Today in the Western media China is attacked more than praised. Shortcomings whether real or alleged are seized upon, harped upon and magnified. Achievements are ignored or admitted only grudgingly and sourly. The fashion is often to present whatever China does as wrong: If her population grows, she is threatening to crowd the world. If she plans families, she is denying the right to life of the unborn. If she meets economic difficulties, her whole system is wrong. If her economy forges ahead, she is becoming the world's third, second or even foremost power on the way to being a dangerous military superpower!
All this should not unduly distress us. What really counts is what we do, not what is said about us, or even what we say about ourselves. But what we say for ourselves, provided it is reasoned and true, will also have effect if not immediately then later as people look back. If we paint ourselves as all good, then people who come here come back with the impression, "it is not so good as they say." But those who come believing in the black picture painted by foreign media often come back saying, "it is much better than they say."
So if we do what is right and correct what is wrong, we need not worry much about "image."
From My China Eye Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist, published by Long River Press, San Francisco, 2005
In the West the compass is said to point North. To the Chinese, who invented it, it is the "South-pointing needle." The dual view does not affect its ability to guide in all directions, but it does draw attention to the relativity of spaces and the concept of multiple polarities. To the acute and ancient awareness of the Chinese civilization, built even into their everyday language, is the unifying relationship of opposites. "How much" or "how many" in Chinese, is "much-little" or "many-few." The length of anything is its "long-short" relationship. More deeply, the beautiful and thoughtful Chinese word for crisis is "danger-opportunity," reflecting the dual nature of the concept and hinting at the potential to develop in either direction, as in real life.
From My China Eye Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist, published by Long River Press, San Francisco, 2005
There is a Chinese expression nao-hai, which means literally, "brain-ocean." Nothing, in any other language I know of, conveys better the immense and complex working of the human mind, from its deepest depths to its highest tides, its quietest to its stormiest. The ever-practical Chinese do not assume the existence of an abstract element such as the soul. Despite many popular superstitions about the spirit world, the function of thought, like every other human attribute, was attributed to a physical organ though in more ancient tradition this was located as the heart, the seat of both understanding and conscience.
One's "brain-ocean" can be seen as recording experience, and individually reacting to wider stimuli at all levels, as the geographical ocean reflects the color-moods of the sky above it and the dank cold or boiling volcanic heat at its bedrock base.
From The Unfinished Revolution in China, first published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, United States, in 1947 and republished by Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 2003
In the bad old days of not so long ago foreign countries which wanted to get China into a proper frame of mind to talk concessions had a habit of first sailing one of their smaller navy boats up to her shores, unbuttoning their guns and perhaps lobbing over a few shells. This was known as gunboat diplomacy and in its time it seldom failed. Moreover, as a necessary preliminary to the whole business, those at whom the guns were pointed were accused of being "anti-foreign," which was apparently the greatest crime a Chinese could commit. Gunboat diplomacy went out of fashion when Chinese nationalism grew too big for it. The woodenheaded Japanese militarists who tried to use it in 1937 found that even a big piece of their army and navy was too little and too late. The accusation of anti-foreignism as a shooting offence also faded after the Japanese had stolen it and tried to deck out their invasion as a "defence of the rights of all civilized nations."
...There appear to be several types of foreign impact on China and several kinds of anti-foreignism to match. Of course, it might be more profitable to examine how and why foreign countries have been anti-Chinese. But since it is the anti-foreignism of a modern and independent Asia that many in the West fear, and since this book is for Western readers, it is worth approaching the problem from this end.
From the author's introduction, From Opium War to Liberation, first published in Beijing in 1956 and in enlarged and revised editions in Beijing in 1964, in Hong Kong in 1980 and 1998 by Joint Publishing (HK) Co Ltd, and Foreign Languages Press in Beijing in 2004
From Opium War to Liberation never aimed at being a full account of China's century of crucial change that would have taken a whole library. It was intended, as (Edgar) Snow perceived, as a voice "seldom heard" to help Western-educated people (not just those of Western origin but many on all continents who had been schooled under colonial influence) to "shift gears" from what they had been taught as history to what they had not been taught. In short, to awaken them to the need for "reversing the reversal of history," in Mao Zedong's graphic phrase, and direct their attention to rock-bottom realities.
As bridges to this re-focusing, many older English-language accounts which unlike sources in Chinese the readers could check for themselves were dug into for self-revealed evidence of aspects not only of Chinese but of Western history which had been habitually obscured. Among these was the impact of imperialism not just on China and other invaded lands but on the peoples of the imperialist countries themselves. And also, importantly, the mutual support, sometimes conscious and sometimes historically implicit, of the past progressive struggles of both.
From the author's preface, Woman in World History: Soong Ching Ling (Mme Sun Yat-sen), first published in 1993 by the New World Press
Soong Ching Ling (Mme Sun Yat-sen) was an outstanding woman in China's history, and the world's, in the 20th century. Most of it was spanned by her long life born in 1893, she died in 1981.
She was linked with many of the century's key events. In China they included three revolutions and their attendant civil wars plus national wars against foreign invasion and intervention. Globally, they embraced World War I and II and the great Russian and Chinese revolutions that followed in their wake and the subsequent universal surge of independence struggles in the former colonies and semi-colonies of imperialism.
From youth to old age, she fought for the right and duty of women to participate as full equals in all fields of the nation's advance, and for recognition by society of its duty to facilitate this. Her utmost love and concern was for the children, for their physical and moral health, for their education as worthy heirs of progress in the past and confident builders of the socialist future. Many things could wait, she said, but work for the children could not.
(China Daily June 2, 2005)
