Illegal aliens and soft power

I want to pick up on a thread that's been weaving it's way through my intellectual life here in Beijing (which is somewhat confined due to my lack of Mandarin)—the Chinese sense of self identity and how that affects foreigners like me.

I posted earlier an extract from Simon Winchester about the self confidence of Chinese people as a society. Winchester's hypothesis is that the Chinese have so long and deep a history as a people that they exude a self-assuredness that is, at its most benign, unexpected for the unwary Westerner. Winchester describes this cultural phenomenon as 'frustrating' for visitors to the Middle Kingdom, but his tone leads to something slightly more sinister—self confidence can quickly become a kind of xenophobia in the wrong circumstances.

[beware inflammatory juxtaposition!] Beijing recently announced an action plan to 'Clamp Down on Illegal Aliens'—i.e. foreigners living in the city without appropriate documents. You might think this is an unintentional slight that really comes down to a simple misunderstanding of the negative connotations of the term 'illegal aliens'—surely it's just Chinglish? Yes, you might think that, except for the more detailed account provided by state television broadcaster CCTV's Yang Rui on national television:

The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash right now, arresting foreign scum and protecting innocent Chinese girls from them; but in order to do that, we need to focus on Sanlitun and Wudaokou, and target those who frequent the areas and its event organizers. Foreigners who can't find a job in their home country come to China and get involved in illegal business activities such as human trafficking and espionage; they also like to distribute lies which discredit China to persuade locals to move abroad. A lot of them look for Chinese women to live with as a disguise to further their espionage efforts. They pretend to be tourists traveling around the country while actually helping Japan and Korea make maps and collect GPS data for military purposes. We need to take action, first kick that crazy foreign journalist from Al Jazeera out of the country and close their Beijing office, and then shut everybody up, all the members of the foreign press who demonize China.

(The reference to 'protecting innocent Chinese girls', by the way, appears to be a thinly veiled allusion to either the recent attempted molestation of a Chinese local by a white male, or the ongoing rumour that foreign men are 'taking' many of the local eligible young women, or perhaps both.)

I'm not going to get into the political reasons for this move, as there has been a lot of commentary on the subject of why the Government is taking this action, and why now. But I am interested in what this tells us about the Chinese worldview and how I should behave in response.

Obviously, and I want to make this plain, nobody should be making any kind of extreme generalisations that attempt to confront racism with racism. Even on the China Daily website, underneath the publication of the above quote from Yang Rui, there are a few comments that allude to the fierce debate that rages constantly among Chinese locals about whether foreigners are to be welcomed or despised. It's certainly true that Yang is not representative of the opinions of all Chinese people. But it presents an interesting question that has been intriguing me since before I arrived here—how do Chinese people see foreigners? How do they see Australians? What should I be aware of in my interactions with Beijingers so that I can treat them with respect and humility?

As an amusing yet relevant anecdotal pause, I was recently discussing with my coworkers their travels overseas, what they enjoyed and what they didn't, and how these experiences compared to my own. Firstly, their experiences were much more limited than mine. I have been lucky enough to travel through many parts of Europe on a number of occasions, live and study for a short time in western Europe, see the US and parts of southeast Asia and travel a fair bit within Australia and New Zealand. That's not outside of the normal range of experiences among my peer group. My coworkers, on the other hand, have seldom travelled even within China. Some have been overseas with work for short (week-long) conferences, and very few have had the chance to study overseas. But none have been anywhere outside China for pleasure. I try to be conscious of my privileged upbringing and suggest that maybe this is because Chinese people have not been as wealthy as some Western countries, and therefore lack the opportunity to travel. My colleagues agree in part, but in general, they cannot understand how you could possibly exist outside China, where the food is so repulsive! Why would you want to go somewhere you have to travel all the way to Chinatown to get a decent feed?

Now I can attest to the fact that Chinese people have a lot to be proud of with regard to their food. It is, as mentioned previously, AMAZING. But I still like other types of food, too. What would the world be like without pizza, croissant, borscht, hummous or hamburgers? Food is not like an exclusive covenant, where you can only choose one cuisine and you're holed up in one type of food hall for the rest of your life.

What surprised me the most, though was their remorseless attack on the food of other countries. Foreign food was, according to my coworkers, 'disgusting'. On the few occasions they travelled internationally, they lost weight because they 'couldn't find anything edible'. Maybe food is just one of those issues that gets Chinese people really riled up. Or maybe it's a sign of a broader disinterest in different cultures that results from Winchester's self-assured 'Chineseness'. I certainly don't think my coworkers meant any harm, and they probably didn't anticipate that my reaction could be to take offence. Luckily for them, I come from a country without a strong identifying cuisine (unless you count Vegemite as a cuisine ...), so I found the whole thing more amusing than offensive.

Whatever the reason behind Chinese people not travelling much, the broader impact of this phenomenon is that locals, even in Beijing, which is incredibly globalised these days, don't expect me to have a different cultural background. They don't anticipate that I may not know how to eat a whole fish with chopsticks, and they can't see why I wouldn't know the etiquette rules of Chinese business meetings. This obviously leads to some hilarious situations as per my previous post. One thing they do know for sure is that I'm immeasurably rich. Rich enough to buy anything I want and rich enough to pay three times the locals' price at the markets. And they are right in some ways. I try to say that I'm on an allowance that just covers my living expenses with little to spare, and that things in Australia actually cost a lot more than China, or even than the US. But truth be told, i know I'm incredibly privileged to be educated and able to travel. My salary in Australia is many multiples of the most extravagant pay packets here. 

This brings me to the conclusion of my long and winding meanderings that began at 4am this morning. My insomnia led me to James Fallows' recent blog on the rise of China (a somewhat larger and deeper topic than this one!):

Soft power becomes powerful when people imagine themselves transformed, improved, by adopting a new style. Koreans and Armenians imagine they will be freer or more successful if they become Americans -- or Australians or Canadians. Young men and women from the provinces imagine they will be more glamorous if they look and act like people in Paris, London, or New York. If a society thinks it is unique because of its system, or its style, or its standards, it can easily exert soft power, because outsiders can imagine themselves taking part in that same system and adopting those same styles. But if it thinks it is unique because of its identity -- "China is successful because we are Chinese" -- the appeal to anyone else is self-limiting.

Fallows is clearly talking about China's ability to influence on the international geopolitical stage, but it makes me wonder: will I always, regardless of how hard I study my Mandarin textbook, be an outsider here? No matter how much I come to enjoy pork dumpling for breakfast, is it actually impossible for me to be a part of this incredibly exhilarating, stimulating and vivacious Chinese world?

Guess I'll have to wait to find out.