Somebody recently told me that in early 2023, legislations were proposed and passed in several states of USA to exclude Chinese people from buying properties.

It’s a holy shit, deja vu moment. Sure sure you can read the news and tell me that it targets Chinese nationals working on behalf of the people’s republic of China. Whatever! That’s just not what a Chinese person (or any other American) hears when they hear “exclude Chinese from buying property” everyone knows exactly what it means: being Chinese is undesirable and we must rid of them.

But I do wonder, like, what is so great about my Chinese-hood? Why can I not dissociate myself from the “Chinese” in the legislations and news that report them? Why Chinese ? Why do Chinese culture and people need to exist at all? Why is desirable in any way shape or form?

The majority of people who identify with the Chinese are raised and grown in the PRC. For better or for worse, they do have significant indoctrination about why everything from its historic culture to modern governance are all just the best of the best of the best ever ever and for ever and ever and ever. This type of indoctrination is neither irrational nor unfair in any sense of those words. Most Americans, myself included, will quickly belittle that pride in that culture citing irrational fiction indoctrination. This disparaging proclivity is not necessarily supported by facts or events that we personally experienced. (Meaning it is at least in part caused by irrational fiction indoctrination of our own)

So, in all honesty, why do I not want China and Chinese to have negative meaning? Why do I think it deserves to have a better meaning to every single person who speaks or thinks these words? Why do I care about what hidden neurons these tokens activate in the human neural network? Why should China and Chinese mean anything but what we think and feel they mean right now?

This is an open question to the whole world.

I will jot down some first impressions as I settle my mind into this question:

• Functional
  • Alive—it is a surviving culture.
  • Communication—The Chinese language runs a very big country and feeds many mouths.
  • Productive—The country have always produced much in many good ways.
  • Adaptive—Can you imagine the constitution of Communist PRC having clause guaranteeing religious freedom of its citizens as a human right?? Check that out!! Chinese people and culture can seem rigid and inept, but some times they are surprisingly accepting of foreign ideas. I mean com’n does anybody remember the adoption of national population control from foreign “scientists”?
  • Optimizing
  • Efficient—Check out Ancient Chinese language, it is “highly compressed“ in terms of number of characters used to communicate. For god’s sake, they don’t even type space, you have to infer word boundaries while you read Chinese!! The “Strong concepts” section below is a single character per bullet point when mentioned in historical texts.
• Complex—the complexity and diversity of the culture hints at its beauty and value that has yet to manifest. This may seem silly, but I believe reverence for complexity is something that we generally accept as humans.
• Strong innate concepts of
  • Honesty—the words have immediate association with the concept of honesty to Chinese people. Honesty is a strong and innate concept to the culture
  • Piety—here one mostly think of Gilliam piety, but certainly there are, and have been, a lot of Chinese who are pious to other subjects.
  • Loyalty
  • Compassion
  • Charity
  • Social Order—Although Chinese scholars debate what’s right, the need for structured social order pervades Chinese history.
  • Career—Although this is traditionally asked of men, the idea having a life-long career is a must is very Chinese.
  • Aspiration—the idea that people should have grand aspiration or to be devoted to a cause. Possibly more than life-long endeavor.
  • Hardship—huge thing for Chinese, lots of stuff about how to deal with hardship of all kinds.
  • Striving—We believe in hard work. What ever that means to Chinese people.
  • Teacher—has a very special place in the heart of Chinese people.
  • Duality—most often Yin and Yang, but other dualities too.
  • Collective good—Chinese people and culture have this concept and frequently discourse regarding it.
  • Love—modern Chinese focus on parental love and patriotic love. But from the amount of historical text addressing the subject in a negative way, and the population, we can gather that Chinese people and culture experiences and value a lot of love of many kind.

What else?