Cultural Perspectives

I had an awfully good conversation with my Dad on Skype the other day, and I think that I ought to share some of the thoughts that arose from it.

How to put this? Chinese and Americans often don't understand one another very well. Intellectually, it's a no-brainer. But experiencing it first-hand has been interesting. For example:

I've started to make a group of Chinese friends. They're BeiWai students like me, only studying English full-time instead of Chinese. This is pretty convenient since we correct one another's pronounciation and can translate words we don't know for one another. One fellow, English-named 'Will', likes to talk politics, and, being who I am, one of the first things I asked about was Tibet. His response was interesting. He told me that the Dalai Lama was a power-hungry ex-slaveholder who had manipulated the Western media to his perspective. While I concede that we tend to see the Tibet issue pretty one-sidedly, his position seems somewhat extreme.

Anger at the Western media is not uncommon. I read a really fascinating article written by an award-winning columnist for the New Yorker Magazine about China's 'Angry Youth.' These are the guys that occasionally carry out attacks on Australian film festival websites to make political statements. One of these 'Angry Youth' makes a claim, the author told us during the lecture he gave a few weeks ago, that CNN actually takes orders from the U.S. State Department before it reports the nightly news.

My Chinese Government class has been informative along these lines as well. We learned that, particularly among the old Party hard-liners, the Korean War is regarded as a huge military success for the PRC. Despite around 400,000 or more military casualties for a war that ended in a stalemate, the "War to Resist America and Aid Korea" was regarded as a huge victory over American Imperialism. Some scholars argue that it gave future PRC leaders sufficient confidence in the PLA (People's Liberation Army) to challenge American power later. I find it fascinating that a war regarded as a lukewarm success in the United States is a point of pride for old-timer Chinese nationalists.

I think that these misunderstandings, or perhaps better phrased as 'differences in interpretation,' go both ways, however. Before I went, I got a lot of people telling me to be awfully careful about what I say, to keep a close eye out for the police, etc. While well-meaning, my experience so far has suggested that this advice is a bit more cautious than is necessary.

For example, I've had no problem discussing China's political problems with friends in a university park. Although the Internet is censored (or, as the Central Committee phrases it, 'harmonized'), anyone with a little Internet-savvy can get around it, no problem. In our classroom in a Chinese university, we talk freely about the political implications of the 1989 protests in Tian'anmen and the corruption of the current political regime.

I think the point is that as long as you're not making a serious disturbance (or doing drugs, or proselytizing), the government couldn't be bothered. I'm the first to admit that if I strolled out onto Tian'anmen Square with a 'Falun Gong' T-Shirt whilst espousing Tibetan independence at the top of my lungs, I'd get in serious trouble. But the perception that modern-day China is Stalinist Russia is unfounded for a number of reasons. However, on Saturday, I'm off to Yunnan, a rural, heavily minority-inhabited province, so we'll see how my own perspective evolves from there.