王力宏牛津‘认识华流’英文演讲稿

力宏在牛津大学以“认识华流”主题演讲的英文演讲稿。

【Leehom Wang Full Address Oxford Union】

Thank you all for being here today, and the late comers as well. Thank you for coming in quietly.

I want to start off today just to take a moment of silence for the victims of the Sichuan e arthquake and for the victims of the Boston American bomb. So let‟s take a minute to pay our respect to them. Thank you.

I never thought I would be addressing you, the esteemed members of the Oxford Union, without guitar or Erhu, without my crazy stage hair and costumes . But I did perform at the O2 Arena in London last week. I am not sure any of you would make that. But in many ways, that would be similar to what I am talking about today, that is, introducing Chinese pop music to you. I am actually a Chinese ambassador of Chinese pop whether you like it or not. Both music and movies. And today I am here to give you the state of the union address. It‟s not the Oxford Union.

It‟s the union of east and west. I want to frankly, openly and honestly talk about h ow we‟ve done a good job or how we‟ve done a bad job of bringing Chinese pop to the west. And I also want to press upon all of you here today the importance of that soft culture, that soft power‟s change and how each of us is involved in that change.

Soft power, a term I am sure you are all familiar with coined by Rhodes Scholar and Oxford alumnus Joseph Nye is to defined as the ability to attract and persuade. Shashi Tharoor called it in a recent TEDTalk, …the ability for a culture to tell a compelling sto ry and influence others to fall in love with it‟. I like that definition. But I want to put it in college terms for all you students and you audience. The way I see it, east and west are kind like freshman roommates. You don‟t know a lot about each other but suddenly you are living together in the same room. And each one is scared the others gonna steal his shower time or wants a party then the other one wants to study. It has the potential to be absolute hell, doesn‟t it? We all had horror stories of that roommate without heard about those stories. I know for a lot of students here in

Oxford have your own separate bedrooms. But when I was a freshmen at Williams College, I was not so fortunate. You‟re kidding me!Woohoo! All right！Great. Well, I had a room mate, and he was that roommate. Let‟s just call him Frank. So Frank was my roommate and Frank liked nothing more than to smoke weed.[laughter] And he did it every day. And Frank had a two-foot long bung under his bed that was constantly being fired up. Fo r those Chinese speakers and audience. Frank would “火力全开” on that bong every day. So, yes I guess I was kind of opposite of Bill Clinton who tried America but didn‟t inhale. I didn‟t try a but I did inhale. Every single day, second hand. And strangely enough every time I go into our bedroom, I mysteriously end up late for calss. I don‟t know what happened. It was like …Dude, is it already ten o‟clock ?‟ So, how many of you have live lived with that Frank ,or be a Frank Gat? Having a roommate can be a recipe for disaster, but it has the potential for being the greatest friendship you have ever had. See, Frank, he didn‟t make it to second year. And I got two new roommates in the second year, Stephen and Jason. And these days, the three of us are the best of friends. So going back to my analogy, of east and west, and roommates. Do we want to be Frank, or do we want to be Stephen and Jason? And I think, in this year of 2013, we should all be striving for the later, shouldn‟t we?

I mean I am assuming that we all agree that this is the goal that we should all be strving for.

Let‟s look at where we are in reality. Recent headlines in the media include foreign policy magazine. Chinese victim complex. Why are Chinese leaders so paranoid about the United States? Or the AFP, Agence France-Presse, human rights in China worsening US fines? Bloomberg says, in the cover of this magazine, Yes, The Chinese Army is Spying on You. And It‟s such a great one I just want to show you the cover of the magazine . yes,be very afraid! So, it actually in extremely high mount of negative fear and anxiety about China ,Sinophobia , that I think is not just missing form, but also misleading and also ultimately dangerous, very dangerous. And what about how westerners are viewed by Chinese? Well, we have terms for westerners. The most common of which are …gwailo‟, in Cantonese, which means the “old devil”, …laowai‟, meaning …the old outsider‟ in Mandarin, …ang moh‟, which means the “red hair one” in