In Search of the Real China

By Kim Kuay Lim

Most of the China-related books that have been published are one sided, either for or against China assuming the role of a responsible country in the community of nations. None has really got it right impartially, yet not afraid to expose China’s sensitivities over 5,000 years of continuous existence. “In Search of the Real China” is a personal attempt by the author about what is good or bad, real or false, about China as a nation and people without seeking favour from either.

For the readers of Chinese origin, “Chineseness” is about self-criticism, if they are to be accepted by non-Chinese races worldwide, including non-Han race Chinese within the country. Today’s world cannot continue to exist disparately. Soon enough the month of October will have gone past, yet the taken for granted frozen Artic has yet to start freezing to stop causing inundation of other above sea level islands from sinking to oblivion.

Non-Chinese readers, especially in the West, must learn to join hands with Chinese worldwide to bring forth wholesomeness to one and all. Beneath white, yellow, black and brown, all are as vulnerable as demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Life can only reverse back to an abnormal normal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Kuay Lim
• Release date: Oct 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005417369

Kim Kuay Lim

Kim Kuay Lim is from Singapore.He joined the Singapore Government Administrative Service and served variously as Assistant Commissioner for Labour, Commissioner of Oaths, Commissioner of Insurance, Commissioner of Chit Fund, and Commissioner of Singapore in Hong Kong.His other appointments included operationally within Singapore and abroad with the Foreign Service and Trade Development Board, and several directorships, including the Zoo and Jurong Town Corporation. He retired from active service before the turn of the Millennium.He has travelled extensively, effectively more than thrice around the world, critically appreciative of diverse peoples and places."In Search of the Real China" was first published in print in January 2002 under his pen name of Lin J. Ke. It was overhauled and expanded in early 2020 to include chapters on Teochew (Chaoshan), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet following another round of visits to China, and republished as an ebook in October 2020.

Book preview

Chinese civilization may not be the oldest. It is certainly the only civilization that has evolved uninterrupted for more than 5,000 years. And it is still evolving. The roots of this civilization can be traced to the yellow-skin people, who originally inhabited the basin of the middle reaches of the Yellow River as early as the Neolithic age. Like any other ancient civilizations, the Chinese civilization has had its fair share of ups and downs.

The Chinese are to be found not only in China and the adjacent countries in Asia, but in all the four corners of the world. Indeed, they are to be found everywhere. The majority have become nationals of their adopted countries. But many know little about their motherland, its history and legends. This is not surprising. Even the Chinese in China do not quite know the real China. Hence, I have taken on this mission to search for the real China. The official records of China do not give a complete picture. In imperial China, the court historian faithfully recorded daily important occurrences, usually concerned with the what and not the why. In this book, I am not attempting to rewrite the history of China. It is not even an academic piece of work. I am simply making a statement or assessment from the perspective of an ordinary observer with a keen interest in the China of today relative to its past. It is written not only for the ordinary travellers and businessmen venturing into China but also for the majority of those who seek to get a proper perspective of China and its nationals, worldwide, Chinese and non-Chinese.

Today, after more than seventy years of totalitarian rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is confronted with one important question. Will globalisation, part and parcel of modernisation, result in the Americanisation of China in a big way? Will McDonald’s and Starbucks replace the traditional restaurants and teahouses? Will family members start calling each other by their personal names? Will ageing parents be abandoned by their own children and left to fend for themselves? Above all, will the Chinese brand of socialist capitalism end up as a mere replica of the standard brand of capitalism made popular by the United States?

It is for the specific purpose of connecting the present to the past that I undertook this journey to find answers to these and other questions. Starting from Beijing, I headed straight for the mouth of the Yellow River in the Shandong province, the first stop of an 80-day journey that ultimately took me to the western most frontier of modern China.

The first half of the journey was focused on tracking the Yellow River from its mouth in Shandong almost to its source in the Qinghai province. The aim was to analyse and appreciate the value of this great river in the context of the Chinese civilisation, past, present and future. As an independent traveller undertaking this journey on my own initiative, I did not have the benefit of official support which could give me access to places or information that are closed to the general public. Nonetheless, I had the advantage of a resourceful chauffeur capable of reaching some of the most remote places in China. Hence, I was able to cover the most important sections of the Yellow River. The track took me through eight of the nine provinces and regions traversed by the Yellow River. They are Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Qinghai. Sichuan was the only Yellow River province not in my itinerary because the dominant river influencing this province is the Yangtze River, not the Yellow River.

Along the way, I managed to climb four of the renowned Five Great Mountains. According to Chinese mythology, the Five Great Mountains were formed from the limbs, head and body of Pan Gu, the creator of mankind. The Eastern Mountain, Taishan, was the head; the Central Mountain, Songshan, was the stomach. His left and right arm became the Northern Heng Mountain in Shanxi Province and the Southern Heng Mountain in the Hunan Province, respectively. The two feet of Pan Gu together give rise to the Western Mountain, Huashan, known to be the most treacherous of the five mountains.

After completing the Yellow River journey, I doubled back to Lanzhou, the starting point of the Silk Roads course of my journey. My aim was to trace the two main routes of the ancient Silk Roads. For eight weeks, I found myself in some of the remotest towns in the deserts and mountains of the outback of western China. The journey enabled me to locate and visit famous ancient Silk Roads stopovers in the China section of the Silk Roads, most of them were important oasis towns or kingdoms, some abandoned long ago. In certain cases, visiting the ruins was akin to paying homage to the grandeur of the past. The two regions, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu Province, are important to the current government in its effort to develop western China.

Some of the terrains in western China were deadly treacherous. There were occasions when we came pretty close to being stranded in partially dried up riverbeds, hundreds of miles away from the nearest human settlement and frequently inundated by flash floods. I was able to see some of the most beautiful parts of China, places that have remained unspoilt by souvenir hunting tourists. The Pamirs and the Tianshan (Heaven Mountain) are several notches above the mountains in China proper, long spoilt by uncaring domestic tourists and tour touts. Occasionally, we would run into a couple of cyclists or backpackers from the West. They took the risk of entering China via one of its most dangerous backdoors, the Karakoram Highway. The highway was part of the Silk Roads in Central Asia. Today, it is no less dangerous. The ingenuity that went into the construction of the highway is a marvellous feat of engineering.

Travellers to the western part of China will be pleasantly surprised to find it so distinctly different from the interior or the coast. According to 2010 official population statistics, close to 40% of the inhabitants of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are Uyghurs , a Turkic-speaking minority ethnic group. The second largest ethnic group of Xinjiang is the Han Chinese who migrated to this part of China since 1949. The other dominant minorities in this oil-rich backyard of China are the Huis, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Mongolians. With the exception of the Mongolians who are essentially believers of Tibetan Buddhism, the varied inhabitants forming a large proportion of the Xinjiang populace are Muslims.

I asked myself at journey’s end: what has 5,000 years of civilisation done for the Chinese people? From the founding of the Zhou dynasty in 1134 BCE to the demise of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in 1949, China as a nation enjoyed in all less than 300 years of universal peace and prosperity. Throughout the remaining 2,700 years, the people of China were forced to survive, generation after generation, in the midst of war and chaos, famine and poverty, under oppressive tyranny. The produce of the nation was meant for the consumption of the emperors and the privileged class, warlords and their henchmen, as well as imperial officials and the gentry. The populace, comprising merchants and traders, peasants and craftsmen, street vendors and labourers, still managed to stay alive and propagate, and they continue to slave for the nobility.

Throughout the history of China, nothing obviously worthwhile, such as silk production, has been specifically promoted and coordinated on a national scale for the advancement of the Chinese people as a whole. All pursuits by emperors and kings, strong or weak, were never based on the needs of the people. Each and every one of the uprisings that ultimately led to the establishment of a new dynasty was led by a scoundrel whose goal was none other than the pursuit of personal glory. Brilliant scholars and fearless generals worked hard to gain recognition from the ruling emperor not because they wanted to serve the nation or the people. They were never taught or inspired to work for the people. This is Confucianism, the school of thought that dominated Chinese behaviour to this day. Instead, they were prodded throughout their entire life by ethical rules of Confucianism to be absolutely loyal to their emperor, regardless. Lu Xun, famous early twentieth century Chinese writer, came to the same conclusion that the problem with Chinese civilisation was that it was a culture of the commoners serving their triumphant superiors at great cost of misery to themselves.

The CCP took over as the absolute authority of this vast nation in 1949. Throughout their fight for control of China, the communists had proclaimed that they were doing everything for the people of China. The same could be attributed to Sun Yat-Sen, the man credited with making it possible for China to discard its ancient imperial roots in favour of meeting the challenges of building a modern nation. Of course, he only managed to complete one tiny step. The CCP took several bold steps in the same direction. But the first thirty years of the CCP reign were a complete washout. Fortunately for China and the CCP, the leadership in Beijing managed to recover somewhat from their earlier disasters and reverted to more routine nation building. But, 20 years after the second political resurrection of Deng Xiaoping, the man who set the country on its journey to become a modern economic powerhouse, it is still difficult to conclude that China is truly a nation built by the people for the people.

Is the China of today learning from its past? Will the leadership in Beijing harness all its national resources for the good of the people? Can it succeed in deterring external forces from containing the country or from breaking it up? China will certainly continue to exist as a country and a people for the next 100 years. Whether it is a greater or lesser China depends on whether its leadership at all levels can put their acts together and rise above factionalism and individual interest.

To the West, China having the second largest economy is a problem. And to the English-speaking countries, particularly USA, China must be cut down in size, physically, economically and multilaterally, without paying too high a price. In the USA, the slogan is Make America Great Again. It means make America white again. This white supremacy is dominating the political scenario in all the countries in the West, including New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK and the EU. It is returning to their past gunboat legacy of the nineteen century of cowing China into total suppression and for them to once again benefit immensely from it.

Today, Asians are learning to stand tall and look straight into the eyes of the Whites. They have mastered Western languages and sciences, their industrial and technological capabilities. What they need is uplifting their own level of social and interactive graces.

Or must Asians await patiently for the eventual collapse of countries of the West, individually and severally? It will take more than one Donald Trump and his white supremacists to destroy the pretentious fabrics of Western self-deceiving democracy and righteousness. Hopefully, countries of Asia will not similarly be succumbed to their self-destruction as opportunities are offering similarly unmatchable accumulation of wealth and power.

A. Chinese Civilisation

1. Origins of the Chinese

China today is a multi-racial society comprising the Han Chinese and 55 other ethnic minorities, a few of the latter having their own languages and written scripts. The national language of China is officially known as Hanyu (or Han Language) and not Zhongwen (or Chinese Language). Han Chinese is a people of Mongoloid origin and said to be the descendants of Huang Di or Yellow Emperor (2698 – 2598 BCE), the founder of the first legendary dynasty of China. Han Chinese is in fact inseparable from the evolution of Chinese civilisation over more than 4,600 years, counting from the reign of the Yellow Emperor.

At the dawn of Chinese civilisation, the two most powerful tribes were the Hua and Xia. Their leaders subsequently unified several of the yellow-skin tribes to form one large community or kingdom. Historians later referred to this unified race as the Huaxia race, the ancestor of the Chinese race or Han Chinese to differentiate it from the other minority races. Today, more than 91% of the population of modern China are Han Chinese (or Han race). The remaining 9% is made up of 55 other races. Most of these minority races have long adopted Han culture and language. Several are struggling to keep their respective native languages and customs alive, but few are winning the battle. There are exceptions. The Tibetans, for example, successfully resisted assimilation, due to the overwhelming influence of Tibetan Buddhism. Mongolians, who have stayed in the grassland beyond the Mongolian deserts and mountains, have also managed to retain their cultural identity to a large extent, due in part to their isolated existence.

Since the birth of the Huaxia race, Han Chinese have dominated the evolution of Chinese civilisation and culture. Chinese culture is known for its inherent power to unobtrusively assimilate other races and cultures. Even when China was under rulers of non-Han Chinese origin, Chinese culture continued to be the dominant force for the ruling class to impose effective control over the populace. In fact, the majority of those non-Han rulers found themselves inexorably sinicized, often after struggling extremely hard to retain their own racial identity. The only exception were the Mongolians, who ruled China from 1271 to 1368.

Since the establishment of the first unified China with a central government under the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, China survived three major periods of fragmentation. The first, and the longest, was from 304 to 589, following the collapse of the Han dynasty until the founding of the Sui dynasty. The second fragmentation followed the breakdown of the Tang dynasty in 907 and it lasted until 979, whence the Song dynasty took centre stage. The third and last major disintegration of China occurred immediately after the fall of the Qing dynasty, before the present government, led by the CCP, came to power in 1949. This last round of fragmentation was initiated and led by powerful forces of the West and Japan, which almost succeeded in breaking up China permanently.

Chinese Mythology

According to Chinese historians and mythologists, the origins of the Han people may be traced to the arrival of Pan Gu, creator of mankind some three million years ago. As the ancient Han Chinese were not aware of the existence of other kinds of people elsewhere, it can be assumed that the mankind created by Pan Gu was, in essence, the Han people. Ancient Han Chinese, unlike their compatriots in other parts of the world, did not deify their creator. The job of the creator was to create mankind, heaven and earth, nothing else. Deification was accorded to other mythological personalities; chief among them was the Jade Emperor. He was the God of Heaven and one of the Almighty Gods.

After Pan Gu came the Three Emperors period. The first emperor, Heaven Emperor, was regarded as a direct descendant of Pan Gu and he lived for 18,000 years. The Earth Emperor, who also lived for 18,000 years, followed the Heaven Emperor. The last of the Three Emperors was the Mankind Emperor, who lived for 15,600 years.

The Three Emperors period was followed by the Five Shi Emperors period. The Shi Emperors were said to possess more human qualities while the Three Emperors were closer to godliness. The mythological stories related to the Shi Emperors were closely associated with the existence of mankind in the post mythological and legendary era. You Cao was the inventor of tree shelters that allowed people to live above ground level away from dangerous wild animals. Zhui Ren was credited with finding ways to use fire smartly. Fu Xi was the most versatile. He was a jack-of-all-trades, from cooking to bureaucracy to the playing of musical instruments, fishing and animal trapping. Nü Wa, the only lady among the five was credited with replacing the pillars that held up the sky. And last, but not least, was the one who gave the Han Chinese of the future their daily food: Shen’nong (or Super Farmer) identified edible plants and cereals. He wrote the first version of the Book of Medicinal Herbs, a book that is still being used by modern Han medicine practitioners.

From Myth to Legend

To the best of our knowledge, Han Chinese civilisation arose in what is today the provinces of Henan and Shanxi, mainly along the lower section of the middle reaches of the Yellow River. The first legendary emperor of Han Chinese civilisation came from one of the more than ten thousand tribes that settled in the vast region where the cradle of civilisation was located. His name was Ji Xuan-yuan, leader of the You Xiong tribe, and subsequently referred to as the Yellow Emperor. Thereafter, Han Chinese all over the world routinely use the reference Descendants of the Yellow Emperor to resolve conflicts among the Han people.

The capital of the Yellow Emperor dynasty was established in You Xiong, his native town. Today, the site of this first ancient Chinese capital is located in Xinzheng, Henan province.

Ancient Han Chinese historians chose to award the Yellow Emperor with full credit for giving Han Chinese a complete set of foundations for the future evolution of their civilisation. The foundations covered a wide range of firsts:

Moving from tree houses toliving in ground-level houses made of stone and mud

Making use of animal hide for clothing the people and, later, silk for the nobility

Deployment of wheeled vehicles and small boats

Deploying weapons of war and strategic battle formations

Playing musicalinstruments and standardising musical notes

Using earthenware for food storage

The Han character for well (井) which means underground water receptacle was being used to establish a method for the even distribution of land for farming. The piece of land represented by the square in the centre went to the State, and the eight pieces of land represented by the eight openings were given to eight families.

The Yellow Emperor dynasty lasted 490 years from 2698 to 2208 BCE. During this period, several other important inventions were made, some by members of the royal family and others by high-ranking imperial officials. For example, the wife of the Yellow Emperor was credited with the discovery of silk production. And three of his senior court officials were credited with the invention of written scripts, mathematics and the calendar.

Beyond the Realms of Legend

On the basis of archaeological finds dating back to more than 4,000 years ago, the legendary Yellow Emperor dynasty was succeeded by the Xia dynasty in 2205 BCE. Xia dynasty was the first of three dynasties grouped under the semi-legendary period that lasted for nearly 2,000 years.

The first emperor of Xia was Si Wenming (2205 – 2198 BCE), a smart leader who tried to ban alcohol consumption because he believed that it would bring about social decadence. Of course, he did not succeed in ridding China of alcohol as its consumption continued to be an important part of the Chinese culture to this day. The Xia dynasty came to an end at the hands of an emperor who indulged in all kinds of excesses, from inflicting sadistic tortures to indulging in extreme sensual pursuits. This weak and over-indulging last emperor phenomenon recurred throughout the history of China, applicable to the very last imperial dynasty. The fall of a Chinese empire or kingdom, Han Chinese-ruled or otherwise, had always been brought about by a totally incompetent emperor, hopelessly useless and morally decadent.

The second dynasty of the semi-legendary period was Shang (1783 – 1122 BCE). It has been established through archaeological finds that the people of Shang were capable of using written scripts to record predictions of the future. These scripts have been accepted as the origin of the Han written script. Complete collections of these written records or oracle texts were first found near Anyang in Henan province, the site of the fifth capital of the Shang dynasty, Yinyi. The Shang dynasty relocated their capital six times over a period of 662 years, due to constant flooding by the Yellow River.

The Shang people were essentially animists. They were the people who gave Chinese civilisation the original concept of worshipping ancestors as well as the divination of all kinds of gods and immortals. The dynasty ended in 1122 BCE and the main trigger of the fall of Shang was a woman, Da Ji, one of the most beautiful women in ancient China. Here was another