"Dialogue" with Andre

Of the nine countries where I have taught since 1995, the one which (besides the U.S.) has left me the most ambivalent is China. On the one hand, the people were quite friendly and the students refreshingly diligent. As a teacher, moreover, I (like other foreigners) seemed to be generally respected for my contributions to Chinese development. And in a material sense life passed comfortably enough for an archetypal bourgeois like myself: lodgings were spacious and replete with every modern convenience, the food was delicious, and DVDs were dirt cheap. On the other hand, the authoritarian nature of the political regime deeply offended some of my own innermost principles. Disturbing in a more practical sense was the repeatedly demonstrated untrustworthiness of my university employers (with respect to scheduling, meeting contractual terms, etc.). And behind the undeniable friendliness of the people lay a subtle but distinct standoffishness, a clear tendency to perceive their own "kind" as somehow apart from everyone else.

For approximately one year following my departure from China at the start of 2006, my positive impressions of the country and its people remained dominant, helped in no small measure by my infinitely worse experiences in the next two places I worked, Russia and Azerbaijan (especially the latter). My subsequent year in Mongolia, however, provided a much pleasanter contrast against which to view my Chinese sojourn, a contrast further accentuated by my current country of residence, Korea. But what has really solidified my unfavorable assessment of China and the Chinese -- what has sealed my determination never to return to China, even as a tourist -- is a lengthy e-mail I received from a former student of mine in the spring of 2007. The English name of this student was (and, as far as I know, remains) Andre.

Andre was my best student at the best university where I taught in China, China Foreign Affairs University. Indeed, Andre is one of the best students I have ever had anywhere. Not only were his speaking, writing, and other academic abilities commendably above average, he showed an intellectual curiosity and adventurousness rare even (or, rather, especially!) among tenured professors, let alone among job-obsessed students. More than once we spoke about history, about movies, about literature, about subjects far removed from the daily fare of our respective classes. (He's the only person I've ever met who shared my fondness for Thomas Mann!) Andre's stated intention to pursue his studies in Europe, getting degrees in international relations and law, then perhaps in art history, before returning to his home country to teach, was thus no more than I believed him to be capable of. That he subsequently applied for -- and won -- a scholarship to a prestigious German university shows he is well on his way to achieving the goals he has set for himself.

For some time after my departure from CFAU, Andre and I remained in intermittent e-mail contact, writing chiefly about matters related to our respective careers. Then Andre fell silent for about a year -- until one day in April 2008. After explaining that he'd lost my e-mail address and just refound it, Andre proceeded to spew forth a polemic that, on balance, would not have been out of place in the state-controlled China Daily (or in any one of the myriad Chinese-language equivalents thereof). Among the writer's main contentions:

• there was absolutely no basis for comparison between the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and those in Berlin 1936
• the Chinese authorities were absolutely right in insisting that politics and sports be kept totally separate
• Chinese actions in Tibet, though perhaps unduly harsh, were justified, and in any case "Tibet" was a strictly domestic issue in which no outsiders had any right to interfere
• Western reportage on China was hopelessly biased and unfair
• given its own record of imperialism exploitation, racism, poverty, etc., etc., etc., the West had no right to criticize China for anything -- unless and until the West first acknowledged all its own sins
• over the past sixty years Mao and his successors had done more on behalf of their people than any other government in history
• people outside China have no legitimate reason to distrust China or the Chinese

And so it went. To be fair, though, Andre did profess an eagerness at the end of his diatribe to get my feedback.

Which profession I accepted at its face value. Stung less by the actual content of Andre's philippic -- as noted, it was no different from standard Chinese propaganda -- than by its emanating from someone who had seemed above such crude nationalistic fervor, I responded in a correspondingly implacable tone: that in my view China should never have been awarded the Olympics in the first place; that, unlike the average Chinese (or, for that matter, American), I subscribed to the Martin Luther King dogma that an injustice against one man anywhere was an injustice against all men everywhere; that the legacy of the West, though admittedly reprehensible in many ways, was more than simply racism, poverty, and imperialism (as his own decision to study at a German university attested); that Mao had killed more Chinese than all the "foreign devils" put together; that China's undeniable economic growth had not come without severe cost to people within as well as (environmentally speaking) outside China; that the West's past imperialism did not in itself justify China's present actions in places like Darfur or Zimbabwe (or, I might've added, gainsay China's own centuries-old record of imperialist conquest -- as attested by the 50+ "official" minorities residing in contemporary China); that neither Chinese history nor China's current authoritarian regime gave other Asian countries any reason to accept China's growing power without trepidation. In short, I concluded, his largely uncritical appraisal of China's actions past and present, his wholesale (and hypocritical) denunciation of the West, his implicit but obvious conviction that China and the Chinese were somehow "better" than any other nation and any other people on earth -- bespoke a spirit, a mindset, a Weltanschauung totally at odds with the humanism, the internationalism, the moral breadth of someone like (the later) Thomas Mann.

Less than 24 hours later Andre responded -- but to no avail. Never one to waste time trying to combat views rooted in willful ignorance and irrational prejudice, still less to engage in serious discussion with someone whose moral sensibilities are subordinate to considerations of country or class or religion, I tossed Andre's response into the "trash," unread. Apart from a brief letter Andre sent some four months later, in which he admitted that I was not the only person to look askance at the Beijing Olympics but did not otherwise make reference to our earlier exchange, there has been no further contact between us.

Nor can there be. For all his reading, all his ostensible openness to other cultures and other civilizations, all his apparent interest in expanding his mental horizons, Andre is at heart unwilling and, I suspect, unable to accept any idea, any creed, any point of view which runs counter to -- or at any rate does not support -- the belief in Chinese superiority that lies at the core of his intellectual being. Hence my placement of the word "dialogue" in quotation marks at the head of this entry.

To be sure, such racist/nationalist sentiment is hardly unique to China. Nor would I claim that all Chinese think this way; on the contrary, one frequently reads (in the "biased" western press) of Chinese who are genuinely desirous of making their homeland a respected and admired (rather than merely feared) contributor to humanity's welfare, and whose willingness to engage in dialogue with others is not circumscribed by reverence for Confucianism, Maoism, Sinocentrism, or other staples of China's past. But these, I'm afraid, are the exceptions rather than the rule; rarely have I encountered a people so singularly averse to criticism either of self or of country. The concrete policy implications of such unfettered arrogance on global warming, economic growth, arms proliferation, respect for human rights, and other issues affecting an entity which to this day China refuses to acknowledge -- the world community -- I leave for relevant experts to forecast. For myself, I shall simply refrain from returning to a land where ignorance and bigotry are cherished even among the elite.

UPDATE

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