Magan's World: MANCHÁN MAGAN'S tales of a travel addict
EVERYTHING HAS changed in China since last summer. All of us who visited before then need to reappraise the assumptions we took away with us. The shift in the national psyche that occurred during the Olympics has most likely invalidated whatever we may have felt about the place.
Those of us who have been there over the past decade have a tendency to regard ourselves as old China hands, and we readily make sweeping assertions about 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the world’s population, based largely on a whistle-stop tour of some terracotta soldiers and a large dam. It’s as though a walk through the Forbidden City and a trip up the Yangtze was all one needed to comprehend the most elusive and equivocal culture on earth.
I spent three months in some of the remotest parts of China in 2002 and returned with one insight I didn’t want to share with anyone. It was too harsh, especially considering how little I really knew about China. It was basically that I couldn’t sense a soul in the people. I realise it’s a nebulous concept, and denying a country its soul is an appallingly arrogant, and probably completely unfounded, thing to do.
The feeling stemmed not only from the fact that Mao and the Communist Party of China had taken away people’s sense of personal morality and ability to think for themselves but also from the thousands of years before, in which the Confucian doctrine of harmony was always emphasised, and defined as a blind obedience to hierarchy at the expense of one’s internal sense of knowing.
I feared the Chinese had become blank slates, willing to do and say whatever they were told. Everyone I met, even thousands of kilometres apart, would answer my questions the same way, all somehow sharing the same thoughts. Their ability to assimilate and adapt to what they were told was further reinforced on a visit to Starbucks in Shanghai, where my Frappuccino was not only made in strict accordance with the guidelines laid down in the company’s Seattle HQ but also served with the cow-eyed Starbucks smile. I’d never encountered that smile outside the US before. Only in Shanghai could they replicate both the coffee and the smile perfectly.
Yet now I see I was wrong in my assumption. Anyone who watched those images of proud Chinese being interviewed by the world’s media during the Olympics could see evidence of a soul burning from their eyes. The act of throwing open their doors to the world for the Games seems to have affected the national psyche. The Chinese saw themselves for the first time from the outside, and their pride and self-belief were palpable. Their eyes seemed to hint that they were a people who were no longer prepared to be controlled.
These are all just assumptions, but the fact that the long-dormant belief in Buddhism is on the rise again is significant. Temples are being restored and lamas funded by local communities. The fixation with Christianity, as a fashionable western import, is already waning; authoritarian systems that demand conformity to strict dogma are no longer acceptable. That Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion, and that it teaches one to turn inward for one’s awakening appeals to them.
If I’m right about this, and the Communist Party doesn’t allow room for it, it’s likely things will turn tumultuous in the next few years, which could mean that none of us will be getting to visit China for a while, making it all the more important that those of us who have been do not set our opinions in stone about a people who are changing every day.