The changing image of the Chinese was a subject of the recent American television documentary, The Pacific Century. The program noted that what opened the door for the arrival of missionaries en masse in China was actually the drug trade forced on the country when the British launched and won the Opium War. As the West prevailed and the Chinese succumbed to the drug, the long-lived stereotype of the opium fiend was born.
After the Opium War, large numbers of Chinese laborers migrated to America to work in perilous jobs such as mining and railroad construction. When laws were passed in 1882 to keep Chinese workers out of the country, they became easy targets for attack and their image reached rock bottom with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. This was the case until Pearl Buck revealed the Promethean Chinese peasant battling against nature in her best-selling novel The Good Earth. Such was the respect felt by Hollywood bosses for the Chinese that they went so far as to use a white actor in the leading Chinese role for the film version.
Hollywood's shaping of the Chinese image did not stop at the movies. When the Americans joined the war against Japan in 1941, Hollywood newsreels moved public opinion. The Japanese were the enemy, and the once ridiculed Chinese became lovers of peace who had never started a war in 4,000 years of history.
Today the volume and speed of the dissemination of information has surpassed imagination.Yet understanding the world through the media is rather like viewing flowers in a fog. Following the earth-shaking events that began in 1989, it seems we have had to substitute a telescope with a microscope to observe 1992.
With the end of the Cold War still ringing in our ears, we have seen racial hatred rise in Germany, tensions over economic reforms in Russia, war in Yugoslavia and the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Lowering our eyes back down to earth from the vision of the superpowers talking peace and the parting of the bamboo curtain, bloody scenes from Burma to the Balkans led Newsweek to call 1992 "The Year of Fratricide."
As for Europe's year of unity, the widespread suspicions long felt by the continent's people were only revealed on television screens when the citizens of Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty and the French followed with their "petit oui."
The shock of the April riots in Los Angeles damaged the image of the American dream cultivated by Hollywood and visions were also blurred concerning Christopher Columbus, America's first pioneer. Conflicting research and claims from all over the world became the focus of media attention: Was it an Italian or a Chinese who discovered the New World? Was Columbus hero or invader?
No matter whether looking at the world from Taipei, or at China from the world, the barriers of culture and history tend to combine with the limitations of the lens to make for sweeping comments and discrepancies between what happened and what is remembered. In fact, even within one's own culture it is often hard to find the right lens to make adjustments for focal length.
Take the "cross-strait families" that have appeared in Taiwan, HongKong and mainland China (p.98), split up by the demands of their professions. People might well ask: Are not the Chinese the people who put most value on the family? But when you take a longer focus on the wife of the tea merchant who is concerned more with profit than with staying close to his spouse, is her kind of regret and longing not the subject of many a case from the classics? And has not the noble who longs for his concubines when his own camp is occupied by the enemy always been portrayed as the loser of his own country?
With the case of the recent accusations laid against the Chinese over their alleged use of rhinoceros horns in medicine (p.5), those who are deeply pained by the Chinese people "eating to extinction" demonstrated their bitterness by citing bear paws, monkey brains and giant salamanders. It is not hard to find counter examples of Chinese culture cherishing life and animals. Yet, with the rhinoceros nearing extinction, people feel the need to decide whether the Chinese are really the guys in the black or the white hats after all.
In 1987, Deng Xiaoping graced the cover of Time as Man of the Year. Two years later viewers the world over were outraged by the Tienanmen Massacre on their screens and Deng Xiaoping's image plunged. By 1992, following his southern tour, the "retired" Deng was able to threaten HongKong over its proposals for democracy at the same time as he became the Financial Times' man of the year for creating 12 percent economic growth.
Still, look at how we have moved from "Columbus the hero who discovered the New World," to the simple "Columbus reached America in 1992." Has it really taken people 500 years to unravel that myth and accept the truth?