Kevin McGeary

    AN army of smiling volunteers is preparing to welcome visitors to Shenzhen. Their preparations have included language study and lessons in etiquette. Such stories have occupied newspapers over recent months, but most people in Shenzhen have been quietly getting on with their lives. One such person is Simon from Britain. But his promising business career has run into a problem. He has encountered a bureaucratic Catch 22 that will make it impossible to open a representative office in Shenzhen without a Chinese partner. This labyrinthine bureaucracy is part of a much bigger problem: the difficulty of integrating into Chinese society.

    The past 30 years of reform and opening have been atypical of China’s recent, hermetic history. Therefore, it will take time for Mandarin-speaking foreigners to become the norm, and for expats to grasp the subtleties of Chinese culture. The patriotic song “Heirs of the Dragon” describes Chinese people as having “dark eyes, dark hair and yellow skin,” which illustrates an “us-and-them” divide between natives and foreigners which has become gradually less accepted in developed Western countries since World War II.

    Popular English instructor, Li Yang, has written a book entitled “The Secrets of Making Friends With Foreigners.” Although the book doesn’t go into detail about what “foreigners” look like or what other languages they may or may not speak, it encourages readers to see foreigners as an “opportunity” to learn English.

    So, when Li Yang’s readers decide to view every foreigner they see as an English opportunity, they are already committing the ultimate cultural faux pas: singling somebody out on the basis of race. American expat Rod Brenes lives in the small town of Longyan in Fujian Province. Every day, he has “hello” shouted at him by a stranger, often in a comical voice or accent. After shouting it, the strangers will usually walk off laughing with their friends. Shouting “hello” is hardly comparable to the kind of prejudice that was targeted at Chinese migrants in Brenes’s native California during the 19th century which culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But, it is a reminder that, with his brown hair and pale skin, he is thought of as an outsider. His ability to speak, read and write Mandarin does not change this.

    A century ago, Lu Xun identified the problem. He said Chinese never saw foreigners as human: in the past they had been seen as subhuman, now they are seen as superhuman. If you are not seen as human, it is not possible to be appreciated for what you are. Singer-songwriter Martin Papp, who writes and records songs in Mandarin, described in a China Daily interview the constant struggle to be appreciated for his music, and not merely because he is a foreigner singing in Chinese.

    No country or culture is in a position to point the finger about prejudice. Recently, the very concept of ethnic diversity has been challenged in the most brutal way possible in Norway, a stable, prosperous Western country. America’s evolution toward a nation “united in its diversity,” as described by Walt Whitman, is far from complete, but the creation of discourse about racial and national prejudice came into existence because it was necessary, as chronicled in Nell Irving Painter’s book, “A History of White People.” Similar discourse will have to be created in Shenzhen if it wants to fulfill its dream of becoming an “international city.”

    (The author is a Shenzhen Daily senior copy editor and writer.)