Let me start with a tongue-in-cheek observation.
China has committed a grave and unforgivable crime against humanity. It has become rich and powerful.
In this world of ours, only Western nations are allowed to be rich, and only the United States of America is allowed to be powerful. Other nations may be permitted to move into the middle-income league, but must not aspire to leadership of any sort. Those are the rules.
China has violated this "rules-based society". That's why we see so much outrage in the West about anything and everything China does. The negative slant of every news item in the Western press would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous and violative of basic journalistic ethics.
Both my native country (India) and my adoptive country (Australia) seem to have been caught up in this wave of negative sentiment towards China.
Indians are unable to step past the trauma of the 1962 border war to see the India-China relationship in perspective. How can two civilisations that developed cheek-by-jowl for over three millennia without a single conflict suddenly become bitter rivals because of a mishandled border dispute? It makes no sense, and it is juvenile to allow such an insignificant issue to hold to ransom a relationship that could be immensely beneficial to both countries. Indians are simply unable to see that both countries have suffered similarly at the hands of Western colonialism, and that together, they can wrest power back from the West. Instead, Indians are happy to be part of Western strategies to "contain" China. In my general blog, I've written about how I believe Indians should learn to think about China, and what I believe India's foreign policy stance should be.
Australians too seem unable to see that the economies of Australia and China are complementary, not competitive. China and Australia can grow in tandem, and a smooth relationship is in the interests of both countries. Yet Australia seems unable to outgrow its tendency to fight other countries' wars. After fighting for Britain in the first and second world wars, and joining the US in its disastrous adventures in Vietnam and Iraq, Australia has decided to disrupt the harmony of its relationship with Beijing at Washington's behest. Nothing good is going to come of this. The US is not compensating Australia for the loss of its exports to China. If anything, the US seems happy to replace Australia in the Chinese market! Aussies are supposed to be smarter than this.
In any case, I have decided to shut out the noise and start to understand China for myself, with as few induced biases as possible. My own visit to China in 2018 helped me understand that China is a normal country with normal people, not an Orwellian dystopia where people live in constant fear of a predatory government. Having Chinese friends in Australia has also helped me overcome the many negative stereotypes that I grew up with in post-1962 India.
I believe that the first step to understanding a country - its culture, its society, and its worldview - is to learn its language. I can never hope to understand China through the medium of the English language. I must learn about China through Mandarin. Language shapes thought, and one cannot understand how Chinese people think unless one learns to think in Chinese.
My attempts to learn Mandarin have frequently stalled. I started with a private tutor in 2013, but had to discontinue my lessons after a couple of months when he moved to another suburb. I joined the Confucius Institute in 2016 and completed two courses, but my cohort disbanded thereafter, and I found it hard to get back into the stream at the right level.
Right now, thanks to Duolingo, I'm making slow but steady progress. I hope to complete all levels in the Duolingo app a year from now. Du Chinese is another app I have downloaded. It provides simple texts to practise reading.
I will document my learnings here.
No comments:
Post a Comment