Comrade Will

And there’s a special brand of toxicity that crops up again and again. It’s the branding of any problem or obstacle as uniquely Chinese, the branding of ‘these people’, the constant denigration of local culture or tradition. It dances on the edge of outright racism a lot of the time, and sometimes jumps right over. One of the reasons I was so happy to get out of Korea, where I lived for a miserable year, was because I was dangerously close to that attitude myself. I was blaming everything bad in the country on ‘Korean-ness’, even regular old human laziness, incompetence and greed.

Of course, Korean culture has plenty of problems, as does Chinese culture, and any culture. But culture is a much more transitory thing than that kind of casual dismissal implies. Playing into the idea of a monolithic Chinese culture leaves the detractors in the same position as the people they’d dismiss as ‘panda-huggers’, except that the qualities they attribute are different. Bitter expats see China as eternally power-worshipping, greedy, corrupt and cowardly; soft-headed pundits or government shills see it as eternally filial, respectful and virtuous. And both pour the bitter, wonderful and fluid reality of Chinese cultures and histories into a fixed mould of their own making.