Whether I was greeted with, “welcome to China” everywhere I went like a guest of a small village; or asked by strangers for selfies to show off their new “foreign friend” on social media; or told by a young male hairdresser how honoured he was to cut my hair or had KTV (karaoke bar) employees kowtow or was accompanied by random Chinese to help me with ordering and eating in a cafeteria or on public transit or just daily life, China was different. Visiting a few years later, my son will never forget when were in the northeastern city of Harbin figuring out how to get to a tourist site. Out of the blue, a woman walked up and asked if we needed help. When she didn’t know which bus we needed to catch, she found a policeman who did. But it didn’t stop there. Then, both the woman and the policeman took us to the closest bus stop and the policeman told the driver where we needed to go. Once we got on the bus, we were instant celebrities with everyone looking out for us to make sure we didn’t miss where we needed to get off, and Harbin was a city of 10 million!
Even the first words my Chinese teacher taught me were lessons in harmony; “Ni hao mei nu” (Hello, beautiful girl) and “Ni hao shua ge” (Hello, handsome boy). Once I understood this was literally how one addressed a Chinese girl or boy one didn’t know, a stranger, my mind was transported to an earlier time of innocence, grace and gentility. How this medieval mindset coexisted with the ultra-modern 320 kilometre-per-hour bullet trains, skyscrapers and unrivalled modernity of its subways was baffling. After a few months, such a strong feeling of safety moved into me, I had to catch myself, more than once, fantasizing I could stretch out my arms, fall backwards and never hitting the ground because I’d been saved by a random Chinese person who had been watching me. It was no different on the first day of my university class when a student (and self-proclaimed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member) volunteered to be my classroom monitor to assist with class preparation (photocopying etc.) and other students jostled to help with day to day living and practice their English. Was this really the “police state” the Western media incessantly talked about?
Having grown up in one of the world’s youngest countries and Toronto, its most multicultural city, it was ironic how at home I felt in this most ancient and alien of civilizations that used ideagrams, ate bizarre foods like duck blood soup and engaged in complex banquet seating rituals. I’d however heard similar themes from other foreigners who’d mention a mysterious longing to return years after leaving China, and even read about it in Chinese history. For instance, in a translated version of, Dongjing meng Hua lu (Dreams for Episodes of Splendour of the Eastern Capital[1]), an authoritative book on affluent Chinese culture, Meng Yuanlao describes the congenial nature of Chinese, especially towards strangers in the ancient capital of Kaifeng 900 years ago:
There was such happy times, so many people and an abundance of things in the shops, the wonderful festivals, so many sights for the eye to enjoy, above all, I remember the humane and congenial character of the citizens, always ready to help a stranger.
The West has long believed, when China became wealthy, it would become a democracy, but this was based on defining China in Western terms. Not surprisingly, this caused the West to misunderstand China for the past 200 years. Initially, it was British, “Old China Hands” (OCHs) whose interactions with Chinese were superficial and limited to master-servant relationships that the West relied upon for understanding China. Then it was U.S. missionaries who were so zealous in raising money for bibles they convinced Americans that China was becoming Christian in what Churchill called, “the Grand American Delusion”.
Increasingly, there’s a consensus the West will never understand China if it isn’t understood in its own terms, in the context of Chinese civilization or Westerners will have little chance to know the real China, in history, or presently.
The differences between the West and China with respect to the nation state concept is but one example. China being an amalgam of the world’s oldest continuous civilization and a huge modern state with its super-large population, super-vast territory, super-long traditions and super-rich cultures, that blends the ancient with the modern has existed for thousands of years so Chinese view themselves as part of a civilization that existed long before the modern European notion of nation-state.
[1] Meng Yuanlao (1187). Trans. Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital
