Correspondent Howard W. French has had his hand on the pulse of China for years. What makes his writing so insightful is not what he says, but what he leaves unsaid. It is always the underlying meaning, the subtext, that reveals the depths of his understanding.
In his recent Letter from China: Mosque siege reveals the Chinese connection, French ties Pakistan’s recent, direct confrontation with radical Islam to Chinese diplomatic relations. He uses the siege at the Red Mosque in Islamabad as an example in the widening reality of Chinese are becoming international targets for radicals. It has been reported by Asian diplomats that Chinese leaders put strong pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to take stronger action. The point being that Pakistan’s instability is hurting Chinese interests in the region.
On June 23, the seminarians entered a Chinese-run health care center, which is often a euphemism for sex parlor, and kidnapped seven Chinese people, including five females whom they believed to be prostitutes…almost no one in the press has printed, even speculatively, what many Chinese themselves presume to be the truth of this matter, that the women kidnapped and later released in Islamabad were sex workers.
After all, there are important myths to protect: One of them is the essential goodness of the Chinese people, and the other, that China does not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.
Chinese citizens and Chinese interests are fanning out around the globe at a rate that is unequaled in this country’s long history. Wherever they land the Chinese are very often reproducing a Chinese way of life, as Americans did in the postwar era over half a century ago.
But getting to the point, French sums up what exactly it is that Chinese are recreating for themselves when they go abroad.
Among the Chinese, naturally enough, there is good and bad. Along with fresh injections of capital and ingenuity and China’s famous entrepreneurial bustle, the Chinese also often bring an insular clannishness, a driven style of management, an unblushing attitude toward corruption, and as the case in Pakistan suggests, an acceptance of things like brothels, which are common in China but in many other societies are seen as undesirable or are illegal.
The man on the street in China believes that in the eyes of the world that Chinese are perceived as good. Chinese media does a lot to reinforce these myths, leaving the public baffled when something happens to Chinese workers abroad. As their influence continues to expand outwardly, Chinese will be forced to consider previously un-thought of things such as cultural sensitivity. It is one thing to spin a prayer wheel in the wrong direction at a Tibetan monastery, but opening sex-parlors in Islamic countries is only going to incite ire and hatred.
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