April 1, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    At age sixteen, I attended London University as an external student. One course, "British-Chinese relations in the nineteenth century," was taught by Sir John Pratt. Sir John, a part-Indian, was knighted for his service to scholarship. In his lectures, the Indian scholar, though honored by Britain, denounced Britain to British students and me, a Chinese, for dumping opium on China, making it into a nation of addicts. Resistance by the Chinese emperor and his commissioner Lin Zexu led to what is now known as the Opium War (1839-1842). China lost. Thereafter China suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of European powers, eager to carve up the country into "spheres of influence," following their success doing the same in Africa. Wherever the Europeans established extra-territorial rights in China, they lived under their own laws, and the Chinese were treated as second-class citizens—no, worse, as barely human—in their own country. A public park in the French concession of Shanghai, for example, had the infamous notice, "No dogs and Chinese allowed."

    The humiliation was all the more galling because for centuries, China was a center—the center—of advanced civilization. As late as the eighteenth century, China was the richest country in the world. The per capita income of its people exceeded that of Europeans. Now, allow me to indulge in a bit of fuzzy psychology. Drawing on your own experience, isn't it true that your successes in life, however glorious at the time, tend to lose their punch and even fade completely from memory as the years roll by? In contrast, the failures and humiliations continue to lacerate. The wound simply doesn't heal. The same would seem to be true of a whole people. A nation soon takes its successes for granted. China forgets that it was once an imperial power, spreading domination, but also high culture, to distant lands and peoples. What it cannot forget are the humiliations, especially since they occurred so recently.

    Much as one may disapprove of communism, most Chinese feel some pride in their country's recent rise to a modicum of wealth and power. The Olympic Games, the Chinese hope, will be the occasion when the world recognizes their country's achievements, its place under the sun. But the world, by which I really mean the West, is intent to humiliate the Chinese again, this time not by military force, which it no longer commands, but by disrupting the Games on the grounds that the Chinese are responsible for the murderous regimes of Darfur and Myanmar, and for tramping on democratic (!), peace-loving Tibet. What I find so obnoxious is the West's ignorance of history, its self-righteousness. So Prince Charles won't dream of attending the 2008 Olympics; and so the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has his second thoughts about dirtying his hands in Beijing. That such self-righteousness should come from Britain and France, so recently imperial monsters that gobbled up the earth, is beyond belief.

    China's attempts to please the West, almost begging it to attend the Games, leave me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, China does show a degree of sensitivity to world opinion. (Let Bush's America take notice!) On the other hand, China's eagerness for approval—like a plain girl at the debutante's ball—makes me bow my head in shame.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu