1. Introduction

With the increasing interchange of world views, products, ideas between nations and cultures, almost all disciplines and fields of study have met with impetuses and challenges from global perspectives. At least in the Chinese context, the integration of humanism and scientificism in the professional and academic discourse has long been a focus of attention. In the case of the waiyu ‘alien tongue; foreign language’ sector, which includes foreign language teaching and research in the more formal name of waiguoyu (since the 1920s) or waiguo yuyan wenxue ‘foreign language/literature’ (since the 1980s), in a broad or more general division of renwen sheke ‘humanities and social sciences’, dilemmas and problems due to glocalization are obvious in the age of globalization. And at the same time, prospects are in view for the sector to develop its academic disciplines in human and social ‘sciences’ in the socio-culturally globalized world of international and intercultural academic communication.

2. Waiyu ‘Foreign Language’ as a Glocalized Concept

The Chinese language is non-inflectional and the term waiyu can be singular/generic or plural, referring to one or more than one foreign language. The most popular and authoritative dictionary of the modern Chinese language defines waiyu (or waiguoyu) as ‘language, including writing, of a foreign country’.¹ The more formal term waiguo yu or waiguo yuwen includes literature: although yuwen more often means ‘philology’, waiguo yuwen is also a short form for waiguo yuyan wenxue ‘foreign language and literature’, as it is in the Disciplinary Catalogue of the Ministry of Education, China.² In step with the Sino-Soviet and Sino-US relations in the 20th century, waiyu used to refer to Russian in the 1950s and English in the late 1970s. And since the late 1980s, it has been used to refer to a number of foreign languages taught on various levels in China.

In practice, however, waiyu has a variety of referents in the Chinese context. First, it refers to a subject, English or any other, at primary or secondary schools or a category of subjects in ‘foreign language type’ universities that admit and educate students in different foreign languages or related fields. Secondly, it refers to a common and compulsory course in the university curriculum for students – even English majors have to learn one or another ‘foreign language’. Thirdly, it refers to a major at college, and hence a distinctive part of the division waiyu xi or waiyu xueyuan ‘department or school of foreign languages’ for institutional management. Fourthly, it refers to a category of academic fields in the Catalogue of the National Social Sciences Foundation that covers non-Chinese linguistics and literature, etc. Even as an academic discipline and a category of fields of research, waiyu refers to many things with varied characteristics.

3. Administrative and Institutional Issues

The multifaceted nature of waiyu at the tertiary level is the most perplexing, with problems of administrative intervention and institutional management, especially when attention is geared in recent years to university rankings on the basis of the nationwide biennial collegiate disciplinary evaluations.

In switching from one foreign language to another in the latter half of the 20th century, officials took waiyu at its face value as no more than a practical tool or ‘a weapon in the struggle of life’ in Karl Marx’s words. Even now, on the tertiary level, administrators still regard waiyu as skills-training rather than an object of study, let alone ‘a properly constituted academic discipline’Reference Lyons³ comparable to any field of ‘science’ in any sense. Not surprisingly, waiyu has been an elusive object for the administration and a gloomy profession for its practitioners.

Knowing one but not the other, administrators in science and engineering universities consistently take foreign language teaching as a marginalized and peripheral sector. In their ambitious plans to make the rank of first-class universities in the world, administrators have made strong efforts to support ‘key’ or ‘backbone’ disciplines in science and technology, only to have humanities and social sciences mark their universities as ‘comprehensive’. Since the implementation of the policy of opening up to the outside world, they have attached importance to foreign languages but ignored their disciplinary development. A decade ago, administrators of a prestigious university seriously considered ‘dropping’ their ‘foreign language department’ on the grounds that as they believed that none of the world’s best universities has such a division. The department survived only after the authorities had been informed about the existence of such departments in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,⁴ Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences,⁵ Cambridge University’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and its Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies⁶ and Oxford University’s faculties and colleges in the Humanities Division⁷ that host almost everything in ‘foreign’ languages, literatures and arts in the sense of waiyu. Ironically, as part of their plans to meet the standards of world first-class universities with ethnic diversity and internationalization, the university started enrolling international students, many of whom are studying English or Japanese in the department that the authorities once attempted to dismantle.

A case in point is the department that hosts the Globalization Conference from which the current paper results. Founded in 1926 as the later well-known xiyang wenxue xi ‘Western literature department’, it was reshuffled into a ‘foreign language (Russian) teaching group’ in the collegiate restructuring in 1952 (when the university became one of science and technology) and was dissolved during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s (when all foreign language teaching came to a halt). When the department was re-founded in the early 1980s, it was literally a language teaching unit. Only at the turn of the century did it begin to develop as an academic division within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. While it is a teaching unit of English, Japanese, German, French and Russian as foreign languages, it is an academic unit with undergraduate and graduate programmes in English and Japanese in a number of interdisciplinary fields of research, housing faculty in theoretical and applied linguistics, foreign literature, literary theory, translation studies, cultural studies, and intercultural communication studies. It has undertaken more tasks and picked up more characteristics in recent decades owing to the growing trends of inter-disciplinarity, inter-institutionality and internationality. Yet, administrators largely take it as a waiyu xi ‘foreign language department’ in spite of granting it the title ‘Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures’ in 2010, officially abbreviated as waiwen xi ‘foreign literature department’.

In order to survive and prosper, China’s tertiary waiyu sector has made all other possible efforts in the past two decades. Measures taken include restructuring curriculums to sound new and changing disciplinary titles to appear academic. For example, gonggong yingyu ‘common English’, a basic course for non-English majors, was changed into ‘College English’ to enjoy equal status with ‘College Physics’ and ‘College Chemistry’ in the curriculum. And in order to highlight waiyu as a major and an academic discipline, professionals invented a new title waiguo yuyanxue & yingyong yuyanxue ‘foreign linguistics and applied linguistics’ under the category of waiguo yuyan wenxue ‘foreign language(s) and literature(s)’, even if their faculty members are mainly or only English.

Heavily influenced by classical Chinese philosophy, which attaches great importance to naming,Reference Xi⁸ a wave of changing institutional titles started in the 1990s in the nationwide movement of creating ‘big’ universities by the Ministry of Education, which upgraded many a xueyuan ‘institute’ to daxue ‘university’ with more attractive titles, higher official status and greater financial support. In order to gain more favour and resources, institutes in the waiyu sector have been responding most actively. The ‘foreign languages institutes’ in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou were the first to become daxue without ‘languages’ in their English titles: ‘Beijing Foreign Studies University’, ‘Shanghai International Studies University’ and ‘Guangdong University of Foreign Studies’. Up until now, five of the eight ‘institutes’ in China have become daxue, and all carry ‘university’ in their official English titles, such as ‘Beijing International Studies University’ for Beijing di’er waiguoyu xueyuan ‘Beijing second foreign languages institute’.

The one institute that has changed its title most often in the shortest time is the only institute teaching Chinese as a foreign language in China. It was Beijing yuyan xueyuan (Beijing Language Institute) from 1964 to 1996. Upon becoming a ‘university’, it became Beijing yuyan wenhua daxue (Beijing Language and Culture University). But possibly because the new Chinese title proved somewhat too long, only six years later, in 2002, it was reduced to Beijing yuyan daxue ‘Beijing language university’. The removal of wenhua ‘culture’ from the Chinese title not only caused an inconsistency with its English title, but also created a fuss and a real joke.⁹

Under the administrative level of daxue, former ‘departments’ were grouped into various xueyuan ‘schools/colleges’. To de-emphasize ‘foreign language’ and appear new, they named the former waiyuxi ‘foreign language department’ as the ‘school of international studies’, and the former yingyuxi ‘English department’ as the ‘school of English studies’ or of English language and culture, with some more new titles sounding good but being misleading or confusing.¹⁰ To attract more prospective students and potential employers, many waiyu curricula changed their titles to business or foreign trade. The former Guangzhou Foreign Languages Institute changed to Guangdong waiyu waimao daxue ‘Guangdong foreign languages and foreign trade university’ by incorporating a neighbouring business college, but somehow it retained ‘foreign studies’ in its English title.¹¹

4. Professional and Academic Issues

While administrators, usually highly educated in science and engineering, fail to do justice to developing waiyu as a profession or a discipline, even professionals in other academic disciplines have no adequate knowledge of foreign language teaching as part of any linguistic and literary ‘science’. They would be surprised to know of faculty in the waiyu sector doing research projects funded by the National Social Sciences Foundation and stunned to hear some linguists doing research projects funded by the National Sciences Foundation. Once, in some small talk on campus, a professor of life sciences seriously inquired the ‘point’ of research work by waiyu teachers, on the assumption that they are doing nothing more than memorizing the dictionary. A more ‘scientific’ question is: while the biologist studies the types, classes, and structures of plants, animals and microorganisms, what is there for a foreign language teacher to analyse?

In fact, the question is not totally naïve or meaningless. It is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance and misconceptions many outsiders have about the object of study in a discipline that involves tens of thousands of practitioners in China. We have to go out of our way to explain that while waiyu is a basic, if not peripheral, category of courses in the curriculum of science and engineering, it is also a major for students in foreign languages and literature and an academic discipline in humanities. While the biologist studies living organisms in terms of taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, physiology and ecology, etc, the linguist studies language(s) in terms of typology and morphology, etc, and on the levels of phonology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc, and the literary scholar does far more than the amateur’s reading of poetry, fiction and drama. Just as the biological sciences have their proper methods and objects of study, so do linguistics, ‘literaturology’ and ‘translatology’. A botanist examines a plant and its parts in terms of their structural mechanism and practical values; a linguist or literary scholar examines a text (spoken or written, literary or non-literary) and its parts in terms of structures and communicative effects in the same way. A flower is the reproductive organ of a plant for the botanist, and what he cares about are the ontological traits and practical values such as medicinal or cosmetological effects. A flower is a sign for the linguist and literary scientist (who is also a social semiotician), and what he cares about are the functional and social semiotic values it may convey in sociocultural contexts, although he more often studies linguistic signs. On a higher level, the natural scientist is concerned with things and the human scientist is concerned with signs. The former studies the ontological nature of things, and the latter studies the functional nature of signs, both sociological and psychological. The humanist scholar tries to explain why a sign means what it means, just as he studies why a rose is preferable to a cactus as a gift of affection on a particular occasion. Principles in human and natural sciences are never socially contradictory: when the natural scientist has characterized a certain flower as noxious, the social scientist will not take it as a sign of goodwill and present it as a gift no matter how beautiful it may look.

Language is a single thing for many natural scientists, but it is a double-faced thing for human scientists who also study it as object of reflection in social semiotic and social discursive perspectives. It is only in 2002 that a professional linguist in China’s waiyu sector rightly pointed out that ‘majors’ and ‘tools’ are relative and dialectical concepts: a foreign language is a tool for the student of computer science, but knowledge of the computer is a tool for the student of foreign language and literature.Reference Hu¹²

In the official move to build first-class universities, faculty face more and more pressure to publish or perish. But all teaching and research activities related to or carrying the epithet waiyu have few resources available. In the most extensive e-resource facility available in China, Tsinghua University Library, there are 48,269 waiwen kan ‘journals in foreign languages’, but only 41 show up under the search term ‘foreign language’. Apart from the four in English, i.e. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching (0219-9874, Singapore), Foreign Language Annals (0015-718X, United States), German as a Foreign Language (1470-9570, Germany) and Reading in a Foreign Language (0264-2425, founded in Britain in 1983 and moved to Hawaii in 2002), 13 are in Japanese and 24 in Chinese. Eighty-eight journals are shown by the search word ‘linguistics’, ranging from linguistics to applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguisitcs, computational linguistics, etc, but none of the many ‘foreign language type’ journals in Chinese (which have official English titles, contents and abstracts) is listed. Of the 20,326 journals in Chinese, the search term waiyu got ten, waiguoyu got three, waiguo wenxue ‘foreign literature’ five, yuyan ‘language’ eight, yuyanxue ‘linguistics’ one, and fanyi ‘translation’ ten. On the one hand, there is a serious dearth of journals for waiyu professionals to disseminate their research work. On the other hand, it is hardly possible for any individual or professional society to found a new journal due to strict government regulations.

Professional societies in the waiyu sector are also experiencing problems. In spite of the large number of researchers in the sector, attempts to found a national or regional professional association have hardly been successful. With more strict measures on non-governmental organizations, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has strictly limited the number of first-level disciplinary associations or societies for legal re-registration so that all others have to be affiliated to a ‘parent’ association or society in order to be legally active. For instance, the Functional Linguistics Association of China (FLAC) was founded by linguists of the waiyu sector in 1995 as a sub-association under the Association of English Teaching in China, which was very influential but later labelled as a third-level association and hence illegitimate to shelter other associations according to new rules, which also stipulate that lower-level societies are not allowed to be xuehui or yanjiuhui ‘association, society’ or have ‘China’ in their titles. The FLAC, which had hundreds of active members, became illegal overnight. Therefore, the Functional Linguistics Circle has been seeking shelter in higher-level organizations to become a ‘sub-committee’, but has failed a number of times. The Linguistic Society of China, a national first-level association, was the first to turn them down on the grounds that they do not accept applications from a third-level association. Since many people in the Functional Linguistics Circle are doing social semiotics-oriented discourse analysis and Chinese-English translation studies, leaders of the Circle tried to apply for legal shelter under the China Association of Comparative Studies of English and Chinese, which initially turned them away on the grounds that their Association was experiencing difficulties and unable to shelter lower-level organizations.

In spite of the many colleges, schools and departments in the university, the absence of ‘linguistics and applied linguistics’, ‘foreign literature’ and ‘comparative literature’ as independent academic departments within almost all universities in mainland China has remained a problem. The discipline of ‘foreign linguistics and applied linguistics’, as it is called, is housed in the school or department of foreign languages, but ‘foreign literature’ and ‘comparative literature’ are more often housed in the school or department of Chinese language and literature. What makes things even worse is that, until some time ago, the waiyu ‘foreign language’ sector and the hanyu ‘Chinese language’ sector have had strict divisions of labour. The parallel structure of ‘Chinese language/literature’ and ‘foreign language/literature’ is set up not only for the ‘convenience’ of administration, but also for the practical situations in the academic activities, where practitioners in the hanyu sector rarely sit side by side or converse with those in the waiyu sector.

Fortunately, there were signs of change in the 1990s, as a result of the increasing exchange and collaboration between some scholars in the two sectors who are more aware of the irrationality of the opposition. Current Situations and Prospects of Chinese Linguistics (1996), an anthology of overview articles on almost every subfield of linguistics, brought scholars of the two sectors together and housed their writings under the same cover, but in separate sections.Reference Xu, Wang and Liu¹³ The project was obviously initiated by the waiyu sector, since two of the three editors are professors of Russian and English linguistics, and the other is a professor of Chinese linguistics. While the efforts were mainly academic, the success of the ‘joint venture’ was perhaps more administrative, as the first editor (in Chinese linguistics) was then the Director of the State Language Work Committee and a Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and the second editor (in Russian linguistics) was then the President of Beijing Foreign Studies University, which owns the publisher of the anthology, although the majority of the articles on linguistics in foreign languages were written by professors of English.

However, there are more things on the higher level to change. Even in the latest Catalogue of Disciplines (The Ministry of Education, 2013), the category ‘0501 Chinese Language and Literature’ covers ‘050102 Linguistics and Applied Linguistics’ and ‘050108 Comparative Literature and World Literatures’, ‘0502 Foreign Languages and Literature’ covers ‘050201-050208 English, French, German, Indian, Japanese, Spanish, and Arabic Languages and Literature’ and ‘050211 Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics’.¹⁴ In the Catalogue of the National Social Sciences Foundation, ‘Foreign Literature’ parallels ‘Chinese Literature’, ‘Linguistics’ is simply Chinese, and a separate section is ‘Foreign Language Studies’, without anything like ‘foreign linguistics’ or ‘linguistics in foreign languages’.¹⁵ Although many linguists in foreign languages are also doing research on various aspects of Chinese and analysing Chinese discourse, they have been seen by linguists in Chinese as ‘offbeat’. Although many linguists in Chinese, unable to read foreign languages, heavily rely on those specialized in foreign languages to translate and introduce western theories, they do not acknowledge them as collaborators. The real reason behind the Linguistic Society of China’s recent rejection to legally shelter and rescue the Association of Functional Linguistics of China from trouble is that some linguists in Chinese do not welcome their colleagues in foreign languages.

The situation in literary studies is hardly better. Critics in the waiyu sector are normally not expected to trespass into Chinese literature, with the exception of comparative literature. Meanwhile, there is another dimension of the division of labour: an opposition between language studies and literature studies in both Chinese and foreign languages. This is not unique to China. As was noted by the late East Anglia Professor Roger Fowler, the division of ‘the literature syllabus’ and ‘the language syllabus’ existed in many British universities in the 1950s, and English departments were staffed by people with two different kinds of training and interests. As literary studies gained ascendancy, ‘language’ was presented as an archaic irrelevance at best and an inimical source of potential contamination at worst. The position of the philologists became an entrenched defence under constant attack. A regular ‘Berlin Wall’ ran down the middle of English studies, and ‘the flavour of the dispute between the warring factions could be sensed’. The history of English studies in England presented ‘a lamentable spectacle of two close neighbours jealously fencing in their pastures and defending them at any cost, including irrational argument’.Reference Fowler¹⁶ Former Stanford University Professor of Spanish Language and Literature Mary L. Pratt compared the situation in America to the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America having their annual meetings at the same time and in the same city but in different hotels: ‘Both feel that their disciplines belong in each other’s vicinity, but they do not exchange programs or street guides; so to get from one to the other you have to find your own way’.Reference Pratt¹⁷

It is an admirable part of the waiyu sector in China that it has largely avoided the rigid language-literature opposition and brought people of different ‘factions’ together in interdisciplinary fields such as stylistics, cognitive poetics, and translation studies. However, more efforts have to be made on higher levels of administration in order that these close relatives in humanities and social sciences stay under the same roof and work hand in hand in the real name of interdisciplinarity in the age of globalization.

5. Problems of Practitioners

While many problems hinder the development of the waiyu sector, practitioners have problems of their own. For one thing, they are not doing sufficient work to inform the administration and the public of their wide coverage of disciplines such as language, literature and culture, etc, or the complex fields of study such as theoretical and applied linguistics, literary studies, cultural and intercultural studies, and translation studies. For another, they have largely limited their research work to waiyu-type journals (which are not normally circulated outside the waiyu sector) although their academic inquiries deal with issues in language and/or literature related to philosophy, logic, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, etc. Thus, their discussions from such perspectives as structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitivism, realism, naturalism, romanticism, historicism, feminism, and ecocriticism, etc, are rarely known and hence rarely taken seriously, especially when a few are merely doing introductions or reviews rather than in-depth research work.

A more serious problem is that they have not adequately made known that studies in the humanities, in spite of categorical and terminological differences, are methodologically similar to the natural sciences in terms of systematicity, objectivity and consistency; and that the particularities of the humanities do not mean arbitrariness, subjectivity and inconsistency. The misconception that the humanities are non-science has been confirmed by none other than some humanistic scholars themselves. And the conflicts between logical and scientific thinking versus otherwise have been shown by a recent dispute over literary authorship in China.

For ethical reasons, I will not relate specific details of the dispute. In brief, in 2012 a debate was sparked off on the internet on whether a literary best-seller in China was actually a scandalous fraud, chiefly because of the striking contrast between the author being a high-school dropout and his novel about university life carrying quotations from over a hundred western classics that the author openly admitted not having read. The authorship was called into question by an IT engineer and a life scientist, based upon their logical reasoning and independent textual analyses against other writings that definitely originated with the alleged author. Upon the release of their analyses on the internet, the two scientists found themselves faced with a large number of netizens who stubbornly defended their idol by insisting that novels are fictional and their authors cannot be real; literature is special and is not subject to ‘scientific’ analysis, etc. Their loudest counter-argument is that scientists and engineers are not qualified to make judgements in literature.

Owing to the rapid information transmission on the internet, the questioning started a very vociferous debate overnight. Before long, the IT engineer, Maitian by net name, retreated from fierce personal insults and attacks thrown at him from the author in question, who refused (or was unable) to prove his authorship by any means. And the analysis was systematically taken up by Dr Fang, a Michigan-educated biologist working in Beijing as a freelance writer in popular science and literature and a well-known fighter against academic misconduct. Fang was also personally attacked and insulted, and even threatened with an attempted libel suit. A little later, Dr Shi, a Stanford-educated Chinese linguist holding a professorship in Singapore, on the basis of what he calls ‘linguistic fingerprints’ confirmed the stylistic analyses and logical conclusions of the two scientists that the novel in question was definitely written by an easily recognizable and stylistically distinctive ghost writer.

Conventional media, somehow, have never paid any attention to the dispute. It might be useless to argue with the layman or obstinate netizens whether literature is subject to scientific analysis or if an authorship can be proved or disproved. But the point of the debate is very simple and the answer to the question is a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or in the computer scientist’s jargon, 1 or 0. A man has or has not written a book, and hence is or is not its author – whether ‘precursory’, ‘executive’, ‘declarative’, or ‘revisionary’.Reference Love¹⁸

But from the very beginning, the debate went off course and was diverted onto the sceptics’ qualifications, their personal malice to a young literary star and their vicious intentions to destroy a popular literary icon. While the serious reader was expecting critical discussions to reveal and clarify issues of great social and cultural importance, scholars in Chinese literature have been too cautious (or too numb) to do anything. What made the matter worse was that when all systematic analyses based on evidence and logical reasoning pointed to the negative, a few professors of Chinese literature misled the public by endorsing the impossibility of studying literary authorship, with their mistaken conceptions of the nature of literature and their misunderstanding of the distinction between an author and a narrator.Reference Booth¹⁹ Literary scholars in the waiyu sector, who are assumed to be more conversant with and more sensitive to western theories, and more ‘scientifically-minded’, have kept silent.

It might be said that the dispute is less than a literary matter, considering the nature of the book in question. But the partial nonfeasance of the waiyu sector can be disastrous. First, linguistic and literary scholars failed in their social responsibilities compared with western scholars, who are concerned with socio-cultural phenomena, and have left the public in the dark about a socially and culturally important issue. In the globalized world, no one is living in a once-isolated community and a dispute on an intellectual work is no longer a private or local matter. As the protection of intellectual property rights has become a global concern, the deliberate negligence for the settlement of the authorship dispute in China is academically disappointing, unfair to the author in question and irresponsible for readers in doubt. Secondly, the dispute has fuelled misconceptions about the humanities being arbitrary subjects where cognitive experience, scientific thinking and logical reasoning do not apply, leading the baffled into believing that linguistic stylistics, forensic discourse analysis and structural literary criticism are not scientifically principled. Thirdly, they have allowed western literary theories to be abused, providing evidence for erroneous beliefs that literature has no conventions; it is the narrator, not the author, that is responsible for a literary work; an ‘omniscient narrator’ can be more knowledgeable than the author; a man’s ‘linguistic performance’ can override his ‘linguistic competence’,Reference Chomsky²⁰ and his literary creation can override his ‘literary competence’.Reference Culler²¹ Fourthly, they have unwittingly helped to downgrade their disciplines so much so that administrators have no reason to give adequate attention or support to these disciplines.

5. Conclusion

The teaching of foreign languages in China started in Beijing in 1862, and the first modern school of foreign languages was founded in Shanghai in 1920.Reference Li and Xu²² Scientific studies of language, literature and other social and cultural phenomena in the structuralist paradigm in the west arose in the mid-20th century, and structuralist linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, and literary criticism were introduced in China only in the latter half of the last century. Foreign language professionals have been in the forefront of reading and introducing western theories and applying them in their own teaching and research work. For sociopolitical reasons, the ‘foreign language/literature’ profession suffered in different periods, and much work done before the 1990s had been limited to translating because this was relatively safe. The scientific study of foreign languages and literatures has been really underway for less than three decades. Much progress has been made, but many problems have to be solved before China’s waiyu sector becomes an adequately recognized and properly sustained academic discipline as it is in other parts of the world in this global age. While the support of administrators and institutional organizations can be important for developing the humanities and social sciences, the practitioners of the relevant disciplines themselves have to do more substantial scientific work in their fields of research and at the same time adequately play their roles as social and cultural workers in the age of globalization. The successful development of foreign languages and literatures as humanistic and social disciplines in China is certainly part of the development of humanities and social sciences in the globalized world, where no social or cultural phenomenon is local or isolated from the rest of the world.