Our pal China: Big daddy loves you, SA!

Some articles have appeared recently on Thought Leader with regard to “China taking over the world”. It is also big in the current literature, for example Martin Jaques’s recent When China Rules the World.

The key word there, of course, is “when”, not “if”. The book to some extent explores the “how”, and, to state the obvious, the rule will be based on economy. Evident examples are the various raw materials Africa has and leaders like Hu Jintao have made it clear the juggernaut he leads is going to seriously effect where that impoverished continent is going.

It all sounds positive to me, less so to blogger David J Smith, and quite understandably, if one follows the (perfectly sound) logic of his blog and the impassioned (and perfectly respectable) stances of commentators like Siobhan.

I slept over the blogs for a week before deciding how I would answer and why my thoughts on where China will help lead the world is arguably for the common good. The simple reason is that I have lived here for nearly five years (good grief, I can hardly believe that myself) and love the people. My response to David Smith’s blog in a comment was one of agreement but also one of being defensive about the Chinese because I have known them personally and they have certainly been kind to chookie (my wife) and myself. Sure, “the Chinese” — note the collective, generalising group noun which I will come to later — can still drive me stark raving bonkers and after my first year, in the more remote Zhejiang province, I could easily have been described as racist in my attitude towards the Chinese. The habits I see sometimes that I particularly do not like (as do a number of Chinese by the way), in order of importance, is the almost imbecilic inability to queue or wait your turn, the spitting on streets accompanied by loud hawking noises, a general lack of sanitary awareness in public (from littering to babies doing their business in the streets with the assistance of parents), being stared and laughed at sometimes because I am a “foreigner” and the elitist groups they form.

Shanghaiese scorn Chinese from elsewhere, an attitude which many of my Chinese friends from “elsewhere” get very fed up with. Beijing people say of the Shanghai men that they are “women”. The Hong Kong elite scorn the mainland and see them as commoners, rabble.

That aside, I find Chinese enormously endearing, sweet, non-aggressive (their non-aggression is the direct opposite of many South Africans), friendly and helpful. They have a charmingly simple sense of humour and are always ready for a laugh. I have taught all age groups and love the children. They are adorable, respectful, more playful than their Western counterparts, generally hard-working and so cute in their willingness to answer questions. I have never had my own children and I get quite broody. Sure, a minority of the kids I teach are blurry naughty, cheeky and lazy. That just goes with the teaching territory. As I put it, those kids are still going through Freud’s anal phase of childhood development.

Let’s start putting the above positive “tirade” in perspective. I also love my wife, but, like the Chinese, she has a number of habits that drive me bats. The wet towel after a morning shower left on the floor or the bed. Ditto the clothing left scattered about. She is like a squirrel without a nest. Her stubbornness. Her bad mood if a meal is not to her liking (and she cooked it and it gets taken out on me, I ask you.) Is it not possible for her to go through a single week without buying a least one new pair of earrings or a necklace? Just one week? Moan groan blah blah fish paste. But I love her and she is also a best friend. I phone her every day from the office for a “chook check” and send lovey dovey text messages every day. I don’t buy her flowers because they are too expensive and they only last a few days. Pot plants are cheap, last for years and I still maintain they are romantic. Sort of. I also think South Africans are great people but could also berate us for a number of bad traits.

So my perspective on China is extremely biased by a people who have dug their way into my heart since February 2005. They are not just books and articles I have read, I have got to know them in their own country in the flesh. Like, with skin on. But I am justifiably biased — they are wonderful people who are also a pain in the ass at times. (Like a certain spouse whose name will not be mentioned for fear of going without dinner for a few days. The making of proper Bistro gravy is still a mystery to this ex-bachelor but I like it with most meals.) I disapprove of many aspects of the system the Chinese live under. But then I also disapprove of what South Africans have to endure in SA. I strongly question, historically, the internal and external policies of the USA and the UK for the last 50 years. Oh, and for much longer than that of course. The opium was in the bottom holds of the ships going to China whilst the tea was going in the opposite direction. The ploy was candied over with evangelical types strutting about with their bibles on the upper decks as they prepared to go save the Chinese heathen, forgetting the heathen had not been asked if they feel they are heathen.

At the risk of repetition, there is a dangerous difference between reading a number of well-researched books and articles on a country and actually living there. The map is never the territory. Though we are not many, there are a number of South Africans and Zimbabweans in China who I know are most grateful for the employment opportunities.

So “we” don’t have Facebook and Twitter in China. I think it is ridiculous. The barring of these forms of communication only serves to point out that the Chinese government, in its uppermost echelon, has something to hide. We all get that. I find few governments don’t have something to hide or lie about now or in the past, be it WMD or Guantánamo Bay or Robben Island. Of course pointing out the evils of other countries does not detract one iota from the crimes that “China” has committed against humanity. But I put the word China in brackets. What is “China” or any other country in a person’s mind? In the case of China it is a reality that has perhaps something, but all too often little or nothing to do with the abstract subconsciously resumed in a person’s mind or a collective identity’s ideology. If it is the China written about by David Smith or commentators like Siobhan, they are “correct” but how can a different “China”, the one I have known and which has been extremely benevolent to me and my wife co-exist with their “version”?

Well, my answer is that the pictures people form about another country or race risk being simplistic, too abstract. The reifications we form are simplifications of the actual terrain, and sometimes they are gross simplifications. For example, a person still identifying “China” with the horrors of Mao’s policies and purges is a bit like someone still identifying Nazi Germany with the current Germany

David Smith uses a chilling picture from the Tiananmen Square killings which shows a vulnerable man walking past tanks. That picture then becomes a person or a group’s abstract of what China is. Clearly, it is not China. On the note of my use of the word abstract. Recently we had the National Day parades celebrating the 60th anniversary of China’s (I am the first to admit a number of those years were not spent in freedom). Though I love the country I found all the red flags with the yellow stars on them draped along many streets an unnerving sight, even though I have come to love the people and feel safe here. This is because I still have an abstract of oppressive, evil “China” taught to me at school and supported by the media. But neither the photo David Smith uses, nor the response I have to streets lined with the Chinese flag, are China.

The current government, I have no doubt, having lived here in peace and freedom for a number of years, is anti-Maoist. They perhaps may not say it, but their actions reflect it. Virtually everyone around me is employed, content and happy. They certainly don’t feel oppressed. Some Westerners may say in shock a number of Shanghaiese live in poverty, but that is an incredibly relative term. I have never seen such a happy people who often materialistically have very little. If I walk down “poor” streets, people are far from miserable. There is food, heaps of it, on sale everywhere and there is no end to the endless bric-a-brac of restaurants, some not much larger than ye old-fashioned telephone booth. I have placed a few of my photos of such areas in Shanghai at the end of this blog.

On the other hand, the average South African in his smart, crushingly expensive car in Johannesburg on the way to work in the morning looks bloody miserable (the crushing HP repayments and insurance on the car surely being one reason).

What is not made clear to me in the recent Thought Leader blogs is what will be the outcomes of China gradually influencing the world. The assumptions seem to be that the outcomes will be vaguely evil. Well if the tree is good the fruit will be good, and if the tree is bad the fruit will be bad, says the wisdom literature simply and inarguably. The fruit in China, certainly where I live?

People in China are generally happy, more than willing to work hard and have a serenity and a healthy mindset I aspire to. Sure, there are the Uighur riots, and I don’t wish to minimise that. Sure, there is the problem of Tibet, an example of oppression I loathed before coming to live here. The Tibet problem — note how I agree it is a problem — is more complex than the map presented to the “Free Tibet” “struggle heroes”. For a start, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, whom I admire, does not want Tibet to be completely independent of China. I personally still would prefer Tibet to be independent. But the leader of the Tibetan people does not. The economic good the “Big Daddy” can do for Tibet is one compelling reason. Not many “Free Tibet” “celebrants” look at the history of the Lamas and their oppressive rule over the Tibetan people prior to Chinese occupation. The Tibetans, by all accounts, were treated like slaves. I am not saying it is better now in Tibet; I am saying the problem is more complex than that served up by movies such as Seven Years in Tibet.

I fail to see why China cannot be regarded as part of a solution to the global problem. She is. Anyway, this blog is getting too long but I may wish to follow it up with another blog where I look at perceptions of “China” and Douglas Hofstadter’s “loop” theory. I would love to discuss why people refuse to change their views of themselves (also an abstract) and their view of other abstracts, such as the unexamined pictures people carry “inside” them of other countries, other races and so forth.

And I know I am starting to give Professor Bert Olivier a run for his money with my use of inverted commas around words to show I question the semantics or the “presence” resumed by those words!