PS, I`m not in Beijing watching the Olympics... I`ve been in Beijing studying Chinese.
Anyway, as I was going to say, you really need to study Chinese history and visit China to understand the Chinese attitude toward the world. China has been around for thousands of years, and it went for hundreds of those years at a time with literally no mentions of it coming up in any Western textbook. China is isolationist by nature. When the West began encroaching in the 1800s and early 1900s, the Emperor actually received tribute from Western diplomats, the same as he had from Korea and other neighbors for centuries. He saw it as a token of recognition that Chinese culture was supreme- we were the ones who saw it as a bribe. Zhong Guo, the Chinese name for China, literally means "Middle Country"- maybe the Communists once had different aims, but CHINA as an entity, and its people, have never been much interested in anything past their own (ginormous) country. |
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