I try to stay out petty arguments, especially with locals. Anyone brings up Taiw@n, and I’ll be the first to chime that ‘of course Taiw@n is a part of China.’ If I’m feeling snarky, maybe throw in ‘much in the same way that Canada is part of the U.S. – they use dollars, speak English, and have a common ethnic and colonial history.’ THEN they start to argue the absurdity of that argument, and maybe realize some of the inconsistencies with their own position.

This post from Cnreview got me wondering how very isolated the Chinese internet is, and how much of it has to do with outright cens0rship, and what amounts to language barriers and differences of habit. This post has an excellent discussion of the realities of internet cens0rship, and how they affect behavior and use (panopticon! Which incidentally, in Chinese is 圆形监狱, or ‘circle form prison.’)

Regardless, last night I became involved in a rather asinine pissing contest with a local (graduate student) who casually proclaimed “Japan has no culture.” For some reason this sent me over the deep end. The discussion ended with me calling her a “Sinocentric nationalist in need of a more nuanced world view” and me being described as “stupid, because you don’t understand what it’s like to feel Chinese in your bones with 5,000 years of blood history.”

My descent in childishness is troubling largely because I consider myself fluent in Chinese. If someone like me can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the (presumably politically motivated) Sinocentric narrative – we’re in trouble, insofar as Chinese-Western relations become more important. It’s easy to say ‘the government is bad, the people are good’ – but what if everyone could communicate, and they discovered that we (Westerners) are all pompous, arrogant rationalists; while we come to some conclusion about the majority of Chinese being so nationalistically insensitive as to border on virulent racism.

What I wanted was something like:

As you know, Chinese only uses morphosyllabic ideograms in it’s writing. As a result, it is more difficult to import foreign words than in languages that make use of an alphabet or syllabary. As a result, domestic equivalents must often be found for new concepts to be introduced. Even entirely foreign concepts, such as Buddhist terms introduced via India, or technology borrowed from English speaking countries often maintain a distinctly local feel. For example, you’ll note the difference between Hong Kong’s use of 巴士 (bus), a transliterated borrowed word, and the Mainland’s use of 工交车 (public transport vehicle) to describe the exact same thing.

This effect perhaps reduces the natural mutation in language that takes place over time. As a result, even though Confucius was writing more than 2,000 years ago, it takes only a moderate amount of study for a speaker of modern Mandarin to read original texts. This provides a sense of unity not only based upon ethnicity, but also deeply linked to the means of communication, which have tended to remain more stable and accessible over long periods of time.

SOMETHING! Or maybe noting that due to central China’s geography, it was often unified, and laws and language were spread amongst a very large area.

But no. All I got was (translation is my own, original follows):

Even though there has been this affliction (Westernization), she (China) is still herself, this is because it is a part of our bone marrow from the earliest period, and it’s impossible to get rid of that aspect of self! This is at the very least how it is to me!

虽然满目的仓痍（西化），但她仍然是她，其原因是它早已根植在我们的骨髓中，是不会丢失自己的！至少对于我来说是这样!

Some will rightly point out discussion and argument styles are different. Maybe everything is wrong kill kill kill Western educated graduate students need to add some more id – there is unfortunately no way I can argue the ethnic high ground.

What’s at stake? Stances like these cause more and more anti-Chinese sentiment (torch protests) which are then misinterpreted here. Unnecessary antagonism ensues. Will continue exploring.