By Larry Romanoff,
November 20, 2019
We have a saying that after
spending one month in China you could write a book; after a year in China, you
could write a chapter; in five years you could write a paragraph, and after
five years you could write a note on a postcard.
That saying has become
almost an urban legend but it is essentially true. I can still recall the day
when, walking down a street in downtown Shanghai after being in the country for
about a month, I experienced an illusion of such extreme clarity that I said to
myself, “I could write a book on this
place”. I cannot explain the mental or sociological processes that combine
to cause that initial illusion of understanding and clarity, nor the forces
that so effectively and progressively dismantle it to a condition where the
more time we spend in China the less we understand it.
My Chinese friends tell me I
have a deep understanding of China, of its people and culture and, while the
praise is flattering, it is also largely undeserved. Indeed, after fifteen
years in the country, there are days when I am blindsided by something so basic
that I am convinced I understand nothing, and I would have to say that if China
cannot be understood by Westerners from the inside, it most assuredly cannot be
understood by Westerners from the outside who have no useful contact with
anything Chinese.
Westerners live in an illusionary black and white world framed for them by the programming from their Zionist media and are mostly incapable of escaping their ideological indoctrination. There is an adage that you cannot understand a painting when you are inside the painting,that you must step out of that painting and look back on it, to see it as it really is. Few Westerners are capable of this because of the propagandised indoctrination taking place from birth. This social indoctrination is true of course for all societies, but the Zionist West, unlike the vast majority of the world’s population, views virtually everything about other nations and peoples through a series of political-religious ideological lenses that cast a rather severe chromatic aberration on anything seen through those lenses.
These ideologies are of capitalism, democracy,
colonialism, militarism, White supremacy, Darwinism, Christianity and Zionism,
these forces conspiring to twist the truths of China so as to almost eliminate
any possibility of real understanding while simultaneously disdaining any real
need to do so. The White man, the Zionist West, here including Japan, sees the world
as Metropole and periphery, the non-white world populated by inferior beings
meant to be exploited by coercion or military force, their resources used to
enthrone the West while enslaving the world, all according to God’s plan. To
see the truth of this, we need only examine their deeds, history providing
ample testimony to this assertion.
The Western media are notorious for their incessant
and shrill China-bashing, but it seems true that virtually everyone outside
China is reading from the same script. We must have hundreds of publications
and websites named China Labor Bulletin, China Economic Review, China Auto
News, China anything and everything . . . , that are not in any sense Chinese,
but are media sources established by Westerners who are primarily but not
exclusively Zionists and who, mostly deliberately, misinterpret and
misrepresent the facts and fundamentals of China. We have Western-produced
statistics on everything related to China, from GINI coefficients to bank debt,
from GDP to National Income and standard of living, from education to health
care to longevity and infant mortality, all of which, even when based on
numbers initially obtained from official Chinese government sources, are then
massaged and misrepresented to prove the opposite of reality. We have hundreds,
and perhaps even thousands, of books about China, mostly written by these same
people viewing the country through those same ideological lenses and thus
mostly being works of historical fiction, many reprehensibly so.
The ingrained notion of
superiority, white supremacy in fact, is a major obstacle to understanding even
for the well-intentioned. When the Chinese travel to a foreign land and witness
a foreign culture, they think “I’m different”. When Americans (and
Canadians, Brits, Aussies) encounter a foreign culture, they think “I’m
better”. It is also true that the Americans particularly, but the entire
white and English-speaking world in total, have no respect for, and see no
value in, any other culture, secretly believing that all the world wants to be
like them and that claims to cultural protection are merely an excuse to avoid
the inevitable, which is to become American clones. It is in this combined and
complicated context that sincere individual Westerners attempt to understand
China, an exceedingly difficult task in the circumstances.
The Chinese are not
handicapped by the horrors of Christianity or party politics, and they mostly do
not view outside events through a distorting lens. Westerners are fond of
portraying the Chinese as being brainwashed, but in my long experience the
Chinese are the least brainwashed of all peoples while Americans are the poster
boys in this regard.
Due to all of the above,
when Westerners look at any aspect of China, they may see it clearly, but most
often do not understand what they see. Because they view the world through
their ideological lenses, they interpret their misunderstanding in terms of what
that event would mean if occurring in their country and in their culture. And
from this misinterpretation of a misunderstanding, they then make judgments and
form conclusions which are invariably wrong and often foolish.
As one example, a
high-ranking American politician said recently in an interview that the Chinese
need to rid themselves of what she termed their “shyness and lack of
confidence”. It was beyond the limits of her understanding to realise that
what she was seeing was neither shyness nor a lack of confidence, but modesty,
one of the most beautiful characteristics of the Chinese people. Noah Webster
wrote “modesty results from purity of mind”, and further that “unaffected
modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the
diadem of their honor.” Westerners are often tempted to agree with the
above politician’s appraisal because Chinese will seldom react or respond to
these open provocations, however, the lack of response is most often simply
because the Chinese are too modest and polite to tell you what they really
think of you. I can testify that the Chinese are not lacking in confidence
compared to any other civilisation, and also that they have little respect for
the American version of “in your face” which they view not as confidence
but as arrogance, rudeness and disrespect. And yes, I know better than you that
some Chinese can behave very badly, many tourists coming to mind, but these are
in no way typical Chinese but some kind of aberrational subset I have not yet been
able to clearly define.
As another example, I was
walking down a street with an American acquaintance who commented on the
proliferation of “wheelchair ramps” which appear on virtually every
street intersection in every city small and large. He then proceeded to give me
a dissertation on China, the Chinese people and the Chinese culture, based on
the apparent ubiquity of these passages. I had to interrupt my education to
inform him that those were not wheelchair ramps but were instead designed for
bicycles.
More than a few Western
journalists have told us that China’s conviction rate for accused criminals is
99.9%, this number having been extracted from thin air because China does not
assemble and publish those statistics for all levels of courts from all cities,
towns and counties. However, the comparable conviction rate in the West, at
least for Canada and the US, is about 60% or a bit less, this differential
attributed to the highest level of democratic virginity in the West and an
extraordinarily high level of police and judicial corruption in China. But is
that necessarily true?
More importantly, what does
the 60% Western conviction rate mean? It means that nearly half of all the
people charged with a crime, were in fact innocent and that it required the
trauma and expense of a court trial to keep an innocent man out of prison. Or,
if we want to be stubborn, we can look at this from the other side and claim
that 100% of those charged were in fact guilty, but that a clever and
expensive lawyer let them walk free. Is that better?
It is true that China has a
high conviction rate, but that is because Chinese police conduct what are
perhaps the most thorough and conscientious investigations of any country. The
police will not lay a charge until they are 100% certain of a man’s guilt and
also that they have not only sufficient evidence for a conviction but also the
greatest volume of circumstantial evidence for a judge to determine the most
appropriate sentence. It is the Western system that is corrupt and badly
flawed, not China’s, and China has no FBI to lay fraudulent charges as a method
of harassing political dissidents.
I was once standing on the
Maglev platform at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport, and watched while a man and his
wife were having a heated discussion with a policeman that lasted for several
minutes. I wasn’t close enough to learn the topic of their debate, but the
argument ended with the man’s wife kicking the policeman in the shins. I can
think of more than a few Western cities where that wouldn’t have been a good
idea.
The truth is that people in
China are not afraid of the police. In Canada or the US nobody will pass a
police car that is driving at the speed limit on a highway, but in China it
happens all the time. I commented on that to a friend who said, “Why should I
be afraid of him? He’s my servant, not my master.” In China, I can argue with a
policeman and challenge his conclusions without fear of arrest for “disorderly
conduct”, but in real life it goes much farther than this.
I once lit a cigarette in a
shopping mall (Yes, I know. Don’t tell me), and a policeman approached to tell
me I couldn’t smoke in the mall. Of course I already knew that; I was
preoccupied and wasn’t thinking. I told him that, and I apologised and told him
I would leave. He walked me partway to the door, his colleague joined us and
said something humorous and we laughed, and I went outdoors. I saw them when I
returned, I waved and they waved back, and we were friends. The important
consideration is that he didn’t want to punish me; he didn’t want to start a
war; he just didn’t want me to smoke in his mall. So long as I was willing, a
warning was sufficient.
If I accidentally drive my
car where I shouldn’t, the result is the same. In Chinese cities, we sometimes
see a car parked on a sidewalk, this usually because the owner has an urgent
necessity to stop for only a minute in an urban area where parking is almost
non-existent and traffic is heavy. But so long as the street is clear and the
sidewalk has sufficient room for pedestrians to pass, the police will ignore
the car for a short while, cars normally being towed away only if they actually
block traffic and cause bedlam; never as a means to collect revenue as is so
common in the West.
This is an aside, but the
only country in the world similar to China (to my knowledge) is Italy. In Rome,
I once asked a policeman (this is a true story) if I could leave my car in a
driveway for a few minutes while I ran across the street to have a quick
coffee. He agreed, but asked that I leave my keys in the car in case he had to
move it. The driveway was the emergency entrance to a hospital.
In the US, in Canada, and in
many European countries, overstaying a visa – by even one day – will give you
cause for permanent regret. Normally, you will sit in a jail cell until you
have paid your fine and have a paid ticket out of the country, at which point
the police will take you to the airport and put you onto the plane, and you
will be prohibited from returning for quite some time. I once overstayed my
visa in China by about three weeks although in my defense it was due to a
misunderstanding that wasn’t my fault, an excuse that would bring me no
sympathy in Canada or the US. But going through China’s customs and immigration
exit, the officer gave me a stern look and said, “You know, you shouldn’t do
that”. It was only then that I realised what had happened, and when he
understood the unwitting nature of my transgression and my sincere regret at
its occurrence, he let me board my plane free of harm. Once again, he didn’t
want to punish me, he didn’t want to start a war; he just wanted me to obey the
laws.
Once, for reasons I cannot
recall, I filed all my utility bills neatly together in a desk drawer and
forgot about them. A month or two later, I found little white notices stuck
onto the outside of my front door, which were requests for payment. The
management office asked me to leave with them the bills and the cash, and they
called the utility companies who sent a courier to pick up the payments. No
penalty, no interest, no recriminations, no denial of service. The utility
companies didn’t want to punish me; they didn’t want to start a war; they just
wanted me to pay my bills. I once arrived home after dinner to discover my
house had no electricity. It was merely a breaker that was quickly reset, but
at the time I wondered aloud to a friend if perhaps the electricity had been
cut off because I’d forgotten to pay my bill, and she said “I’ve never heard
of such a thing”.
Westerners are fascinated by
the Chinese cultural concept of Guanxi, which Wikipedia tells us “defines
the fundamental dynamic in personalized social networks of power, which can be
best described as the relationships individuals cultivate with other
individuals, and is a crucial system of beliefs in Chinese culture.” Also
that Westerners use the term “instead of referring to “connections” and
“relationships” as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide
cultural implications that Guanxi describes.” (1) This is both true and
false, proving that Wikipedia doesn’t understand Guanxi any more than do the
columnists at the New York Times. We have a saying in the West that “It’s
not what you know, but who you know”, the concept of an individual benefitting
from friendships and connections being universal and not particular to China.
But in China, friendships
and so-called ‘connections’ have a flavor of trust and responsibility that
exists nowhere else in the world, at least not to my knowledge. A good friend
was purchasing a new house for her parents and wanted to pay the full price in
cash with the signing of the contract so as to benefit from an attractive
discount. She was $200,000 short and called to ask if I would lend her the
money to complete the payment. I agreed without even having to think about it,
and transferred the money to her account the same day. If I recall correctly,
she gave me an IOU at one point but I have no idea what I did with it, and the
loan was repaid. In reverse, when I purchased my last house I wanted to pay the
entire amount in cash with the purchase contract for the same reason, but most
of my money was sequestered in bank GICs that didn’t mature for several months
and I was $35,000 short. I was chatting about my house with another friend and
asked if she would lend me the money. We immediately walked across the street
to her bank and she gave me the cash, no questions asked.
There is an organic
strawberry farm near my home, with the sweetest strawberries I have ever tasted
(the most expensive, too). I sometimes would buy a basket as a gift for the
girls in the property management office. One day, I locked myself out of my own
house, having neglected to leave a set of keys at the office. But a young girl
at the office took great pains to find a locksmith, who had to come from
another city 40 Kms distance to unlock my door. When I discovered I had no cash
with which to pay him, the young girl, maybe only 20 years old, negotiated the
man’s price down by 40% and paid him from her own account.
To say that such things
wouldn’t occur in the West, even with family, is a huge understatement. In
China, they are normal, underpinned by a cultural quality of trust and
obligation that cannot be fathomed by someone living in the West. The English
language, precise as it is, has no vocabulary to explain the quality of these
relationships and the inseparable obligation inherent therein.
One major complaint that
corporate executives, especially Americans, express about China is that the
Chinese often don’t follow the terms of a contract. From an American point of
view they are correct, but that American point of view is as black and white as
is their political religion, hence the culture shock. To Americans, the Chinese
signing of a contract is only an intermediate stage in a permanent negotiating
process whereas it should rightfully form part of the Ten Commandments since it
is written in stone. This is easy to understand but it bypasses completely the
Western ideological intellect.
I want to use an analogy
here, one that compares China to Japan but that applies equally to the West.
Japanese chopsticks are tapered to a pointed end and, when the Japanese eat
fish, with these chopsticks they can easily first pick out all the bones and
then eat the fish. But Chinese chopsticks are not tapered and are typically
blunt at the ends. Thus, the Chinese eat the whole fish, and then pick out the
bones one by one as they find them. In the West, this is how we view a
marriage. We know there will be rocky periods in the future, but we want the
marriage and we proceed with the implicit understanding that we will work
through those periods as they arise. The Chinese apply the same intent toward
business dealings. It isn’t wrong; it’s just different.
One day, when my children
were much younger, I arrived at home to find a window broken. I asked what
happened and who did it, and one of my sons confessed. But what do you suppose
my reaction would have been had my son said, “I refuse to answer on the
grounds that I may incriminate myself” or worse, if he had said, “I
don’t think you can prove I did it, so I plead not guilty. Give it your best
shot.” I am by nature a gentle person, but any kid of mine taking such a
position would receive a slap on the head he wouldn’t forget.
And now we come to China’s
judicial system, which operates in exactly the same way we raise our children.
If you are caught doing something wrong, you confess, you admit to your crime
and, if you have some good sense, you apologise, express your regret for what
you have done, and throw yourself onto the mercy of your father. It helps
immensely if your regrets and apologies are sincere. But, with Chinese police
and courts, if you want to be stubborn and arrogant and force the police into a
lengthy investigation and the courts into a long trial, you will receive no
mercy when found guilty, and no clever lawyer will save you. That is precisely
what we teach our children. If a child lies and tries to avoid blame, the
punishment will inevitably be more harsh, and that is as it should be. In this
sense, the Chinese judicial system is perfect while the Western system is
stupidly flawed. In Chinese courts, lawyers are not permitted to lie or to cast
unfair aspersions or to attack vulnerable witnesses as they do in the West.
It is the same with the
process of plea-bargaining that the Americans are desperately attempting to
push onto China as a superior method of dealing with crime. But it is not
superior; it is instead an enormous fraud being perpetrated. The problem is
that Chinese judges have proven almost impermeable to bribery and Chinese
lawyers have not been trained to lie in a courtroom. So what to do when
Americans are charged with crimes in China, as they increasingly are and
increasingly will be? The benefit of plea-bargaining is that it removes
judicial decisions and sentencing from the judges and the courts and turns this
discretion over to two sets of lawyers on the hopeful theory that lawyers can
be bribed more easily than can judges. Again, in this respect the Chinese
system is perfect while it is the Western (American) justice system that is so
badly flawed. We need think only of the recent events in the US where Jeffrey
Epstein avoided 200 years in prison for his international underage sex
trafficking ring, accomplished only by removing decisions as to guilt and
punishment from the courts and placing it entirely into the hands of lawyers
and money, all done without the benefit of sunlight.
Let’s return for a moment to
the Western media. I will begin with John Bussey at the Wall
Street Journal who, in one brief article titled, “China: Bullying to
Prosperity”, won a Nobel Prize for dishonest and unethical reporting. This
was his article in part:
“Watching China bully
Wal-Mart Stores this week – and watching Wal-Mart prostrate itself under the
beating – is an embarrassing reminder of a simple fact: China, the world’s
fastest growing major market, has the upper hand with U.S. business. Its array
of protectionist barriers, weak rule of law, and siren-like market make events
like this all but inevitable. In the company’s stores in the city of Chongqing,
nonorganic pork was labeled “organic.” This was the mistake. The pork was
otherwise fine. Seizing on this error at a time when inflation is a hot-button
issue in China, officials accused Wal-Mart of cheating the public by charging
premium prices for regular meat. They fined the company, shut down all 13
Wal-Marts in the city and jailed a number of Wal-Mart employees. The actions
played well in the national media. There’s little if any recourse in
authoritarian China when something like this happens to a U.S. company. There
aren’t regular courts. Like many other U.S. firms that have run afoul of
nationalist sentiments in China, Wal-Mart could only beg forgiveness. It has
nearly 350 stores in China with revenue of $7.5 billion. So Wal-Mart dropped to
its knees.” He finished with an astonishing claim where he cleverly quoted a
(non-existent) “American executive in Beijing who watches these matters”
who supposedly said Wal-Mart had done far more than Chinese companies “to
secure the safety of the [country’s] food supply.” (2)
We should all feel sorry for
poor baby Wal-Mart, with only $7.5 billion in revenue in China and being forced
to “drop to its knees” because “there aren’t regular courts” and
“authoritarian” China has “a weak rule of law”. Bad China, no
question.
But that’s not exactly how
it was. China had had years of trouble with Wal-Mart repeatedly breaking every
law on the books. Those same stores had for years been selling ordinary pork
labeled as organic, each time being caught and fined a trivial amount, 8 times
in the prior 7 months alone. It was so bad that when the inspectors were
leaving the store with the confiscated illegal products, Wal-Mart’s staff were
already busy labeling yet more ordinary pork as organic. It was just a game
where the retail price was several times higher and the profits so huge that
the nuisance of inspectors was trivial. What changed the game was that this
last time the inspectors made a wrong turn as they were leaving the store, and
found themselves in a refrigerated room with 75,000 kilograms of ordinary pork
labeled as organic. And thus was Wal-Mart “securing the safety of China’s
food supply”. But according to the WSJ’s Bussey, a low-level clerk made an
innocent “mistake” and mislabeled a few packages of meat, but the mean,
authoritarian Chinese government which has no courts and no rule of law, made
the company “drop to its knees”.
I can provide dozens of
heavily-documented cases where foreign companies, mostly American, have
committed the most egregious crimes in China, yet were repeatedly warned rather
than being severely punished as they would have been in any Western country. In
one case, Coca-Cola was forced to destroy about 100,000 cases of bottled drinks
because of an atrociously high level of chlorine which, it was discovered, was
poured into the drinks to kill an equally high level of fecal bacteria. In the
West, the company’s business license would have been canceled, especially
considering the lies the company told, even going on national television to
claim their product was “perfectly safe” when it patently was not. It is also
worth noting that of the ten largest corporate consumer frauds perpetrated in
China in recent years, eight of those were by American companies like
P&G, OSI, Nike, GSK, KFC. (3) (4)
In a similar instance, the
Western media stridently reported, ad nauseum, that “a Chinese human-rights
lawyer” had been imprisoned by “The Communist Party”, ostensibly for
being a Chinese human-rights lawyer. Once again, bad China. But once again,
that’s not exactly how it was.
It was true that this lawyer
had on one or two occasions acted for someone who had a complaint about the
system, the story being weaved in the Western Zionist press that he was
unjustly tossed into prison for daring to assist a challenge against the “authoritarian,
totalitarian, and brutal” “Chinese dictatorship” and, even worse,
daring to challenge the shaky position of The Communist Party of China who
would exterminate anyone for the sake of maintaining their “feeble grip on
power”. In only one article of nearly 100 that I read on this particular
case in the Western press, was there even a suggestion of an extenuating
circumstance. In only one article, the very last sentence made vague passing
mention of “a tax problem”.
That “tax problem”
was a bit more than nothing. In China, there are various classifications of purchase
receipts, only one of which is usable for corporate expense tax deductions. In
many Western countries, even a cash register receipt is usable in this regard,
but in China we must have an official receipt containing a government stamp.
Since these receipts are equivalent to a tax credit of 25%, they are valuable
and are sometimes traded. If I have official tax receipts my company cannot
use, I can sell them to you at 10% of face value and you can save 15% on your
corporate income taxes. In this case, this ‘human-rights lawyer’ and four of
his friends, all lawyers, had been running a business where they printed
counterfeit tax receipts and sold them to unsuspecting businesses, in total
more than $300 million worth. All five were arrested and thrown into prison
but, according to the Zionist media, this lead lawyer (only) was imprisoned not
by the courts, but by “the Communist Party”, and not for a massive
counterfeiting fraud but for defending the poor and helpless who were
victimised by the vicious communists. When Westerners have only a diet of daily
articles like this presented to them by their most trusted media, how is it
possible for anyone to accurately understand anything about China?
China is renowned for its
low crime rates. Cities like Shanghai and Beijing, along with Tokyo and
Singapore, lead the world in almost all aspects of personal safety. I have
travelled through almost every part of this country, from the largest cities to
rural areas, in daylight and darkest night, alone and with companions, and in
15 years I can honestly say I have never once had the slightest concern for my
personal safety, and in fact the thought had never entered my mind.
In this context of absence
of crime, China has bypassed cheques and cards in favor of a universal mobile
phone payment system but is still in some ways a cash society, surprisingly
still using bills for many large transactions. In any city in China we see on a
daily basis people standing in line at an ATM, patiently waiting while one
person is feeding huge wads of bills into the machine, 10,000 RMB at a time,
the pile of cash often exceeding perhaps $US50,000. This is such a common
transaction as to be completely ignored by everyone. In my 15 years in China, I
have never heard of anyone being robbed at an ATM.
Urban governments in China
often expropriate for redevelopment downtown land containing old and
dilapidated housing, leading the Western media to decry the “brutal,
authoritarian displacement” of citizens, but once again that’s not exactly
how it really is. These old homes are not heritage sites but mostly miserable
and impoverished one-room hovels sharing a common kitchen and bathroom, where
windows and doors leak wind and rain, and lacking both heating and air
conditioning. The local governments move an entire small urban community into a
suburb where they have built lovely new apartment buildings that are turned
over to the people free of charge. The new homes are one or two-bedroom
apartments, built to a good standard, with real toilets and bathrooms and
kitchens, far nicer than these displaced citizens could ever have hoped for.
Anyone who doesn’t want to move, will be paid a cash sum for their old home
but, with urban housing being very expensive, accepting the new home is the
universal option. In similar fashion, the Chinese national government recently
built more than 60,000 new homes in Tibet, given to the people free of charge,
to remove them from poverty, put them together in real communities, and help to
protect the environment. The Western media unanimously refused to report this.
Further with housing,
China’s national and city governments take action to moderate house prices on
the dictatorial communist premise that houses are homes to live in, not “assets
for speculation and profiteering”. In the very large centers homes are
quite expensive, much less so in the suburbs and second and third-tier cities,
but even so about 90% of all Chinese own their own homes and about 80% of these
are fully paid. Bank mortgages are uncommon in China although growing to some
extent. The Chinese do not like “the feeling” of being in debt and a
high savings rate is contained in Chinese DNA, leading to housing down payments
of typically 40% to 50% with the balance being borrowed from the extended
family and repaid interest-free over time. China is the only country to my knowledge
where a young couple can easily borrow money for a house purchase from aunts,
uncles, cousins, grandparents, and pay cash for their first home, and
low-income couples are often able to purchase below-cost subsidised housing
from the government or, surprisingly, from many State-owned corporations that
build low-cost housing from their surplus profits. Socialism at its finest.
On this same note, I wrote
in my article on Socialism that in Xi’An there is a school with one of the
finest campuses in the world, hectares of green grass, an Olympic-sized
swimming pool, flower gardens, lovely condominiums and townhouse residences for
the faculty and students. The school was built with surplus profits of a local
state-owned tobacco company that wanted to give something to the community. The
firm not only built the school but pays the annual operating costs.
Further with housing (and
other major purchases), the Chinese do not like the feeling of buying anything
that is used, this applying to homes, automobiles, major appliances. If the
Chinese purchase a used car, it will be a first car and a maximum of one or two
years old, the remainder disappearing into the rural areas as temporary but
affordable transportation. If a Chinese buys a used home, their first act is to
completely gut the interior, stripping the entire dwelling to bare concrete,
and reconstructing the entire home to make it ‘new’, this renovation
simply taken for granted as part of the purchase cost.
Let’s return for a moment to
the unpaid utility bills. In the West, utility companies typically cut off
electricity or gas immediately on the due date, then charge the homeowner a
substantial re-connection fee, a financial penalty, and extra interest on the
due amount. This harsh attitude is surprisingly derived from the West’s twisted
Christianity where, according to the bankers, you have committed a sin – an
offense against God – by failing to pay your bill on time and therefore “deserve”
to be punished. The utility company doesn’t cut off your electricity because it
needs the money but because it wants to punish you, to make you suffer for your
transgression against the god of money. The Chinese, not having been terminally
infected with this sacrilegious version of religion, cannot fathom the
existence of such an attitude. The West, in their eagerness to destroy China,
cannot in turn fathom the concept that “freedom of religion” inherently
includes the possibility of freedom FROM religion. But the Chinese do in fact
have what we might term a religion (in addition to Buddhism), one that derives
from Confucius, and teaches gentleness, forgiveness, and understanding.
Confucius taught only reform and education, never punishment, at least not in a
civil context. This brings us to the surprising but inescapable conclusion that
the Chinese are far better Christians than are the Christians themselves.
This is one reason China,
with more people than the US and Europe combined, has only 1/1,000th as many
lawyers. The Chinese way is to settle disputes by discussion and negotiation,
never by force. This is so true that in many police stations in China, the
first room you see when you walk through the door is a ‘negotiation room’
or a ‘dispute settlement room’. The police will moderate many forms of
disputes that can potentially be settled without the filing of criminal charges
or civil lawsuits. The American way, and in fact the white man’s way is to call
the police and hire a lawyer, which is why Americans spend more each year on
lawyers than they do on the purchase of new automobiles. The Chinese way is
better.
This is probably an
appropriate place to point out that, aside from the normal border disputes
between neighboring nations, all the world’s wars have been initiated by the
Christians and Jews, following in the footsteps of their God whose major
commandment was “Thou shalt not kill”. In case you don’t know, China has
never started a war with anyone, and the country’s last battle was a minor
border skirmish about 50 years ago, one that was begun by India not by China.
One indication of the
inherent socialist and humanitarian nature of the Chinese people is their attitude
to innovation and IP, a powerful point of dispute between China and the
capitalist West. In the West, in years past, patents were granted for a period
of only three years, enough time for an inventor to either produce or sell his
invention, and this only for creations deemed to be socially useful. There was
no patent protection for Barbie’s plastic breasts or Apple’s ridiculous “rectangle
with rounded corners”.
We can think of it this way:
if you tell me a humorous story and I repeat it to another person, you are not
offended if I fail to credit you as ‘the owner’ of the joke and in fact
you are pleased that my appreciation was sufficient to relate it onward. This
is essentially the Chinese position on innovation. They are not offended that
you liked a creation so much as to copy it and improve it and, in real life,
this flurry of activity from the entire nation that surrounds a new invention
produces real creativity and development. Most every new invention is primitive
at the outset, requiring much modification and amendment to result in its
eventual perfect form. In the absence of the designed hindrances to innovation
and competition by the West’s brutal IP laws, the natural Chinese way is to
permit a new invention to escape into the national population where potentially
millions of people will contribute to the modification and development,
resulting not only in an astonishingly rapid evolution of a new product but its
free ability to benefit the entire population instead of being jealously restricted
to the selfish benefit of one person. This is the reason that China’s IP laws
are so much less aggressive than those of the West, especially of the US. The
natural, innate and deep-seated Chinese concern is for the benefit of the
nation, of all people, and I worry that China is being corrupted by the vicious
greed inherent in Western capitalism evidenced by the country’s “tightening”
of its IP legislation.
There is one other item
worth noting here, that of the pace of change in China. Western countries required
the best part of 100 years to industrialise and move from agrarian societies to
urban development, while China managed this in perhaps 30 years, one
generation. When young people in China are married today, they want a new
house, a new car, and a foreign vacation. When their parents were married, they
wanted a bicycle, a radio, and a sewing machine. I have spoken to many Chinese
in their early 30s who tell me that when they graduated from university only
ten years ago they couldn’t have imagined owning a new home and having a car
and taking European vacations only ten years later. Such enormous change
inflicted on a society with such speed, naturally creates a great many strains,
and it is much to the credit of China’s national government and the extraordinary
quality of its leaders that these strains have been managed while maintaining a
powerful coherence in Chinese society, the exceptions being mostly minor.
This is so true that
consistently in all polls at least 85% and often 95% of the population express
great trust in their government and support of its actions. (5) The NYT ran a recent
editorial that must have choked them in the writing, but that grudgingly
admitted the Chinese very broadly support their system of government and that
it appears to be working very well for them. In an Article in The Economist
magazine, the writer, in deep shock, bemoaned the fact that “a
disconcertingly high percentage of China’s population appear very happy with
their government”. A few years ago, the Americans, disbelieving these
statistics, attempted to provoke the Chinese people to a “Jasmine revolution”,
flooding the Chinese social media with a call to congregate in Wangfujing in downtown
Beijing to protest against their “brutal totalitarian government”.
Unfortunately for the Americans, the Chinese had no such interest and nobody
showed up to protest. The only participant was then-US Ambassador Jon
Huntsman who came to view the (non-existent) results of his handiwork, and
who was recognised and so ridiculed by the shoppers present that he put his
tail between his legs and ran for cover. (6)
However, due to the rapidity
of social change, it is possible in China today to see remnants of the prior
generation incongruously mixed together with those of the new age. What this
means is that your picture of China can be very much colored by your focus. The
national government has indeed brought 800 million people out of poverty in a
very short time but we can still find pockets of poverty simply because it is
not possible to do everything at the same time. So, in a railway station
somewhere, we can see in one view the sleekest and fastest fifth-generation 350
Kms/hr. high-speed trains next to a first-generation 50 Km/hr. train. When
totally different generations coexist simultaneously, we can look at any sector
and find evidence to prove whatever point we want to prove. Those who want
to disparage China will simply choose a focal point that places the country in
an unfavorable light and present that as the basic condition of the entire
country.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his
articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in
more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held
senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at
Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs
to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing
a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted
at: 2186604556@qq.com
*
Notes
(2) John Bussey | The Wall Street
Journal
(3) China scandal costs OSI Group
hundreds of millions
(4) Drug Giant Faced a Reckoning as
China Took Aim at Bribery
(5) http://www.unz.com/article/should-we-compete-with-china-can-we/
(6) China’s jasmine revolution: police
but no protesters
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
