1. From Xinjiang to Harmony

"Who am I, really?"

It’s the first unit title of the Beijing Foreign Language Press Oral English textbook used in my sophomore EFL classes at the University of Jinan, Shandong, China. The core unit reading is a brief introduction to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, specifically to ground Chinese student understanding of Maslow’s concept of “self-actualization”. Essentially a Western rather than Eastern theory, in feedback after group discussions of the set tasks, the Chinese students added a culturally specific caveat qualifying their understanding - self-actualization was not only "being all one can be" but also finding inner fulfillment in individually contributing one's best to the betterment of society for all: the individual enhances the collective, integrating the opposite ends of Hofstede’s core Cultural Dimensions continuum in order to re-contextualize Maslow's theory into a holistic socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Completing this unit with the students explained an observed phenomenon in previous years teaching: when asked about who is their "hero", numerous students would mention one name specifically above others: Yuan Longping (袁隆平). Yuan Longping (1930/09/07 – 2021/05/22) was a Chinese agronomist and inventor widely known as the "Father of Hybrid Rice". His research "helped transform China from food deficiency to food security within three decades" and was instrumental in China's journey to end poverty. Internationally, he became a figurehead, the father of the then-emerging "Green Revolution": a true people's scientist, his work symbolizing China's post-Mao agricultural modernization and self-reliance. In 2019, shortly before his death, he was awarded China's highest national honor, the Medal of the Republic. Upon his death in 2021 (at age 90, from organ failure), tens of thousands mourned publicly with flowers and rice stalks; state media and citizens celebrated him as a "father" figure who lifted millions out of hunger. Yuan Longping's legacy is one of the most tangible scientific contributions to humanity in the 20th century, turning potential famine into food abundance for billions. A national "hero" indeed, and exemplary embodiment of what might be now best termed "self-actualization with Chinese characteristics".

But I, an Australian foreign teacher in China, am not Chinese. And if I have any Self left to actualize, it is in reflective self-cultivation, integrating Confucian ideals as autoethnographic praxis: iterative process over product. Specifically, following on from a panel appearance / informal presentation (and subsequent pre-print publication Trans-media Auto-ethnography at the 11th Nishan Forum) at the 2025 11th Nishan Forum on World Civilizations in Confucius’ hometown of Qufu, Shandong: a longitudinal auto-ethnographic transmedia examination of lived experience of Australian “multi-culturalism” as a prelude to trans-cultural “global citizenship” in an increasingly multi-polar world. It's become a perpetual "work-in-progress", process and/as product in a personalized methodological distillation of autoethnography's original core concept definition:

From a genesis of meta-cognitive reflection, compatible with auto-ethnography’s partial origins in therapeutic writing as much as of autobiographical literature, my hybridized "personal style" stems from an initializing intersectional reckoning with trauma, filial piety and transitional lived experience. A core confessional writing body of research commencing with Wright (2008), McMillan & Ramirez (2016), Matthews (2019), Custer (2022), Lu (2022) and Razzaq (2023). In comparison to this foundation, it seems to me a shame that the once promised outsider equal access to autoethnographic inquiry has been steadily submerged beneath an exponentially increasing volume of papers recounting doctoral journeys of “becoming” in Academia. At least such works seem to me irrelevant, but then all I could offer that elite members-only club would be a fringe-positioned self-published account of my failure to meet the qualification criteria for inclusion. Although my Chinese peers sometimes refer to me by the title “Professor”, I stopped short of a doctoral degree due to illness, ultimately preferring the solace of private solitude.

Transitory pedagogic musings remind me of a commitment to professional practice, designing course content to follow through on tertiary EFL student grounding in Maslow to explore the concepts of “self” and “identity” in a Chinese inter-cultural communication [IC] context. The goal hence being to facilitate, through an ethnographic analytical prism modeled on Hofstede's 6 cultural dimensions and Hymes' SPEAKING model of speech act theory, the confident student self-expression of their own “cultural story / identity”. The core skill set sought is specifically Sapir-Whorfian discourse analysis: deconstructing the relationship between language and culture in authentic key texts, including digital AV materials. In pedagogic practice of such, hence, on-going reflective autoethnography becomes an action research educational design methodological principle, hence in my Nishan Forum panel presentation I introduced autoethnographic methodologies in inter-cultural communication pedagogy as best practice principle in facilitating one of the Forum's key concepts - "mutual learning".

Chi, Zhang & Kulich's (2022) autoethnographic delineation of a cultural story template as proto-typical foreign teacher self-introduction within IC pedagogic practice inherently thus posits my own cultural story / identity as starting point, with the end point being my afore-mentioned 2025 11th Nishan Forum participation and pre-print paper. Here now removed from pedagogic praxis alone, I introduce my own (multi-)cultural story with an epiphanic memory. I remember, before first coming to China in 2011, completing a SAR Research Fellowship at Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] following post-grad degree award of a Graduate Diploma in Information Study [GDIS] and consequent associate membership application to the Australian Library & Information Association [ALIA]. My research field, however, being representations of disability in Australian film, proved non-commercial and I turned to obtaining a teaching qualification, a Graduate Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages [GCTESOL]. With that, in response to an employment ad, I successfully applied for an EFL teaching position: in China.

VIDEO 1: Reflections on the 11th Nishan Forum on World Civilizations | video complement to the SAGE Advance pre-print paper Trans-media Auto-ethnography at the 11th Nishan Forum: From Xinjiang to Harmony-Intercultural Pedagogy and Civilizational Dialogue | Personal Archive 2025/07/13

Culture Shock Honeymoon

I first arrived in China, in Xinjiang (XUAR) in September 2011 to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to Han, Uyghur, and Kazakh middle-school students under stakeholder regulation by the CPC Ministry of Education’s reforms and Mandarin national language standardization policies. From arrival at Urumqi airport, I was met by a Uyghur student assigned to assist me to the local bus station and obtain a ticket to the petrochemical hub town of Dushanzi where I would again be met, by my designated teaching supervisor. Beyond the pragmatics of culture shock occasioned by living and working in what seemed to me akin to an oil and gas refinement frontier "boomtown", there was, however, an additional context weighing on me. Some three weeks prior to my arrival in Urumqi, there had been an extremist religiously motivated Uyghur terrorist attack in Kashgar. Indeed, prior to leaving Australia to come to Xinjiang, I had researched the Autonomous Region: Western media, including Australian media, had well established coverage of the region when Uyghur diaspora figurehead and World Uyghur Congress leader Rebiyah Kadeer leveraged the 2009/07/05 Urumqi riots to posit the supposed "cultural genocide" of the Uyghur minority in XUAR. It should be noted here, however, that the designated term "cultural genocide" has no independent standing or validity as a distinct category of the crime of genocide under the established UN Genocide Convention (1948) or the criterion-based legal framework it enshrines, and is therefore not a prosecutable offense in its own right under international criminal law.

Nevertheless, a mere three weeks after the Urumqi riot galvanized Western media coverage, an Australian-produced film about Kadeer herself - The 10 Conditions of Love - debuted at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), screening over the objections of the Chinese consulate. Likewise, Kadeer (whom the Chinese authorities held responsible for instigating the Urumqi riot) was granted a visa to Australia, at the special behest of then Labor MP Michael Danby, with whom Kadeer would maintain a long-term association. During her 2009 Australia visit and film-related events, where Danby introduced the film and paralleled Kadeer to the Dalai Lama while also writing in support of Kadeer for Taiwan's Taipei Times, Kadeer described decades of Chinese policy in Xinjiang as “cultural genocide” (focusing on language, religion, and identity suppression), and urged China to stop their actions. Although this was reported in Australian media at the time, it did not receive international coverage; until 2017 saw the first media accounts of Vocational Training Centre centrality in Xinjiang's operational de-radicalization based counter-terrorist policies prompted an English translation lexical choice substitution, "camps", the deliberate, allusive association of which with Nazi WW2 "concentration camps" emotively underpinned subsequent USCIRF and National Endowment for Democracy [NED] sponsored Uyghur diaspora groups' accusations of "genocide".

Internal security tightening throughout XUAR was noticeable to me after the 2012 inauguration of Xi Jinping leadership, in both the increased visibility of armed security officers in small groups uniformly patrolling urban areas, and such as traffic stop ID checks. Indeed, a bus I was travelling on from Dushanzi was once stopped for a routine passenger ID check and I was escorted aside to wait until my papers cleared their verification system, whereupon I could return to the bus (which waited for me to rejoin) and continue the road trip to Urumqi. Hence, Uyghur separatist / extremist / terrorist dynamics were a lingering background context as I set about daily life and commenced what was my formative EFL teaching experience - facilitating IC between myself as foreign teacher and the student cohort, wherein I noticed the higher aptitude for, and ICC competence in, English as spoken by the Uyghur female students in particular. This was also concurrently being noticed in formal research into EFL in XUAR specifically as a region undergoing rapid “bilingual” (actually trilingual) education reforms. Foremost amongst this research was Sunuodula & Feng (2011), Learning English as a third language by Uyghur Students in Xinjiang: A blessing in disguise?, a qualitative/ethnographic study based on interviews with Uyghur tertiary students in Xinjiang. It contextualized EFL specific to XUAR as "trilingualism" (Uyghur L1 → Mandarin L2 → English L3), a core argument being that, despite systemic disadvantages in English provision for minority students, the high enthusiasm and relatively strong motivation these Uyghur students show toward English could be interpreted positively as “a blessing in disguise”.

The paper / book chapter contrasted Uyghur-medium (minzu) schools (where instruction is primarily in Uyghur, with Mandarin taught as a subject) versus Han-medium schools (Mandarin as L1 and full medium of instruction), finding that Uyghur students from minzu schools often entered higher education or mixed settings with significantly weaker Mandarin proficiency, creating academic barriers for Uyghur students as Mandarin was the standardized language of tertiary-level instruction for most university subjects (and even for EFL classes). This in effect placed Uyghur students at a clear disadvantage relative to Han peers (for whom Mandarin = L1). So too, this gap was found to further compound difficulties in L3 English learning when it is also taught through the medium of Mandarin. Interestingly, characteristically distinguishing this XUAR trilingualism, Ahåt, R. (2013). Motivation, gender, and learner performance of English as an L3 in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region found that:

With rising numbers of Uyghur undergraduates entering Mandarin-medium universities in Urumqi, and XUAR specific minority incentive programs (such as the lowering of pass grade requirements from standard 60 to 50 for Uyghur minority students) facilitating their greater access to and participation in tertiary education through China, these students faced a now clearly mounting disadvantage. To address this, select middle and high schools across XUAR introduced joint Han–Uyghur-Kazakh minority EFL classes not taught in Mandarin, but instead taught entirely in the target language English, and where possible taught by native-speaking foreign teachers. These scarce teachers were deployed selectively, including to Urumqi, Korla, and, in my case, Dushanzi. In consultation with local school supervisors, I was informed that my classes were a recent semi-formal pilot trial addition to the student learning load, not exam-assessed but feedback monitored: their interest was methodological - the lesson plans I designed and used in what was an action research and content-based instruction [CBI] facilitation of foundational intercultural communication competence skill development to my mixed ethnicity classes (ages 9–12), the children of local residents and petrochemical workers. Consequently, during my second semester in XUAR, I enrolled (by distance) in an Australian university's Master of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages [MTESOL] degree, specifically to deepen and enhance the pedagogically grounded hybrid-theorization informing my IC educational design praxis of (auto-)ethnographic methodological principles; context-specific to XUAR application in my concurrent lesson planning / classroom teaching.

Thus, with the exception of primarily my assigned school supervisor and one or two of the Chinese EFL teachers also working at the middle school, most of my communication in English was with the students. One of the top students, a Uyghur girl surprisingly proficient in English, invited me to her parents' home to talk with her and a friend in English. I accepted the honour and found the Muslim host, the girl's father, very cordial, apologetic for not spending more time with me (as it was also a day of celebration for which he had the duty to entertain his guests for a traditional meal: roast sheep). The student translated for her Uyghur father, a well-respected town dignitary working closely with the school administrators in developing local resources and integrating Uyghur/Han educational programs such as the experimental English language classes assigned to me. As he parted, he confided an intellectual interest in Freudian psychology. The student and her friend, of compatible age, practiced their English until, after satisfied with their informal conversation English outside of the classroom setting and student/teacher dynamic, it was time for me to leave. While I later observed the school's Uyghur teachers performing their cultural song and dance at a teacher's banquet, they were not part of the English department, and so my interaction was limited to dinner chat or pleasantries on other social occasions.

Determined to document my lived experience living and working in XUAR, I began filming a digital video travelogue from the moment I arrived in Urumqi and was escorted to the bus for a three-hour journey to Dushanzi. Shot handheld with natural light and sound, I montaged the footage on the go as it were, assembling the film in approximate real time equivalence to its shooting, as autoethnographic filmmaker-as-researcher methodically shifting from an etic to an emic perspective over the course of the two semesters I was employed in XUAR. After leaving Xinjiang and China (following brief visits to Beijing and Chengdu), I returned to Australia with an 8+ hour experimental film travelogue documenting the lived experience of a foreign teacher, an Australian, in XUAR. As a former SAR Research Fellow at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and with my own first two experimental autoethnographic films (on Australian disability arts) added to the NFSA collection, I offered the complete 8hr XUAR, China location shot travelogue to the NFSA to add to their collection alongside my Australia-shot film work. However, my personal record of daily lived experience in XUAR (as an authentic contrast and riposte to the Western media clamour of “cultural genocide” as an Australian produced Kadeer film jointly biased public discourse on XUAR) evidently did not interest the NFSA, and they declined to add it to the collection, without even first viewing it.

VIDEO 2: Edited anthology of three short sequences from an 8+ hour autoethnographic travelogue I filmed of my daily life experiences in XUAR in 2011-2012.

Filial Piety

Filial piety is a core Chinese Confucian value. Without enough time in China to see its scaffolding throughout the social order it is difficult to conceive how deeply ingrained this value is in self-definition. It is an essential component of both the Chinese individual and national identity constructs. It is not merely personal but foundational to Chinese cultural and political identity construction. While I now conceive of filial piety in a Confucian prism, some fifteen years ago, before coming to China, it was not held as a core personal value. To the contrary, I sought to veer from any value system derived from filial piety as a core component. In Confucian thought, it shapes individual moral cultivation (self-discipline, gratitude for the body and life given by parents) and scales outward to national identity, grounding social harmony and maintaining the hierarchical social order of roles and responsibilities. In Western philosophy, perhaps Cicero's conception of "pietas" (piety, dutifulness) would make for an analogous value-based epistemic system. Cicero treats "pietas" as natural and instinctive, rooted in gratitude and the bonds of blood / kinship, much as Confucian texts ground "xiao" (respect, care, obedience, ritual devotion) in the inescapable debt to parents. This parallel has been fruitfully explored in cross-cultural philosophy precisely because both systems were foundational to enduring civilizations.

As I said, I now conceive of filial piety in a Confucian prism, but within such, it is tinged with melancholy for being understood too late to amend past behaviours, the lingering memories of which conjure paroxysms of shame, regret and sorrow. The triggering recollection is always the same - the death of my father, alone in his retirement unit while I was far from his side, many years now in China, and of no comfort, solace or care to him in his final days / hours. What tempers my guilt over essentially deserting him is that it was due to circumstances beyond my control: my father died during the Covid-19 pandemic at a time when my home country of Australia had suspended all flights to and from China, stranding me there and then, when it was really needed, denying me relief payments on basis of my being out of Australia. From that point on, cultural connection to Australia steadily eroded such that I long considered myself Australian solely because of being an Australian passport-holder, feeling neither national pride nor even nostalgia. In my solitude, however, being "Australian" is one intersectional core component in my personal identity construction: specifically, in qualification of the lived experience of multiculturalism.

My father was Czech, Slavic. His childhood was spent under Nazi occupation before and during WW2; and thereafter under the Soviet liberators until he deemed himself capable of fleeing Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia for the International Refugee Organization [IRO] refugee camps of post-war Germany. And there from one such camp, "selected" for immigration to Australia, processing at Bonegilla, assigned labour on the Port Augusta railroad until migration contractual obligations were fulfilled. He seldom talked about his life prior to coming to Australia and setting up residence and business as an opal miner / jeweler in South Australia's remote Coober Pedy. One evening, however, he opened up slightly about his youthful and childhood experiences prefacing his reminiscence with acknowledgement of Nazi racial policy deeming Slavs to be subhuman, "untermensch" to be mass exterminated under Himmler's Generalplan OST to ensure the greater Nazi Lebensraum agenda. To interject briefly: as his son, I too am "untermensch" if judged by Nazi eugenics policy. But as my father revealed more, so too could I sense the traumatic experience he endured in the recollected details of his childhood, and how as an adult parent this had negatively affected my intra-familial socialization.

Video recording his reflections at the time, the archival value of the recording only clarified itself to me after his death. The 2022 night I was informed of his passing, I located the recording to re-watch it, determined to later edit it into short archival oral history. That same night, I staged my first vlog entry: a stream of consciousness monologue reaction to learning of my father's death. Years later, I edited that monologue into final vlog format and uploaded the video onto my account on the Chinese social media platform XiaoHongShu (Red Note). By then, however, I learned something new about his youthful wartime experience that proved an epiphanic moment in identity construction. From childhood under the Nazis and adolescence under the Soviets, he escaped Czechoslovakia and made his way through post-war Germany to the IRO American sector. There he was interviewed and allowed to remain in the IRO American sector on political grounds: the alternative return to the Russian sector carrying with it a genuine risk of being arrested by the Soviets on suspicion of espionage.

Not long ago, less than a year or so, while researching online, I found his American sector documentation, in the Arolsen Archive, the largest record of the victims of Nazi persecution. Although my father's childhood was subject to the Nazi SS, however, he was a non-Jewish victim of Nazi occupation, and thus when the Arolsen Archives records, including the political refugee database archiving my father's documentation, were added to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Survivors and Victims Name Database, my father's name was also added to the USHMM database. Although I knew of his childhood under Nazi occupation, which he survived, his name is recorded as a Holocaust survivor / victim subject to political persecution. So too, I had never before thought of myself as the son of a Holocaust survivor, a self-reflective prism to re-examine my own traumatic lived experience of neurodivergence in terms not dissimilar to the phenomenology of "inter-generational" trauma characterizing many children of Holocaust / Nazi persecution survivors (Yehuda et.al, 2016: Dashorst et.al. 2019: El-Khalil et al. 2025). I am "untermensch": re-watching that edit of my first vlog, I see now my monologue as an epiphanic reckoning with that realization, and therein of filial piety's harmonious anchoring of my continuing self-cultivation.

In my research for, and panel presentation at the 2025 11th Nishan Forum, I selected one of the core principles, "mutual learning" as the teaching goal. On value based equivalence between China's GCI delineation of the "shared values of humankind" and Australian immigration policy's designated set of "Australian values" qualifying citizenship rights, I selected 2 common elements - diversity and harmony ("social harmony" being the Chinese goal, with the Australian being the different connotations of "social cohesion"). As an example of mutual learning AU/CN IC I thus outlined and task strategized a hypothetical template case study analysis comparing and contrasting Australian multicultural "social cohesion" to Chinese Confucianist vale-driven "social harmony" as a model of how to facilitate the Nishan goal of "mutual learning" through IC teaching praxis. As mentioned above, the SISU autoethnographically delineated a "my cultural story" template for foreign IC teachers in tertiary education to utilize as a model for student-driven narrativization of their own "my China story". My personal context-specific "my multicultural Australia story" thus begins in reflection on inter-generational trauma, the shared phenomenology of lived experience of filial piety defining the so-called "New Australian" first and second generations.

VIDEO 3: First vlog attempt was an edited version of a stream-of-consciousness recording initially made some years prior, during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the occasion of my father's death.

NEXT: Incentivizing Australia-China Inter-Cultural Communication to Facilitate Mutual Learning