Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: “The West,” the Israeli diplomat was saying, “has a secret weapon it doesn’t yet know about. More explosive then nuclear warheads where Southeast Asia is concerned, and at least as immoral. A Siamese king, back in 1910, wrote a book about it. He called it the ‘Anti-Semitism of the Orient.’ The Jews, you see, are the Chinese. It hasn’t changed. There’s only one unifying factor in this part of the world: each indigenous people—Malay, Thai, Vietnamese—hates the guts of a Chinaman.”
By “the Chinese,” he meant, of course, the Chinese of the diaspora, the Nanyang; China proper is a distant, amorphous presence. China is old, but the Chinese of the Nanyang are comparatively new on the scene. Admiral Cheng Ho sailed the straits of Malacca to Arabia and Africa in the 15th century. Long before that, Chinese traders were busy in the Malay archipelago, Borneo, and the Philippines. But Europeans, after all, were doing much the same thing at much the same period: Cheng Ho and Vasco da Gama are practically contemporaries. Yet each left a surprisingly superficial mark: the odd coastal fort, the odd Buddhist shrine or seaport mission-station.
But then—one reflects—the spirit of Asia has always been continental, not maritime. The sacred, royal cities of Asia—Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, Thailand’s Ayuthia, eyen Peking and Delhi—belong to the hinterland, to the jungles, steppes, and mountains where Asia retires to contemplate her navel. True, Islam and Hinduism came to Southeast Asia by the sea-routes. But the pattern did not fundamentally alter. Bombay, Singapore, Shanghai are modern, European artifacts imposed on an ancient fabric. Asia and Europe were alike, until modern times, in precariously perching on the edge of vast, unknown waters. But where ancient Asia had her Middle Kingdoms, ancient Europe had her Mediterranean, her Middle Sea.
It is a useful generalization, and its relevance to the problems of present-day Asia is soon evident. Everywhere, after all, it is the seaport cities that inject turmoil and change into Asia (whether we choose to call it revolution or disruption matters rather little). Everywhere, in today’s Asia, the hinterland sends back an echo that is discordant and disquieting.
Disquieting, in the first place, to the Westerner. But still more so, in the nature of things, to the Westernized Asian of the seaport cities. On a trip that took me from Tokyo to Saigon, from Singapore to Delhi, I heard the complaint many times: “They don’t understand us!” Needless to say, the visiting Westerner meets much the same types wherever he goes: the seminar-trotting intellectual, the international businessman, the cultural diplomatist. They have many things in common, and the chief of them is that they all speak English—and speak it, more and more, with an American accent. (There is, one notes, a dangerous illusion common to English-speaking travelers—that any English-speaking native is more intelligent than a non-English-speaking one. This is not so.) In India, the traveler may do a little better, may look for a wider range of contacts. But here, too, he is readily deceived: faced with the irresistible garrulity of the Indian intellectual, he forgets that less than 2 per cent of India’s population is English-speaking. In Japan, he will do decidedly worse: Japanese find English (strange only that we should find this strange) just as difficult as we find Japanese. In cosmopolitan Singapore or Bombay or Hong Kong, by contrast, he will have less difficulty. Nevertheless, he is not meeting—and is uncomfortably aware of it—anything that could be called a representative cross-section.
Who doesn’t understand whom, then, and why not? A generation ago, the answer would have come pat: the Westerner would have found himself rebuked, in his representative capacity, for the West’s general failure to understand Asia. The Westernized Asian, isolated as he might be from the life of the hinterland, set himself up as its spokesman. But now, it is almost the other way round. It is he who feels misunderstood. Not, this time, by the intruding and unsubtle West, but by those whose spokesman they once claimed to be. The Jan Sangh and D.M.K. in India, the Soka Gakkai in Japan, are not phenomena to the liking of these former opponents of the West. Coarser spirits adapt; the refined avert their eyes.
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All of which, more or less, is to be found here in Malaysia. Malaysia is interesting, indeed, just because it is so extreme a case. Here, the agents of Westernization were the Chinese. The Chinese—mostly from the South, speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects—made Singapore a great trading center, organized the tin mines, penetrated into the villages with their stores and services. If Malaysia is today one of the most modern of Asian economies, there is no question but that this is due to the 40 per cent of Chinese in her population. The hinterland, here, is Malay. And what you think of the Malays depends on what you think of the post-colonial situation. If you are a hardworking European or Chinese entrepreneur, you see the Malays as a lazy, good-for-nothing lot—who have perhaps the one merit of being conservative. If you are a Chinese intellectual (and there are few non-Chinese intellectuals) you are circumspect: the Malays, certainly, are the “indigenous race,” and their culture, language, and religion must be respected. But is it right, is it fair that road signs and public notices should be in Malay and English (soon it will be Malay only), and never in Chinese? South Africa and Belgium, with roughly the same linguistic divisions, have found a compromise—why not Malaysia? The answer, if you cling to the old-school colonial approach (so oddly adopted by present-day Malay nationalists) is that the “non-indigenous” Chinese have no right to a distinct enclave, or subculture, within a truly Malayan Malaysia. The Malay is idle? So he is: but the Chinese is pushy. The Malay is becoming an underdog in his own country. The state must protect him.
This outlook, British and traditional as it is, still prevails. The ratio of entry into the civil service is four Malays to one Chinese (on ability, it is admitted that the ratio might well be the other way round). In the army it is much higher: to all intents and purposes the police and the army are an instrument of Malay domination. In business, it is advisable to take a Malay partner into your firm: it looks well, and it pays off in terms of government influence.
Kuala Lumpur bears eloquent architectural witness to this British-fostered doctrine of the supremacy of the heartland over the periphery, of Malay over Chinese. Victor Purcell, in his Memoirs of a Malayan Civil Servant, describes how in 1910 the government, requiring a new Secretariat, gave the commission to a government surveyor who had promised a building “in the Islamic style.” Why “in the Islamic style”? Because it seemed good to the authorities that the depressed Malays should have some “indigenous” expression of their culture and religion. As a result, the Secretariat—and half a dozen other permanent buildings in Kuala Lumpur—are built in a carefully composed Colonial Islamese. Strange. But stranger: the most modern buildings in Kuala Lumpur—the airport, the University Mosque, the War Memorial—have developed the same style still further (not, let it be admitted, without elegance). The War Memorial is like nothing so much as some exotic Moorish relic in Granada or Damascus. Its central group of statues was sculpted by an American. But it is marred, in Malay eyes, by one defect: the three bayonet-wielding soldiers aloft look all too Caucasian. (They represent the British and Australian soldiers who took part in the operations during the “Emergency” ten years ago.) The American sculptor has been discreetly approached, apparently, and the defect is to be remedied by recasting. But the defect that springs to the eye of the Caucasian, non-Malay observer is that the two prostrate, bayonetted figures at the base of the statue bear unmistakably slit-eyed, Mongoloid features. They are Chinese.
To the casual visitor, then, the system would hardly seem viable. How can one half of the population, and that the less industrious and less skilled, hope to keep down the other half—40 per cent Chinese and 10 per cent Indian—in the long run? Comparisons spring to mind. South Africa, for instance, where the relative position of Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites is not dissimilar. The Afrikaners, slightly more numerous, control government and army; the English control commerce. In the context of white South Africa, such an arrangement seems to work—on condition that the commercially-minded English keep out of government. Up to the present, this is what has happened in Malaysia. The Chinese big businessman has been content to exert influence behind the scenes; the small Chinese shopkeeper to know that the leaders of his community can extend indirect protection. The Malays have ruled; the Chinese and the Indians have exhibited an on the whole profitable docility. It is, in its own way, a division of power.
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But can it last? Common sense, I think, suggests that it can’t and won’t. The Chinese are a far more distinct “racial element” than are the English in South Africa; and their real power is increasing, not decreasing, as the economy grows more sophisticated. Their weakness, as a political group, is plain enough: they lack a nationalism of their own with which to counter the aspirations of the Malays. Pro-Peking nationalism is too dangerous; the Kuomintang has no appeal; and a regional nationalism makes little sense in Chinese eyes. Yet the number of Chinese who have ceased to be Chinese in a cultural sense is very small; a handful, at most, of English-educated and English-speaking people who were known, in other days, as the “Queen’s Chinese.” No one who knows the Chinese can believe that they will voluntarily give up their identity: that has happened only when China has been very weak, and then only among the very poor (which many of the original Nanyang Chinese were). In Bangkok, admittedly, it has happened to some extent; but the Siamese lack the absolute barrier to intermarriage that exists between pork-eating Chinese and Moslem Malays. Yet to expect the Chinese population of Malaya to accept Malay as the exclusive national language—the language of government and administration, and the language of instruction at the university—seems to be demanding just this. It will be surprising if the Chinese younger generation accepts this species of apartheid.
Yet one cannot be quite sure. The Chinese may or may not be by nature inscrutable; they certainly know how to play a waiting game. There’s my friend Wang, for instance, who spent some time in prison during the Emergency on the suspicion (probably justified) of being a Communist, and knows every side of the question. The Communist insurrection failed, and failed largely because it was Chinese: Britain could deploy Malay nationalism against it. There will therefore be no revolution and, for himself, Wang has long ceased to desire one. He has his niche, a good one, in the university structure; to keep it he has merely to keep his mouth shut. Wang has the look of a man who has been through the mill: he has no wish to go through it again. To provoke him, since he is an affable fellow, one asks questions that are not perhaps wholly tactful. But one need not have worried: he parries them blandly, with a suavity worthy of the last of the Queen’s Chinese. “We must learn to compromise,” is Wang’s theme-song. He means it, and perhaps he is right. But whether, when he says it, he is echoing British precepts or ancient Chinese wisdom, I shall never know.
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Singapore: He crouches like a tiger while you question him, sniffing for a fault in your logic. He reminds you, at the drop of a hat, that he is a Cambridge double-first. He is the very type of the lawyer-politician: quick on the draw, resourceful, often too clever by half. He cultivates, along with Cambridge intellectuality, an air of toughness reminiscent of Singapore’s waterfront. He receives you in an open-necked shirt. His name is Lee Kuan Yew, and he is the most important man in Singapore.
Since 1965, when Singapore and Malaysia parted company, Lee has been Singapore’s Prime Minister. Few would dispute that he is one of the ablest politicians in Southeast Asia, or indeed in Asia as a whole. His triumph has been to defeat the Communists at their own game, to use them as political tools and to throw them away once in power. Like Willy Brandt, with whom he is often compared, he has shown that the Communists cannot compete in an open fight with a purposeful social-democracy. He has also shown that social-democracy can be made to work in an Asian context—a reminder to our pessimists that the alternatives in Asia are not necessarily between Communism and some rackety military despotism.
Yet, today, Lee Kuan Yew is not a happy man and Singapore not a happy place. For Lee’s is a tragic stance. When Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman proclaimed the dissolution of the union with Singapore, Lee wept before the television cameras. He is still apparently unable to see what led to the rift. Yet it is evident that the damage was, at least in part, self-inflicted. For Lee, the Malays were altogether too slow, too inflexible, too “reactionary.” He was never one to suffer fools gladly, and the Malays were quick to note it. He is the very type of the Westernized Asian (English is his first language, not Chinese) to whom the ways of the hinterland are alien, obscure, vaguely nefarious.
And worse, the man had a plan. All too brashly, he began to show his cards. He would expand his Singapore-based People’s Action party into a Malaysia-wide left-wing opposition party which would eventually compete on equal terms with, if not take over from, the Tunku’s ruling party. But it stood to reason—however Lee might emphasize the non-racial basis of his approach—that such a party must appeal chiefly to the disadvantaged Chinese and Indians within Malaysia, leaving to the Tunku’s party the rural, backward Malays and a few rich Chinese. In European terms, the plan might have worked. A progressive, industry-based mass party would alternate in power with a country-based conservative party. But in Asia things are not that simple. Polarization between Chinese and Malays could hardly have been avoided; and when it came to the crunch, the Malay leadership preferred to eject Lee Kuan Yew altogether rather than connive at his strategy.
Lee is still—or purports to be—nonplussed: “Why, I gave them fifteen years, didn’t I?” he told me with injured innocence, “What more could I have offered them?”
It is impossible not to admire Lee—and impossible not to be exasperated. He has so many rare virtues; yet he has a hubris about him that causes him invariably, it seems, to ride for a fall. The root of the trouble is, as he put it to me, “I have no hinterland. They call me the Willy Brandt of Southeast Asia—but where is my West Germany?” His opponents, on Right and Left, have their hinterlands: the Tunku has his loyal Malays; the Communists have Peking. Lee has only his island-state. What he is trying to do is not unheroic. But Lee is a one-man band, a man tragically too big and too bold for any role Singapore has to offer. For the truth is that his fate is bound up with the fate of the Nanyang Chinese. Lee’s refusal to admit the communal basis of politics in the region is admirable, but quixotic. The position of Singapore, now that the confrontation with Indonesia is done with, is not enviable. Whatever configuration emerges from the wreckage left by Sukarno, the whole region seems certain in the end to be Malay-dominated, in language, culture, and possibly religion.
Will the “Queen’s Chinese” accept this state of affairs? They will have little alternative. An educated Malay to whom I spoke brought up the old chestnut about the Jews of Asia: “And you know what happened to them, I suppose?” I said that I did: “But surely that’s just why it mustn’t happen here?” “Why not?” came the reply—in a tone that left, really, nothing to be said.
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Kuching, Borneo: Tom Harrisson is a bit of a schizophrenic: half intellectual, half Wild-Man-of-Borneo. He has now retired from his job of curator of the Sarawak museum, a post he has held since the war, but his legend—and his presence—loom large. Tom’s background is interesting. As a young man in the depressed England of the 30’s he founded Mass-Observation, a narodnik movement very expressive of the age, whose members sallied forth to “Worktown” and other English working-class enclaves and meticulously recorded their impressions. It was, he now admits, rather an amateurish affair. Nobody knew much about sociology, as presently understood, and nobody much cared. It was a Schwärmerei, but it represented something of a breakthrough: people actually looked and listened for the first time at the way “the other half” was living. During the war, Tom got himself parachuted into Borneo, to organize anti-Japanese resistance in the hinterland. It was not his first trip to the South Pacific (he had earlier written a book called Civilized Savages), but it brought out his extraordinary gift of empathy toward primitive peoples, who seem to have responded to his leadership much as the Arabs did (according to his own account) to T. E. Lawrence’s. The anthropologist turned hero! Tom, too, responded—and has spent twenty years of his life mass-observing the ways of his Dayaks, Kelabits, and Punans. There is probably no man alive who knows more of Borneo than Tom Harrisson.
Tom’s fault, as he well knows, is his Faustian appetite for knowledge. Unlike those precise young graduate students from the States who are always picking his brains, he doesn’t know where to stop. Is he an anthropologist? Well, he knows more than most. Is he an archaeologist? Well, he is untrained, strictly speaking, but few can rival his knowledge and expertise. He has a great fear of being ground down, as he maintains the younger generation is, by the academic machine. We take a trip down-river to a remote Malay kampong on the coast that has, Tom explains, very special associations for him. It was here that Alfred Russell Wallace, whom Darwin generously admitted to be the co-discoverer of evolution, lived and worked. In his diary, Wallace records how he dissected a thousand birds in one small area of jungle. A thousand birds! Tom’s heart lifts at this evidence of Victorian energy and enthusiasm. Mass-observation, indeed! And Wallace, he reminds us, was no more than a “gardener,” an uneducated, enthusiastic amateur. Yet experience and intuition led him to the same conclusions as Darwin. He was one of the great inductive geniuses. “Now these graduate students,” Tom exclaims indignantly, “they know everything, you see, before they come out here. Look at that patch of jungle over there: they know that every bird they study has its particular food-chain—insect, berry, earthworm, what have you. And they write it up very convincingly. But I’m not so sure. I’ve seen those birds—at least when they’re hungry—gobble up anything in sight. I’m afraid they don’t stick to their damn food-chains, whatever Cal Tech has to say about it.”
Surprising as it may seem, he is full of praise for the Peace Corps. They don’t suffer, according to Tom, from the deductive arrogance of his graduate students. Indeed, they carry the inductive approach rather far. The girls of the Peace Corps are to be seen teaching the local Chinese the Frug and Watusi in the local dancehalls; the girl who works in the next village has a Malay lover. (The locals do not altogether like such familiarities.) The Peace Corps, in fact, has something of the old narodnik panache of Mass-Observation. Tom, on the whole, is skeptical about the good they are doing to the natives, but he has no doubt that the natives are doing these young Americans good. His general attitude is that “interference” of any kind should be deplored; local customs should be preserved and protected. He is particularly down on the sewing machines that are making their appearance in Dayak long-houses these days. Local folk, he implies, knew how to get along without them in earlier times. But the Peace Corps, he points out, is laying up treasure for America in the years ahead. America is acquiring the same range of skills and linguistic expertise that the British, French, and Dutch had in the past. Ten years from now, America will have a reserve of people with the kind of direct, personal knowledge of remote parts of the world that Britain’s “imperialists”—of whom Tom Harrisson is in effect a late and admirable specimen—were once proud to boast. That is, the Peace Corps is in the Yankee tradition: an idealistic enterprise that will turn out to be highly profitable.
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Manila: Southeast Asia is like Southern Africa or the southern part of South America: it is one of the ends of the world. Nothing much has originated here; almost everything has had to be imported and, in the process, has undergone a sea-change. Thus the “Chinese culture” of the Nanyang Chinese is often (so mainland Chinese say) a poor enough thing. There was a time, in Sun Yat-sen’s days, when the Chinese of the Nanyang were in the forefront of the national revolutionary movement. It would be hard, today, to find much evidence of a popular political will—except in Peking’s interest—among the Chinese of the Nanyang. It is the same, of course, with the colonial British culture that has been imposed on the local elites; it is not bad, as colonial cultures go, but it reinforces the sense of living on the periphery, of belonging to a culture whose center is half the earth’s circumference away. Nor can the Malay culture—to which the Philippines belong—claim much more. The religion of the Malays is Islam, imported many centuries ago from the Middle East and India. Their language is indeed “indigenous,” and may eventually become the lingua franca of the whole area—with the Philippines, some 140 million people. But, for all the talk about the lost medieval empires, historically the Malay world was mostly feudal and nomadic. And what was true of the Malay peoples for most of their history is truer still for their cohabitants of the region, some of related blood, some of distinct and more ancient stock—peoples like the Punans and the Kelabits. The best portrait of this world is Conrad’s Lord Jim: the Malaysian archipelago was always a wild and unruly place.
In this respect, at least, the Philippines run true to form. The man of Malay blood has a tendency to run “amok”—the word itself is of Malay origin. In Indonesia, recently, there has been a good deal of running amok: Communists and others have been massacred with a ferocity that seems to belie the gentle manners of the Malay. In the Philippines, running amok is on the whole a less violent sport; it is controlled, even institutionalized. The press is ferocious in its polemics, yet it is free, not government-controlled, and in present-day Asia that is worth something. Politics is a curious mixture of native Malay anarchism and loudmouthed Yankee populism. Of the three strands that go to make up the Filipino character (Malay, Spanish, North American) the Spanish is least in evidence-though there is something about Filipino politics, as about Filipino women, that is reminiscent of Latin America. In sum, the Philippines is one of the most interesting examples of cultural cross-fertilization—and cross-fertilization, admittedly, can breed monsters in the world of today. Compared with her, India or Indonesia or Japan are homogeneous societies: the Philippines is a society as violently alienated and set-against-itself as any to be found.
Like all arguments, this one can be stood on its head. And this my friend Frankie José does with relish. The Philippines, he asserts roundly, is today the most interesting country in Asia. Why? Well, because she’s been exposed to the disruptive forces of European civilization so much more thoroughly, and for so much longer, than her neighbors. It is four hundred years since the Spaniards came to Luzon; scarcely a century has elapsed since Japan embarked on her Meiji era. And what the Philippines took from the West was not, as in most of Asia, the externals of commerce and technology, but the heart of the matter—Catholic Christianity. If Asia’s cultures have one feature in common, he argues, it is that they have resisted the impact of the West’s fundamental religious and philosophical ideas. (Just how hard it is for Asian intellectuals to conceive that there might be a link between the West’s technological fertility and its religious background was brought home to me in Kuala Lumpur. A prominent Indian intellectual, addressing a seminar on “Democracy in Southeast Asia” had offered us a potted version of the rise of Western civilization—mentioning the Christian tradition merely to congratulate the Western Enlightenment, which he greatly admired, on having escaped from it. Yet it is surely arguable that, for example, the doctrine of Creation—so different from Hindu or Buddhist concepts of matter—underlay the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.) The Philippines, then, is a kind of pattern for Asian countries in that it has experienced the West more intimately and more traumatically than any other. Such, at least, is Frankie’s opinion.
Now Frankie, as you may guess, is a bit of a chauvinist. But he is very typical of the new generation. They want to have it all ways: the Philippines is both an Asian country and a European one. She belongs both to the newly-emergent Malay world and to the Catholic West—but she belongs to the American Century too, which gives her the edge over most of Asia. Certainly, attitudes to America are ambivalent. It is sad and ironical that whereas America left the Philippines after the war with great reserves of good will (much unlike the Dutch in Indonesia or the French in Indochina), there is now widespread anti-Americanism in the Philippines (the Dutch, French, and British are now back in favor in their ex-colonies).
Why should this be? The answer, on the face of it, is disheartening—though in the long run it has a ring of inevitability. The Filipinos are tired of being “little brown Americans” and are determinded to establish an “Asian identity” for themselves. This does not mean that they are not grateful for what America did for the Philippines in the colonial period (in education, a good deal; in land reform, rather little). At bottom, they know that they owe America a considerable debt for so gentle an awakening into the 20th century. But that, of course, is half the trouble. The debt is too great to be happily borne; it must be abreact-ed as anti-Americanism. Nevertheless, this anti-Americanism is as confused as the search for an “Asian identity” to which it runs parallel. Ask Frankie what it means to be Asian, and you will get a very respectable reply; it means belonging to the Colombo Plan, or ECAFE, or perhaps SEATO or ASA or Maphilindo. (Frankie looks, he grinningly admits, like the all-purpose Asian: brown, squat, and twinkling, he could be Japanese, Thai, or Indonesian.) It means regional cooperation, and even military commitment—though the Filipinos show little of the Korean keenness to get deeply committed in Vietnam. And beyond that? It does not have much to do with Buddhism or Taoism, or Vedanta or Zen. There is no spiritual secret that the East has to offer the West: that is an invention of the West. Asians, according to Frankie, are much like everybody else. But, being that, they expect their share of the cake.
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Hong Kong: Opinions differ about the Chinese. The 18th century thought them admirably rational and progressive; the 19th, cruel and conservative. Their admirers—down to the late Arthur Waley—have usually lived at a great distance from them; some of their non-admirers have lived very close to them indeed. But the consensus would appear to be that the Chinese are indeed an admirable people; if they have a fault, it is that there are too many of them. The fundamental admirableness of the Chinese is a dogma that is to be found in the most unexpected quarters. In Hong Kong, citadel of China-watchers of many confessions, I talked to Father Ledanyi, Hungarian Jesuit and long-time student of China. My questions turned, inevitably, on the “Cultural Revolution,” then in full flood. Would China emerge denuded of her ancient culture? How was the iconoclastic fury of the Red Guards to be reconciled with that Western image of a wise and practical nation inherited from the 18th century? Obviously, I am asking naive questions, but Father Ledanyi has the patience of his trade and of his cloth. How, he gently chides, could the events of the past months—sensationalized in the Western press—change the course of Chinese life? He goes on to speak of “those three thousand years” with a pride and affection that almost persuade me he had spoken of “our” three thousand years of history. Had he done so, I would not have been surprised. Father Ledanyi belongs to that breed of China-watcher for whom China—the eternal China—can do no wrong.
In fact, it is not so rare a breed as the outsider would expect. And here the contrast with the rival craft of Kremlin-gazing, over the past generation or so, seems of interest. Thus it appears that most China-watchers like China, that it is somehow hard to study China for long without liking her, without doing the kowtow before those three thousand years. It seems, again, that you cannot pick and choose among the bric-a-brac of tradition: it is all or nothing, and in most cases it is all.
Why is this? Kremlin-gazers are free to pick and choose among Russia’s contradictions: it is possible to love Russian icons and deplore Russian Marxism; to prefer Chekhov to Dostoyevsky, or Pasternak to Mayakovsky—or indeed vice versa. Russia is a rag-bag; she does not expect to be taken whole. China, apparently, does. Her more ardent admirers would argue, I think, that this is because China’s culture is indeed a seamless garment. To accept proposition A is to assent to proposition B—until the Analects of Confucius and the Thoughts of Chairman Mao come to seem part of the same fabric. How far this is a true view of China, the outsider cannot tell. He can accept that the texture of Chinese culture is uniquely close-knit; but he will be skeptical as to whether those three thousand years do not show contradictions at least as great as anything to be found in European history. Can it be that there is a gentle brainwashing process at work among those who study China, so that China gets a better press from those who follow her bewildering moods and statistics than from the sobersides who study the Soviet Union? If so, it is perhaps fair compensation for the crude name-calling to which she is subjected in other circles.
Yet I doubt if the visitor to Hong Kong, if he looks a little behind the scenes, will leave with an altogether favorable picture of the modern Chinese. It is only necessary to speak to long-term residents to get a different picture: many do not like the Chinese. Of course, it can be said that the average Englishman or American resident in Hong Kong knows little of Chinese culture, and cares less. But the irritation with the Chinese that you find among such people must have some basis. A teacher at the university—an English anthropologist—put it quite frankly. “Yes, the Chinese are the most irritating students I’ve ever had to teach. You see, they know everything before they start—or at least that’s the impression they like to give. It’s all in Confucius, so why bother—that’s the line they take. I’ve never met such a conceited lot. Of course, they’re quick. But, with all their quickness, they’re strangely rigid. You give them two propositions and say: relate them. Nothing happens. The propositions swim around in their minds, happily unrelated. It’s absolutely infuriating! As to the famous Chinese cleverness: yes, I’d say they were intellectually quick, but not intellectually inquiring. Which is what Western critics of China have always said, I suppose. But it’s the conceit, I think, that gets you down. The slow, grinding conceit of knowing it all better. No, the Chinese may be an admirable people—though I find that a bit overdone. But you won’t get me to say they’re lovable, I’m afraid.”
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Others, again, complain of their standoffishness. A young Englishman, married to a Chinese, explains that it’s plain sailing once you’re in—but being in means accepting the Chinese at their own valuation, means not presuming to criticize. He did just this, he says, and his mother-in-law, having accepted his submission, will now defend him like a tigress. But he readily admits that if you don’t make your submission, they don’t want to know you. Certainly, he agrees, the manners of Hong Kong, that cutthroat commercial metropolis, do not predispose you to a charitable view of the Chinese as a people: “They shove and kick and that famous Chinese politeness is not much in evidence. Unfair to the Chinese? Well, maybe a little. But why treat the Chinese as if they came from another planet? Rudeness is rudeness, conceit is conceit, Chinese or Western.” It’s a refreshing view. One would have more confidence in the China-watchers if they were occasionally to be heard wishing the Middle Kingdom to hell.
Hong Kong is a unique place—intriguing, not least, because it stands under sentence of death: the greater part of it is due to go back to mainland China before the end of the century. Politically, it is very curious. It is, if the flow of capital is any guide, the true capital of the Chinese of the Nanyang. Yet, like them it has no firm political status. It is a colony, yet it has no wish to govern itself—that would involve political commitment. Hong Kong, perhaps, can tell one more about the mentality of the Chinese of the Nanyang than any place in Southeast Asia. The overseas Chinese do not look to Taiwan as some kind of alternative to Peking—and it is extraordinary that successive U.S. administrations got people to believe that they did. There is a sense, of course, in which Hong Kong is an alternative to Peking: her millions of refugees are witness to that. But the alternative, Chinese-fashion, is pragmatic, not ideological. Hong Kong is today a pleasanter place to live in than Shanghai or Canton, and it will be for a long time. But no Chinese is going to defend the status quo with his blood: on the contrary, if Peking seriously demanded Hong Kong as part of China, the great majority of the population would acquiesce—and the rest would find some other place of exile. Taiwan is an irrelevancy. The average Chinese of the Nanyang has only one loyalty: to China. He would prefer to live in the relative comfort of Hong Kong, Singapore, or Bangkok, but he would not—unless he were Lee Kuan Yew—be prepared to challenge the issue. Hong Kong stands today as a landmark to Chinese pragmatism. An admirable commitment? Perhaps not. But hardly a surprising one.
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