China: A Very Personal View (I)

China with its thousands of years of history, billions of people and vast spaces of geography defies any simple descriptions or important insights. So while I enjoy traveling there or studying its history and being with its people, my comments must (of course) be very personal, incredibly partial, and severely biased. So having just returned from spending a month there here are a few snippets.

The Chinese: wonderfully hospitable; Once again I was the object of great unreserved hospitality. My hosts made every effort to care for me. They wanted me to have the best accommodations, most appropriate food, highest places of honor at feasts, safety on the streets and the appropriate respect for my role of teacher. When they learned I was 82 years of age and still conducting workshops they expressed a reaction almost of awe. But then they learned something else about me which raised me even higher in their estimation. They learned that the most famous movie director in China, John Woo, was a student of mine in elementary and high school. That trumped age and any other experience or set of skills I might have carried with me.

The Chinese: Ambivalence about children. Of course, Chinese. like parents everywhere, love their children. The child is the focus of love, attention, favors, and the very best education possible. I learned that only in a very few homes is a child expected to do chores, for that may distract from the child’s most important role, namely, that of being a diligent student - twenty-four-seven; year round. In their zeal to have their one and only child be all that s/he can possibly be Chinese (like parents in most parts of the world) tend to swing between severe authoritarianism (this child must do exactly as I teach it and be rewarded or punished to achieve that) or the child is king or queen, so the parent is extremely permissive and “what this wonderful and only child wants, this wonderful and only child gets!” On the other hand, in a much-needed effort to control population growth the one child per family law is still being enforced. Tragically, especially female fetuses continue to be aborted and some children with birth defects continue to be abandoned.

The Chinese: Driven by capitalism. The government may still be socialist but private entrepreneurs drive the economy. When I traveled along the coast at Xiamen, just across from Taiwan, I noticed a building which looked strikingly like the new Goldman Sacks Building on Wall Street, it suddenly hit me: in the month that I traveled only in southern China Government was convening a forum in Beijing to discuss this matter.

Chinese: Atheistic and spiritual. The Chinese “constitution” continues to declare atheism as the official position of the country. And there is plenty of evidence of a secularism in which spiritual values are dismissed as irrelevant. Concurrently there are deep undertones of spiritual yearnings and pursuits. The same organization that is promoting Parent Effectiveness is very successful in offering seminars and workshop on “Your Spiritual Being”, “Meditation” and “Higher Consciousness”. The story of Christianity in modern China is almost beyond belief. There are now many more professing Christians in China than at any time in history. Both the three-self churches (self-propagating, self-governing and self supporting) which number more than 15,000 and the more than 30,000 unauthorized house churches are growing at an unprecedented rate and estimates of the number of Christians in China run from 50 million to 100 million.

Of course, I barely stuck one toe into that vast ocean called China. I will say a little more about one other toe in those waters in my next blog.