My thoughts on China

Let me make it clear first: I love my country. I am so VERY proud to be Chinese. You may think otherwise after reading what I have to say, but do not for one second doubt my love for my country or my people. I just don't like those who are currently in power, period. And there isn't much the populace can do about that (not without lots of bloodshed anyway.)

I have read and thought about my country a lot in the past few years. The sheer history of the thing is over-powering. And that is before we even get into things like culture, literature, art, and, to me the most important thing of all, what lays in China's future. The Chinese culture, well, what can I say, is simple amazing to be a part of. It is so vibrant, so full of life, yet so steeped in tradition. Literture, something I am quite fond of, is also overwhelming. One can spend a whole life time studying parts of it, but only to gain a peek at a tip of the iceberg. But many of this lay in the past. I am more concerned with the future. In my not-so-humble opinion, us Chinese have for too long, wasted too much time reveling in our past, however glorious and beautiful it might be. In doing so, many have lost sight of the future and how we can shape it.

One thing I absolutely despise is the fact that many Chinese, even today, still cannot shake the mentality that "ours is a great culture with a long history, so we don't need to learn from others." Wrong! Face it, we fucked up. Big time! Can you imagine a country that had no advanced for practically 2,000 years in most aspects to be equipped with what is necessary to deal with the modern world? Our ancestors fucked up by closing the door to the West, by warring amongst ourselves when we should be strengthening ourselves and learning from others. Mao Ze-dong, that prick (such a puny word for what I would like to express), fucked China up good when his head grew too big for his shoulders and started such hare-brained schemes as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultrual Revolution. Call me an ungrateful anti-revolutionary. I am sure that's what the Chinese government would call me (if they cared.) God knows how many years he has set China back, when we could have learned and advanced and be on top of the world by now. He destroyed an entire generation of Chinese, and the detrimental effects are still being felt today, and will be felt for years to come. What I can not for the life of me comprehend is why do people in China today still revere and respect him, after all that he has done? Whatever good he did before, he was a monster in the end, period. Him and his lackeys, the Gang of Four. Granted that is all over, and China seems to be on the right track now, but still, there is SO much catching up to do. I would love to see the day when China can actually rival the States in everyway, but I seriously doubt I will see that day in my lifetime.

Granted, we were once the Middle Kingdom, the Centre of Our Own Little Universe. That changed when the likes of Matteo Ricci came to China. The many battles, unequal treaties, foreign invasions, the Opium War, the Japanese invasion, all proved that we, as a country, sucked. Many had tried to change that. Even today, many Chinese scholars and intelligentsia are still searching for a way to help China fit into and learn from the modern world. By that, I don't mean just technology and science. We have done well in these aspects. I am talking about picking ourselves up by the bootstrap and joining the modern world as a responsible, rational player. So far, I don't see signs of that happening yet, thanks to the gerontocrats of the Commuist Party. These people still hold to the idea that China, as a nation of 1.2 billion, can pretty well do what we damn please. Witness the 1989 students massacre, the Spratly Islands dispute, the "missile exercise" in Taiwan Strait, the smug face of Wu Yi during trade negotiations with USA (or any Chinese official during any official function), the Britain-bashing by the Xin Hua News Agency over matters concerning Hong Kong's handover. It pains me to see my country run by such a bunch of megalomanic idiots. Granted a country's government should protect its own interest, but there are certain standards of rational behaviour and decency that should be upheld for participating in world stage, aren't there?

One thing us Chinese are very good at is in-fighting. After all, there are now 1.2 billion of us. This is of course another cultural tradition, since we have been doing this for hundreds, thousands of years. When presented with a foreign enemy, we can be pretty damn united if we wanted to. But without such a threat, man, we fight like children. Mostly for power, of course. And usually, the battle operate under the principal "might is right." Witness two Chinese arguing, and more often than not, the one who shouts the loudest emerges victorious. You can see this at all levels of the Chinese society: within the Communist government; the students at Tiananmen Square, 1989; any Chinese Students Association in Canada; and even dissident organizations striving for democracy in China; etc. There seems to be this yearning for some one individual to take control, possibly another cultrual heritage from thousands of years of Imperial rule. I have been to many a students organizations meetings in Canada, and often the first thing was to elect a leader. And often, if someone knew s/he wasn't gonna win, s/he will pull out of the process all together. And once someone won, s/he will start to act like s/he owned the joint. This is why so many Chinese people insist that democracy, in the Western tradition, can never work in China. Witness Taiwan, Singapore, China, all places with a Chinese government. What they have in common is a virtual-dictatorship. A central figure, who wields great power over the rest of the governing institutions, is always present. Whoever says dynastic rule is dead in China doesn't know what he is talking about: what do you think Mao Ze-dong and Deng Xiaoping were but virtual-emperors? Is democracy the best thing since sliced bread? Probably not, but its the best system we can conceive of today. Can we ever achieve some sort of democratic, or even representative government in China? I certainly hope so. Eventually. But my guess is it will be decades before that come to be. And have you seen news footage of what a parliamentary session looks like in Taiwan? It is like watching a bunch of grown up juvenile delinquents running a country. How do they resolve severe political differences? They beat the crap out of each other in the parliament. I am talking about physical assault here. Funny to watch on TV, but pretty sad when you think about it.

Which brings me to another thing. Everybody seems so hot on China these days. The Chinese century. A market of 1.2 billion people. The next economic giant. What many don't realize is just how backwards most areas in China are still. I am talking mostly about the intangibles here, such as mental attitudes. For example, the idea of civic duty is, for all intents and purpose, absent. Take Guangzhou, for example, the city closest to Hong Kong, with a booming economy. People there are among the wealthiest in the country, so you would expect that they would have more of a sense of civic duty? Wrong. Its every man (or woman) for himself (or herself). Why do you think corruption is so rampant in China? I am convinced that it is not something the government can root out (since half the government is corrupt itself.) It's this "Guan Xi" (relationship/contact) thing. If you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who could get what you wanted, you went for it. End of story. Never mind that you might've jumped a queue of five thousand in doing so. That's simply how things are done in China. Screw the "proper channels." Work ethics is something else I have noticed. There is none. For example, I stayed in a hospital in Guangzhou for 14 days after a renal transplant in what was supposed to be an intensive care unit. Many of the nurses came on their shifts, first thing they did was take a nap. Then, if you complained about some discomfort, their responses will often be somthing like "that's expected after an operation, deal with it best you can." Holy shit, these are medical professionals? They are in China. They get paid the same regardless, so why work too hard, right? Of the 10 and some nurses I met there, only 2 of them cared enough to console the patients and made them feel like human beings. This attitude is the same across the board, workers in China (at least in the Pearl River delta area) will follow instructions to the tee, but will not go one step further under any circumstances. If say, as a factory owner, you expect them to show some initiative or creativity in their work, say in dealing with contingencies, you would be so very sorely disappointed. These attitudes are not something that can be changed overnight. It takes education, lots of it, over generations. That is why I give the general population of China at least 100 years before it has the possibility of catching up.

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