My first electric scooter ride on a balmy Beijing evening had me swerving between the venerable weeping willow trees of classical Chinese paintings, down 13th-century hutong alleyways, then zipping onto the highway straight into oncoming traffic.
It was jarring to say the least. That five-minute journey seemed to encompass a one-thousand-year history.
Such is the dizzying feeling, the whirlwind of China: at once spinning clockwise and counterclockwise, but somehow managing to spiral up to avoid collision. This whirlwind guided me through Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan, Shanghai, Jiashan, Xitang and Hong Kong on a three-week visit at the tail end of summer, not long before the Occupy Central protests escalated to an unprecedented degree in Hong Kong.
From a distance, China appears to be a vast, monolithic place. It’s a nation of extreme expanse and contradiction we seem to be very comfortable oversimplifying. Once I got up close, I began to understand China as a nation of paradox with a long and fractured history — a history of missing pieces and my family’s own narrative threads intertwined.
As economic development moves at breakneck speed, China’s moving parts are nearly impossible to crystalize or reconcile with all of its past. But here are a few ways we misinterpret China through our foggy, Western lens:
1. China is one large, unified country.
When people say China is one way or another, I wonder what fragment of the vast expanse of time and space they are talking about. Post-imperial China or post-Mao China? Are they visualizing the response to the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests? Or remembering the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics? Are they talking about the first or the last Qing Dynasty? Or the Tang Dynasty era, ushering in foreign trade and new religious and cultural influences?
And which of China’s 22 provinces are they talking about? It is estimated that China, with a population of nearly 1.4 billion people, speaks up to 300 languages and dialects and is home to more than 100 ethnicities. In the stretch of 89 miles — the number of miles between Seattle and Bellingham — people in China would rarely speak the same dialect.
In comparing Western countries, I am in agreement with author Ben Chu who wrote the 2013 book “Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China is Wrong.” As Chu relates it, calling China a nation with a continuous 2,000-year history starting with the first official dynasty documented, is like saying the entire continent of Europe has one shared narrative and continuous 2,000-year history:
“If it is culture, rather than politics, that constitutes the glue of continuity, then Europe might be said to have the shared philosophical heritage from Ancient Greece, reinforced by Christianity, then the Renaissance, and finally the Enlightenment. Of course this would mean you turn a blind eye to the Dark Ages, the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, and the two shattering conflicts of the twentieth century.”
2. China is a stranger to democracy and foreign influence.
This false perception is constructed by one dominant narrative: China’s evolution since Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy in 1978 has been a battle of new vs. old ideals, ancient Confucian China vs. Communist China vs. Western democracy. For Americans awaking to world consciousness in the late ‘70s, regular media perceptions of China became more frequent and accessible, making a dip in the dominant narrative of the Red Scare era.
The Open Door Policy was a two-way street: more foreign correspondents reporting on China, and China’s major media outlets approaching internationalization. The world began to see a radicalized and rapidly-evolving country in sound bites and clips of mass demonstrations and beatings, not unlike the way the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests have dominated headlines and airwaves these past couple weeks.
But focusing on that period alone is taking one erroneous extraction from a country’s complex national identity and complicated history. This also encourages the assumption that democracy was never supported in China prior to the late-70s.
At the turn of the last century, Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his multitudes successfully overthrew thousands of years of imperialism to establish the Republic of China. His Three Principles of the People — nationalism, democracy and the peoples’ livelihood — paved an enduring legacy of being one of the most universally well-respected political leaders in China’s history — even across the contentious Taiwan Strait.
Our perceptions don’t take history and its byproducts into account, the result of a fractured and incomplete narrative.
3. Chinese Americans have a place in China … because they’re Chinese, right?
A few weeks ago, I became an accomplished public transport navigator and taxi hailer while visiting Beijing, Wuhan, Xi’an, and Shanghai. My clumsy Mandarin made for a curious spectacle of a first impression on taxi drivers. Where was I from? Hong Kong? Korea? I was Chinese and from the U.S. — born there, I told them — but my parents were born in China.
When I described my family’s relatively recent migratory paths from Kunming and Wuhan in Southern and Central China, respectively, to Taipei, then to the U.S., they responded with their bottom line: “But are you Chinese or a foreigner?”
In a paradigm that is still foreign versus Chinese, the concept of a Chinese American or an American-born Chinese (ABC) is not universally understood, nor embraced in China.
The first ABC in my family immigrated to the states in 1955 to study at the University of Oregon, spent his whole life assimilating and then returned in 2000 after his wife passed to rebuild a new life in Wuhan, his birthplace. It was here that his life and family legacy would come full circle, but even with the expectation that the China today was not the China he knew, the Wuhan he returned to in the 21st century was so profoundly alienating to him that even 14 years later, he laments, “[the locals] still don’t accept me as Chinese.”
4. China will soon surpass America as the world’s greatest economic power.
China just can’t shake their Western brand identity, nor the world title given by the U.S. as our Eastern “peer competitor.” Even a few months ago, the Financial Times reported that “China is poised to pass [the] U.S. as [the] world’s leading economic power this year.”
But let’s not forget the obvious. China is still a developing nation, and poverty reduction is still a fundamental and colossal challenge in a nation of more than 1.39 billion. At the end of 2012, 98.99 million people still lived below the nation’s poverty line of 2,300 renminbing annually (that’s $375.56 a year).
Also, remember all that hand-wringing during the recession about China stealing U.S. jobs? In fact, later reports found that China was more likely helping the U.S. economy recover with a steep rise in unprecedented U.S. exports since 2003.
5. China is a military threat to the U.S.
The U.S. knows how to pick its friends. U.S.-backed Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan are rich with oil and other natural resources. These islands should feel very vulnerable to China, especially considering its “bloated” military budget and massive economic growth.
But the U.S.?
While it’s equally unclear to me what both countries’ motives are, I wonder who should be more afraid: A nation with advanced military operations, allies all over the world and a defense budget of $525.8 billion, or its supposed Eastern “peer competitor,” a nation with no neighboring allies, and a defense budget of $131.57 billion?
John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago on the advisory council of The National Interest, is looking at the big picture in his 2014 book, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.”
In one chapter dedicated to evaluating whether China can rise peacefully, Mearsheimer contends that China’s military power still pales in comparison with the U.S.’s. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has fought six wars: Iraq (1991), Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2011-present), Iraq again (2003-2011), and Libya (2011).
“Beijing would be making a huge mistake to pick a fight with the U.S. military nowadays. Contemporary China… is constrained by the global balance of power, which is clearly stacked in America’s favor,” Mearsheimer writes.
6. China is “out-educating” the U.S.
Never underestimate the dual powers of the model minority myth and U.S. Sinophobia. An otherwise routine release of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) flamed U.S. fears that too many other countries were “out-educating us,” in the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Thanks in part to ABC’s 2010 headlines, this went from myth to flat-out lie. “China beats U.S. in reading, math and science” and “China debuts at the top of international education rankings” were reports that cherry picked Shanghai’s and Hong Kong’s student performance, respectively.
This “China vs. U.S.” paradigm of popular reporting dismisses all of rural China and much of its non-rural population. From an impoverished Hubei province school requesting that students bring their own desks that year, to the disparity in per student funding between Beijing and Guizhou (Beijing’s is six times higher), what the U.S. sees in headlines and even more thoughtful Western reporting doesn’t even begin to describe the early state of evolution that China’s education system is in.
Leveling the playing field won’t happen overnight, or even in 20 years, but according to the World Bank, China has focused on ensuring universal education in the farthest reaches of its rural poor.
7. China hates the environment.
It’s hard to see through China’s infamous smog. Sixty-five percent of its energy is still extracted from coal, contributing to 10 billion tons of carbon emissions a year (though the U.S.’s emissions per capita are still higher).
Still, China is trying. Today, the nation stands as the No. 1 producer of wind and solar energy in the world, and has drafted a law that requires the grid to purchase 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. Sichuan metropolis Chengdu is attempting to build a “car-free” city. In increasingly international metropolises like Shanghai, a diverse global ingenuity feeds the booming social interest start-up culture. Though Shanghai has a long way to go, its transformation into a more sustainable city, as shown at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, stands as the chief model of its fruits.
Lesson learned: China cannot be understood with Western values.
Looking at China through a Western lens provides a pretty blurry picture. Imposing our own set of assumptions and values on a country so vast, so fast-evolving and so different than our own is problematic. Interpretations of ideas like “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” vary from generation to generation, province to province, ethnicity to ethnicity and even individual to individual. But on the other side of the Pacific and everywhere, freedom will always be something worth fighting for.
As hard as it is to grasp China’s shifting winds, we should at least try harder to understand their movement.
This was written several years ago so that might have played into it but there are several things here listed as “misunderstandings” that more or less feel like excuses to help the world better accept China. It is difficult for them to accept a China that runs the world. The west has spent a large amount of time and energy in rewriting that part of its history where China was the pinnacle of human society. And the major issue with that is that the west has had a strong man in charge problem since conception. When there is a powerful entity in the west that entity typically becomes a tyrant and tries to take over everything. United Greece, then Rome, France, Britain and now the US. To settle their nerves it does sound like a good idea to pretend China is a developing nation with a weak military and no friends. The sad thing is that anybody who went to school ever knows none of this has done much to stop or slow China down from being the biggest strong man one more time. Far back when China was by definition a third world country and barely scraping by they were magically able to get two military victories over the US at a time when the US was at its military peak. While the west has spent resources to stop the average man from learning about these things anybody that has ever stopped and thought about the Korean and Vietnam Wars would still fear China. The strategy you used doesn’t work.
Instead of going that route that has been a pitfall of many people trying to defend China why don’t we start educating the west about what it is like being a strong man nation the Chinese way? You mentioned how the US has been at war before during and even after the Red Scare born Cold War. They followed WWII by fighting Russia. They followed that by fighting in the middle east and africa along with constantly threatening Korea and China and once again Russia. In our Chinese heritage this is a “ba wang” or a tyrant. Ba wang are never going to last in terms of Chinese understanding. Back in China’s history there was a military conflict called the “Chu-Han Contention” that followed the downfall of the Qin Dynasty. (Speaking of which is that what you meant by the “first Qing” dynasty? You know they are totally separate and unrelated names right?) In the conflict the Chu regime was what remained of the Chu Kingdom from the Warring States Period which was destroyed by the Qin. After Chu and its allies which included the Han were able to overthrow the Qin the Chu decided they wanted things back to the way they were during the Warring States Period. Their commander and chief was a brilliant general named Xiang Yu but he did something that would haunt him forever in that conflict. Half out of necessity and half out of hating his enemies he ordered the live burial of 200 captured enemy soldiers. The act caused him to lose support to the Han who had been gaining territories through the act of defending and supporting them.
China is a history of rejecting tyrants and favoring and remembering benevolent leaders. If the west was able to figure that out then a rising Chinese power wouldn’t be scary at all. Take that same history of US war and put the time period onto China. After WWII which China only took part in because it was trying to free itself from the “8 Nation Alliance” China was involved in 3 wars. The first was Korea which only happened because China was afraid that America’s real motive for attacking the north was to conquer Korea to have a foothold to getting back into China. This was in 1950 only 1 year after China was finally under its own control again. After that war the next one was against India who was trying to take the opportunity of a weak new Chinese government to claim Chinese territories for itself. After that was the Vietnam War that America still tries not to talk about. This war was masked as an attempt by the US to “free Vietnam” but even back then it was obvious to many people that it was more Red Scare mentality and China considers it a second failed attempt to get a foothold into the country just like Korea before it. Ever since that war China’s been at relative peace with only things like Japanese or Filipino fishing boats entering Chinese waters and then claiming that those waters belong to their countries. The most offensive of these episodes was when Japan drew out a map of their sea borders and those borders pressed right against the entire eastern side of mainland China and basically wrapped around both Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. America defended this map. Actually besides the claims of its neighbors that its territories belong to them China has only had to deal with the US being another western strong man. From dirty tactics like blowing up a Chinese Embassy “by accident” to the many attempts at limiting its economic and political development the US has proven time and time again why the west is afraid of powerful nations.
It is our job not to excuse things and make up weaknesses that China doesn’t really have in order to stop them from worrying about another powerful nation trying to take over. We have to educate them that China’s history and behavior is almost point for point the opposite of what they know.
And that brings me to my next point. 2000 years of continuous history. First of all there’s no point in going by their numbers. China’s history as Chinese know it is around 5000 and it is a continous 5000 year history. Unlike the example and parallel you drew from Europe China doesn’t need to call on its Ancient Greek history and then its Roman history and then its Enlightenment history and so on. China’s history goes from one Chinese dynasty to the next. In fact its from that that China actually has its own version of how to bookend its continuous history. 2000 years is a number the west likes and you have used by stemming it from the first time a Chinese leader marked it as the start of the nation’s imperial history. Of course Qin was not the first dynasty at all. Qin followed the Warring States Period which is itself just the result of the loss of power in the Zhou Dynasty that came before it. The Zhou Dynasty existed in this time period almost to the end and the period was shortly ended by the rise of the Qin Dynasty. But even before Zhou was Shang and even before Shang was Xia and even before that you get where I’m going with this. That leads up to the 5000 year mark China agrees with. But the history goes even further. Look up on wikipedia how any country is described. In almost every article you should find a part about when “Neolithic tribes” settled on the lands. If that’s the ruler we use for a nation’s history than one more time unlike the west China can root that part of its history to a continous source too. At around 8000BC or 10000 years ago there existed artifacts that we have found showing the earliest versions of China’s most common utensils. Old forks (yes we used forks. They had two tines.) and combs, brushes, bowls and so on have been found and dated (by non-Chinese archaelogists too) to come from 6000-8000BC. This culture extended up to the first dynasty or the Xia Dynasty. So not only is it silly enough to use the easily disproven 2000 years but even China’s own 5000 year marker isn’t accurate to reflect how long China’s history really is.
It shouldn’t be something to hide from them that China’s that old. I think it is another statement about how China isn’t a threat to them. If we were ever going to try taking them over you’d think we’d have plenty of time. In fact recent discoveries have found that Chinese from as far back as the Shang Dynasty have been able to travel to the Americas and trade with Native American tribes. There was a historian that once said about the fear of a rising China that if China was ever going to try taking over the world there might have at least been some artifacts left behind when their fleets set sail around the world as far back as the Song Dynasty. But the only records of their presence in the world are their accurate world maps and a single tale about a giraffe that was taken from Africa on one of their expeditions.
Also don’t use democracy as some olive branch to them. The west might have been educated that democracy is somehow a magic pill any country needs to take to become a force of good but China’s had its own version of that even if the west portrays it poorly. It is called the “Mandate from Heaven.” Ominous words right? But what it really means if you look at it is very “democratic.” In a nutshell it states that a dynasty is only “allowed by the gods” to stay in power if they can deal with natural disasters well and meet the needs and demands of the people. If at any point the people are suffering the Mandate of Heaven is lost and it usually signals for a revolt. Many dynasties fell in the end due to overtaxation, cruelty or being unable to protect the people from some epidemic.
Now that I’ve written so much it has given me a little insight on why you have Number 3 there. I will agree westerners do consider us more Chinese than American but I’m not really sure if Chinese consider us more American than Chinese. I remember going to China and I was warmly received. In fact as long as I didn’t need to speak Mandarin they really appreciated how I was speaking the local dialect as well as I could. I had never been complimented so much for my poor Chinese but it turned out there was a very easy and pretty funny reason for it. As you know every generation comes up with their own slang. And many times that slang isn’t appreciated by the older generation. We are Chinese Americans. Our Chinese comes 100% from our parents and we are cut off from our peers in China so we don’t learn their slang. So when I at my age spoke using my parent’s Chinese to speak to them they thought I was raised well because I wasn’t saying things their kids were saying.
What I took from that was that Chinese are very accepting of you as long as you try to relate to them. There are Chinese Americans they don’t accept but it has nothing to do with not understanding or embracing Chinese Americans. More often from what I hear is that Chinese Americans tend not to embrace them and they’re not in any mood to oblige. For example that man who left the country in 1955 and assimilated into American society. By 2000 when he went back how accepting of 2000 China was he? You mentioned how he accepted that the China he knew wouldn’t be the China he went back to but how willing was he to reaccustom himself to it? Many stories I’ve heard were that the person returning home didn’t like the new customs or wondered why the foreign customs he picked up hadn’t caught on when China was “supposed to be modern” now. I had never known China the way my parents did but I had their stories and it was very different from the China I would visit. But I talked to the older generation who knew what I was talking about. I tried using their eyes to look at my generation and then try my best to fit in any pieces we might have in common. In the end being the same age with common interests in video games, movies and the internet were enough for me to fit in and I was able to get along with my parents generation because I had all the stories they’d told me fueling conversation topics I could talk to them about. (and again they really liked my older speech) There’s a saying in Chinese. Where you go is who you become. So maybe the man who left China in 1955 embraced the new life he had but by 2000 was too set in his ways to keep it up when he got back home.
Just like I said how we shouldn’t excuse our culture or history when helping the west accept us and not fear us we need to stop adhering to their expectations too. It isn’t enough to get them to stop looking at China through their western lens. We need to stop too. We need to explain ourselves as ourselves and not from their perspective. Explain the Mandate from Heaven and why democracy isn’t the only answer. Explain the benevolent superpower and why power doesn’t immediately mean corruption. Explain the Chinese American not the Chinese who uses American values in China. When we can do that I think those misunderstandings will go away. At the least the reasons behind them will come out and give them a chance to understand why they have them.