I have been receiving more emails from overseas these days than usual.
Writing from India, Australia, the United States and elsewhere, some readers hope to make me, and more Chinese through me, understand their points of view.
One Tibetan, living in India, wrote to me, saying that the "Tibetans in exile are seeking autonomy and not freedom and that our means of realizing this goal is through peace and non-violence. There are times when our adrenaline does the talking, we break things, we shout, we cry but physically harming and hitting people is out of the question".
On Monday, he and another reader sent me the article by Grace Wang from Duke University published in Washington Post, talking about how she "was treated so shabbily by her fellow-Chinese when she tried to mediate a dispute between Chinese and Tibetan students".
While accepting their good intentions, I can sense their frustration and even anger at the fact that the Chinese worldwide have rallied together in support of the Beijing Olympics and condemned the recent riots in Lhasa and some Tibetan-populated areas in neighboring provinces.
They reason with me, saying that we Chinese at home get only "censored" information and do not get the whole picture. And for those overseas Chinese worldwide, who have every access to every major and minor Western media outlet and who have also spoken up, the only explanation is they are "brainwashed".
Above all, they say, there is a great misunderstanding between the Chinese and the Westerners they represent.
To bridge the gap between differing points of view, the Chinese must do better to understand the West and make China better understood by the West. James A. Millward even wrote a special Public Relations 101 for China on www.opendemocracy.net.
While agreeing with some of Millward's points, I believe many in the West, including the Tibetans from India, have missed a point that a netizen made about Mr Millward's lecture. "How can the West better understand China", the netizen asked, "what are the ways to avoid unfounded statements and opinions about China getting splashed across the Western media?"
In fact, it is the prejudice against China and other developing countries that has sowed the seeds of misunderstanding and miscommunication.
The force that has united most of the Chinese worldwide is not the result of simple propaganda, but born of bitter experiences for more than a century in our relations with the West, ever since it forced open the doors of China with guns and opium.
One work that best summarizes the twists and turns that the Chinese have gone through on the country's road to modernization is How the Chinese Feel, a verse being circulated via emails among the Chinese worldwide.
I have been trying to identify its writer, but have yet to succeed. I have to beg the writer's indulgence for quoting a part from his work :
We tried Communism to equalize, You hated us for being Communists.
Now we embrace free trade and privatize,
You berated us for being Mercantilist
(And since you made up that word, you must know what it means, as we don't).
HALT! You demanded: a billion-three who eat well will destroy the planet!
So we tried birth control, then You blasted us for human rights abuse.
...
As Gregory Clark, a former officer in Australia's Department of External Affairs, wrote in a Japan Times' opinion article, "China, it seems, just can't win, no matter what it does. It is the 6-ton elephant that everyone likes to bash."
I am proud that most Chinese have learned that we need not curry favor with the West at the expense of our principles, our national sovereignty and our territorial integrity.
We must not lose sight of our social and economic imperatives and of the challenges that we must overcome today despite the Western clamor.
E-mail: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 04/24/2008 page8)
