Kevin McGeary

    ONE of the fundamental rules of journalism is often broken by foreigners writing about China. That is, to imagine that personal experience is everything.

    Stan Abrams of China Hearsay pointed out the tendency of Western journalists at established publications to support their arguments with: “When I was in China last year...” followed by something smug and ignorant. Robert Herbold wrote in The Wall Street Journal that, in some ways, China was a more developed country than America. That is an interesting premise, but unfortunately, Herbold based his article on his stay in Shanghai (the country’s financial center) and Beijing (the political center) and his high-speed railway trip in between. Can a person who has only been to Manhatten and Washington, D.C. claim to understand America?

    I am a music lover and my four years of experience in China told me that Chinese people only like sentimental love ballads and vapid pop. But when Radiohead — a band known for innovative music and social comment in their lyrics — opened a Weibo account recently, they swiftly gained 49,000 fans, hundreds of whom urged them to tour China. Therefore, my assumption based on experience, that Chinese people all like the same music, was wrong. Xu Meihong, co-author of “Daughter of China,” explained to naive American Larry Engelman that although she and other Chinese girls appeared shy and child-like, that did not mean that their minds were not working feverishly all the time. She explained, with a statement that could be on the walls of all China writers: “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

    Another common mistake is to ignore a piece of advice that is a slight variation on that given by Xu: Just because you think you can see it, doesn’t mean it is there. The author of the now defunct blog Laowai Diaries believed that, based on his experience of being the only foreigner in a small town in Anhui Province, China is a very collective society. He observed that his students would always eat in groups, never drink alcohol without playing group-orientated drinking games, and were under constant pressure to conform. He put this down to Confucianism being a collective ideology. But the more-experienced John Pomfret wrote in his memoir, “Chinese Lessons,” that because students lived in small, eight-to-a-room dormitories, and were often pressured to conform by parents and teachers, they would often express their individualism in subtler yet more determined ways than their American counterparts. He also argued that interpretations of Confucianism had changed over time, only becoming a collectivist ideology during the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

    Author Xue Xinran also cautioned against using any one-ism to explain a given phenomenon and that China writers should not separate modern China from its past. It may be tempting to explain Chinese people’s perceived tendency to be less opinionated by parental or workplace authoritarianism, but Xue believes that the fiercest censorship comes from within individuals. In an interview with Amazon about her book “China Witness,” Xue explained how Chinese people’s lack of “a sense of self” came from an ancient clan mentality. Professor Gao Mingxuan, a Chinese penal code expert, stated: “The concept of guilt by association was always very important in ancient Chinese law. As early as the second millennium B.C., a criminal’s family was punished as harshly as the criminal himself.” Feudalism, Confucianism and now consumerism all have significant influence over Chinese society, but some phenomena, such as clan mentality, have survived all of these.

    The problem with Westerners who write about China is that most do very little research, but just look for whatever evidence to support their own prejudices. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and The New York Post likes low taxes and small government, so O’Reilly said that the Chinese and Indian governments do not invest in infrastructure. Complete nonsense. James Fallows of The Atlantic came to China with his wife (a linguist) and they both learned the language and published thoughtful, interesting books about their observations of China.

    Analysis of China ranges from the wildly inaccurate, such as O’Reilly arguing that the Chinese Government does not invest in infrastructure, to the magnificently concise, such as Fallows saying “never before was there a place where everything is so controlled, yet so out of control” (like the housing market, which is so controlled yet so out of control). There is a limit to how much analysis one can do in a 4,000-word opinion piece. But one hopes that opinion columnists with an agenda like O’Reilly do not succeed in drowning out serious reporters like Fallows.

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