You are not a guest

         Many, many times we have heard from foreigners and Chinese alike, “You are a guest, and it is not your job to say what is right and wrong here.”

         Well quite simply you are wrong. It is your duty to do so.

         We are not Chinese; we were not raised, thankfully in a hideous system of oppression, which refers to the mass murder of millions as a ‘mistake.’ We were not raised in a system of failed neo-Confucian legalism, which advocates apathy and self-preservation as the end of all existence. We were raised, most if not all of us, in a proud western moral rational Judeo-Christian culture and one that has time and time again proven its superiority over the East. The colleges of England and America are full of the rich students of the world, whose parents beg, bribe, or steal so that their children can have an elite ‘western’ education. If this were not an objective truth, you would not be teaching English here.

         In addition look at Lu Xun. His portrayal of the character of the Chinese people was weak, craven, cowardly, boastful, and arrogant. The Diary of a Madman deals with the theme of cannibalism, namely how the Chinese will devourer each other to gain an advantage over their fellow man. Ah Q is a boaster, liar, and fool who abuses those weaker, while fearing all those with power. Such behavior is typical of a bully, which we see in the relations with Vietnam and Philippines.

         Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winter in Literature, and Soviet dissident has a great quotation,

“Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business.”

 But the regime tells us “stay out of China’s affairs.” Or authors say “I am not at all interested in qualifying what is right or wrong” in a place.

         When for hundreds of years the Chinese crushed their women’s feet, western missionaries stopped them. It was not the ‘wisdom’ of the East, but the cold reality that such feudal practices embarrassed educated Chinese such as Liu Xun. Liu Xun admired the modernization practices going on in Japan. Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of modern China, also greatly stressed western medical practices and sanitation. These men, great Chinese men, did not say “cultural difference’ but saw things for what they were, backwards cultural traditions that damaged the health and souls of the Chinese people.

         Cowardice is cowardice. Solzhenitsyn writes how a line of 100 prisoners, all of whom were veterans of world war II, met who had survived brutal war, and could kill a Nazi with their bare hands, could be escorted by a few teenage boys with submachine guns. It would have been the work of a few seconds to overpower the guards…but they never did. Why?

         Because under the system of Marxist thought, they were guilty, it didn’t really matter. Their will had already been broken by the state. It wasn’t until the Ukrainians, who had tried to secede from the Soviet Union and were in prison for life, that guards started getting killed. The Chinese don’t care because they have been told “think about yourself…” Well I have a poem for those who think about themselves…”First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew…” I think we all know how it turns out.

         Anti-foreign feeling was stirred up under the Qing as a way of distracting the Han majority from the real problem: a regime that ruled for their own enrichment, and disinterested in the welfare of the majority. Is this a repeat of such events? Perhaps.  According to Ezra Vogel in his massive Deng Xao Ping: The transformation of Modern China, he points out that nothing was as successful as the reintroduction of anti-Japanese material into the school curriculum in the 1990s, at creating neo-nationalism.

         But returning to the original issue, do I feel safe in China? Sadly yes. I’m far, far more likely to be a victim of violent crime in the United States than I am in China. That said, I’m far more likely to be cheated, to die of lung cancer, or to have people insult my girlfriend here. My response is simply that I grow tired of those who say “You are a guest.” I am not a guest, I’m a law abiding, tax paying resident and free citizen of the world. Above all “I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.”