Stereotype.
My gf is going to give a presentation to a bunch of 8th graders in a small Michigan town about China and her experiences there. My first reaction when I heard about this, and being borned in China, was "don't just feed these kids stereotypes of China and the Chinese people." She agreed. But it got me thinking, what exactly are the stereotypes that Americans have about China?
If you are a teenager that watches movies and sports, would it be Jackie Chan and Yao Ming? Do all Chinese people speak broken English with funny accents? Are all of them friendly if only sometimes puzzling, but physically gifted?
Or is China still the land of Terracotta soldiers, buried underneath two millenia of earth, each one embodied with a unique physical features and personality, but forever preserved in military formations, deadly and merciless? A land of dead philosophers and failed dynasties and ancient history?
Or do all Chinese people wear pointy hats like the ones you still sometimes find in cartoons, working the field of rice patties behind a water ox?
Or do you see China as a nation of bicyclists, where the rush hours in the morning and evening filled with tin-tins of bike bells and muddled coughs of motopeds?
Of course, if you have been watching Lou Dobbs every night on CNN, China may be a place where 1.3 billions of people are single-mindedly hell-bent on working for 1 dollar an hour to steal the good paying jobs that fun-loving Americans with high school diplomas used to expect.
Well some of these are really only stereotyped fantasies, but the rest are simply many facts of life in a country that is ever changing. The point was that my gf and I have very different views on what the true identity of Today's China is. Is it a nation where 800 million people still live in small rural towns and have to farm for a living, or a nation where the decadence and excess of its cities rival that of anyone in the world? I don't know.
But seriously, is it so easy to distinguish fiction from reality? Do you wonder what stereotypes that non-Americans have about the U.S.? McDonalds? Movies with killer robots fighting with an Austrian hero? Badly designed, highly unefficient automobiles? Land of freedom and liberty? Best schools and even better companies? JFK? Donald Trump? George Bush? Michael J... nevermind. We can laugh and cry about all these things, but they are all part of us. Our perception about ourselves are all shaped by our experiences, therefore our recognition about other's stereotypes about ourselves inevitably becomes a part of us. We aspire to some while simultaneously struggle to fight off the rest. See, stereotypes can be useful.
Why UN doesn't work.
I read David Brooks from NYT more than any other columnist from their opinion lineup. He has an article today on the
real fight behind John Bolton's confirmation. It is the battle over two visions of the UN's role in international politics--global governance vs. international peacemaker. Brooks and Bolton are for the lateral, and they distrust the current UN for overreaching that role.
Brooks made five points, but I only found the first to be the most convincing:
We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.The fact that Russia and China make up two fifth of the permanent security council has always bothered me, and Brooks only revealed this hypocrisy of UN, a supposedly advanced democratic creation, while been straight-jacketed by undemocratic components. The rest of his arguments includes (1) UN's lack of accountability, (2) the superiority of U.S. Constituition, (3) lack of enforcibility of its resolution, and (4) its anti-Zionist agenda. (1) is really inevitable in any large institution, including the U.S.--at least UN fires people when things go bad. (2) is really an extention of his best argument, i.e. everyone needs to become more democratic, like us (or U.S.), wink wink. (3) is partly the result of large members like the U.S. and Russia and China. (4), well, I will leave that alone.
So yes, the belief that UN should act as a superduper World Government is naive, but build strong international institution isn't easy, but it is necessary.
P.S. Perhaps a better idea to build strong and democratic global institutions should be modeled after EU. Its membership is based on potential nations' ability to demonstrate democratic governance and sound fiscal responsibility. Ok, maybe not the latter.
Who killed Lenin?
The consensus in the mass media the days following John Paul II is that he brought down communism in East Europe. His contribution has been cited as high as 50%. Call me naive and ignorant, but I can't imagine one man's power to bring down a socio-economical experiment as big as the iron curtain/communist bloc. It seems that everyone points to his memorable return to Poland after he became the Pope. But of course he would. He is the Pope, who's going to touch him? He went back to the home country. Did he do anything to denounce the regime? No. Communism in Europe failed because it failed match the economical progress from the West, not because of token gestures by a religious leader. I don't think I ever heard of anyone who mentioned John Paul II's name in conversations about the fall of communism until this year!
It seems that if anyone should be taking credit for helping the democratic movement in Poland and the neighboring countries would not be the Polish bishop and future Pope, but the cardinals that broke the stranglehold Italians had on the papacy and elected someone from a communist country as the next Pope. So I say, let's elect a Chinese Pope and we will just wait another 10 years for CCP to crack up.
