From Sandton to Shanghai

(Challenges of the Rainbow Nation. Copyrighted by Zapiro. Reproduced by permission)

Life in Shanghai is frequented by taxi rides. It makes sense. Taxis are cheap, cover the city and follow a relatively standardized process. Once in, the challenge that awaits you is to tell the driver your destination in pitch perfect Mandarin or get a blank stare in response.

Having hopefully been understood, the driver will inevitably comment on your excellent Mandarin. One gets over this language praise rather quickly. The utterance of only a couple of words in Mandarin generally gets fantastic reactions from most Chinese people. It is merely a sign of courtesy and should not be believed in a hurry.

Shanghai taxi drivers and for that matter taxi drivers in China’s largest cities have a relatively impressive, if simplistic knowledge of South Africa. If your Mandarin gets you further into the conversation, there is about a 95% chance that your newly acquired Chinese friend will say: ‘Yes - South Africa is the land of diamonds, Mandela and crime.’ Dig a bit deeper and ‘gold, wealthy country and beautiful scenery’ might come out too. I once found a guy that could even tell me our last 3 country presidents.

Crime is the disturbing stereotype though. ‘South Africa is a dangerous country, people get killed all the time there,’ is the common response. What I have realized is that the large number of ethnic Chinese living in South Africa - up to 300 000 people - are one of the reasons why such detailed news makes its way back to Chinese shores. Interestingly, because Chinese people living in South Africa are often perceived to be a cash-based society, they are specifically targeted and stories of gratuitous violence travel quickly back to Shanghai taxi drivers.

As a South African living in China, crime is a fascinating concept for me. I always explain away our terrible reputation in South Africa by saying that our country had a long history of institutionalized violence, our income inequality rates are dangerously high, we were ruled by and iron fisted government during recent decades and the social fabric of traditional societies have been largely destroyed.

Then after some thoughtful thinking on these points, I realized that the past 50 years in South Africa and China’s history were actually not that different. In South Africa it was called Apartheid. In China, Chairman Mao led the country through a series of violent purges culminating in the brutal Cultural Revolution. The difference is that now, South Africa is one of the most violent nations on earth and violent crime in China is ridiculously low.

Yes, China has the death penalty and South Africa does not. Ditto that South Africa is democratic and China is still ruled by the strong arm of the Central Communist Party - who still has much bearing on the day to day lives of its populace. But it is too simplistic to suggest that if South Africa became an autocratic-ruled, death penalty-driven country overnight that crime’s pervasive footprint would necessary alter substantially.

Authority is something to be respected in China and this has roots in strong Confucian values. It is not merely people respecting the emperor or designated leader of the day but a system of organising social relationships - sovereign to subject, parent to child, husband to wife and elder to younger sibling. In Mao’s quest to create an egalitarian society, he was initially dismissive of Confucian thinking but grudgingly realized its importance in self-ordering a billion-strong nation.

It is ultimately because of this authority that China can boast its long history. Power is not destabilized unless absolutely necessary and Chinese people will sometimes blindly follow this authority against superior individual moral judgment. When power is destabilized for whatever reasons, it is usually the result of a long series of weak leadership decisions where it is clear that China’s highest leadership clearly do not have the mandate of heaven on their side any more.

And this is where the difference comes in. China’s millenniums long culture and history provide a very stable long-term base beyond the short-term events that might seem so devastating at the time. When these destabilizing influences materialize, like the kind of changes that Mao wrecked on China for over 3 decades, there is an innate Chinese understanding that normalcy will prevail in the end for the simple reason that it always has.

Whenever I try to contextualize China’s turbulent last century, I always return to a quote from Nora Waln in her China-based book called The House of Exile: “I asked what this war was. Shun-ko’s husband answered: ‘It is not a war. It is just a period. When you are adequately educated in Chinese history, you will comprehend. We have these intervals of unrest, sixty to a hundred years in length, between dynasties, throughout the 46 centuries of our history.”

Returning back from a recent trip to South Africa, the biggest thing that struck me was how much of South African outlook was governed the prevailing issues at the time. It was a scary day to day existence with a wary eye cast on the future. People had such an uncertain idea of what challenges the next month would bring let alone what 10 years into the future held.

South African’s short sightedness has resulted in an extremely emotively-fueled and impatient country. Enough good trends happening at the same time create a rosy outlook into the near future, while the simultaneous occurrence of a series of negative events habitually plunge South Africans into a spiral of doom and gloom. Because our past was built on such a recent foundation, there is no way to contextualize these smaller trends within a larger and more reassuring framework.

In all of this, I am reminded of a Xhosa saying: “Ningadinwa nangamso” - do not get tired of tomorrow. For as soon as we tire of tomorrow we have nothing of importance to live for, no individual or national purpose to strive towards. At the moment South Africans seem to be tiring of tomorrow, whether it is the mobs fueling xenophobic violence across South Africa’s townships or the white South African families on one way tickets to Perth. Chinese people on the other hand are relishing in yearly increases of household income levels and consistently sustained double digit economic growth rates.

As Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘Hope is a good breakfast but it is a bad supper.” Not only do South Africa’s leaders need to start making our dinner more attractive by serving up enticing menus for the future, but the present lukewarm breakfast is currently being served with tasteless flavours of crime, social disharmony and unimpressive leadership displays. In some cases, breakfast is not being served at all. And all of this news is filtering back to Shanghai’s world savvy taxi drivers.

(3 minutes of silence in Beichuan near the earthquake epicenter. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency)

There are lots of things I would like to write about the devastating earthquake to hit Sichuan Province.

I would love to say more about how the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was on a plane to the disaster zone within 1 hour and 22 minutes and talk about how he was bleeding from stumbling over collapsed rubble. I would like to talk more about how George Bush hightailed it in the opposite direction on Air Force One when the Twin Towers can tumbling down or how it took a week for him to fly over Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

I would like to explore the idea that natural disasters are often a prelude to seismic shifts in Chinese affairs. The massive earthquake that hit Tangshan near Beijing in 1976 was only 2 months before Mao died and the subsequent opening up of China to the rest of the world after China had withdrawn into its shell during the preceding 500 years. Or how in the first place, it was a lightning strike that razed the Emperor’s Imperial Palace to the ground and under this ominous sign that the mandate of heaven was on shaky ground, China closed doors on the world.

I could talk more about how the political pettiness of Tibet seems years away already when more than 50 000 have died and many took their last gasps beneath building rubble. How even the unstoppable Olympic Flame will be stopped in tracks for 3 days of national mourning. Or how sad it is that it needs such a huge tragedy to show the world that maybe China’s Communist Leadership is not quite the bumbling, emotionless human rights disaster that seems to always crop up in the last paragraph of most foreign articles on China like a big ‘but’ at the end of an argument.

I could say more about how the earthquake was so powerful that my wife and most of Shanghai’s financial district so many thousands of miles away had to be evacuated as the long waves from the Sichuan epicenter swayed the huge concrete forests to dizziness. Or about a fellow South African student who slept outside in the rain for days in Chengdu as 140 aftershocks of level 4 or more pummeled the buildings that remained defiant to gravity.

Standing on my balcony yesterday with all these thoughts flowing through my head, a national 3 minutes of mourning kicked off at 2:28pm to commemorate the dead and give channel for a national outpouring of unified grief. Only the silence was not silence as people had been encouraged to sound every car horn and air raid siren in the country. It reminded me how Chinese people like to set off loud firecrackers to chase the evil spirits away and bring luck to new businesses, new years and new homes.

In my case, every single barge that littered the Huangpu River was simultaneously sounding their fog horns in what was one of the loudest noises I have ever come across. The silence was truly deafening for me and a couple of Chinese people that scrambled to the river to pay their tributes.