By popular demand, I’m going to start posting excerpts from my China Trip journal. I say “excerpts” because not all of the 40-plus pages of trip notes are blog material (believe me, you don’t care what I ate on the plane.) However, I thought I would pick and choose a few highlights and post them.
But first: a prologue.
Just this morning, CNN ran a story about the whole kerfuffle that happened yesterday at the last stop on the Olympic Torch journey in Lhasa. Apparently a very high-ranking Chinese official took the opportunity to offend most of the world by going off about the fact that Tibet would always be under the red 5-star flag, and then firing a few verbal shots at the Dalai Lama. Having reported that, the CNN reporter took the following shot at the Chinese people:
The torch relay has been accompanied throughout by enthusiastic, sometimes bordering on hysterical, shows of nationalist fervor. Flag-waving young Chinese mobbed international stages of the relay, often confronting pro-Tibet or human rights protesters, sometimes violently. The domestic stages have been surrounded by a sea of red and yellow national flags.
There is no doubt that the Chinese official went way overboard spouting the party line in a completely inappropriate situation, and it sounds as though he’s as big a jerk as some of our own official jackasses. I hate the Tibet situation as much as anyone (perhaps more, since my spiritual teachers have overwhelmingly been either literally Tibetan, or from that tradition.) However, I have to make a comment about the CNN reporter’s spin on the Chinese public’s reaction to the torch relay.
A good reporter can put any kind of spin on any story. Whether they should or not is another question – the important thing is to recognize when “spin” is being put on something. This reporter has “spun” the last paragraph to make it sound as if the Chinese are a bunch of screaming meemies ready to erupt into violence at any moment. (He conveniently left out the fact that a lot of the international pro-Tibet protestors were violent as well – even HH the Dalai Lama remarked about that, and expressed sadness about it.)
But as far as the Chinese people’s enthusiasm about the Olympics: “Hysterical shows of nationalistic fervor” are not what I saw. I saw “massive, excited crowds displaying a huge rush of patriotic pride.” Sounds different, doesn’t it? Well, it’s the same damned thing. And guess what, dude: I was there, standing IN several of those enthusiastic-sometimes-bordering-on-hysterical crowds.
Please imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you have grown up in a country that was pretty much closed off politically from the rest of the world, for reasons that have nothing to do with you or most of your own generation. Then, over a 25-year period, an almost unbelievable amount of change happens. In your grandparents’ day, the average family income was the equivalent of 50 bucks a month. For your parents, though, the situation improved to around 500 bucks a month. (I was told by one young Chinese person that in her parent’s youth, the three markers of a family’s financial success were whether they owned three things: a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine.) In one generation, they have gone from that, to having cell phones, cars, decent educations, and a lot of other nice stuff that would have been considered unimaginable one generation ago. Yes, their Internet is censored, but at least they have it-- they can get some idea of what the rest of the world is like. The country is immeasurably more open than it was a generation ago, and they know it. You know how our politicians are always yammering about “Is your life better than it was 10 years ago?” Well, guess what: theirs IS, and they’re pretty damned happy about it. This is not to deny the human rights abuses, the oppressive governmental stuff, the Tibet issue, the dreadful environmental record, melamine in the pet food, or anything else – I’m just trying to explain why there might be such an explosion of feel-good national pride happening amongst the Chinese. Expressions like “nationalistic fervor” and “flag waving young Chinese mobbed international stages of the relay” are calculated to cast a negative light on the entire matter. If you would like to see nationalistic fervor and flag waving mobs, I invite you to any number of patriotic American events, and I doubt that an obvious foreigner at any one of those events would be treated with as much friendliness and courtesy as Coyotebanjo, Coop and I were when we were caught in the “mobs” in Suzhou and Yangzhou. Oh, and speaking of the word “mob” – have you ever been in a country of 1.3 billion people? Any interesting event becomes a “mob.” Hell, rush hour is a mob – try driving in Shanghai.
All I’m asking is that we use some discrimination. For the last 50 years our press has been describing Asia as if contained nothing but bloodthirsty commie lunatics, crowds running amok like extras in a giant Godzilla movie, a few kick-ass Kung Fu guys and the occasional Zen master. This is about as accurate as imagining all Americans as filthy rich, xenophobic, six-shootin’ Bible-thumpin’ flag-wavin’ white cowboys. Folks, we’ve got to communicate, and we can’t communicate unless we try to foster some kind of cultural understanding.
And if you don’t think that’s important, hold this sobering thought: there are way, way, WAY more of Them than Us.
No comments:
Post a Comment