Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979.

Gorman, Daniel

Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979, by Rodney Koeneke. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $55.00 US (cloth).

One of the most pronounced features of the increasingly globalized world of the twentieth century has been the spread of English as the nearest thing to a "global" language. While this process has been driven in recent decades by the political and economic might of the United States, the global predominance of English has its roots in the British imperial experience. Indeed, Britain's formal and informal empire spanned almost the entire globe in the early twentieth century, much of its authority built upon what postcolonial scholars term cultural imperialism. The literary critic I. A. Richards was one such "cultural imperialist." In his study of Richards's campaign to promote Basic English in China in the interwar period, Rodney Koeneke argues that Richards's career was "one of the most significant attempts in the twentieth century to bridge the gap between literature and action, to transform the politics of theory into a pragmatic theory of political action" (p. 24). While this claim proves overstated, the study presents a fascinating window into Britain's cultural relations with China and illustrates Britain's declining imperial fortunes at mid-century.

The invention of C.K. Ogden, Basic English was designed to teach English as a foreign language, make technical subjects more widely accessible, and foster understanding across cultures. Basic contained but 850 words, only 18 of which were verbs. Richards believed the teaching of Basic could be a tool for world peace, and looked to China after WWI as a fertile field to test this idea. Empires of the Mind is an account of this high-minded project. Koeneke surveys Richards's Cambridge education, his initial voyage to Peking in the 1920s, his association with the Rockefeller Foundation, the establishment of the Orthological Institute of China in the late 1930s as Basic's headquarters, the Institute's flight to Kunming in southern China, the influence of the Sino-Japanese War and, finally, Richards's minimal post-1945 efforts on behalf of Basic in China.

The book's best sections detail Richards's educational work in China. Particularly fascinating is the account of Basic's evolution, Richards' frustration with the literalism of Chinese students, and his attempt to use Basic to circumvent cultural misunderstandings caused by linguistic ambiguity. Richards believed that ideas exist independently of language, and that, through his theory of Multiple Definition, "the habit of imagining communicative intentions and expectations other than our own for the purpose of understanding a culture, as far as possible, within its own terms" (p. 207), cross-cultural unity could be fostered. From this theory Richards believed international peace itself was attainable.

Despite the progressive language Richards used to extol the virtues of Basic English, his motives for taking a public role were in fact conservative. Like many intellectuals weaned on late-Victorian and Edwardian ideas of elitism, he saw the rise of mass culture as an intrinsic threat, both to his own comfortable position in society and to a common understanding of "civilization." Koeneke places Richards the literary critic alongside Eliot, Pound, and the modernist critics. Rejecting tradition, reacting against the horrors of the Great War, they turned inwards in their criticism. In both rejecting the role of history as a formative cause of events (Richards "didn't think History ought to have happened") and seeing in China a "clean slate" where progress could be made to work correctly, Koeneke deftly identifies the paradox in Richards's thought and the reason that his campaign for Basic English ultimately came to little. Basic English was Richards' response to the destabilizing nature of science and modernity after the war. As a tool for preventing conflict, however, it was stillborn because of its very insularity. In attempting to strip away cultural and political differences to create a common system of meaning, Richards consciously ignored the social and political realities which create difference in the first place.

Koeneke is less successful in explaining Richards's intellectual influences, particularly as they pertain to China. The chapter detailing other British views of China, especially Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's Letters from John Chinamen and Bertrand Russell's The Problem of China, while insightful in its own right, does not show how Richards was influenced by these writers' ideas except by inference. Koeneke's over-reliance on Edward Said to situate Richards within a postcolonial theoretical framework is also somewhat forced. As part of Britain's "informal" empire, China fits poorly into Said's schema. Engagement with the work of other participants in the "linguistic turn" would provide a more nuanced theoretical perspective. While the postcolonial apparatus does help explain Richards's predisposed ideas of China--his view, most notably, of China as an exoticized "living past"--greater attention to the literature on Britain and the West's historical interaction with China would have better contextualized Richards's activities. Works such as Robert Bickers's Britain in China show that, while Britain enjoyed special rights such as extraterritoriality and trading privileges, her imperial presence in China, mostly confined to settler enclaves in coastal cities, was never as strong as it was elsewhere in the empire. As such, a "cultural imperialist" approach only shows us part of the picture.

Furthermore, Britain's influence in China after WWI was in decline, the victim of growing Chinese nationalism, as Koeneke notes in reference to the May 4th movement, and the increasing bellicosity of the real imperial power in China, Japan. Indeed, while Koeneke expertly details the flight of the Basic English project from Peking to Kunming in the face of Japanese occupation, more might be said about the influence of domestic Chinese events on the project's ultimate demise. Koeneke notes that the project produced very few graduates, partly because of administrative and personnel difficulties, and partly because Richards relied on his texts over Chinese help. The major cause of Basic's failure, however, is passed over quickly--namely, the civil war between the Guomindang and the Communists which was already over ten years old by the time the Basic project moved to Kunming. Koeneke intimates that the civil war only became important after 1945, but in fact the world war only marked an interregnum. The civil war was important not just because its ultimate conclusion isolated China from the West, as Koeneke rightly points out, but because it was the defining feature of China's interwar history. The Japanese were able to penetrate China in the first place because the civil war left it with no strong central authority. Basic failed above all because it fell prey to China's assertion of its own nationality, and its failure means that it was not a major component of cultural imperialism.

While Empires of the Mind might give greater space to Chinese factors in explaining the fortunes of Richards's Basic English work, it nonetheless does an expert job of conveying the mental world of British intellectuals in the last generation of empire, in particular their often naive understanding of politics. It is ironic that Richards's political aims for Basic English were foiled by his very ignorance of and inattention to politics itself as a constitutive force in human affairs. Perhaps there is something to be said for leaving politics to the professionals.

Daniel Gorman

Trent University