Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Jonathan, welcome to Berkeley.
Thanks for having me here.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Hong Kong, so I'm a child of the British Empire. Hong Kong then was a very, very different place from what it is today. Hong Kong, when I was born, was a place of about 1.5 to 2 million people compared with 6 or 7 million people today. It was a very traditional Chinese society and none of the hustle and bustle and the highrises that there are today, and was ruled completely by the British, part of the British Empire taken under days of Queen Victoria, a very different place. That's where I grew up for the first ten to fifteen years of my life.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
One thing they did was to take me to strange and remote places, and that's the sensitive path that I followed, interest in international affairs, interest in Asian affairs. My major at Oxford was Chinese, so I think that's something that they gave to me, that interest in the world as a global place, a place that you ought to visit right around the place.
Was your father a diplomat?
No, my father was not. Because it was a crown colony and was part of the British empire, the British were not diplomats there. They were actually running the government, so he was part of the civil service, the Hong Kong government which was running Hong Kong. He was a town planner, he was shaping the emergence of the new city of Hong Kong, in fact an extraordinarily interesting time because during that time the Communist government in mainland China was, I guess you'd say, a pretty repressive place, and there was a constant stream of refugees from mainland China into Hong Kong, increasing the population by leaps and bounds, doubling it within ten years. He was responsible for accommodating all those people, for planning the town, building the apartment houses, and so on. So, that was an extremely interesting and challenging task, simply to accommodate huge numbers of people coming into a place of 400 square miles. This is not a big territory.
So, you breathed internationalism from the early days.
I think I did.
You said you went to Oxford.
I was at Oxford, yes.
And say again what you did your work on.
Well, I did two things there. I did first the classical path of many British schoolboys at the time. I studied -- or "read," as we used to call it at Oxford -- Latin and Greek, and that was my first major. I did that for two and a half years, and then I switched to Chinese.
Chinese in those days at Oxford was almost a spin-off of classics. The way it was approached was very much as an analytic, literary-based field of study. The study of modern Chinese, of written Chinese, spoken Chinese, was, I'm afraid to say, virtually non-existent. Of course, it's completely changed today. So, I have a grounding in classical Chinese and classical Chinese poetry, philosophy, and so on.
Do you read and speak Chinese Mandarin, today's language?
It's a tough language and I hope none of your listeners are going to call in and ask me a question in Chinese, but after I completed my degree at Chinese, I did, in fact, go to Taiwan for a year where I learned spoken standard Chinese. I haven't used it as much as I would like in recent years, and it's unlike French or German or Italian. It's a language which slips into the background more easily. So, I would say that I still have an understanding of it but not a fluent one.
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