by Anne Teoh for the Saker blog

China is a country one wants to repeat when saying its name; much as Trump did when he enunciated, “ China… China… ” in his interview by the press in 2017. If you’re connected to China in any way, you would have an intrinsic understanding what repeating the name ‘China, China ,“ signifies, for that is similar to the way the Chinese repeat the name of a child, implying much affection, like Lang Lang or Fei Fei,. Enunciating the country’s name twice is quite a satiated feeling; it carries a lot more weight than emotional attachment. The first utterance ‘China,’ rolls out the visual impact of ‘shan shui,’ of the vast rolling geophysics of land, mountains and sky – a concept of the classical landscapes; then, when one repeats its name, one can’t stop wondering or being amazed by the sheerness of what it is, all that is humanity in a civilization.

A Chinese proverb runs , “Zuo ren nan, nan zuo ren,” meaning “It’s difficult to be human, it’s human to be difficult.” When I watched Trump drawl out, ‘China, China…” (He did that very well), I smiled at the double-syllabic pronunciation and the depth of Sino socio-cultural semantics but Trumph’s verbal nuances might be different altogether.

There’s a group in the UK that’s called Society for Anglo- Chinese Understanding (SACU) which does good work in building understanding and trust between the two countries for people who care to know. I’m not a historian, sociologist, economist or a politician. I was an educator, and now a well-read member of the public in human civilization. I hope to contribute towards the importance of understanding among different countries, but more so, being from the English-speaking Chinese community, I have an inherent and instinctive knowledge of China and its long history to impart. I have worked and lived in China for seven months and had traveled widely, within and without.

There’s an adage that says, “Understanding the principle of things stops the pain,” which I used to believe whole-heartedly; but in today’s deep state, we don’t know for sure what to believe anymore; nevertheless, we must remember to stay positive and connected to the good side; and in doing so, there’s time to clarify our perceptions and share our thoughts and ideas.

For the last forty years, I noticed that it’s not usual that another country and its people are so defiled in the media as China and the Chinese – in the dark days of the 80s since the Tian An Men debacle, throughout the 90s and to this day. The history files are rich with notorious names – Fu Man Chu, Yellow Peril, Red Threat, Mass Murderer, the Butcher, Organ Harvesting, Dog and Cat eaters etc; frightening labels. I would be fair to say some of these, in themselves, like dog and cat eaters and harvesting organs have a truth verification, of maybe up to 20% at most e.g. organ harvesting, which needed to be presented in context e.g. harvesting organs of accident victims or murderers hanged for life sentences had their organs donated to save lives. Similarly, I, and I know whole communities of Chinese people, do not eat dog or eat meat; many don’t even eat beef or lamb. However, the harm done in the media have synonymously equated Chinese to such racist type slogans like Dictator, Mass Murderer, Dog Eater, Rote Learning etc. Fortunately, such racist branding remains a one-dimensional creation used to inflict insult, horror and hurt as slogans but have no bearings for meaningful communication.

Chinese who are English speakers might feel some psychological pressures, but the mainland Chinese are protected by their government’s screening and firewall. China bashing and anti- China propaganda have limited or no effect on the main land Chinese’s psyche but ironically, it instills mistrust and alienation and might nurture patriotism for China among some overseas Chinese. Most of all, it drives the well-informed to study the facts – fait accompli, and question the fairness and justification- Overseas, mainland, Chinese or not.

The sheer smear of ‘The Dying Room’ (Channel 4, BBC, HBO 1995) exaggerated hyperbolically the cruelty in poor Chinese orphanages where there were some sick, and terminally ill children put into homes hastily put up when China was going through its aftermath of the One Child Policy; which, I believe, was implemented on the advice given by the UN of the threat of famine if China did nothing to curb its population explosion. However, due to rural Chinese’s feudal bias for male offspring, many baby girls were left on the streets. Babies born with defects at birth were dumped by the heartless parents too. The government responded to this social ill by opening up ‘baby hatches’ and orphanages, which were usually under staffed in bare buildings and basic facilities – China at that time was still in the grip of poverty. The media zoned in on the worst case scenario and focused on the terminally ill babies which were then blown up to imply that babies were left to die as a general practice in the country. ‘The Dying Room,’ affected a powerful political stigma against human rights, using pictures and narratives framed to that effect. However, after watching the programme, we were not fully convinced that healthy children were just left to die, however well the camera was manipulated. One suspects, the general public was less than 50% duped into such belief; that would have been easy, following the trail of ‘the Butcher’ in the Tian An Men debacle.

Yet, the opposite was true of the China that sacrificed millions of lives and stood up against imperialist wars, uplifted 650 million out of poverty; took in the garbage of the world and turned them into useful things by polluting itself, manufacturing solar panels to help avoid climate change, opening up to joint partnerships globally etc. The reality is actually about a China that gives almost everything to the world at cheap prices thereby helping the poor everywhere to be well clothed and have amazing toys at Christmas… yet the defamation continues to this day about autocracy, dictatorship, Chinese copycats, cheap goods and stealing jobs: from downright childish blaming by adult politicians to the more subtle ambiguities like, “We got China Wrong…” using exclusive referential and a sinister alarm bell. The irony so seeped in anti-China rhetoric is totally out of context when one considers the benevolent deeds of China, its WinWin policy for co-operation and peaceful development and their act of opening up the AIIB, Silk Road and BRI to the world, as well as being a big lender taking little or no interest, to needy and developing countries.

Fast forward into the contemporary scenario, we find that the daily menace of China bashing had galvanized a counter defence, that even prompted Gweilo 60 to speak out his experience as the Canadian husband of his Chinese wife in a video clip on You tube under the rhetorical question, “Does the rest of the world discriminate against the Chinese?” He does a walk the talk rendition ( with the real China in the background wherever he moves) and exposes the main channels of discrimination against the Chinese people, institutionally from the governments of the US, Canada and Australia which are well-known historically as is also written in Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, “Chinamen,” and most history resources. The Chinese were singled out and prevented from migrating to these new-found lands through different kinds of legislative sanctions.

An extension of this form of racism against the Chinese race would be the other post-colonial countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia where laws were scripted in the constitution, drawn by the departing Dutch and British colonials, to exclude the Chinese and other races from equal rights to land, resources, fundings and power, diverting them to be prioritized for the natives. It was rationalized that entitlement to land, resources funding and power should be vested in the rights of the Muslim ‘bumiputra’ Malays against the Chinese community, who are economically more successful than the natives even though most Chinese, and Indians, were Malaysian born decades of generations back and many are poor and living below the poverty line.

I grew up in Malaysia largely semi-aware of bumiputra ( sons of the soil) rights and potential flare-ups between the Malays and other races, but I had a fairly happy existence. Apart from the usual name-calling reported in the media from some racial kerfuffles, usually from politically active groups, there was a multicultural awareness and harmony in diversity. That was largely because the issues of racism, sexism, socialism or capitalism were political constructs more widespread in western society. Most Malaysians cherish peace and harmony and there’s respect for each other and good relations among the different races. In my time, there were some politicians speaking out about racism and unequal rights but that didn’t really sink in for me to think that they affected our lives; perhaps mainly because we all got by through education and found our niches in universities and the job markets fairly easily. It was only when we graduated and mixed around that we understood most of those rights were related to ‘privileges,’ and therefore, non-Bumiputras didn’t have the same opportunities galore meted out to the Malays; perhaps except for the lucky ones. By then, many educated Chinese would have emigrated or find jobs in other countries of the English-speaking world, causing subtractive empowerment and a brain drain. This category of Chinese emigres were particularly those born before independence, an English-educated generation misplaced in the transition to the national language or Bahasa Melayu. Today, in spite of the inherent disadvantages, eight out of the ten top billionaires in Malaysia listed by Forbes are of Chinese descent.

There’re subtle differences between main land Chinese (1.6 billion?) and the Chinese of the diaspora world wide (46 million). Generally English-educated, overseas Chinese knew little or nothing about what’s going on in the mainland and vice versa. As a teenager, I had wondered from time to time what main land China and its Chinese people were like. I’m partly ‘peranakan,’ – native born for more than five generations, and my English education meant I was mainly westernized. According to history, the Chinese had migrated to the Sunda Shelf ‘Nusantara’ archipelago since 200 B.C. and perhaps before that into prehistory. But in the 70s, whenever I looked in the library for information or books about modern China ( I imagined the period after the last Qing Dynasty), all I could find were Confucius or the ancient dynasties.

Did I identify myself as Chinese, Malaysian or British in my youth? It’s really far more sensitive and complex than generally assumed. Whatever, the invisible western influenced China Wall ensured no news could be had of anything going on inside China.

Personally, I didn’t think of myself as Chinese, Malay or British but I was aware we spoke a lot of English, that I was part of a Chinese family and that there were also Malays, Indians, Eurasians and westerners around. I grew up with a multi-cultural mindset but even then, I had a subconscious awareness that China and the Chinese would be a homogenous country, mainly from my recognition of the later arrivals of Chinese immigrants who I heard being labelled as “China born’ Chinese, every now and then.

I grew up to observe that this group mainly wore Chinese style samfoo – trousers and top with qibao collars and split sides; the older people usually wore dark wide trousers and longer tops with lower qibao collars , ornamental Chinese hook-up cloth buttons and split sides; some of the women had bound feet which was a curiousity even at that time. There were also Chinese servants with long braids, wide black trousers and white tops with long sleeves. They worked for the very rich and in my adolescent eyes, they were vessels of the real Chinese culture, as I then could judge by their clothing, hair styles and kind of cooking and social interactions. They stood with straight backs, were more formal, controlled and cohesive as a group and they shared the same language, usually Hokkien, Cantonese or Hakka, usually in a lingo more difficult for me to understand. They used chopsticks and ate quietly whereas we used forks and spoons and sometimes engaged in domestic talk at meal times. Compared to the “China born”, the peranakans and Malaysian Chinese were much more casual in their social interactions, laughing a lot and conversing freely, speaking their minds. The China-born mainland Chinese were restraint, ceremonial and carried with them the air of civilized social behavior seeped in the Confucian, Daoist and dynastic culture of an imperial country.

So, in tracing current day practices to the past, one draws from the neutral mind of early childhood impressions and try to rationalize the development based in contexts that go beyond ethnic, national, socio-cultural, political and linguistic borders. Why should China and the Chinese be feared at all? In the next article, I shall define some observed traits of the Chinese and their community in various countries based on their lives, tradition, culture, language and deeds.
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References:

Gweilo 60, Youtube 2018 : Does the Rest of the World Discriminate Against the Chinese?
Maxine Hong Kingston : ChinaMen
Padraig Joseph MacGrath : Soft Power: Rising Chinese Dominance in the Sciences