Written evidence submitted by Mothers
Bridge of Love
A DROP IN THE CHINA OCEAN—WHAT IS TODAY'S CHINA
COMING FROM?
(What I have experienced in China, whether in
terms of place, the times, the environment or the situation, can
only be representative of a minuscule proportion, like a drop
of water cannot be used to explain the ocean, but only a spoon
of tea or a bowl of soup—Xinran)
China has been criticised and even punished
over the half century since it was controlled by the CCP in 1949,
it has not listened to the world about democracy, freedom, and
human rights exactly as a naughty boy grows up but never follows
his parents and teachers' words with their kindness and talents.
We always try to find out the reason that make our naughty children
go against us; it is not necessary to say that most of their parents
hardly admit that their misunderstanding and disappointment actually
pushed those children to the opposite directions of their wishes
without caring and support. So the West has also done to New China
since the last century as well, as according to recorded Chinese
history, the country has called itself New China since 1949.
How many westerners (possibly including quite
a large number of Chinese too) really know this New China with
their knowledge of this country? Do we really believe New China
has realised Communist ideas? What new things has the CCP achieved
in this large agriculture country in its 30 years management of
5,000 years of Chinese roots before the 1980s?
ACCORDING TO
"THE CIA WORLD
FACT BOOK"
2005
For centuries China stood as a leading civilization,
outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but
in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by
civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation.
After World War II, the Communists under MAO Zedong established
an autocratic socialist system that, while ensuring China's sovereignty,
imposed strict controls over everyday life and cost the lives
of tens of millions of people. After 1978, his successor DENG
Xiaoping and other leaders focused on market-oriented economic
development and by 2000 output had quadrupled. For much of the
population, living standards have improved dramatically and the
room for personal choice has expanded, yet political controls
remain tight.
People's Republic of China is located in Eastern
Asia, bordering the East China Sea, Korea Bay, Yellow Sea, and
South China Sea, between North Korea and Vietnam.
Area total: 9,596,960 sq km; land: 9,326,410
sq km; water: 270,550 sq km; mostly mountains, high plateaus,
deserts in west; plains, deltas, and hills in east; lowest point:
Turpan Pendi -154 m; highest point: Mount Everest 8,850 m; world's
fourth largest country (after Russia, Canada, and US); Mount Everest
on the border with Nepal is the world's tallest peak.
Natural resources: coal, iron ore, petroleum,
natural gas, mercury, tin, tungsten, antimony, manganese, molybdenum,
vanadium, magnetite, aluminium, lead, zinc, uranium, hydropower
potential (world's largest).
Population: 1,306,313,812 (July 2005 est); Population
growth rate 0.58% (2005 est); Ethnic groups: Han Chinese 91.9%,
Zhuang, Uygur, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean,
and other nationalities 8.1%.
Religions: Daoist (Taoist), Buddhist, Muslim
1%-2%, Christian 3%-4% Note: officially atheist (2002 est).
Languages: Standard Chinese or Mandarin (Putonghua,
based on the Beijing dialect), Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghaiese),
Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka
dialects, minority languages (see Ethnic groups entry).
International organization participation: AfDB,
APEC, APT, ARF, AsDB, ASEAN (dialogue partner), BIS, CDB, FAO,
G-77, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, ICRM, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO,
ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, IOC, IOM (observer), ISO, ITU, LAIA (observer),
MIGA, MONUC, NAM (observer), NSG, OAS (observer), ONUB, OPCW,
PCA, SCO, UN, UN Security Council, UNAMSIL, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNHCR,
UNIDO, UNITAR, UNMEE, UNMIL, UNMOVIC, UNOCI, UNTSO, UPU, WCO,
WHO, WIPO, WMO, WToO, WTO, ZC.
Agriculture—products: rice, wheat, potatoes,
corn, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, apples, cotton, oilseed, pork,
fish.
Industries: mining and ore processing, iron,
steel, aluminium, and other metals; coal; machine building; armaments;
textiles and apparel; petroleum; cement; chemicals; fertilizers;
consumer products, including footwear, toys, and electronics;
food processing; transportation equipment, including automobiles,
rail cars and locomotives, ships, and aircraft; telecommunications
equipment, commercial space launch vehicles and satellites.
Disputes—international: in 2005, China
and India initiate drafting principles to resolve all aspects
of their extensive boundary and territorial disputes together
with a security and foreign policy dialogue to consolidate discussions
related to the boundary, regional nuclear proliferation, and other
matters; recent talks and confidence-building measures have begun
to defuse tensions over Kashmir, site of the world's largest and
most militarised territorial dispute with portions under the de
facto administration of China (Aksai Chin), India (Jammu and Kashmir),
and Pakistan (Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas); India does not
recognize Pakistan's ceding historic Kashmir lands to China in
1964; about 90,000 ethnic Tibetan exiles reside primarily in India
as well as Nepal and Bhutan; China asserts sovereignty over the
Spratly Islands together with Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam,
and possibly Brunei; the 2002 "Declaration on the Conduct
of Parties in the South China Sea" has eased tensions in
the Spratlys but is not the legally binding "code of conduct"
sought by some parties; in March 2005, the national oil companies
of China, the Philippines, and Vietnam signed a joint accord on
marine seismic activities in the Spratly Islands; China occupies
some of the Paracel Islands also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan;
China and Taiwan have become more vocal in rejecting both Japan's
claims to the uninhabited islands of Senkaku-shoto (Diaoyu Tai)
and Japan's unilaterally declared exclusive economic zone in the
East China Sea, the site of intensive hydrocarbon prospecting;
certain islands in the Yalu and Tumen rivers are in an uncontested
dispute with North Korea and a section of boundary around Mount
Paektu is considered indefinite; China seeks to stem illegal migration
of tens of thousands of North Koreans; in 2004, China and Russia
divided up the islands in the Amur, Ussuri, and Argun Rivers,
ending a century-old border dispute; demarcation of the China-Vietnam
boundary proceeds slowly and although the maritime boundary delimitation
and fisheries agreements were ratified in June 2004, implementation
has been delayed; environmentalists in Burma and Thailand remain
concerned about China's construction of hydroelectric dams upstream
on the Nujiang/Salween River in Yunnan Province.
Did you know the following numbers apart from
general knowledge about China?
— Three hundred million rural Chinese
will move to cities in the next 15 years. China must build urban
infrastructure equivalent to Houston's every month in order to
absorb them.
— 220 billion text messages were sent
over mobile phones in China last year.
— General Motors expects the Chinese
automobile market to be bigger than the US market by 2025. Some
74 million Chinese families can now afford to buy cars.
— China has more speakers of English
as a second language than America has native English speakers.
— China has more than 300 biotech firms
that operate unhindered by animal rights lobbies, religious groups,
or ethical standards boards.
— On average, American companies make
a 42% return on their China operations.
— There are 220 million "surplus
workers" in China's central and western regions. The number
of people working in the United States is about 140 million.
— Apparel workers in the United States
make $9.56 an hour. In El Salvador, apparel workers make $1.65.
In China they make between 68 and 88 cents.
— One in 10 American jobs is at risk
of being "offshored".
— There are 186 MBA programs in China.
— China's sex industry alone needs
one billion condoms a year.
— China has 320 million people under
the age of 14, more than the entire population of the United States.
— More people use the Internet in China
than in the United States.
— Women's work is getting harder and
more time-consuming due to ecological degradation, male out-migration
and the shift to the household responsibility system.
If you want to be able to understand about today's
China, I think, no matter from what perspective, we must work
from one premise, which is that in the past, four social phenomena
which are accepted all over the world have never really been accepted
or put into practice there: religious belief, public communication,
the legal system and sex education.
Religious belief
In the last 5,000 years, the Chinese regarded
their emperors and leaders as their god, whose every word could
mean the difference between life and death. In the early 20th
century, China was plunged into chaos as the feudal system came
to an end, and in all this bloodshed, the role of saviour was
taken over by the warlords. They all understood that the Chinese
could not do without their gods, as props to their spirits. No
matter how different the theories of democracy, socialism and
communism represented by Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao
Zedong were, most ordinary Chinese in the period from 1920-80
did not look on them as political leaders but as new emperors
with modern names, and as their gods. This is why the cult of
the individual was able to continue, and also the reason why the
Chinese revolution is not the same as the French Revolution, the
Industrial Revolution or the Russian Revolution. Therefore it
is easy to understand the hysteria of the Red Guards during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the way top-level intellectuals
and peasants and workers alike unquestioningly obeyed their leader's
commands, bowing their heads and allowing their gods to throw
them into prison. I know it is difficult for the rest of the world
to understand this part of history, but having once observed the
sincerity with which people from profoundly religious societies
offer their children or their most valuable possessions to their
gods, you will understand the feelings of ordinary Chinese people
towards Chairman Mao. Although Chinese communists were not allowed
to believe in any god, the entire population of one billion was
actually drifting blindly in a mental fog of temple incense.
The legal system
In the eyes of most Chinese people, the emperors
and Party committees were the legal system, and the jury system
just a fiction from Western films. Most modern Chinese only know
of the police, not of lawyers or judges. The first law set up
in China by the first emery Qing Shi-Huang in about 230BCE was
a very cruel rule—the criminal and three thousand of his
relatives must be killed if only one person broke it (Chinese
called this law jiu zu lian zuo). It lased until 1912 when the
"Xinhai revolution" removed the last empire. Afterwards
Chinese rulers believed they were liberators and brought freedom
and democracy to China, even though they arrested people without
judges' signed warrants. In fact, even not many policemen knew
this system before the 1980s.
Public communication
The only information ordinary Chinese can obtain
from the public media (radio, television and newspapers) are the
orders of those emperors and the political parties. If you were
born blind, no matter how others describe the beauty of colours
to you, you still have no way to imagine the difference between
yellow and blue. For people who have lived all their lives in
China without any chance to travel anywhere, it is impossible
to imagine the right to freedom to read, watch and listen to what
they like, and to communicate with the rest of the world. The
drab, drained information they can get has numbed the natural
desires of most Chinese for information. Thus, they will take
their private pleasures and topics of conversation from one secret,
a single mistake or a piece of gossip. As I once said to a western
friend, do not mock the bitter taste of our tears, because we
have never tried anything that is truly sweet.
Sex education
Sex, which is regarded by the rest of the world
as a basic part of human nature, was a defining characteristic
of hooligans or delinquent behaviour in China until 1983. Touching
or hugging someone of the opposite sex could lead to criticism
or even imprisonment. Even at home, pillow talk between couples
could be used as proof for one of them to inform against the other
after a quarrel, which could result in imprisonment or dismissal
from their jobs. Because of the lack of sex education, very many
Chinese men and women did not know the difference between men
and women, or what sex is. This is no joke. They are human beings,
but the physical part of their nature has been destroyed by political
brutality and the ugliness of society. Principles from a thousand
years of history are like a prison, in which Chinese people's
love and sex are locked away. The only heroes are in novels; the
only ardent lovers are in pictures, and the ones who succeed in
love are often acting out a tragedy. China started public sex
education in 2002, more than twenty years after young citizens
had adopted western sexual relationships. This unbalanced development
not only cost millions of forbidden babies which were killed or
became orphans, but also raised the number of women community
suicides to the highest in the world, according to a UN report
in 2002.
Apart from these four issues, from 1912 to the
1980s, the Chinese education system never had a chance to improve,
or to build itself up to international standards, because of:
Warlord War (1912-37)
Anti-Japanese War and The Second World War (1937-45)
Civil War (1945-49)
Korean War (1950-53)
Countryside Revolution and the Great Leap Forward
(1950-63)
The Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
For these reasons, the last two generations
of Chinese to enter middle age have had insufficient knowledge
or experience in these fields. They have lost their way in the
struggle between human nature and the political system. However,
I find that the new generation is just the opposite. They have
come into the world with all their parents' sexual hunger, and
swiftly, ravenously, taken on everything in their society that
can fulfil their human needs. They imitate lifestyles from abroad
in a search for a real "human" existence, even at the
cost of the loss of their families or possessions.
Like a starving child, China as she opens up
would eat everything she could lay her hands on, indiscriminately.
We saw her afterwards with a flushed and smiling face, but she
herself did not realise the harm this would do to her long-starved
system. Can we feel her pain inside because of the imbalances
inside her body? The China the world sees is just a child wearing
new clothes who is no longer crying out with hunger.
But have people considered?
— What is the educational background
of the current batch of policy-makers, managers and local officials
among the 78% of the population, of which more than half have
been educated less than 10 years?
— What is the international standard
of democracy Chinese could be able understand and believe in for
benefiting today's China which has more than 500 years gap between
urban and rural areas?
— How much could we expect liberal
knowledge and thoughts from today's China, which has been opened
to the world for only 20 years in its three thousand years history
and with its five thousand years civilization, where most of its
people still believe McDonalds is the best western food and Starbucks
is the best western coffee?
— How much could we allow those new
Chinese generations, who are studying in the UK and also brought
up with the beliefs of "speeding up" and "anything
could be possible", as a bridge or a part of energy between
this country and China when they take over the future with their
western education?
I personally believe that it will take two or
three generations for China to build up a benign cycle of education,
where more and more Chinese young people can grow up in a healthy
educational climate, and only then will they be able to understand
China's place in the world, what is special about it and what
is universal. Only then will they have the ability to develop
China more reasonably and efficiently; only then will China be
able to truly understand the world, and work together with it.
This is because most of us only understood the
eternal nature of the Shakespeare poems we studied at school when
we fell in love; we only realised the importance of parents' "over-cautiousness"
and "nagging" when we had children of our own; and we
only became aware that old age was not an excuse to criticise
the young when we ourselves were old. It is just like the way
we ignore the feeling of writing a letter when we use the Internet;
just like we forget that a live voice on the phone is more human
than email; just like the way we even choose partners through
a computer, without bothering with the old-fashioned "looking
first, touching second, possessing last". I believe that
it is not until people get to know China more widely and deeply
that they can understand why so many Chinese are chasing after
money and desire; why so many Chinese youth are losing their way;
and why China's political and economic reforms are so much more
difficult than in other countries.
China has 56 ethnic groups, with totally different
histories, languages and cultures. Its geographical area is 42
times the size of the entire British Isles. Its 5,000 years of
history have nourished wealth like that of modern Europe and poverty
as severe as that of the Sahara Desert; over 1.3 billion people
are making things, trading, and loving too, in hundreds of accents
in different languages. Different people hear such different news
and stories about this only one China, including Chinese themselves
as well.
Therefore we need to bridge the gap between
the West and China, between different cultures, poor and rich,
with open eyes to today's China helping young Chinese for a future.
Please have a look at what my charity MBL is
doing for these three bridges . . .
MBL'S MISSION
IS TO
BRIDGE THREE
GAPS
1. A Bridge between China and the West
Projects:
(A) Open Eyes to Today's China
— Cooperating with Toby Eady Associates
Ltd, MBL organised more than 50 publishers, literary agents and
professors from the West to China to engage in cultural dialogues
and debates with over 500 Chinese writers, professors, and publishers
in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian and Nanjing in 2004 and 2005.
— Our goal was to create opportunities
for greater literary and educational ties between China and the
West in the future.
— MBL is working on organising another
trip in April 2006.
(B) Chinese Art Students' Exhibition
— Cooperating with China Art University,
Shanghai Art University and Sichuan Art University, MBL is locating
student artists within China eager to share their art with the
Western world and networking in the UK for venues to display their
work.
— Two successful trial exhibitions
held in May of 2005 show that this is an excellent way to showcase
artists from China, as well as allow the Western viewers immediate
access to the current pulse of China on many levels—social,
political and economic.
— Future exhibitions will ensure that
Chinese art students have the FREEDOM to finally express their
works of art in the West, especially since there are still some
press control policies in effect in China today.
(C) MBL Cultural Events
MBL organised three big events in London in
2005:
(1) A Chinese New Year Kids Event at Whiteley's
Shopping Centre, in which more than 100 families were involved.
(2) A Summer Event at Kensington Gardens,
with a performance by Chinese children and art games for kids.
(3) A Moon Festival event at Shanghai Blues
Restaurant, at which more than 250 business and media representatives
were present.
MBL also has monthly student activities such
as the Chopsticks Students' Drinks Party. This event, held in
a casual atmosphere, allows Chinese students and Westerners to
get to know each other outside of an academic setting. The Chinese
benefit by learning more about what it means to live in Britain,
while at the same time sharing their own stories of growing up
in China.
2. A Bridge between Birth Culture and Adoptive
Culture
Projects:
(A) MBL Website
— The MBL London office and Beijing
Centre are working together in order to help adoptive families
communicate with each other across 27 countries. Those involved
include Chinese families and children who want to help Westerners
learn more about Chinese cultures and traditions.
— MBL believes that through this type
of exchange, adoptive families throughout the world will have
a greater understanding of what it means to be Chinese—a
knowledge they can then in turn pass to their adopted Chinese
children.
(B) MBL Children's Journal (English)
There are three focuses of the MBL children's
journal:
(a) Language practice in Chinese and English.
(b) A guide to Chinese traditional handmade
toys.
— The journal was designed for children
adopted from China, Chinese living outside China and anyone with
an interest in China. The idea behind the journal is that it can
be a tool used to promote a greater understanding of what life
is like for children in China—their language, the simple
handmade toys favoured by generations of Chinese, and even the
folk tales Chinese children know by heart—tales of daring
deeds, love and family.
— MBL produced two issues for 2004
and 2005, each with 5,000 copies. Unfortunately, the journal has
had to be discontinued because of a lack of funds as well as because,
according to the General Administration of Press and Publication
of the People's Republic of China, foreign organisations are
not permitted to produce publications within China.
(C) MBL Columns in Chinese and English magazines
— We are planning to open magazine
columns with letters from adoptive and Chinese families, from
different countries, so that we can help Chinese children to have
conversations with different people in their early age.
3. A Bridge between Poor and Rich
Projects:
(A) Support Disabled Chinese Girls
— Every year, MBL selects disabled
girls from throughout the countryside of China. In 2005, MBL supported
Qian Hongyan and Zhang E, helping them not only with their medical
treatments and living costs, but also helping them to plan for
the future by taking courses such as English and computer studies.
(B) China Volunteers Training
— MBL will begin training volunteers
in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing in 2006. These volunteers will
be equipped with the knowledge needed to work within impoverished
communities throughout China assisting families and their children
aim for a better life.
— Following the training, volunteers
will understand what it means to live in a rural region of China—what
the residents face on a daily basis, what their basic needs of
life are, and what is involved in working with families unaccustomed
to receiving volunteer intervention from any organisation.
Xinran Eady
Mothers Bridge of Love
26 January 2006
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