culture - Typically Chinese – the WTO column

(Tomorrow in Chinabiz)

Ann Arbor, MI – What do powder, Dutch tulips and freedom have in common? Well, they all have their roots in China.
For those who think that my short stay at US universities has caused all kind of nasty side-effects let me assure you that talking to academics is sometimes better than smoking grass. It really broadens your view on the world. We have been blaming both academics and journalists that while information on China is wide available, we have done a poor job in explaining China to the rest of the world.

Attributing good or bad habits to national characteristics is a great way to spend time during otherwise boring parties. You can talk about what is so typical about the Chinese, the Americans or the Spanish. Fortunately, during those gatherings you do not have to go very deep, otherwise you might discover that many of those ideas are just nice topics to discuss at those informal gatherings, but nothing more.
When the Chinese claimed that the famed Dutch tulip was not coming from Turkey as we always assumed, but from China, I knew that nothing was safe anymore: What in this world would now not be coming originally from China?
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Last week I attended an interesting meeting of the Center of Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan and got my final shock. Professor Marty Powers explained there that the concepts of freedom, individualism, free speech and egalitarism were originally Chinese. Powers did not seem intoxicated by anything else than academic values.
Trained as a historian I always thought those to be typical Western values, developed during the Enlightenment and based on a very European worldview. Blood has been spilled to get those ideals realized.

Wrong, wrong again: the Chinese were first, yet again, explained Powers, professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures. Centuries before the Enlightenment would literally enlighten us peasants in Europe, individualism and egalitarism were en vogue in China. Starting in the 12th century the Chinese elite developed those characteristics and shocked the Europeans when they discovered China in the 16th and 17th century. “Free speech and access to public offices were in China at the time very well regulated, while the European languages even did not make a distinction between the office and the officer,” said Powers. “Sacking an officer in Europe would be unthinkable.”
Europeans were disgusted by the free-wheeling Chinese, who enjoyed a solid legal system.

That is more or less the opposite what you hear nowadays when foreign investors get together and complain about China. Unfortunately, the wisdom of sinologists does not have much practical use today. But this shows that it is not ethnicity but rather social conditions which define how people behave.. Especially studies among American-Chinese and other overseas Chinese show that they are able to adopt different ways of behaving, depending on time, place and their own choice. This kind of flexibility still needs a wider following among the non-Chinese.

Fons Tuinstra