Given that I am ethnic Chinese, born in Taiwan and living in SA, I’ve had to learn to live with my “Chineseness”. Like most kids of immigrants I had to play translator for my parents growing up in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal. I worked as a Mandarin-speaking tour guide in Cape Town, and went on to write my doctoral thesis on the Chinese UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia.
I have made a career explaining and teaching China to South Africans. Sometimes people pigeonhole me as an apologist for China. Then when I reveal my family are from Taiwan and I’m certainly against military action across the Taiwan Strait, people get confused.
A mistake many South Africans make when they try to understand China is to see things in a presentist way. They experience China through what has been reported in English language newspapers. Like most of the world South Africans are presented with a clichéd narrative.
As Prof Jing Tsu of Yale University phrases it: “Big China, bad China, crazy China.” We only see China as an economic giant that is either all good or all bad. We do not see it as a civilisation going through ups and downs.
SA government officials inevitably tell me how in awe they are when they visit the metropoles of Beijing and Shanghai. How they are whisked from one gigantic factory to the next, treated as honoured guests and shown the monumental achievements China has made in the past three decades.
Many such China “experts” preface themselves by saying they know only a few words of Mandarin, but they really do understand China. They then go on to recite verbatim Chinese propaganda — the country is really just a big peace-loving panda wanting nothing but to be loved by the world, but has been forced to defend itself from the cruel hands of Western imperialism.
On the other hand, I am sometimes challenged by readers asking how I can possibly defend such an evil regime. A China that has teamed up with Russia to batter Ukraine, is pillaging Africa to steal its natural resources, and has a blood lust for Taiwan. All of this directed by chain-smoking Chinese Communist Party leaders, presumably from inside their volcano lair in Beijing.
The fact is most people in the Chinese diaspora in Africa are driven by a desire to make a living and build a future for their families. They want as little as possible to do with the Chinese officials who don’t really know what is going on in Africa and can’t help much anyway.
The Taiwanese are quite impervious to threats of invasion that will be over in a matter of days, after which the Taiwanese will embrace their new masters. After all, this has been going on for 70 years now.
The balance of expert opinion is that it will be 2030 at the earliest before the Chinese military and navy will be strong enough to carry out an amphibious operation across the Taiwan Strait against a combined Western and Asian alliance led by the US, with any reasonable chance of success.
And with the US and her allies, notably Japan but also Australia and the Philippines, now embarking on an arms race against China, and with the US making concerted efforts to delay exports of technology to China, this date is almost certain to be pushed back. I certainly hope so.
The clichés concerning China may have an element of truth, but they are far from the whole truth. China is not a peace-loving giant — ask the Vietnamese how many wars they’ve fought with the Chinese over the past 2,000 years. Nor is China evil, out to colonise the world.
Speak to me and any of the Chinese diaspora in SA and we will be happy to give you more nuanced views.
• Dr Kuo, a former lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University in China, is adjunct senior lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business.
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