My posts from here on out won't be like this, and I don't intend to offend anyone with this. Yes, there is a difference between intention and effect, but I'm fed up and want to get this off my chest. Don't get me wrong, I still love China. But some days it just rubs me the wrong way.
Today was one of those days. I was standing in my neighborhood, waiting for a friend to come down from his 6th floor apartment, marveling at the way light diffused through the twilit fog while a bunch of Chinese kids and one of their parents were playing speed badminton in the park across from me. The game wasn't anything worth watching, as I've spent more than a year living in China and it's a common occurrence. But one of the small boys decided to shout out and point with his racket, "看！老外！" "Look! A foreigner!" It happens so often here that I normally ignore the exclamation, sometimes I even joke and describe myself as such, a foreigner. There's nothing wrong with that, right? ...right? This time though, it struck me wrong. Why is that okay?! Before you say, "Sterling, stop being so sensitive, it's just what they do here in China. It's the nice way of saying it. It's not 洋鬼子, (foreign devil,) anymore. Just relax," let me just compare that with America. Would you point out someone's foreignness? Would you treat them as a second class citizen? The answer should be no. That little boy pointing to me and exclaiming with such glee at how I differed from him just because of my looks got me fuming. Why didn't the parent stop him and say, that's rude? Because they don't view me the same way they see themselves. As a foreigner, I'm just a novelty to the average citizen. And if you come to China without being Chinese, you'll be a novelty as well. But novelties aren't quite human. When I first came here, I thought it was so cool, to be so different, to be able to talk with Chinese and get special treatment. But the special treatment doesn't last. Now I just want to be treated as an equal. It's exhausting not to be.
In a blog I wrote 5 years ago, I said being in China was like being in the US during the 50's because everyone was so nice. Well, it's also like being in the 50's because of the general attitude to foreign minorities. If you speak with anyone here in Chinese, they'll say, regardless of how fluent your Chinese is, "Wow, your Chinese is great!" As if they're surprised, like they believe that the language is too hard for other people to learn. (About 1/6 of the planet speaks it.) But some people have heard plenty of foreigners speak and won't really comment anymore, but if a foreigner expresses an opinion or an idea, something that actually makes sense, the reaction their face betrays is like wow, who knew a foreigner had such grand ideas like that? If you replace "foreigner" with any racial slur you can think of, all of the sudden it sounds like antebellum society in the states, or a WWII internment camp, (be it Japanese in the states, or concentration camps in Germany.) I don't care if you say they don't mean it like that; I'm still being treated differently because of how I look. Should I just relax and take that?
Why, though? How could an entire society develop that is this blatantly racist and not think anything of it, nor receive any mention from the rest of the world? It's time to look back at the books to figure that out.
Let's start with the Middle Kingdom as Chinese refers to China in Mandarin. Simply put, there was a sea to the east and mountains to the west and nothing beyond them. They were the center of their world. What could barbarians wandering in from the wastes possibly offer to a great entity as the kingdom between the Himalayas and the Pacific? For a long time, there really was nothing to offer, Chinese society was a melting pot, with differing ideas and cultures flourishing under the pre-dynasty, pre-unified system. Then Qinshihuang, (the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, the emperor who united China under him through a standardization of characters, measurements and governmental powers,) took power. He took all the books and ideas that weren't ones he identified with and got rid of them. This mainly left Confucian thought. Dong Zhongshu helped with this by banning everything that wasn't Confucian. This all happened around 259 B.C.E. If you look at the books that remain after such a purge, China is left with "The Book of Changes," "The Analects," and about 7 other books. It's like Ray Bradbury based "Fahrenheit 451" off of B.C.E. China. For 2 thousand years the Chinese coveted these remaining books, placing the same amount of importance on them as a religious person would on the Bible. These books were meant to teach you everything one needed to know in life. To become an official in the Chinese government, one had to pass an exam that only tested how well you knew these classics. That test, (the civil service examination,) was abolished in 1905 by Empress dowager Cixi, and only because Yuan Shikai urged her to do so. That is 2000+ years of reading the same seven books over and over and over and over again. Could you imagine if the west only had Plato's Republic yet scholars were encouraged NOT to think about it, and ideas that showed individuality were cut down for breaking with the old ways? Where would we be? No Locke, no Voltaire, nothing, nothing, NOTHING. We would think like we did back then. We wouldn't be innovative. We'd just sit and pat ourselves on the back at how well we memorized the Republic, but not think about what it meant. Socrates wouldn't have come up with the Socratic Method! And then where would we be?
So looking back at China and the undeveloped line of thought, why is it so prevalent that a society be this racist? Well, to be blunt, they haven't changed how they think in 2000+ years. They still view us as those people from not the Middle Kingdom. "But that's not right! There have been big changes since then! The civil service exam ended in 1905, and then the dynastic system ended 6 years later! They surely have changed since then!" says the dissenting voice in the crowd. In the 60's and 70's, despite trying to get rid of Confucian thought, the Chinese method of analysis still used a dichotomous method, eerily akin to Yin and Yang, (一分为二.) That was mandated by Mao himself. It shows how deeply the culture was written in their bones; the fault was with a societal system that was propagated for that long. Look at Yuan Shikai, (the guy who advocated for the end of the civil service exam mentioned above.) He was supposed to lead China out of the dynastic system and into a more modern era. Rather, he ended up trying to a start a new dynasty with him at the head. People still wanted to be emperor despite that that was something everyone was trying to actively avoid.
How then do you prevent something that the offender's aren't even aware they're doing? Write an essay? Hah. I don't have any idea. Yes, there are educated people in China. Yes, there are respectful people in China. But there were the same kind of people in 1950's USA. Sometimes, when I get fed up with all the things that get written off as being "just a China thing," I think of myself as a warrior of civil rights, trying to get the same level of respect for all foreigners in China as the Chinese have for themselves. I know it's absurd, some white kid trying to get equal rights, to be treated like the rest of a nation, but I guess that's my 中国梦, my Chinese Dream.
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