Hui, what a fantastic write-up. I truly enjoy reading your second installment of "moments from my metropolis".
As we marvel at our good fortune living in our respectively enlightened metropolis, we cannot but feel dumbfounded by the slow progress made in our home countries.
Instead of grousing on lack of progress in our home countries, I am diverting to another topic - that of - nationality and nationalism. Two news on naturalization provided the backdrop to this post.
One from mainland China. The mainland chartroom and blogosphere were recently filled with angry posting on Gong Li who recently took up Singaporean citizenship. You can imagine all the accusations against this once adored celebrity from the mildly betrayal of to the highly charged treason against her mother land.
What do we make out of taking up a new citizenship?
I ponder and then I am reminded by my recent reading of Mencius. One thing that Mencius strikes me is how liberal or rather how much more liberal he is compared to the modern days liberal doctrine.
Mencius advocates, in essence, free movement of peoples from one country to another, whether to live to toil the land as a farmer or to serve as an official in the court of the new lord. I think almost all sovereign countries today would not have endorsed especially the latter.
What is the fuss with these angry netizen? They should have asked not just - why my country has failed to retain her but also why my country cannot attract more talented foreigner be my compatriot?
Least that these angry netizen know - at about the same time over in Hong Kong, a German born Jew sworn in as a Chinese citizen and gave up his Canadian citizenship. He is Allan Zeman, a successful entrepreneur in his own right and who is better known as the Father of Lan Kwai Fong, the night life district in Hong Kong (disclosure: I lived there for 6 months).
Since 2004, he is the chairman of Ocean Park, a government owned theme park that rival the HK Disneyland (partially owned by HK government as well). His success in turnaround the Ocean Park (another disclosure: my sons favorite weekend hangout) has earned him the nickname of Mouse Killer in a 2007 Forbe's article.
What a paradox with a Jew becoming a Chinese and a Chinese becoming a Singaporean!
In the world we live in, almost all people obtain their nationality from jus solis or jus sanguinis which are fortuitous. An individual is never given a real choice and therefore my view is that the freedom of adopting a new nationality is very much a human right not to be denied if an individual conforms to the law of nationality in the adopted country.
Equally it is always legitimate to be stay patriotic to one country to effect the necessary change in government or to repel foreign occupation or to end civil strife. It is ultimately about freedom of choice and that create condition for competitive improvement in the society.
Extending Mencius's basic tenet that the ruler has to be benevolent to attract peoples to the farm the idle land and the intellectual to serve as the official into the modern context, one can say that no country earn an automatic allegiance from its citizen unless its government is good or benevolent in the Confucian terminology. This will encourage all countries striving to be benevolent/good government in competing for talent besides grooming its very own.
Nationalist sentiment on the question of nationality is always mindless when the very issue ought to be self introspection and respect for individual's exercise of liberty
3 comments:
Bro, thank you for reminding me about "Moments from My Metropolis" because despite starting a draft I had forgotten about it. This is as good as any to get back on-track!
I'd be curious whether the netizens who loudly condemn Gong Li's decision to be Singaporean would actually welcome Allan Zeman's new Chinese nationality. I suspect those who are, shall we say more narrow-minded, would roundly reject the notion that he is somehow "Chinese". Nationalistic considerations such as contributions to the Motherland (which includes Hong Kong) be damned; and in its place racial considerations come to fore.
In this context, I would be curious for your observations of how Mainland Chinese view children of mixed Chinese-foreign parentage. Are they accepted as Chinese or you hear quiet whispers of a racial nature?
It would be useful to consider some of the ideas in a book, which I recommend, titled "As the Future Catches You" by the brilliant Juan Enriquez-Cabot. I am amused to see that there are some YouTubes of him talking about the intersection between genomics, business and public policy which is his area of expertise.
Well in his book he considered the future of the nation state in the global economy given that we may be seeing a disconnect between (i) the "productive capacity" i.e. brainpower and the ability to create value out of them, and (ii) the "burdens" of a nation state such as land, population, conflicts etc.
You might say,"Wait a minute, people and land are assets." But the fact is a modern globalised knowledge-based economy rely less and less on that and there come to a point of diminishing returns for those traditional economic factors. I remember once he said Hong Kong's competitiveness can leave on a few jumbo jets and what's left would be an "average" Chinese city. Similarly, the US can probably keep 80% of its economy by retaining 20% of its people (resulting in a 4x boost to the per-capita income!!).
That may not be too far-fetched. Juan Enriquez's new(er) book which I have not read is precisely about the global forces that may break-apart the USA (without assuming that's necessarily a bad thing).
So what I am saying is that any sense of nationalism that is overtly focused on "historical land mass" and "racial stock" does not in fact serve the best intest of the nation. Not only it encourages conflict and destruction; it distracts the focus and energy away from continuous investment and improvement in people and ideas.
So may be by focusing on the human-level and by using humanity (not politics or nation-states) as the overarching context. We get closer to understanding Mencius.
on your question of how mainland chinese view children of mixed-foreign parentage, i supposed it is more in the category of envy and sometimes, I would like to think, still a little novel in a country with an overwhelming Han peoples.
it is really not too often to see children of mixed parentage in mainland, unlike HK.
what is wonderful of the CCTV is the program featuring foreigners (mainly students) who perform various chinese opera, dance and musical instrument and etc. These help foster a positive image of foreigner in the mainland.
By the way, one of Obama's half brother is married to a Henanese woman. I have read report of chinese women marrying the Arabs and converted to Islam in Yiwu, Zhejiang famous as the gateway fo doing business with the middle east.
Intermarriage between Han, Manchu and Hui muslim are pretty common especially in urban area.
Less is heard of Han with Tibetan and Uighur.
on whether the mixed race children are accepted as chinese, it depends on the identification of the child him/herself with chinese language and culture.
racism surely exist in section of society against peoples who are not like themselves.this is likely to be the same everywhere.
Chinese has long assumed to being the dominant culture in all its interactions with outsiders although historical evidence (via many "foreign" conquests) indicate that the record is quite mixed. If I were making education policy in China, one priority would be to temper the sense of racial or cultural superiority...because if mis-managed China would at best, have a difficult relationship with a globalised world at worse embroil in disastrous warfare that demolish decades of progress. What use to work for a relatively isolated Empire will need to be refined for a nation that is one of many players on the world stage.
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