Author: globalpossibility7

Initially I thought to post the address of the person inviting students in Chinese on WeChat to use their service for writing essays and reports in other students’ names. I was more than a little disgusted by the fact that it is happening, although one of my previous students told me it was common knowledge amongst overseas students in general.

But doing so would only feed the story that too many already have of Chinese people in general: that they are not to be trusted, or that they will cheat and steal their way to success at all costs.

This is clearly true of some Chinese people. It is also true however, of some Australians, some Americans, some Europeans from any country you might choose to name and so on, including some people from every place on Earth where humans live. It is quite easy to find stories about these kinds of people.

From my personal experience, the Chinese students I have met are incredibly hard-working and impeccably honest people.

I’d like to see cheating and lying disappear wherever it is happening. History and human nature suggest that may never happen. In the meantime, we have the choice as to what we choose to enliven with our attention.

Whilst I don’t care to hide from the shadow reality (the fact that a minority of humans will always choose to live in the dark), this blog is about what is more valuable to us all. It’s also, from my experience, about the majority of humans, not just some of us.

Most who are now experiencing the influx of Chinese people into their lives don’t have access to real stories about the Chinese who are amongst them.

It’s one aspect of the latest wave of migration that I hope to explore and portray through this blog.

These stories will be coming soon. In the meantime, I am using my experiences from various parts of China as an introduction to the Chinese world from a personal perspective.

Take a look at the page entitled Journeys through The Middle Kingdom and The Land of Oz

above all human is a conference about the future of humanity, of
technology, and the intersection between the two.
— Read on www.aboveallhuman.co/

My posts, particularly my first post below (“a musing”) seem to be a pretty good segue to this upcoming conference in Melbourne.

It’s a one day event in the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, August 29th.

If I were in Oz, I’d definitely be going.

It never ceases to amaze me how synchronicity is interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives. This conference and the views which drive this website are part of the same wave, even though there was no direct, conscious connection between us.

Synchronicity:  I love it.

Stories.

We all have them.

What makes a good one?

There are lots of answers to that question, but one thing for sure is that if a story is never told, we will never know.

We can learn so much from listening to the stories of others.

Stories have always been able to not only inform, but to teach even if not intended to do so. We may never know who may learn something valuable or what they may benefit from in hearing what we ourselves might think of as an insignificant story.

It’s human nature to generalise. When faced with myriad, complicated information it is necessary for our minds to categorise things which share similarities, shrinking the volume of data into manageable chunks.

Our generalisations help us to make sense of the increasingly complex world we inhabit. Unfortunately, although generalisations invariably originate in some kind of truth, the problem is that our mental categories can never be completely accurate. What we gain by virtue of lumping many similar things together, we lose in the details of important differences. This is precisely where the value of stories comes into play.

The great value of our personal story lies both in its uniqueness and in how we and others are able to see ourselves through it. Although we obviously share fundamentals with many, perhaps greatest of all being our humanity, it is our particular path through life which defines our differences. We use these differences to measure and evaluate our shared experiences, our shared existence as humans on planet Earth.

Our stories give people the opportunity to make these measurements, to identify themselves in what we do and do not share, to understand more fully not only ‘the other’, but fundamentally to better understand what it means to be human, on Earth, at this time in human history. Who and what we are collectively, is morphing into something we have no historical record of so far. We need more than ever, to learn about being a new kind of ‘us’.

If we don’t understand differences how can we realistically evaluate situations involving those people who seem so different? Important decisions are being made every day, many based on ignorance. Decisions are made on our behalf by people who, given their political and economic power, determine our futures. We owe it to ourselves and to our future, to make informed decisions and mitigate the lack of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

In a world of growing division, considering others from the perspective of ‘us’ is invaluable. It is too easy to use nationalism, religion, culture, language, to divide us into groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, the undisputable fact is that we are all humans on one planet at one moment in time. At the same time we are being thrust into each others’ orbit with increasing velocity. The momentum of these changes is monumental, the pressures placed on us collectively are unprecedented. The potential for dischord, distress, conflict and loss is incessantly on the increase, but so is the possibility of better outcomes.

In light of these reflections, Open Secret, this blog and its podcasts seeks to facilitate the possibility of better outcomes by showing us just how much we have in common and offering the possibility of gaining a better perspective of our differences. It may even encourage us to share with, rather than retreat from and isolate ourselves and others.

Most urban Australians encounter people who don’t share the same cultural, historical backgrounds. Our daily lives have long included others who have made their ways into ‘our world’ via as many different paths as there are people. Although modern Australia is a diverse multi-cultural nation, built by the ‘invasion’ of foreigners, as indigenous Australians know too well, the increasing presence and impact of people who were not born in this land is inescapable. Overseas students are arguably the biggest number of these foreigners nowadays and of these, by far the greatest cohort comes from China.

Open Secret has emerged out of my own experience of living and working in China. This journey began for me more than 30 years ago with a university degree in Chinese Studies. Since then I have visited China numerous times, travelled to many parts of that amazing land and lived there for a total of over 10 years so far. So initially at least, one part of Open Secret will include stories, both from Chinese students living and studying in Australia, and of Australians and other westerners who are living, or have lived in China. My own story is only one of these and I offer it as part of this website to stimulate others to share their own stories. As we will see, the issues raised through the experiences of people who are actually engaged across cultures is a perfect introduction to the issues alluded to in the paragraphs above. This is in no small way because of the fact that the Australia of the future is increasingly, inextricably linked with the growth of China.

What better place to understand this growth and the possibilities it raises for our futures, than through the stories of its youth and reflections of China and Australia through the prism of these experiences.

In 1986 a small series of significant coincidences led me to study Chinese at university.

I was fortunate to meet a man who at the time was Chair of the newly formed Asian Studies Program at Murdoch University. A Hong Kong Chinese by birth, he completed his PhD in Sydney and ended up in Western Australia in time to coincide with my own journey there. This coincidence was not lost on me because, a mere four months after meeting him and deciding with a sense of excitement and anticipation to study under his scholarship, he passed away. Our meeting had been just enough for me to turn a corner in my life from which I have never returned.

The shock of the professor’s untimely death was enough to make me reconsider my decision during first semester: should I continue to pursue my relationship with China or choose other options for study? After an introduction to Chinese language however, I decided to go ahead and follow his lead. I was inspired by a sense of participating in building a bridge of understanding between East and West, a bridge which would be increasingly imporant over the span of my life to everyone. I graduated in 1990 with a degree majoring in Chinese Studies, worked in the newly funded Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University and went on to complete my Graduate Diploma in Education, majoring in second language teaching.

That journey, begun in Perth many years ago, continues to enrich my life and urge me forward with an ever growing sense of anticipation. China has always amazed me, in ways both good and bad, but the magnitude of its development has at the same time, continually confirmed the vision of how significant this is to what was coming. This prescience is no longer as private as it used to be, now that people in the world outside China are finally starting to see it for themselves.

When I began studying Chinese one of the challenges was finding native speakers with whom to practice my infantile language skills. There were so few Mainland Chinese on Australian streets that it was literally impossible to find language buddies. This problem was solved for me when my education qualifications earned me a scholarship to study the language in China. My scholarship was conditional on me returning to Australia and teaching Chinese at school.

After about 10 years of trying to inspire young Australians I gave up. The certainty of China’s importance to our 21st century world proved impossible to share in a country where the only certainty was the magnificent land we occupied and our treasured lifestyle in Australia.

This land, physically removed from the rest of the world is home to a comparatively pristine physical environment. Australians as a result, have a comfortable relationship with nature and a respect for the freedom borne of the privilege of growing up in a land of clean air, frequently beautifully clear blue skies, oceans clean and abundant and wide open spaces.

We have enjoyed a standard of living which is still the envy of those who don’t have it. As a result, the name many Australians have come to use for their homeland seems entirely apt: many of us affectionately call it Oz. The Land of Oz, a comparatively, almost unbelievably wonderful place removed from the populations and resultant problems found in so many other lands. Why would young Australians want or need to learn what they and their parents, as well as most educators and politicians across the nation, all believe to be an incredibly difficult language?

The Chinese language continues to remain beyond the reach of most Australians. The  mutual understanding I imagined when I began my journey was based on Australians learning Chinese and reaching out across the cultural divide to touch and be touched by the growing Chinese world. I had always believed that if I could do it, surely others could and would too. I remain convinced that it is NOT such a difficult language to learn. Becoming proficient in ANY second language requires effort over time. The benefits however, exceed the investment. Chinese language is in fact elegant in its simplicity, amazing in what it reveals about China and the Chinese, and invaluably useful for anyone who wishes to swim with the tide this century.

The fact is that the ones skilled enough to cross this cultural divide are not Australians at all. They are the young Chinese who now fill our city streets and whose ability to use English, although it varies greatly, is exponentially greater than almost every Australian’s  ability to do the same with Chinese. These students continue to arrive in droves whilst at the same time, the number of Australians studying Chinese to anywhere near the same level of proficiency that these Chinese students already have in English, is as miniscule as it was 30 years ago.

I no longer lament this fact. It is simply an immovable object in the face of the Chinese tsunami: bedrock of the Australian condition over which the wave of Modern China is sweeping as my professor knew it would, way back in 1986. He wasn’t alone, but even those who shared his vision have not been able to alter this cultural bedrock in The Land of Oz: “She’ll be right, maaaaate. They’re all learning English anyway.”

The way forward, from my perspective, the reason I am writing this and creating what I hope to be a forum for the gestation of mutual understanding, is for both sides of the cultural divide to see into Modern China and Australia. One way to do this is through the eyes of young Chinese living here, in Oz, or elsewhere in the world. I imagine this website can also be a place for those from Australia and elsewhere, who have experienced living in China, to feed into an ongoing discussion.

It’s an open secret that the Chinese have arrived both on the world stage and in our city streets. What this means however, depends to a great extent on the stories of China and Chinese people, to which we have been exposed. Likewise for Chinese people, the stories they encounter from The Land of Oz are all they have to inform them of the realities of Austalia and Australians. Telling and listening to stories takes time. If a wider range of stories is not easy to access our views of the rapidly changing world are limited. In a world of unprecedented, pressurised cultural interaction, this limitation is increasingly significant.

A well-known Nigerian writer addressed the notion of the dangers of a single story in a TED Talk. Chimananda Adichie discussed the idea of stereotyping and the danger of only knowing what she called “a single story”. She was referring to the fact that people make decisions and pass judgements on people they don’t know based on the little they do know. “The danger of the single story” she says, “is not that it is not true, but that it is incomplete.”

How complete is our story of China? What do we really know about Chinese people?

What do Chinese people really understand about Australia? About Australian people?

One of the first things anybody who studies China begins to comprehend, is just how huge and diverse it is. It is larger than Australia by some 2 million square kilometres, with a population well over 50 times Australia’s. It’s landscapes range from steamy tropical land in its south to the highest plateau on Earth (about the size of South Australia) in its west, to the edges of Siberia and the desert mountains of Central Asia in its north and north west. It’s history and the evolution of the peoples included in The People’s Republic of China are as various as the whole of Europe from the Mediterranean to Scandanavia.

We still know too little about China and Chinese people and the same is true for them of westerners in general and particularly how western countries are differentiated. This lack of real understanding, through face to face relationship outside of commerce or politics, is more important now than it was when I began studying China.

We are all fed such misinformation, such limited fragments of the realities which comprise modern China that it is almost impossible to have well informed opinions: it is far too easy and commonplace to rely on stereotypes. This stereotyping in turn makes it more difficult for young Chinese in Australia to really connect with Australians.

The numbers of university students from China who now occupy our major cities, Melbourne and Sydney in particular, make it easy for them to retreat into their own language and cultural groups. Many of my own students from China who are now studying in Australia, have said that they find local students unwilling to connect. I believe if this is true across the huge numbers of overseas students, it may have tragic consequences. This feeling is reinforced in almost everything I see in the media about China and the Chinese in Australia.

What the media fails to portray is the real and significant divide between governments and people. This should be blatantly obvious to anyone living in a Western democracy. It is also true of China, although the differences between government and people are not all exactly the same as in Western democracies. The point is, we cannot know a country’s people through that country’s government. For example, I have met many Americans and consider some of them true friends. If I had never been there and seen the diversity of what makes modern America for myself it would be too easy for me to believe that a country which could choose Donald Trump for its President must be truly full of people I wouldn’t want to meet.

Our reliance on media representation of China is not good enough. Chinese in Australia likewise, retreating into their own cultural linguistic bubble is not helping bridge the gaps between us all. In fact, it reinforces the limited beliefs some Australians have about Chinese people. We need more realistic insights and balanced discussion of the realities of what is happening both in China and with Chinese people outside of their homeland. They too, need the opportunity to really connect with Australia and Australians.

In some small way this website is offered to help bridge the gap.

It is an evolving open door. Passing through it, in either direction, could lead to a better understanding and at the least, should help us avoid what Adichie called “the danger of a single story”.

I believe we may find that a deeper respect for our shared humanity emerges from real understanding. What we share is much more important than that which we don’t. Limited stories feed limited understanding. Stereotyping adds nothing of value to what we need, more than ever at this time.

Our lives on Earth should be an open secret, because it is we who are already living it. Communication is the key to solving problems: fear and ignorance divide whilst deeper understanding provides the possibility for something much greater.