360 in 365 – Joachim voyage autour du monde

Good-bye China.

I left China two days ago, and arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, yesterday night. After about 45 days it’s a bit strange.

When I first came there after Mongolia, I tried to forget the clichés “China is big, lots of people, they don’t speak french and they’ll eat us all”. This kind of talk isn’t really constructive. So yeah, I didn’t really know what to expect. A dictatorship that forgets free of speech (and facebook), an economical phenomenon that’s going up and up and 5000 years of history, and also landscapes with mountains and pines and bamboos in the foreground. This, I expected.

But I didn’t expect to be so nicely surprised by China. Landscapes, people, life… Even facing poverty, destruction (I passed through the 2008’s earthquake region) or corruption, there’s a hige dynamic feeling to be felt from the Chinese people.

Even tourists were interesting and motivated!

Here in France (or Back there in France), we’ve got all sorts of rethorics concerning the rest of the world. And then, you get to move around, and you see that reality has multiple faces. Some things I saw, some people I discussed with enabled me to have other views and think differently than in France. Reality has many faces. What I say is not an absolute truth, but some thought work in progress. Nothing’s all black or white, and if in France there’s millions of intelligent people, they have hundreds of millions of them in China.

A couple I met in Dali told me that some friends of them asked why they didn’t boycott China, and why they were going there on vacation. Why would you do that? I mean, Boycott China? That’s 1.5 billion people and the economy that grows with them. A couple not travelling there will surely influence the government, riiiight. And living in Paris or any western country without buying “Made in China” is completely illusory. All of our way of life in the Western World is based on cheap labour in poor countries. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, far from it, but it’s illusory to think that a few Prius-owning rightly thinking bohemian bourgeois can turn the Chinese governement’s policies when they decide to go to Bali instead of China this spring.

And yeah, Mao’s times are over, and we tend to forget it. Deng came and gave back to the people the possibility to survive and to do business. And now with Hu, you can forget about the communist economy : everybody’s got something to sell, and it’s the biggest capitalist market in the world. That’s why you get to see McDonald’s and KFC at every street corner in big cities.

And we also forget, in France, that China is not North Korea. And that the Chinese people aren’t idiots. One of their jokes was actually mocking one of the Party’s motto : “Mao is the sun who shines upon the Chinese people”, and adding “but Deng is the moon who gives us light to play Mah-Jong”. Mao was an idealist, but Deng was more important for them, thanks to him they could do business (for the Chinese : Mah-Jong = gambling = business = luck = … = proffit!). Chinese people I met are patriots, they love the country and didn’t get brainwashed, or at least not at a point that robbed them from their critical thinking.

In fact, the biggest recrimination of people of my age was against the Chinese educative system, that didn’t give them the tools to think in constructive ways, and so on. We could say, from a Westerner’s point of view, that it’s the main point and that it’s Evil and Communist, and their system blocks all original thoughts. But in that case, how would they be able to notice these problems? Their system might be considered as brainwashing, but it’s not performing well, so yeah, that’s not so bad, is it?

And Chinese people my age (yes of course, I had discussions with all of them) are shocked when western countries tell the Chinese government how it should behave for any kind of situation. We can understand them : if Lichtenstein gave France lessons about how to handle the Corsican and Basque cases, what would we say? It doesn’t mean I’m okay with the way China handles Tibet or Xinjiang. But the situation is better than a few years ago, and it’ll be better over time, I guess. Changes take time.

And anyway, who I am to “Be okay” with other people’s affairs? Who sleeps with whop, how people are lead… I’m against inequality and suffering. Except from that, well, my convictions like pissing myself in black pants : a warm and cosy feeling for me, but it doens’t concern other people unless they don’t like the smell.

Oh well. Measure in everything. You need some mesure in governments, but also in the way we criticize them. The goal of a government isn’t the freedom, or the happiness or the survival of the people. The goal of a government is to keep the power to itself. And all the means are good to that goal : give the people illusions of freedom (you can buy what you want as long as you buy) or happiness (remember you’re happy whey you buy), or give the people something to eat. And governments tell their people that they are actually the best way of governing. And that everyone that’s advocating another system is dead wrong. And sometimes they make sure these people turn up dead. So yeah, democracy? the best way to govern! Dictatorship? the best there is also! (give the people the benefit of the doubt and allow self-government? well, mmh, NO)

Ok so yeah. China’s nice, beautiful, we eat well and no need to boycott. Because anyway in a few years when they turn Europe into a giant tourist park, we’ll be able to think it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Good-bye China, we’ll meet again. I lived great and incredible things with you.