Free A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu Page A

Indeed, in Taiwan, where the Nationalist government fled in 1949, simplified Chinese is not in use. But there is no denying that because of simplification, many millions of people over several generations have learned to read. And it is their ability to read that gives added force now to their burgeoning sense of Chineseness.
    As it is with Chinese characters, so it is with Chinese character . There is a complex original. It is sprawling and unwieldy. Then comes a simplified version, easier to retain and transmit. But is something lost in the simplification? What is the essence of Chineseness? And does a more abstract, less detailed representation of that essence truly do it justice?
    National character is both real and imagined. It is real because it is imagined and imagined because real.
    The popular, simplified conception of Chinese national character ( guomingxing ) begins with the fact that China has long called itself Zhong Guo, “center nation” or, in the better-known translation, the Middle Kingdom. A presumption of greatness. Other popular notions of Chinese character hold that the Chinese are tradition-minded, thanks to Confucius and his heirs, and noninterventionist, thanks to Taoism; they cherish order because of China’s long history of warlordism, chaos, and foreign rapacity; they take a long and cyclical view of life because Chinese history affords one of the longest views available of recorded human experience. They are resilient and have weathered the worst that heaven and earth can deal out.
    But there are other things that people, including Chinese people, sometimes say are part of Chinese national character. For one: a suffocating conformity that leaves only a vestige of individualism, as warped and rotted as the crushed bones of bound feet. Moreover: unthinking obedience to central authority, rationalized by a pragmatic unwillingness to stick one’s neck out. Sublimated pain and anxiety that come out in periodic paroxysms of mass insanity. And then something subtler, what the 1920s reformist author Lu Xun called an “Ah-Q” mentality in his famous short story. Ah-Q, a tragicomic everyman, kisses up to his social superiors but heaps scorn down on his peers and lessers. He fails in his day-to-day dealings with people but deludes himself into believing that each setback is actually an advance. He is boastful, small-minded, nitpicky, legalistic, oblivious to the reality of the world around him until a series of events carries him like a cork on a current to his execution.
    Which of these notions of Chinese character is true? National character is a chimera, a quantum reality neither here nor there yet both at once. When the current president of China, Xi Jinping, ascended to power, he began to deliver speeches championing what he dubbed “the Chinese Dream.” This Chinese Dream is, in the first place, a reaction. It is an answer to the fact that America has the American Dream and that an American columnist, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times , wrote, “China needs its own dream.” Soon the state marketing machine was selling one. The Chinese Dream is deliberately vague, a blend of official slogan and unofficial buzzword, but in its broad strokes it seeks to do rhetorically what simplified Chinese characters do lexically: remove complexities, create unity. The Chinese Dream, according to the keepers of Communist Party doctrine, consists of four clean parts: Strong China, Civilized China, Harmonious China, Beautiful China.
    Some reformers in China hope that “Beautiful” means a greater emphasis on environmental sustainability or that “Civilized” means more individual liberty. Others interpret “Harmonious” to mean greater equity in the spread of prosperity. Much hope—many a dream—is invested in the meaning of these words. No one is quite sure if these beams of doctrine can actually bear this much weight, but then, it doesn’t