In the West we seem to have a sort of fascination with China. It's viewed as this slightly mysterious country that has suddenly been flung into the limelight as it's economy develops and brings it to our attention. Slowly, more and more travellers are making it past the typical South East Asia backpacker route and into the Middle Kingdom, and I think a lot of people are surprised by what they find.
Just before I left the UK it seemed like China was everywhere, the newspapers heralded China as the new hot place to travel and TV programme after TV programme was aired that revolved around various aspects of China and Chinese culture. I have now become invested in China and so I try to make it my business to watch as many of these TV shows as I can, to get an insight into how the West views China and how that compares to the reality of my experiences.
Often these documentaries do a pretty good job of representing China but, as is always the way with TV, it is sensationalised. The things that are the strangest are highlighted, which is to be expected, but the thing that strikes me is how rarely anything is shown through the Chinese perspective.
Recently I watched two programmes about China. One was a new BBC documentary presented by Billie JD Porter about the pressures on young people in China and the education system (watch it here) . It is part of a series about Chinese life and, I think, it's main purpose is to show how different China is. Having worked in the Chinese education system and talked to a lot of Chinese students about their lives and the pressure they feel is put on them I found this documentary particularly interesting. And honestly, I think the documentary did match up pretty closely with my experiences. The pressure to do well is extreme and one of the words I hear most when talking to students about school and study is "stress". Students can easily do anywhere between five and seven hours of homework a night and that's not seen as particularly excessive, it's just the way it is.
One thing I think that the documentary got right is why parents put this extreme pressure on their children. This is the first generation since the Chinese communist revolution in 1949 that has grown up under a stable government and in a China that is rapidly getting richer. For the older generation every opportunity was a struggle and now that opportunities are comparatively abundant they expect their children to work as hard as they can to make the most of these opportunities. Another source of the pressure is the one child policy (read my post about how the one child policy has effected attitudes towards contraception here). With one child the hopes of the family lie on one person, China doesn't have very good provision for old people so it is the children's responsibility to look after the parents in old age. This means that the pressure is on to have the means to provide, it's not just your own lifestyle that you have to think about but that of the older generation too.
But for all the documentary did right, for me, the problem wasn't so much what was shown but rather how it was shown. The whole time Porter reported in a way that made it sound to me like she was saying that the Chinese way was wrong just because it is different. A lot of the time I felt Porter was disrespectful to the Chinese culture and customs and I never felt that she tried particularly hard to understand "why" in a deeper sense. She was happy to put Western ideals on a country that doesn't have any desire to be western.
This is where the second programme I watched came into its own. This programme was a TED talk by Martin Jacques entitled "Understanding the rise of China", and my boyfriend had asked be to watch it because he said that Jacques really understands the Chinese mentality. It is a great talk, it's not long - just over 20 minutes - but its a perspective that is so rarely seen in the Western media. In fact, it's such an interesting talk that I went to the trouble of embedding it into this post, just scroll down (if my HTML skills fail watch it here).
Of the whole talk there was one sentence that stood out for me,
That in a nutshell is the biggest mistake we make as outsiders - and I say "we" because it is a mistake I make too. As China's economy develops and it become more present in the global arena we are having to take note of the Middle Kingdom in a way we haven't really done before. But there is a problem. We judge China by Western standards and we don't take it for what it is outside of our preconceived concept of what a powerful country should be. Jacques makes the excellent point that China is the first time we will see a country from outside the Western tradition become a global superpower, this is the first time that a superpower is from a developing country, not a developed one; and I think this scares a lot of people. China is an unknown variable that will mean that we have to shift our thinking to accommodate traditions that are different to our own. Jacques makes so many good points that I couldn't possibly put them all in one post without pretty much writing a transcript but I'll summarise what I got from it.
One thing is that I feel very lucky to see an insiders perceptive of China, lucky that I can learn more about it and try to judge it from outside my Western tradition. I came to China with some ideas of what it would be like, and time and time again my preconceptions have been smashed. I'm fortunate that I've been able to become part of a Chinese family and they have been a big part of shaping the way I look at China. They have such a strong concept of what it is to be Chinese and learning about this has forced me to look at China from a Chinese perspective, although my Western bias does still creep in every so often.
Then on the other hand it just reinforces my belief that travel is so important. If we are going to have to accept another cultural tradition into the league of global superpowers, a cultural tradition that so fundamentally shapes it's government and people, then it is even more important to get outside of our own cultures to learn more about the world. As the world diversifies outside of the dominant Western tradition so must we, travel is still one of the most important things you can do. The rest of the world is so good at accommodating and understanding the Western world. They make it their business to know how the Western world lives and try to understand their traditions. Surely, it is equally important for us to understand the other side of the world, the cultures that one day will surpass Western world in its influence.
Just before I left the UK it seemed like China was everywhere, the newspapers heralded China as the new hot place to travel and TV programme after TV programme was aired that revolved around various aspects of China and Chinese culture. I have now become invested in China and so I try to make it my business to watch as many of these TV shows as I can, to get an insight into how the West views China and how that compares to the reality of my experiences.
Often these documentaries do a pretty good job of representing China but, as is always the way with TV, it is sensationalised. The things that are the strangest are highlighted, which is to be expected, but the thing that strikes me is how rarely anything is shown through the Chinese perspective.
Recently I watched two programmes about China. One was a new BBC documentary presented by Billie JD Porter about the pressures on young people in China and the education system (watch it here) . It is part of a series about Chinese life and, I think, it's main purpose is to show how different China is. Having worked in the Chinese education system and talked to a lot of Chinese students about their lives and the pressure they feel is put on them I found this documentary particularly interesting. And honestly, I think the documentary did match up pretty closely with my experiences. The pressure to do well is extreme and one of the words I hear most when talking to students about school and study is "stress". Students can easily do anywhere between five and seven hours of homework a night and that's not seen as particularly excessive, it's just the way it is.
One thing I think that the documentary got right is why parents put this extreme pressure on their children. This is the first generation since the Chinese communist revolution in 1949 that has grown up under a stable government and in a China that is rapidly getting richer. For the older generation every opportunity was a struggle and now that opportunities are comparatively abundant they expect their children to work as hard as they can to make the most of these opportunities. Another source of the pressure is the one child policy (read my post about how the one child policy has effected attitudes towards contraception here). With one child the hopes of the family lie on one person, China doesn't have very good provision for old people so it is the children's responsibility to look after the parents in old age. This means that the pressure is on to have the means to provide, it's not just your own lifestyle that you have to think about but that of the older generation too.
But for all the documentary did right, for me, the problem wasn't so much what was shown but rather how it was shown. The whole time Porter reported in a way that made it sound to me like she was saying that the Chinese way was wrong just because it is different. A lot of the time I felt Porter was disrespectful to the Chinese culture and customs and I never felt that she tried particularly hard to understand "why" in a deeper sense. She was happy to put Western ideals on a country that doesn't have any desire to be western.
This is where the second programme I watched came into its own. This programme was a TED talk by Martin Jacques entitled "Understanding the rise of China", and my boyfriend had asked be to watch it because he said that Jacques really understands the Chinese mentality. It is a great talk, it's not long - just over 20 minutes - but its a perspective that is so rarely seen in the Western media. In fact, it's such an interesting talk that I went to the trouble of embedding it into this post, just scroll down (if my HTML skills fail watch it here).
Of the whole talk there was one sentence that stood out for me,
"China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different."
That in a nutshell is the biggest mistake we make as outsiders - and I say "we" because it is a mistake I make too. As China's economy develops and it become more present in the global arena we are having to take note of the Middle Kingdom in a way we haven't really done before. But there is a problem. We judge China by Western standards and we don't take it for what it is outside of our preconceived concept of what a powerful country should be. Jacques makes the excellent point that China is the first time we will see a country from outside the Western tradition become a global superpower, this is the first time that a superpower is from a developing country, not a developed one; and I think this scares a lot of people. China is an unknown variable that will mean that we have to shift our thinking to accommodate traditions that are different to our own. Jacques makes so many good points that I couldn't possibly put them all in one post without pretty much writing a transcript but I'll summarise what I got from it.
One thing is that I feel very lucky to see an insiders perceptive of China, lucky that I can learn more about it and try to judge it from outside my Western tradition. I came to China with some ideas of what it would be like, and time and time again my preconceptions have been smashed. I'm fortunate that I've been able to become part of a Chinese family and they have been a big part of shaping the way I look at China. They have such a strong concept of what it is to be Chinese and learning about this has forced me to look at China from a Chinese perspective, although my Western bias does still creep in every so often.
Then on the other hand it just reinforces my belief that travel is so important. If we are going to have to accept another cultural tradition into the league of global superpowers, a cultural tradition that so fundamentally shapes it's government and people, then it is even more important to get outside of our own cultures to learn more about the world. As the world diversifies outside of the dominant Western tradition so must we, travel is still one of the most important things you can do. The rest of the world is so good at accommodating and understanding the Western world. They make it their business to know how the Western world lives and try to understand their traditions. Surely, it is equally important for us to understand the other side of the world, the cultures that one day will surpass Western world in its influence.
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