Wisdom Is Staying True to Reality

The picture of garbage covering Times Square published in The New York Times has received more than one type of reaction among people in China, and opinions trend toward two different poles: Some use it to harden their own prejudices about the United States, and others see it as a good example of the complex nature of life.

On New Year’s Day, the China Daily official microblog posted four photos. The photos showed garbage covering the ground at New York’s Times Square, left over by New Year’s Eve revelers the night before. This post received 3,000 comments and was reposted 14,000 times. The People’s Daily reposted the photos and received 9,000 comments and 17,000 further reposts.

“Only Chinese people don’t pay attention to the cleanliness of public spaces.” The China Daily’s microblog posts were a wordless rebuttal to precisely this sort of criticism. In follow-up posts, the China Daily explained, “As these celebrations get larger every year, how can the safety and order of public spaces be effectively maintained in places where crowd density increases suddenly? These are problems faced by all large cities and a new challenge over which we have already paid a heavy price. National boundaries continue to gradually fade in this age of worldwide mobility, and talking about the quality of people in terms of skin color or nationality [as in the phrase “national quality of people”] is clearly foolishness.”

The “heavy price” was referring to the trampling incident that occurred in Shanghai on New Year’s Eve that led to 36 deaths. “National quality of people” is a euphemistic phrase that some commentators [in China] will trot out when discussing the annoying public behavior of citizens of lower societal position — things like littering, pushing and shoving in crowds, and cutting in line.

This certainly doesn’t represent a mainstream Chinese voice, but there is indeed a certain undercurrent of national prejudice in China that turns against us Chinese directly. These people believe that only in China does this sort of messed-up thing happen because Chinese people are too selfish, too uneducated, inclined to scheming and gullible.

There are two reasons for the appearance of this opinion: One is that people always tend to use the actions of one to condemn the group. For example, if a report comes out about a serial killer some place, people will assume that this sort of awful murderer can only be found in an evil place. Another possible reason is that some scholars use a careful examination of China’s cultural foundation to seek out elements that block China’s progress and hope that through a strict self-examination they can spur on progress.

The problem is that [Chinese] Internet users tend not to analyze or think too critically, but just accept this sort of academic conclusion. This sort of view that sees the whole for its parts is very attractive, and it fits the “fast-food style discussion” atmosphere of the Internet. Thus, very few people will patiently consider whether there is supporting evidence for this reasoning, or whether the logic behind it makes sense. The world of the Internet is black and white, with no gray space to speak of.

The topics of greatest contention between China and the United States are the same. [This contention is] common between China and the U.S. — they are often placed on opposing poles in the political show. If you support China, then you certainly oppose the United States; and the converse is true among at least some people. This sort of opinion oversimplifies complex issues, and part of the problem is that a microblog post is limited to 140 characters so that the quintessential parts of public discourse, including new information and factual details, may be omitted or overlooked.

In my opinion, there is nothing surprising about the Times Square garbage photo. Even under the best of circumstances, any place where 1 million people have recently been will have a large amount of scattered waste. That’s not to say that I didn’t take into account things such as cultural influences, education levels and social background. A group statistically representative of the U.S. population may very well litter less than a representative sample of Chinese nationals. In China, when city dwellers gather, they are more conscientious of the cleanliness of public spaces than people from the countryside. This has absolutely nothing to do with nationality, but with education levels — especially education in citizenship etiquette.

I lived in New York City for two years during the ’90s. New York is definitely not a representative American city, at least not as I see it. It attracts people from all over the country and the world, creating a mixture of many different cultures and ways of thinking. The vast majority of those attending the New Year’s Eve countdown were young people, a situation similar to the celebration on the Bund in Shanghai. In any case, I do not quickly reach an overarching conclusion based on just one incident or a few pictures. I’ve seen a few American urban areas that were even dirtier and more frightening than urban areas in China. I have also seen some American suburbs and small towns that are much cleaner and tidier than Chinese suburbs and small towns. There are reasons these differences arise, but, per my understanding, they have nothing to do with nationality or race.

I consider the extreme reactions of Chinese Internet users to the Times Square photographs as a manifestation of ignorance. Those who don’t understand the United States will very likely see this act as a symbol — a symbol of good or evil. If this is the case, they will see the act of posting these pictures of garbage as an unwillingness to face their country’s own problems — or even see it as a malicious act of slander against their ideal country. I believe those people have probably never spent a significant amount of time in the U.S. or read American newspapers, because American newspapers usually publish news and criticism of local problems and policies in prominent positions.

Of course, there are also many who take joy in another’s misfortune, saying, “They are just as uncultured as we are.” They use these pictures as evidence to justify domestic societal problems. Their attitude unintentionally models the old saying: “The one who retreats 50 paces mocks the one who retreats 100 paces.” They have forgotten that the lessons of other countries’ experience can be applied under certain conditions to similar domestic situations so that we can avoid making similar mistakes.

In addition to showing ignorance, the tendency to view a place as simply either good or bad originates from a lack of ability to observe the complexities of the real world. The world is certainly not black and white. Even a simple phenomenon such as littering will contain all sorts of variables. If all the elements of the phenomenon were examined together, the situation could be so multidimensional that even the imaginative ability of the creators of the physical theory-based movie “Interstellar” would pale by comparison. We tend to dispense with some of the finer details in our discussions in order to simplify. However, we should remember that the golden nugget of wisdom is extracted and refined from real life experience, and real life has always been chaotic and difficult to predict.

Last year, a play I wrote, “Ring Road,” premiered. This was a play I wrote in the past, based in part on my own experiences. The main characters are a Chinese couple living in Silicon Valley. The husband wants to return to China, and he lists all the things he finds intolerable about the United States, such as difficulty for Asians to advance in the workplace, the gradual loss of position of the middle class, etc. The wife, on the other hand, starts to list all the cliché complaints about China: severe pollution, the great competitive pressure on students, etc.

I invited some friends to see a rehearsal of the play, and their feedback left me a little confused and uneasy. Some told me that the play had too strong a pro-American element, and others felt the play had a strong anti-American flavor. I started to try to explain to them how I had never had any sort of hidden political motive for the play, but I gave up halfway through my explanation. Instead, I told them that I hoped they would not see it as a political fable and that it was simply reflecting a real-life journey based on my own observations and nothing more.

We are all used to seeing the world in our own ways, and we are all incapable of completely breaking free from the influence of this subjective judgment, but in order to see a place for what it is rather than how it “ought” to be, one must earnestly and diligently accumulate knowledge. Only after obtaining enough knowledge and by adhering to the principle of fair objectivity can the thread of prejudice be removed from the heart.