Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," National Public Radio, April 14, 2001
The sociologist Erving Goffman used to talk about apologizing as a kind of "face-work," the manoeuvres that help people get through their interactions with everybody's self-image intact. That sense of face comes from a translation of the Chinese expression for "lose face," tio lien. The phrase entered English in the 1860's, at a time when the Western powers were carving up China into zones of influence. The British had made some new demands, and when the Chinese resisted, the British sent a force headed by Lord Elgin to press their case. They burned the Summer Palace outside Beijing. But Elgin decided to spare the Forbidden City itself. He feared that its destruction would result in such a loss of face for the Manchus that the dynasty might fall -- an unsettling prospect for Western trade. In the end, the British came out of the affair with some economic concessions, the Kowloon territory, and a useful new phrase. And while nowadays we talk about "losing face" in all sorts of contexts, the words still have a slightly orientalist ring.
So it wasn't surprising that journalists and politicians kept talking about the importance of saving face in connection with the spy plane incident last week. Some people argued that the administration had to make some sort of verbal concession so that the Chinese could get out of the impasse in a face-saving way. But others claimed that any apology would cause the US to lose face in Chinese eyes and weaken us in our further dealings with them. And when Bush's letter to the Chinese was released, those critics were quick to describe it using another expression borrowed from Chinese. An editorial in the National Review said that "to apologize for a landing forced by Chinese recklessness. . . veers near kowtow territory."
Kowtow came into English after an earlier diplomatic confrontation between China and the West. In 1793, Great Britain sent Lord George Macartney to China as a trade envoy. The Chinese insisted that Macartney kowtow to the Emperor, touching his forehead to the ground in a sign of submission. Macartney refused to do any more than bend his knee as he would to an English sovereign. In his report he said that the Chinese had acceded to his conditions, though according to Chinese accounts he actually did touch his forehead. And critics have been using the word ever since when anyone seems to be too deferential to China people accused Bush's father of kowtowing when he refused to take a hard line towards the Chinese government after the Tiananmen massacres.
"Lose face," "kowtow" -- when we borrow words like that, there's always the implication that we're in exotic cultural territory, and that these things matter more to the Chinese than they do to us. That perception was heightened last week when the Chinese versions of the American statement were released, and the newspapers called in language specialists to explain the subtleties of the translations. You came away with the impression that Chinese was a language with as many words for sorry as Eskimos are supposed to have for snow.
The American coverage made the whole affair sound like one of those familiar cross-cultural confrontations: a simple plain-spoken people with little patience for social rituals up against an Eastern culture that insists on elaborate shows of deference. But the fact is that when it comes to a belief in the ritual potency of apologies, Americans bow to no one. American public life has become a theater of contrition. Politicians ask forgiveness for their sexual and financial peccadilloes, athletes apologize for making racially insensitive remarks, journalists flagellate themselves when they're caught fabricating stories. And not a week goes by without some group calling for an official apology for some wrong that the government visited on them in the past.
In response, English has developed a vocabulary of pentitence that can go verb-to-verb and adjective-to-adjective with any other language on earth. We have expressions for every gradation of responsibility and remorse. "Regrettable," "inexcusable," "an unfortunate error of judgement," "I acknowledge my personal responsibility," "We apologize for any inconvenience." The hard disks of corporate publicists are full of boilerplate mea culpas and nostra culpas to cover everything from oil spills to accounting irregularities. "Unacceptable" is a recent favorite here "Our last quarter's revenues were unacceptable." It's an elegant way of appropriating the indignation without accepting the blame.
So when some suitably placating noises were called for last week, the State Department was up to the challenge. The only question is whether the Chinese were as adept at interpreting the US response as Americans would be. After the statement was released, their media were announcing that the US really had apologized for the collision. A lot of Americans were put out by that there's nothing more irritating than to have somebody think you apologized when you know you damn well didn't. Of course it's likely that those Chinese reports were just face-saving propaganda, like their claims about Lord Macartney's alleged kowtow to the emperor two hundred years ago. But you never know maybe the Chinese really did miss some of the nuances of the American response. They may have a longer tradition of face-work than we do, but they've always gone about it in a very demonstrative way. They measure degrees of contrition by how deeply you prostrate your body; with us it can be simply a question of how sincerely you bite your lip. So it must be hard for them to fathom the subtleties of Western ways.