John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn

John Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn, by Iessica Ching-Sze Wang. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. viii + 152 pp. US$55.00 (hardcover). John Dewey's sojourn in China from 1919 to 1921 was a quintessential moment in Chinese-Western cultural contact. Here was a school of Western philosophy introduced to China, not just by the translation of books, but by importing the philosopher himself. That said, lohn Dewey spoke no Chinese, and so it was his students - Hu Shi primary among them - who interpreted him for his enthralled Chinese authences. Their version of him has been the definitive one; Dewey's own lecture notes are lost, and the only transcripts we have are in Chinese, bearing the interpretative imprint of their translators. If, as Barry Keenan argued in The Dewey Experiment in China, the Dewey who appeared to his Chinese authence was largely a creation of Hu Shi, then the philosopher's actual presence in China would seem to matter little; it might as well have been just his books that made the voyage. In her response to Keenan' s work, Iessica Ching-sze Wang looks at one way in which Dewey's physical presence in China did matter - namely, how China changed him. Dewey didn't, after all, cease to philosophize after 1921, and his system of thought continued to evolve. "We now need to ask the question of how China may have influenced Dewey", she writes in the introduction, "rather than how Dewey influenced China" (p. 7). She seeks to depart from Keenan's work by putting Dewey himself at the center of her study, illuminating the teacher's experience as a "learner" in China. The strongest parts of Wang's book actually engage, rather than depart from, Keenan's work. She outlines ways in which Dewey's view of the May Fourth Movement differed from that of Hu Shi and his other students, rescuing him from Keenan's judgment that Dewey was merely "a good student in reporting what they said". Her third chapter, on "The Reception of Dewey in China", takes us through a fascinating range of competing Chinese interpretations of Dewey's work. Such an analysis may seem out of place in a book that promised to avoid the old question of "how Dewey influenced China", but it is nevertheless one of the most interesting sections, and argues for a different framework for this project as a whole. The sections on Dewey as a "learner" are harder to follow. The author tells us generally that Dewey studied Chinese history, and that he "learned about the Chinese social psychology and the philosophy of life" (p. 65), but she does not tell us what he read, who taught him or exactly what he learned. She credits him with "penetrating insights" (p. 76) into Chinese society, but her examples fall short of the mark. Dewey believed, for instance, that "while western peoples have attacked, exploited and in the end wasted the soil, [the Chinese] have conserved it" (p. …