To Understand the Chinese
Where are they coming from?
Separation of the haves and the have-nots has always been a pillar of human civilizations. All of them used an ideology that convinced both the elite and the subjects that they deserved their fate. In most cases, the ideology took the form of some religion, but “the Chinese” were, and still are, different.
It is easier to understand “the Chinese,” if one manages to understand their heritage, at least to a certain extent.
Literacy alone in China took care of the separation of the privileged and the underclass. Social mobility, however, emerged in China with the introduction of a crude form of meritocracy. When Confucianism was embraced by the rulers (it is an “etiquette” of “ruling properly”; Machiavelli comes to mind as an analogy from the West, but that happened nearly two thousand years later and never got officially canonized) suddenly, small landowners and some artisans who were able to pay a tutor to teach their sons how to read and write and a wondering scholar whose stock of Confucius' works made it possible for the sons to learn all of them by heart and go for the Imperial Exam that could elevate their position. That is why the Chinese respect money even today; social mobility was possible only for those with assets, and the destitute had to succumb to the fact that they were undeserving.
Only about 40% of “the Chinese” speak Mandarin. There are about 300 languages in China, and their stone-age-level writing is the only way they can communicate with each other, which makes their writing indispensable, but they also enjoy the fact that “western devils” have a hard time understanding a writing system (the Russians also pride themselves of the same) that requires familiarity with about 15 thousand symbols (that denote morphemes) with a just about infinite number of combinations with the 52 diachronics (little markers within ideograms indicating some sort of inflection in meaning, but ideograms can also be created for novel ideas), so one of the final tests at the Imperial Exam, when multiple contestants achieved a perfect score by reciting Confucius perfectly (assuming the mandatory bribes before the test hadn’t taken care of it, because when all things went equal, the largest donor’s son was declared winner), was the task to create a new “ideogram,” and the most elegant solution was granted the title of the lowest-ranking imperial official.
So, “the Chinese” are not so mysterious, after all, but bearing in mind that they represent a completely different stance in civilization might assist westerners to realize why they are looked down upon by the folks from China.
Still, not everyone from there is completely detached. I remember having a discussion with a Chinese doctoral student in my time as a doctoral student in Massachusetts. While packing books for shipments for the University Press as student workers, we were exploring the possibilities of some kind of solution to a computer programming problem (it may have been hardware, I forget) and, as I kept coming up with options (as a student in Linguistics), after a few minutes, he couldn’t hide his astonishment, to which, to my amazement, he immediately gave voice as well, as if talking to himself, saying something like, “It looks like not all white people are stupid.” In the same warehouse, after the conversation, I was even befriended by a Vietnamese engineering student, whose idea of westerners also radically changed (but the Vietnamese tend to be Roman Catholics as a result of their French colonial heritage, so they are light-years closer to the West than most people from China).
Obviously, it would be easier to get along with people from China, if they didn’t consider themselves superior, but I cannot blame them, because such a sense of superiority seems to be just about universal among human cultures.
Christianity could have serves as a decent common denominator to abridge various cultures, but it didn’t work out in China in the long run. Christianity was not banned right away. After about 200 years of proselytizing, in 1692, it even received imperial protection:
https://thechinaproject.com/2021/03/24/when-christianity-was-tolerated-in-early-qing-china/
The Jesuits managed to convert up to 400 thousand Chinese (the poor were out of range for Confucianism that was the elite’s ideology, and and many people liked the idea of a personal relationship with God as a personal redeemer, which was missing from the spiritualism in Taoism), but the pope disallowed to have the Sacrament made of rice, and the conversions slowed down. Jesuits were adept at making deals with those in power (which is the reason why Counter-Reformation was successful in Europe), convincing them it was in their best interest to allow Roman Catholicism to flourish. Later, Franciscan and Dominican preachers showed up, ignored the rich and powerful, while publicly declared that Confucianism was from the Devil, which ticked off the ones in power and in 1724, Catholicism earned a 136-year-long banishment from China:
https://thechinaproject.com/2021/02/10/the-yongzheng-emperor-and-christianity-in-china/
Christian missionaries were welcome in China only after the Second Opium War that ended in 1860.
Today, only about 44 million Chinese declare themselves to be Christians:
The idea of equality before God and before the law doesn’t exist in most cultures, and China is not an exception. In fact, even in the West, in Calvinism and in orthodox Judaism, the proof of God loving you is your opulence. There is a pecking order among Muslims, too. The “West” pretends to give people equal opportunities, but upward social mobility has been non-existent for decades, taking the illusion of the American Dream with itself after an ephemeral existence to an early grave.
What is the common denominator among all cultures is that they structure themselves in the same manner, and they respect wealth and power, based on which, they usually develop their own ideologies in order to keep the destitute at bay:
Mr. Horvath, please forgive the off-topic, but I saw your exchange on RTE regarding BC and thought you might find this interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAdi9PdZY-8&t=2s