You Don't Know China: Twenty-two Enduring Myths Debunked

By John Grant Ross

You Don’t Know China takes a wrecking ball to misconceptions old and new. Each of the twenty-two chapters debunks a particular myth on topics ranging from history and economics to language and food. Learn the truth about feng shui and Chinese medicine. Find out whether Marco Polo really went to China. Does the Great Wall actually

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910736180

John Grant Ross

John Ross was born in New Zealand in 1968. He has spent most of the past quarter century living in and writing about Asia. His extensive travels - undertaken alone and far off the beaten track - include exploration in Papua New Guinea, dispatches from the Karen insurgency in Burma, and searches in the Gobi Desert and Altai Mountains on the trail of an ancient Mongolian myth. Ross lives in a small town in Taiwan, the subject of his recently reissued "Formosan Odyssey." His latest book is "You Don't Know China." When not writing, reading, or lusting over maps, he can be found working on the family farm.

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Introduction

January 1884. In southeastern Burma, by the old Moulmein pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea, retired British engineer Holt Hallet turned his gaze away from the port immortalized in Kipling’s poem Mandalay and set off into the rugged jungle interior. With him were a ragtag assortment of servants, a Winchester rifle for tigers and bandits, and six elephants laden with supplies (including two dozen bottles of whisky, a dozen of brandy for medicinal purposes, opium tincture for dysentery, surveying instruments, and his beloved specially commissioned table-armed folding-chair).

Hallet was on a private mission (funded by the British Board of Commerce) to survey a possible railway route from Moulmein in Burma through northern Siam to Yunnan in southwest China. Coastal China had been pried open to traders, but far inland lay an untapped market of teeming millions. As Hallet explained in his 1890 electioneering account of the survey, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States, Every nerve should be strained by the manufacturer and working man to gain for British commerce the great market existing in Western China.

Strained nerves notwithstanding, nothing came of the railway plans other than a few soon abandoned tracks and signs. So little ever does. But this forgotten project is illustrative of the way the West has long seen China: always a vast population just out of reach, a fabled market, boundless opportunity.

Fantasy trumps fact. Indeed, consider the geographical impossibility of Kipling’s Mandalay, in which the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay! There is no bay to the east, no adjacent China from which the sun can rise.

For the West, China was — and continues to be — a wellspring of exoticism, hyperbole, and myths. The reasons are many: its physical size, its distance, its unrivalled population, its great antiquity, and its rich, mysterious culture. When Europeans first encountered China, these factors produced a whole that represented not just another nation or culture, but an Other, a complete alternate universe. Great civilizations such as the Egyptians had passed away, or, like the Ottomans and Indians, were too similar to us, too near geographically, and with histories too intertwined, to provide the shock of otherness.

China was different but not inferior, and this made Chinese civilization unsettling. It had achieved high levels of prosperity, governance, and art, all without Western foundations, without Christianity, and without Western logic and science.

China became an imagined place rather than a real one, a place to project one’s prejudices and fantasies of the East. One minor but telling example of this exoticism is a scene in an old black-and-white Chinese movie. A peasant bids farewell to his wife, promising he will return in August. The Hollywood scriptwriters translated August into a flowery after eight moons have passed and added some reference to plum blossom. A straightforward August was too plain for them; they thought Chinese would speak in a more poetic fashion. In fact, the English words for the months of the year are far more romantic and storied than their Chinese equivalents. In Chinese, months are simply numbered one through to twelve; August is a very utilitarian eight month. Contrast this with the English August which is named after the founder of the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus, and is Latin for venerable.

Interestingly, the Russians have been much less guilty than their Western cousins of this kind of Orientalism. With firsthand contact of their neighbours, the Russians were not given to romantic flights of fancy. Likewise, greater interaction between China and the wider world over the past few decades has brought greater familiarity, stripping away much of the strangeness and exoticism. Chinese exceptionalism, however, is very much alive. China is still considered unique and its achievements unsettling; the success of its authoritarian command economy has presented a surprise challenge to the supremacy of democratic free-market liberalism in the post-Cold War era.

We are living through a global power shift from West to East. China, the lead actor in the drama, is predicted to surpass the United States as an economic superpower in a decade or two. Bookstore shelves announce the new superpower’s arrival with titles like When China Rules the World, China Rising, Rising China, China’s Rise, Return of the Dragon, and Red Dragon Rising. Some titles scream warnings: Death by China: Confronting the Dragon. With every possible word combination of China, dragon, and rise exhausted, there’s been a recent increase of books warning of slowdown or collapse: The China Crisis: How China’s Economic Collapse Will Lead to a Global Depression and Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future being two examples from 2013.

Commentary on China usually has this schizophrenic aspect. As for whether China will rise or fall, the most likely outcome is that the nation will continue its upward trajectory, though at a slower pace. It will become more powerful but won’t replace the United States anytime soon. Expressed as a book title it would be China Muddles Through, which is not quite catchy enough to fund an author’s bar bill. Nuance and balance don’t sell. One recent book with an honest and accurate title is China Goes Global: The Partial Power, by American political scientist David Shambaugh. He correctly calls China a partial power because its global reach and impact are actually quite shallow.

Speaking of honest titles, I have to apologize for You Don’t Know China. I thought the short rebuke would be more eye-catching than a more reasonable, You Probably Don’t Know China Quite As Well As You Think You Do. Oh well, at least it’s dragon-free.

I wrote this book (the first of two on myths about China) to correct perceptions made obsolete by the rapid changes unfolding in China, to clear up some long-held misconceptions, and to add balance to the rising China hyperbole. I hope you find the book informative and entertaining.

John Ross

Chiayi County, Taiwan

August 10, 2013

YOU DON’T KNOW CHINA

1

Five Thousand Years of History

China is a nation with a five-thousand-year history.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt speaking in 2007

Five thousand years of history. It’s a phrase repeated by both Chinese and non-Chinese. Somehow we are supposed to believe that China has more history than other places. A slightly strange concept anyway, and, regardless of whether you want to define history as starting with written records or by the emergence of civilization as seen in the first large settlements, the five thousand figure is wrong.

The Shang dynasty (founded around 1600 BC) of the Yellow River valley in northern China is as far back as we have solid archaeological evidence and positive proof of the first written records. Earlier than that, history disintegrates into mythology. But even if you accept the preceding mythical Xia dynasty as the start, it takes you back only to around 2000 BC.

In terms of age, civilizations in other parts of the world precede China. Writing systems in Egypt and Mesopotamia predate Chinese writing by a thousand years. The world’s first city, Uruk, in modern-day Iraq, dates back seven thousand years. Even in comparison to Europe, China isn’t that old. Confucius’ life overlapped with those of Pythagoras and Socrates. China was first unified in 221 BC, a century after Alexander the Great had created the Hellenistic Empire, and just a few centuries before the zenith of the Roman Empire.

Three, three-and-a-half, four millennia — surely all ancient enough. Does it really matter that China doesn’t have five thousand years of history? Yes, it does matter, and not because it’s annoying to have this inaccuracy spouted ad nauseam as historical fact, not to mention the hypocrisy of glorifying history yet so poorly preserving it. The myth is important because of the inference that China is uniquely old and so deserves special consideration. This has real-life consequences. When dealing with China — whether trying to turn a profit or awaiting democratic reforms — the implication is you need to be more patient and just wait a little bit longer. After all, the country has five thousand years of history.

In 1991 former American president Richard Nixon told his biographer, Within twenty years China will move to democracy and explained the need for America to have patience: You can’t rush them. The Chinese look at history and the future in terms of centuries, not decades, the way we do, because they’re so much older as a culture.

The quotation from the Google CEO at the start of this chapter was also a reference to the need for patience. Here is the full quote: China is a nation with a five-thousand-year history. That could indicate the duration for our patience. The year before, Google had set up a Chinese site, Google.cn, which self-censored search results in order to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) happy. Searches on sensitive subjects like Tibetan and Taiwanese independence and the Tiananmen tank man came up empty or with sanitized material. So much for Google’s informal company motto of Don’t be evil. Despite tarnishing their reputation by caving in to Chinese demands for censorship, there was no commercial pay-off. Google struggled to gain market share and had problems with the Chinese authorities. Events came to a head in 2009 with a series of cyber attacks against Google, targeting the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents; the attacks originated in China and were tracked to state institutes. Google’s patience finally ran dry; deciding they would no longer censor search results, they redirected their website to Hong Kong.

Aside from patience, the five thousand years of history mantra implies the need for extra respect and cultural sensitivity. A good example of this is when Chris Patten, the last Governor General of Hong Kong, was preparing a speech for his swearing-in ceremony. He recounts: The reference in my draft to the shared historic responsibilities in Hong Kong of ‘two great and ancient civilizations’ was scored out on the grounds that Chinese civilization was much older than the West’s and China might feel offended by the assumption of parity. Patten, showing the backbone and bluster that would soon have him branded by the CCP as a whore, a criminal, a serpent, and, bizarrely, a tango dancer, ignored his advisors and went with two ancient civilizations.

Chinese history is long and fascinating; there’s no need to spin it, and it’s a shame to see it used by the government and media as an instrument of nationalism. The implied superiority of such a long history begets a dangerous sense of entitlement. And it’s just plain silly. Imagine if we applied the logic of old civilizations deserve special treatment to Egypt and the modern Mesopotamian nations of Iraq and Iran, places that actually do have five thousand years of history. Imagine executives explaining, Our joint venture in Cairo is losing money but we have to be patient — they built the pyramids four-and-a-half-thousand years ago. Or picture political commentators urging caution along the lines of: Can’t push the Iranian government too hard for democratic reforms — they had cities when we were still living in caves.

Lazy writers continue to churn out falsehoods about China’s glorious past and to contrast it against our own upstart cultures. They paint hyperbolic vignettes juxtaposing Oriental sophistication with Western crudity; silk-robed scholars sip tea and contemplate poetry while far away in darkest Europe the inhabitants run around in furs. In a recent biography on Sinologist Joseph Needham, author Simon Winchester contrasts the engineering masterpiece of a two-thousand-year-old Chinese irrigation waterworks with Westerners who still coated themselves in woad and did little more than grunt.

As well as its sheer age, China being the longest continuous civilization is often said to make it unique. The idea of Chinese civilization as a monolithic unchanging entity stretching in an unbroken line through the millennia is another myth that colours perceptions of China past, present and future. Sometimes the falsehoods are not just quaint asides, but the very foundations of narratives. Martin Jacques’ 2009 bestseller, When China Rules the World, is a case in point. Jacques regurgitates the line that China is special because of its antiquity and continuity, and adds his own take on it: China as a civilization state rather than a nation state. He sees an ascendant China ruled by Confucian authoritarianism, and, as it becomes more powerful, the reassertion of the age-old sense of superiority and a return to tributary-style relationships with lesser nations. This sort of commentary is demeaning to Chinese people, turning them into passive victims of their history forever condemned to repeat it.

2

Wind and Water: the Truth about Feng Shui

Feng shui provides practical methods to strengthen the positive energy in your surroundings and to create beauty. It gives you techniques to transform your home into a sanctuary: a place where you feel happy, healthy, and motivated, where your aspirations become reality.

Feng Shui Your Life Jayme Barrett (2003)

Feng shui (literally wind and water, and pronounced fung shway) is the ancient Chinese practice of positioning objects to achieve harmony. This involves assessing various factors including flows of qi and patterns of yin and yang. Things that block the flow of qi cause problems; things that allow it to flow freely are good. (I explain more about qi in the next chapter.) Feng shui masters are supposedly able to detect these good and bad metaphysical energies and prescribe actions to optimize or curtail them.

My initially favourable opinion of feng shui as a mixture of superstition, time-tested common sense, and a dash of Asian aesthetic (harmony with nature, quietness, and balance) did not survive my first real-life encounter with it. Arriving at work one day in Taiwan, I found the ground-floor office had been transformed into a coffin-like box. The sliding glass doors at the front and all the windows were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Other than a gap left at the entrance, which was so narrow you had to ease in sideways, the place was sealed up as if we were under siege or ready for fumigation.

My boss explained, A feng shui master said we need to cover the doors and windows to stop money flowing out of the building. The result seemed like anti-feng shui; instead of an uncluttered room with natural light and fresh air, it was dark and stuffy, and movement in and out of the office was more difficult. On the master’s insistence, costly potted plants were brought in, oversized palm trees that just made the room more claustrophobic. When the palms started dying (from a complete lack of sunlight, a cynical mind might have ventured), the feng shui expert returned and pronounced this as proof that the qi problems were worse than he had first thought. But not to worry — further expensive remedies were proposed.

This case is quite typical. When a business is experiencing financial distress, it is standard practice to bring in a feng shui expert who charges a basic fee and sells various aids such as mirrors that can redirect the qi.

Another of my formative impressions of feng shui came from noticing the great number of fish tanks in homes and businesses. Was Taiwan a nation of fish aficionados? Well, not apart from a fondness for seafood. I learnt that the popularity of fish tanks was due to feng shui; some aquarium owners explained that water was lucky for attracting wealth; some said it was just the fish which were lucky (because yu, the Chinese word for fish, sounds like the word for abundance), and goldfish were especially lucky. Others said both water and fish were auspicious.

As I mentioned before, I didn’t come to Taiwan with a jaundiced eye. I had thought feng shui a positive influence on Chinese art and architecture — that its emphasis on natural simplicity was a restraining counterbalance to the kind of over-decorative and gaudy impulses evident in Chinese temples. For me, the culture’s aesthetic genius was in subtleties: the upturned eaves of sloping roofs, the curving bridges, the philosophical serenity of gardens. What I discovered was that most Taiwanese and Chinese architecture, whether urban or rural, was of eye-watering ugliness — a chaos of concrete boxes, corrugated iron, and unfinished cement sides streaked with rust stains

The truth about feng shui is that it’s not about beauty, it’s about luck, a tool for turning misfortune around. There’s nothing wrong with wanting health and money, but given my lofty expectations I found these self-centred utilitarian motivations and the crudity of methods rather disappointing. Many years later and married to the daughter of a part-time feng shui master, my low opinion of the practice hasn’t changed. (To keep my wife happy, I had better mention that her late father didn’t take money for his geomancy work — he was sincere about it and just happy to help people.)

In the West, feng shui has found a certain popularity for interior decorating, exterior landscaping, and for architectural designs. Even sceptics embrace it sometimes, hoping to broaden the appeal of properties to Asian buyers and investors. Practitioners can make a few thousand dollars a day dispensing wisdom. How private individuals choose to spend their money is their own business, but things start to get a bit murky when taxpayers have to pick up the tab. For example, in 2007 the Los Angeles Zoo hired a feng shui expert to help design an exhibit for three Chinese golden monkeys about