Don “Orfeo” Rechtman

MANY if not most U.S. citizens still think of China as a backward, third-world country devoid of freedoms, while at the same time many Chinese people I’ve met here in China will tell me “U.S.A. Number One!”, and hope they too can someday realize the “American dream” they have heard so much about in movies and the media. Unfortunately, the so-called “American dream” is just that — only a dream.

I sometimes describe the cause of these misconceptions this way: Forty years ago, China was just recovering from the “Cultural Revolution,” and more than 85 percent of the population still lived in poverty. During the same time period, the U.S. was still in the golden post-World War II, post-Depression era, and in spite of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the middle class grew to previously unseen numbers.

Fast forward to today: the U.S. is on the verge of economic collapse, including the decimation of the middle class, with a poverty rate above 15 percent, complicated by a crumbling infrastructure, an out-of-control health care system, and systemic racism; meanwhile, China has the fastest-growing middle class of any country and has made astounding gains in health, technology, human rights, and poverty eradication, with the probability of ending poverty this year in spite of the pandemic and global recessions. Yet U.S. people, pretty much just out of habit, still condemn China without really knowing the facts; similarly, many Chinese people, again pretty much just out of habit, find themselves mistaking the U.S. of today for the U.S. of yesterday, a land of opportunity that was but is no more.

The nationalism of the U.S. is very narrow-minded: if it is American, then they “know” it is better than anywhere else in the world; end of discussion. In sharp contrast, the nationalism of China takes justified pride in, and appreciates, that which clearly is Chinese, but at the same time the Chinese people are willing to embrace new ways of being, new ways of learning, and to not only respect others’ differences but to study them and learn from them.

Unfortunately, this approach distinction is invariably slowing down the process of cross-cultural respect; as the U.S. has a limited ability to adapt and change, it will be up to the Chinese people and people of other more tolerant nations to help bring many Westerners to a new level of tolerance, acceptance and embracing of the cultural differences that are a part of who we are as a unified humanity.

(The author is a voting citizen from Chico, California, currently residing in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China. His personal website is www.OrfeoMusic.org.)