As a second-generation Chinese American Christian whose Chinese language ability is competent but not fluent, I occupy a very strange space in the Chinese theological academy. I have enough capacity to follow the conversation, but I cannot respond with genuine fluency. Despite being a scholar of Chinese Christianity, I am persistently tempted to keep my scholarship within the Anglophone circles I am most comfortable in. After all, many Chinese theologians have mastered enough English to dialogue with Anglophone scholarship and tradition in ways that make my research much easier.
But my commitment to lived theology beckons me to stay close to the life worlds of Chinese-speaking faith communities. The least I can do is strengthen my use of Chinese language and engage Chinese theology on its own terms, quite literally. And although I may not understand the whole, the different parts I am able to gather enrich the hybrid worldview I carry as a Chinese American, which is no less whole, just different.
For this reason, I am deeply committed to cultural identity and to theological analysis that embraces the linguistic cacophony of being betwixt and between worlds. My second-generation Chinese American understanding of Chinese language and culture shapes my study and expression of Chinese theology in a linguistic mix that responds to the many Chinese contexts I have encountered in different ways: Asian North America, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and, most recently, Malaysia. Each place, with its unique historical complexities, adds new linguistic and cultural layers to my theological interpretations and expressions.
This is the lived source of my interest in what some have termed “Sinophone Theologies (华语神学),” which Dr. Matthew Tsz Him Lai and I had the honor of sharing at the 3rd annual Chinese Society for Public Theology conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We briefly presented this concept as a potential framework for addressing the very concern Arleen Luo elegantly posits in her recent post the need:
To develop a theological method capable of acknowledging difference and sustaining dialogue. If we cannot take seriously the diversity within the Chinese-speaking world itself, public theology may simply universalize the experience of one particular setting.
This post is the first of two that set the table for an extended discussion about Sinophone Theologies as a proposed framework for addressing diversity and pluralism in theological reflection and construction in the Chinese-speaking world. In this first post, I will take the time to define “Sinophone” in a way that makes its commitments to social and cultural diversity clear. In the second post, a preliminary definition of Sinophone Theologies will be provided and its theological foundations explored.
At the conference, Dr. Lai and I opened our presentation with a series of four questions that are shared here to ground Sinophone Theologizing in lived experience as its starting point. The first two questions address the dynamics of diversity among Chinese-speaking peoples, while the latter two address explicitly the marks of Christian identity.
- How many kinds of “Chinese” do you speak?
- What place(s) give you a feeling of “home”?
- As a Christian, what do you stand against?
- As a Christian, what do you stand for?
As you consider your own responses to these questions, I want to explain the rationale behind questions one and two as the basis for organizing this first post (questions three and four will provide a starting point for theological discussions presented in the second post).
These questions address two dimensions: linguistic diversity and places of belonging. Together, they help ground our definition of the Sinophone as inherently pluralistic. Both are related to the reality of diversity within the Chinese-speaking world. There are multiple forms of Chinese, each with its own cultural heritage. Among the audience members we surveyed at the conference, 65% were conversant in two or three forms of Chinese. Eleven percent identified themselves as comfortable with as many as five. Moreover, along with this diversity of Chinese languages, migration has created a diversity of places around the world where Chinese-speaking people identify as home, a place of belonging. Among conference participants, places listed ranged from countries or regions (Malaysia or Guangdong province) to cities (as close as Nanjing or Taipei, or as far as Edinburgh).
In response to the realities illustrated by the responses to these questions, this post aims to provide a careful explanation of the term “Sinophone” and why it is important for genuine engagement with plurality. The concept is drawn from a vibrant conversation in Chinese literary and cultural studies called “Sinophone Studies (华语语系研究),” discussed by scholars like Shih Shu-mei (史書美), Rey Chow (周蕾), and David Der-wei Wang (王德威). For these scholars, the Sinophone is a fundamental category for analyzing the plurality of literary and cultural expressions produced by Sinitic communities around the world in ways that honor their diversity and commonalities without anchoring them to some imagined centralized cultural heritage (e.g., “Chinese” culture). In practice, this means that instead of classifying, for example, the literary works of Malaysian Chinese as either Malaysian or Chinese or even just as Malaysian Chinese, they can also be understood as Sinophone. By placing this literary tradition in an inherently pluralistic category, emphasis is given to the variety of influences embedded in that context while simultaneously providing a pathway for comparison with other traditions that share the same language of expression.
The Sinophone is perhaps best understood by comparison with adjacent concepts such as “Anglophone,” “Francophone,” and “Hispanophone” (English-speaking, French-speaking, and Spanish-speaking worlds). Sinophone functions in the same register as “Anglophone” by emphasizing a common use of language that is not only diverse in geography and culture but also in grammar, history, and even ethnicity. The Anglophone world includes England, the language’s source, as well as Belize, Ghana, Kenya, India, Singapore, and the Philippines. In each place, English’s role as a primary language is not singular but plural, mingled with many other ways of being tied to languages such as Spanish, Akan, Swahili, Hindi, Mandarin, or Tagalog. Moreover, in a post-colonial world, to claim an Anglophone person has some inherent love or loyalty for England is nonsensical because Anglophone persons are often the legacy of English colonial domination (including Scotland, part of the United Kingdom). To align these observations with the introductory questions: England is not home for most Anglophone peoples.
This analogy carries over to the use of “Sinophone” as a descriptor for theology rather than “Chinese,” because the term amplifies the complexities of culture, history, and language among peoples of many ancestries, avoiding the universalizing connotations generally associated with some sense of Chinese cultural uniformity. The Sinophone can include what is now called the (mainland) People’s Republic of China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan in a single category that recognizes sociopolitical tensions and divisions as fundamental to their identities without allowing them to dominate what is shared. And in the same way an Anglophone register recognizes the inherent value of many forms of English, so too does a Sinophone outlook, refusing to acknowledge any one dialect or expression as the formal standard (e.g. Cantonese and Taiwanese are given as much weight as Mandarin). In addition, the Sinophone also includes a diversity of ethnicities who have, for one reason or another, adopted a Sinitic language as a primary language, from Tibetans and Uyghurs in China’s West to Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples. In the same way that an Anglophone Pakistani carries a cultural way of being distinct from that of an Englishman, so too will an Atayal Aboriginal carry a worldview different from that of a Taiwanese of Han ethnic heritage.
A word regarding the adoption of “Huayu 华语” as the conceptual equivalent to “Sinophone” over “Hanyu 汉语,” “Zhonghua 中华,” and “Zhongwen 中文” is also in order. Our preference for the term “Huayu” has both historical and contemporary sources. Historically, we believe that “Hua” is a more multi-ethnic category than “Hanyu” given that “Han” is associated with the dominant ethnic group in China. In addition, from a theological standpoint, “Hanyu” is now most often associated with Sino-Christian Theology (Hanyu Shenxue 汉语神学), which often still centers on the mainland Chinese experience and a centralized conception of cultural history. We have also chosen to set aside “Zhong 中” for the simple reason that the term literally means “center,” and our desire is to decenter Chineseness in theological construction rather than reinforce it.
In contrast, Hua was reimagined in the early 1900s for the modern Chinese state as a national identity encompassing Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Hui, and Tibetan peoples. This resonates with our desire to emphasize the trans-ethnic dimension of the Sinophone. Huayu is also the most common term for the Chinese language in much of Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia), places that have had to forge a shared identity from not only many Chinese dialects but also a diversity of many ethnicities and cultures. Lastly, though certainly not least, because this methodology draws inspiration from Sinophone Studies, it makes the most sense to honor this discipline’s rendering of Huayu Yuxi Yanjiu（华语语系研究）as its translation.
All of this said, after much inner wrestling over my own hybrid cultural identity, I am increasingly comfortable identifying not only as Chinese American, which grounds me in ethnic and national heritage, but also as Sinophone, which ties me into a diffuse and pluralistic web of cultures that must negotiate the complexities of cultural belonging via some sense of shared language use, however mixed up it may be. As a theologian, therefore, I am increasingly identifying as a lived Sinophone theologian who studies the diversity of Sinophone theological expressions around the world, embedded in communities and practices that respond to their own unique constellations of local concerns and global imaginations. This has an inherently public dimension, as illustrated by discussions at the Society for Chinese Public Theology, but it is also relatable and important to every theological discipline from biblical studies to church history.
But what exactly are the theological commitments that would tie together such Sinophone diversity, and what methodological guidance might it provide for doing theology? Keep your answers to the questions regarding what you believe Christians stand against and what they stand for in mind and stay tuned for the second post.
