Comment by FooBarWidget
2 years ago
From my Chinese perspective, the time to ponder this question has long passed. It's not useful.
In a street interview in China (Xinjiang, even) about sanctions, an old man gave an interesting answer. He did not express resentment for the sanctions. Instead, he said: let them sanction, in the end we can't rely on others for our own prosperity and development.
He is right. There is no point in Chinese resenting the sanctions. There is no point in foreigners criticizing the sanctions, we all know it's no use. The only thing that matters now is for Chinese to focus on work. Focus on our own R&D. No need to say much, just get things done.
Not only is it no use, but it's very counterproductive. It's hard to push for innovation locally as it's initially higher cost and lower quality so local companies are incentivized to continue to buy foreign. Without the customers to drive demand the top down initiatives invites corruption and money spent on it just goes into a bottomless black hole. By being sanctioned you have the foreign countries ensuring local companies can only by locally and are not able to bribe the foreign countries to circumvent.
From the US perspective it's different. I'm living in the US, I think we're being petty, disrespectful and I think the action is pathetic.
This is not about China resenting the sanctions. You already have the right attitude This is about a US citizen looking at the US and feeling ashamed at our own virtues.
We should share technology and work together. Not fear one nation surpassing the other.
Was that interviewed man in Xinjiang a Han or a Uyghur? I'd be challenged to think of something more duplicitous than a street interview in Xinjiang.
There are many more ethnicities in Xinjiang than just Han and Uyghur you know. Chinese typically don't focus on people's ethnicities and prefer to refer to people by their place of origin (e.g., "Xinjiang people", "Shandong people", etc), the Chinese way of being inclusive. The man appeared racially ambiguous, could just as well be mixed.
I have a Uyghur acquaintance in Germany who's pretty mad at the media's depiction of stuff. He views it as slander of his home region. At the same time he resents that most westerners don't actually care about the truth, they just want their viewpoints confirmed and get mad at him for presenting a different narrative.
He even gets death threats from other Uyghur diaspora for holding this view.
Colloquially, when Chinese people refer to Xinjiangren, they mean non-Han Muslim people. I heard a lot of casual racism directed towards them while I lived in China. Chinese are being "inclusive" because A. they are ignorant, B. they assume most people are Han, with the occasional minority that looks mostly Han anyway, and C. they associate a region with ethnicity or local culture.
All street interviews that are shown in media parrot official state talking points. If you don't understand that, I don't know what to tell you.
I think it's actually a shame that you now live in a society with free access to information but choose to take state media at face value.
What is his view?