From DEBRA@oln.comlink.apc.orgWed Aug 30 10:18:24 1995 Date: Mon, 28 Aug 1995 20:41:00 +0100 From: Debra Guzman Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org To: beijing95-l@netcom.com, beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org Subject: Dick Shepard on China generalizations [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] ## author : theearthtime@igc.apc.org ## date : 26.08.95 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dick Shepard on China generalizations By Richard F. Shepard Earth Times News Service There is, for those of us in the West, which is largely part of the North, a dangerously high bundle of misconceptions about China, which is in the East and largely part of the South, stowed away in the luggage that we are about to bring to Beijing. These visions are other than those that will be tackled at the Women's Conference, but the conference and China, despite all protestations to the contrary, are tightly bound to each other. The point is as cultural as it is political; indeed, culture and politics are rarely free of each other. In this instance, the misconceptions are not about rights of women and humans, about freedom and human dignity; these, after all, are always in contention in any society, although the way they are approached and the concrete issues in which they are mired may differ from country to country. The East may have its own ideas about the West, based on its own experiences and biases. The misconceptions I am speaking about are the ones we in the West harbor, and they are indeed deeply ingrained in us. Thanks to generations of European-rooted views on races, the Chinese have borne the brunt of attitudes toward the Asians, probably because the Chinese were the people we thought we were most familiar with (although we were by no means familiar with them). There are two stereotypes that have emerged, at least two, although there may be others. First is the idea of Chinese as hard-working, honest, intelligent and easy to push around. It came as a shock to meet Chinese who were as slack, dishonest, dim-witted and militant as any American or other Westerner with who we were familiar. The other was of Chinese as shifty, clannish, dominated by criminal gangs and particularly suitable as villains for movies. These qualities, which might apply to some banker types in golf-club communities, also led some Westerners to avoid their company and to prevent Chinese from being accorded their due in our Western Society, indeed it led to their persecution and disenfranchisement. Now we are going to Beijing and there will be many among us who will carry impressions to China, impressions that one hopes will be shattered after a few weeks there. Of all the countries we will have visited in the course of United Nations gatherings, China evokes the strongest pre- conceptions. Open-minded people--and who among us has the mind entirely open? The best we can do is leave a mental door ajar--will learn that Chinese are more or less no different from the rest of us. We will meet heroes and villains, thinkers and wastrels. The expression of these conditions may differ from our own, but the end-all result is the same. As best you can, leave Hollywood and dime-novel thrillers and ancient ruminations on the Celestial Kingdom in the attic at home. The Chinese are different in culture from us, from Africa, from the rest of Asia. Even from each other, Cantonese from Northerners, coastal from inland Chinese. Cooking varies from province to Province and so does speech (an argument in Suchow sounds sweeter than love-making in Swatow, an old Chinese saying, originated perhaps in Suchow, has it). Whatever generalizations one may apply to Chinese, one alone holds true: there are more of them than there are of any of us. And about half of them are women.