When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 性æč, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itâs marginally better than a kindergartenerâs. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2Âœ, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youâre Cantonese, youâll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youâll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a âdialectâ. It canât be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnât a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnât understand it would either use the siteâs built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereâs no insistence on âSpeak English, I canât understand you,â or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youâd expect. âWrite in Chinese,â âWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?â âThink about where you are,â and âI donât understand youâ (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseâagain supporting the argument that it isnât a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itâs strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youâre American or Chinese, thereâs nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iâve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itâs the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itâs the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itâs one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
I often find myself in accord with my friend Victor Billot. His piece on the UK General Election can be found here. And yes, Britain, this is how many of us looking in see itâlike Victor I have dual nationality (indeed, my British passport is my only current one, having been a little busy to get the Kiwi one renewed).
Highlights include (and this is from a man who is no fan of the EU):
When reporters with their TV cameras went out to the streets to ask the people about their concerns, their motives, their aspirations, they recorded a dogs dinner of reverse logic and outright gibberish. BoJo had screaming rows with his girlfriend, made up policy on the go and hid in a commercial fridge. Corbyn however was seen as the weirdo. âI donât like his mannerisms,â stated one Tory convert as the hapless Labour leader made another stump speech about saving the NHS. âBritainâs most dangerous manâ shrieked a tabloid headline.
Corbyn made a honest mistake in thinking that people may have been concerned about waiting lists at hospitals. It turned out that voters are happy about queues as long as they donât have any foreigners in them, or doctors with âforeignâ looks at the end of them.
The Murdoch Press machine: predictably, business as usual.
and:
A curious aspect of the election is how the behaviour of the leaders seems to be measured by a new matrix of values. The more boorish, and arrogant, the better, in a kind of pale reflection of the troglodyte Trump in the midnight dim of his tweet bunker. BoJo, a blustering, buffoonish figure with a colourful personal life and the cocksure confidence of an Old Etonian, can be contrasted to the measured and entirely decent Corbyn with his Tube pass and allotment. Perhaps this is an inevitable side effect of the growing rage and alienation that bubbles under the surface of society, providing the gravitational pull towards the âstrong manâ who will âmake our nation great (again)â in a world of other people who arenât like us.
I shan’t spoil the last paragraph but it all builds up to that nicely.
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lotâI dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than I ever could. (I hope the image appears in the embed below, since I see no img tagsâit seems reliant on Javascript.) Presumably this is either the Chicago Daily News or the SunâTimes.
Someone kept an American newspaper from 50 years ago for its historic #MoonLanding coverage. This opinion piece was in it.
While itâs true that Nissan is worth more than Renault now, we canât forget what a terrible shape it was in at the time the alliance was forged. While Nissan could have declared the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11, itâs interesting to speculate how it would have emerged: would it have saved face or would consumers have lost confidence, as they have with Mitsubishi? And in the wake of Ghosnâs arrest, stories in the western media began appearing: Nissanâs performance was faltering (‘mediocre,’ says Ghosn). It had had a recent scandal and a major recall. More likely than not, it meant that certain heads were going to roll. To save themselves, they rolled their leader instead.
Weâll see if there has been financial impropriety as things proceed, but to me thereâs an element of xenophobia in the way the story has developed; and it was a surprise to learn at how ill-balanced the Japanese legal system is.
Iâve been vocal elsewhere on how poorly I think elements of both companies have been run, but Ghosn does have a valid point in his video when he says that leadership canât be based solely on consensus, as itâs not a way to propel a company forward.
Iâm keeping an open mind and, unlike some of the reporting that has gone on, maintaining that Ghosn is innocent till proved guilty. Itâs dangerous to hop on to a bandwagon. Itâs why I was a rare voice saying the Porsche Cayenne would succeed when the conventional wisdom among the press was that it would fail; and why I said Google Plus would fail when the tech press said it was a âFacebook-killerâ. Ghosn deserves to be heard.
The trouble with all the yellow-peril reporting thatâs far more prevalent than it should be in Aotearoa is when something happens to you that may get people thinking about a stereotype.
Back in March, of course, we had one writer justifying racism toward (east) Asian tourist drivers in the Fairfax Press, when the facts show that Aussies are the worst of the tourists when it comes to causing accidents on our roads. Thatâs no surprise, since there are simply more Aussie tourists driving on our roads; yet, as I pointed out in March, no one really seemed to mind how many accidents tourists were causing when the bulk of them were Aussies, Brits and continental Europeans.
Then we had another one a few weeks later from the same newspaper group that suggested the increase in corrupt practices among New Zealand companies was due to immigration from countries such as China, tying in the story to a Deloitte report to give it legitimacyâexcept the report makes no such claim.
With the exception of journalists like Dave Moore of The Press (part of the same newspaper group) who prefers to cite motoring facts and back them up rather than rely on hearsay from their grandfathers, it seems pretty easy for some in the media to draw a stereotype of the corrupt, incompetent Chinese driver. Those who think that we have completely moved past drawing pigtails (I said pigtails, not ponytails) on Chinese caricatures are wrong; while there arenât such negative portrayals in our media, it seems incredibly easy, almost a default position, for some less responsible types to fall back on unrealistic conclusions. After all, The Dominion Post said my accent is hard to understand on its p. 1 some years back, and as many of you pointed out to them via the social networks, no one in the real world knows that they are talking about. (Note: I received a Twitter apology from the editor-in-chief.)
The trouble comes when the fantasyland concocted by some starts impacting on everyday life, which is, of course, some of the discussions that US residents are having right now over how black Americans are portrayed. The peaceful protesters donât get covered, because they are less newsworthy; the violent looters do, and it becomes dreadfully easy for the less cosmopolitan to equate being black with being violent.
After a car accident on Friday, where everyone was exemplary, I couldnât help but have these thoughts go through my mind. I found myself telling friends, âI had an accident, but the other driver was at fault,â even though my friends know of my love of cars, and my above-average abilities with them. I double-checked with the police officer that he clearly understood me, when I should never have doubted his objectivity. My radar was alert for anyone who might fall back on the stereotype, even though I live in a city, with an urban population that generally has more contact with minority cultures and know that the fantasyland concocted by certain people is designed only to appeal to the ever-shrinking market of xenophobes in society.
The ages of most of the people involved were under 30, so I really had nothing to fear: the other driver, the police officer, the witnesses, and the schoolboy who, as a responsible young New Zealander, called the emergency services for us. One witness offered her lounge for us to rest and get over the shock. The officer was scrupulously professional, not letting on any emotion (the Dieter Bonrath poker face school of policing, for the Cobra 11 fans out there) as he gathered his facts; he became friendlier after it was established we were both decent folks willing to help, and there was no booze involved. The ambulance staff were ultra-friendly and we had to assure them that we were all right and they should head off to the next gig where there may be a greater need for them. The other driver was honest, considerate and took responsibility, although she was in shock (as was I for some time, though I probably hid it better), yet her first utterance was to ask if I was all right. That says volumes about her character. Not only was this an urban population, this was a young urban population for whom skin colour is far down the list of priorities. Ditto with me: I canât tell you what races people were. I just remembered everyone sounded like me. You know, like Sir Anand Satyanand.
But it is a worry when your thoughts go toward defending yourself from the stereotype, because years of living in a place where you are the minority have taught you to be alert. Granted, no one shoots at us, since our cops are unarmed for the most part, but I began to get an appreciation for the hands-up gesture among black Americans in their country. Itâs a symbol of so much, including ensuring that no one ever mistakes you for being armed, because of the negative associations that are portrayed. You nevertheless worry if anyone around you bought into fantasyland, because you know the less intelligent do: you’ve seen it. (I hasten to add that this is not a criticism of any particular people, because I am well aware that if you go to a place where my race is the majority, there will be a certain segment of the population there that holds negative and false stereotypes of others.)
Race relations in this country have improved markedly since my arrival in 1976, so this is heartening. I donât see things like refusal of service to people of my colour (yes, it has happened in the last four decades), and the stories of my great-uncle and others, of having stones and rocks thrown at you by fellow Kiwis because of their colour, seem foreign and distant. Last Friday was a reminder that most New Zealanders look at others fairly, regardless of their origins. That was a silver lining. Lucy Knightâs instincts kicked in to defend a Chinese New Zealander whose handbag was being stolen by a young man, and Mrs Knight got a serious head injury for her intervention, requiring months of surgery and rehabilitation. I doubt she evaluated the race of thief or victim before stepping in, and, rightly, The New Zealand Herald didn’t care, either. Go to your social media feeds, and by and large, racism is frowned upon. Last Friday was a fantastic reminder of the good of the place I have proudly called home most of my life. A place where xenophobia is virtually dead.
Weâve come a long way, and we just need to weed out the last little bits of this strange fantasy where itâs apparently desirous that Aotearoa looks something like Midsomer but without the deaths. The reality is that the Midsomers of this world (by that I mean any society that adopts a Luddite position in part through having its head in the sand) are terrible at trading and stagnate. Weâre in a global society, weâve a lot to gain from working with others in different nations, and weâre really not that different across the planet. As someone once pointed out to me, the Palestinian Dream looks an awful lot like the American Dream.
And, if youâre truly proud of your country, youâd naturally want to share, secure enough in your belief about the place to know that the fundamental things about it will never change. New Zealand will always be New Zealand, with an independent, determined outlook, and those who come get it. The more we share, the more we all get it. Thatâs a good thing.
