People are Angry at China
Preamble
The essay below was originally written in October 2020. The interesting part is that a lot remains similar, except that sinophobia has calmed down a bit (especially the rabid anti-China sentiment associated with the Coronavirus Pandemic), and the world is paying generally less attention to China, in my view. Due to a coming recession and the war in Ukraine. Remember this was written by someone who was a High School Student at the time, take it lightly. I've corrected some mistakes for publishing as a, now, university student.
The Essay itself, written in 2020:
I have dedicated a fair amount of time to learning Mandarin Chinese a-la-Mainland China. I learned how to draw thousands of little words to make bigger words, I learned to make and understand sounds that seemed not very much like any language I had heard before (Shout out to 儿 and the tones).
I do really like learning the language, because it gives me access to a continental-sized country, numerous diasporas, and double the population of all of Europe (including Russia). It is also one of the UN’s official languages and I love the UN, because as a good Jew, I am a globalist. And China is becoming, or already is a major global power.
Chinese history goes more or less like this: one emperor, one emperor, one emperor, lots of emperors, one emperor, one emperor, one emperor, lots of emperors, one emperor, one emperor (repeat this cycle for a few thousand years), then war, then communists ( people are hungry and also bicycles), then communists that sort of like the West and boom: Factories and money, money, money, money!
Since the first communist who sort of liked the West, China has become more and more important on the world stage and the country is richer too.
China is a repressive, autocratic dictatorship. Those are negative adjectives. I rather the super flawed democracy that the US is (what the fuck is up with electoral college?) be hegemonic than China. Nevertheless, wishful thinking does not necessarily, or usually, translate into reality. I do not expect China to become more powerful than the United States in the near future, but I recognize China’s growing global influence and I like how people treat me as extra deluxe smart because of my intermediate (little do they know) Mandarin.
China (when I say China I mean The People’s Republic of China rather than the Republic of China(the Republic of China will be referred to as Taiwan(who cares about Penghu and Kinmen islands?))) cares about their image to the rest of the world. China cares about soft power. According to Joseph Nye, the Harvard academic who coined the term, soft power is “ It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” And Xi, I have got to say, 2020 was not a good year in that aspect for you (although 2020 must’ve been a great year for about 43 people).
The first reason, in no particular order, but somewhat characteristic to 2020, is what Trump likes to call the China Virus, which for those of us who are not outspoken xenophobes is known as Covid-19. To make a long story short: new virus shows up in Chinese megacity Wuhan. Chinese authorities take way too long to notify world health authorities and to take preventive measures. The world has to deal with a pandemic. People are locked down for months, there are millions of infections and more than a million deaths. Right wing leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump and their supporters like blaming China, one former Brazilian minister of education was really into that. Meanwhile China uses its autocracy to quickly control the virus. People are angry at China #1.
Afterwards a story that began to be heard in 2017 starts to show up again. The Xinjiang（新疆, see I’m great at Chinese) labor and internment camps. Or what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) like to call reeducation camps. Several accusations of human rights abuses are being reported to being inflicted against a Muslim minority in the western Chinese state. These include beatings, removal of religious freedom and separation of parents and their children. This Uyghur minority is being held because of their ethnic origins, and supposedly because of separatism and terrorism. People are angry at China #2.
There is the repression of Hong Kong, a former UK territory. There are claims of neocolonialism in Africa with the one belt, one road initiative. Confucius institutes are shut down because of indoctrination and espionage accusations. Military threats against democratic Taiwan are frequently made. Several territorial claims in both sea and land seem to invade other national sovereignties. People are angry at China #3,#4,#5,#6 and #7.
Then of course there is the run-of-the-mill sinophobia. Claims of Chinese people eating dogs (untrue for most of the Chinese population), claims of Chinese spies, and of general dirtiness, and just people being mean about people and a country they know half-a-thing about (in the United States this hateful information will most probably have come from Fox News, as I heard in The Simpsons once, the number one network for racists). People are angry at China #8 (more like people dislike China #1, but I want consistency).
Now, I’d like to say what I feel like Xi JinPing should feel and do. There are two main options in my view and then a whole spectrum in between. The first one is, it doesn’t matter what the western world thinks of China that much and you (Xi) don’t care about their opinion anymore because the world depends on China, and they won’t shit where they eat. The second big option is to care about what non-Chinese people’s opinions about China are because that makes the country a lot more economically and culturally appealing. And that would mean promoting a freer Hong Kong, Xinjiang and China generally, as well as certainly several other things that would probably inhibit a lot of the CCP’s world power ambitions.
I’d be happy to see a freer China, if not for my selfish desire to go to China and watch the news and access Wikipedia and porn without feeling scared of being waterboarded (another one of my ridiculous fears), for the 1.4 billion Chinese people who would get democracy, the worst political system, just better than all others.
Truth be told, most things fall in the grey area, and so probably Xi won’t turn China into the huge version of Sweden or Norway and probably won’t regress to become a Stalinist-Nazi state.
Time will tell what will happen to China, but if the government still cares about their soft power, as they probably do, they should change some things.
