Friendship means something more in China than in the west. It is a different experience, a delight in its sincerity and intensity but also a responsibility. It is hard to explain to a westerner who has never come under its spell. It doesn’t require constant maintenance, but when it is renewed, even after years of separation, it is understood that it is not just a lifetime commitment, but one that can transcend generations if properly observed. WeChat helps maintain these relationships, but the recent tightening of political control coming out of the 13th National People's Congress seems to be putting a damper on what we can say. You can just feel it, even though nothing is explicitly expressed. I know I will not lose touch with my friends anymore, but it feels like we are descending into another period of political estrangement, and even though our "WeChats" are innocuous and bland from a stranger's perspective, there is an undercurrent that wasn't there last year.
The major difficulty with maintaining friends with Chinese people in times like these is the fear that my publicly proclaimed opinions about, and strong disapproval of the dictatorial actions of the CCP will somehow taint my Chinese friends, cause some loss of preferment or other subtle punishment that can affect them. They claim when you see them not to be bothered by it, but just the same I try to be careful when chatting, even though if looked at objectively what I say is not related to them in the least. I know a bit about Chinese history, (with 3,000 years of continuous historical records - who can say they more know than “a bit”?) and I know it is presumptuous to judge that kind of continuity too hastily, but there is a ying and yang to that history, a cycle (天降大任) related to mandate of heaven, (天命) that China can't seem to escape. The curbs on political freedom in China deeply sadden me, and the harsh repression of those who break out of silence in China infuriates me. I hear the voices of those inside and outside China risking everything in their call for change. And I acknowledge those who say that to ignore or gloss over it, is to be complicit with it on some level.
Still - it isn’t really all that simple. I speak Chinese well enough to converse with non-English speakers on more than a superficial level, and what I heard when I was there last year was not outrage so much as resignation and a willingness to give the devil his due. I talked to strangers in restaurants, people on trains, people who helped me in ways small and large and the sum of it was - they know what is happening, they have an awareness of the repression but always put it in the larger context, the crux of which is - it is so much better now than before. Right now China is more prosperous than it has ever been. That it is freer in an economic sense cannot be denied. People can rise based on their own merits in ways that were never possible before. China is respected on the international stage and there is pride in that. This is no small thing.
It is clear to me that CCP is from an internal perspective a patriotic organization, and the majority of its pronouncements and policies are aimed at benefiting the majority of the Chinese people. It is, for the most part, rational and not driven by racist hate or even xenophobia. After our most recent election, perhaps, the CCP says, and I can not disagree, we liberals in the US need to fix things at home before we go looking for evil on the other side of the world to oppose. Besides, the last fifty years should teach us all that pressuring China on its domestic policies doesn’t work.
I can go on and justify China’s domestic policies by looking at its history and how it has reaped a lot of harm from western ideas that got warped when transferred to a Chinese context (see the underlying “Christian” ideology of the Taiping, whose revolt in the mid-19th century might have killed more people than any war in history. Or, even consider Marxism, another “Western” idea). But I have already stained myself in the eyes of some as a dupe of the Chinese Communist Party so perhaps I should just stop here. Being a cowed useful idiot is not something anyone who wants to think himself to be. I have read Ma Jin's scathing criticisms of Westerns who kowtow (磕头)to Beijing. It is very easy to understand his viewpoint.
But for me, I want to be with Zhivago, and move to the countryside with Julie Christie, and pretend none of it is happening. As I get older I find my active politics ends at the shores of the US. I feel perfectly justified at raging against the US government and everything Trump is doing, vilifying him, satirizing him, calling for his impeachment and the jailing of him, his family and henchman at the soonest moment possible. But other than shaking my head sadly at the rise of dictators elsewhere, I stay out of other countries' business.
You can make the old “What about Hitler?” argument. If I had been alive in the 30s, would I have condemned the Nazis for their racist, anti-semitic policies in the years before we knew about the Holocaust? Would I have called for boycotting everything German in those days? If the world had united and condemned them at the time, might it have had an effect? (I stare back blankly, sheepishly…acknowledging that standing against evil might really not be as complicated as I pretend.)
But contrariwise, look at Mesopotamia in the post-Bush(Jr) era. Look at what American Exceptionalism led to - maybe a million dead and a society destroyed. Many people the world over are tired of American “do-goodisms” and see us sticking our noses in other countries affairs as insulting and in the long run counterproductive to the long-term struggle of the people who actually have to live in the countries involved. I can’t see that far ahead, and history is always a surprise, so we make our choices and take our chances.
Anyway, for those of us who care about the well being and happiness of our friends to the exclusion of protesting against the government's they live under, we probably have a lot to answer for, but would in any event anyway.
The major difficulty with maintaining friends with Chinese people in times like these is the fear that my publicly proclaimed opinions about, and strong disapproval of the dictatorial actions of the CCP will somehow taint my Chinese friends, cause some loss of preferment or other subtle punishment that can affect them. They claim when you see them not to be bothered by it, but just the same I try to be careful when chatting, even though if looked at objectively what I say is not related to them in the least. I know a bit about Chinese history, (with 3,000 years of continuous historical records - who can say they more know than “a bit”?) and I know it is presumptuous to judge that kind of continuity too hastily, but there is a ying and yang to that history, a cycle (天降大任) related to mandate of heaven, (天命) that China can't seem to escape. The curbs on political freedom in China deeply sadden me, and the harsh repression of those who break out of silence in China infuriates me. I hear the voices of those inside and outside China risking everything in their call for change. And I acknowledge those who say that to ignore or gloss over it, is to be complicit with it on some level.
Still - it isn’t really all that simple. I speak Chinese well enough to converse with non-English speakers on more than a superficial level, and what I heard when I was there last year was not outrage so much as resignation and a willingness to give the devil his due. I talked to strangers in restaurants, people on trains, people who helped me in ways small and large and the sum of it was - they know what is happening, they have an awareness of the repression but always put it in the larger context, the crux of which is - it is so much better now than before. Right now China is more prosperous than it has ever been. That it is freer in an economic sense cannot be denied. People can rise based on their own merits in ways that were never possible before. China is respected on the international stage and there is pride in that. This is no small thing.
It is clear to me that CCP is from an internal perspective a patriotic organization, and the majority of its pronouncements and policies are aimed at benefiting the majority of the Chinese people. It is, for the most part, rational and not driven by racist hate or even xenophobia. After our most recent election, perhaps, the CCP says, and I can not disagree, we liberals in the US need to fix things at home before we go looking for evil on the other side of the world to oppose. Besides, the last fifty years should teach us all that pressuring China on its domestic policies doesn’t work.
I can go on and justify China’s domestic policies by looking at its history and how it has reaped a lot of harm from western ideas that got warped when transferred to a Chinese context (see the underlying “Christian” ideology of the Taiping, whose revolt in the mid-19th century might have killed more people than any war in history. Or, even consider Marxism, another “Western” idea). But I have already stained myself in the eyes of some as a dupe of the Chinese Communist Party so perhaps I should just stop here. Being a cowed useful idiot is not something anyone who wants to think himself to be. I have read Ma Jin's scathing criticisms of Westerns who kowtow (磕头)to Beijing. It is very easy to understand his viewpoint.
But for me, I want to be with Zhivago, and move to the countryside with Julie Christie, and pretend none of it is happening. As I get older I find my active politics ends at the shores of the US. I feel perfectly justified at raging against the US government and everything Trump is doing, vilifying him, satirizing him, calling for his impeachment and the jailing of him, his family and henchman at the soonest moment possible. But other than shaking my head sadly at the rise of dictators elsewhere, I stay out of other countries' business.
You can make the old “What about Hitler?” argument. If I had been alive in the 30s, would I have condemned the Nazis for their racist, anti-semitic policies in the years before we knew about the Holocaust? Would I have called for boycotting everything German in those days? If the world had united and condemned them at the time, might it have had an effect? (I stare back blankly, sheepishly…acknowledging that standing against evil might really not be as complicated as I pretend.)
But contrariwise, look at Mesopotamia in the post-Bush(Jr) era. Look at what American Exceptionalism led to - maybe a million dead and a society destroyed. Many people the world over are tired of American “do-goodisms” and see us sticking our noses in other countries affairs as insulting and in the long run counterproductive to the long-term struggle of the people who actually have to live in the countries involved. I can’t see that far ahead, and history is always a surprise, so we make our choices and take our chances.
Anyway, for those of us who care about the well being and happiness of our friends to the exclusion of protesting against the government's they live under, we probably have a lot to answer for, but would in any event anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment