On Exploitation

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire said the liberation of the oppressor and oppressed are intimately tied. One cannot be truly free while the other is enslaved. It is not that we the bourgeois are helping the proletariat. Rather we are working to free ourselves, for one man’s freedom based on another’s slavery is not freedom at all. It is living in fear of revolt, of all the things we could lose at any minute.

This brotherhood of man mentality is never as absent as in post-communist China. Though China was never colonized militarily by the West, it is now being colonized culturally. Most Chinese think all things white are better than things Chinese. The lack of experience with colonization in the past may have left it helpless to guard itself now. It did not fight for its identity apart from that given to it by whites, unlike India, Latin America, Africa. Hence China’s sense of unconditional self-respect is underdeveloped as it is untested. It has not know how/what to treasure and preserve that quality that is uniquely Chinese: to disavow unsuitable whiteness.

So there exists a dynamic between the cultural colonizer and colonized regardless of previous military colonization, one that permeates everyday Chinese life. Providing specific examples to this abstract idea needs looking no further than on the Wudaokou streets. Chinese girls fawn over white men just for being white. They look up to the guys with those innocent, watery, dark eyes of theirs. Their necks tilted, lips pouted, hands caressing. You really can’t blame the guys for enjoying all these attention.

Yet by allowing themselves to be fawned over, the white men are participating in a history of exploitation. They may not be exploiting the girls themselves where they do treat them well (but know that there is a line of pretty girls outside waiting to please them). However, they are perpetuating a system of white superiority by not actively renouncing the image that white, English-speaking is better. So they are committing a moral wrong through sins of omission. But practically, everyone likes attention, so there is not much wrong on a personal level. So what is to be done in this situation? Is all that a white man can do is to stay faithful to one girl and make her understand that he is no better than she is. In other words, just be a good person. But asking for personal sacrifice in exchange for making an unnoticeable dent in the world’s injustices is a big favor to ask of ones not already predisposed.

I experience the same conundrum as the white men where I am given special treatment as an American studying at Columbia. Butthat is also all I am to the givers of that treatment. They expect me to play the part they designed for me, which consists of them talking and I giving affirmation that they are right in their opinions of all things Chinese and American.

And I realize how much I’m used to the freedom of writing my own part in the play that is life. And if I don’t get to write the play itself, as no one does, then I at least get to choose it. So I become sympathetic to the white men in China. Though they are fawned over, they are also put in a script without their choosing. While that play makes them out to be the heroes and saviors, it also strips them of their individuality.

Now how do the Chinese perpetuate this exploitation: by not thinking critically. Initially I marveled at how seemingly reasonable, highly educated people can just repeat what they have heard without having thought through it the least bit.

Examples: “Korean women are prettier than Chinese women, but that is because they all have plastic surgery when they are 18.”
“You will get very sick going to Tibet because of the high altitude.”
“You should not marry someone who is not from Beijing as their families are too poor.”
“The Dalai Lama is an enemy of the state because he tries to separate China.”
“President Hu cares very much about children because he went to an orphanage today.”
…

I am aware stereotypes exist in the States. But they exist at a much larger scale, especially among the educated, in China. I used to think that education exposes one to different ideologies and peoples, making one more open-minded. I was not entirely correct. It depends on the type of education and where it is situated rather than on years of education alone. In the propaganda machine that is China, all the news repeat the same lines and stories. In universities, there exist separate accounts for national and international websites where the latter require payment. So rather than having your world reflect the diverse opinions that you are taught and learn to process, your world reflect mostly the ideologies of the party. While many young people do go to blogs and access international websites at home, that is no substitute for censored media.

So where do I come in in this rant of exploitive histories seeing from positions of both the oppressor and the oppressed? In China, I have a moral responsibility to make my fellow Chinese – those who script plays for me – to see their own worth, their countrymen’s worth: independent of and in spite of comparisons to Americans. Practically, this is a next to impossible task: teaching people about unconditioned self-respect, especially when they do not listen. Yet miniscule, incremental dents made on a person-to-person level are the only certain, doable options we have.