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Édith Coron
Executive coach and intercultural specialist based in China since 2006

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