Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [154]
It is worth emphasizing just how dramatically the face of China has changed in the last quarter century. Even after formally “opening up” to the world in 1978, Chinese leaders remained deeply suspicious of the West. Foreigners arrived in a tiny trickle and were viewed as oddities, even in the major cities. According to corporate expats who arrived in Shanghai in the early 1990s, they felt “very James Bond-ish” in a land where few spoke English, “money was flowing really, really stupidly,” and “anything seemed possible.”13
Around 1995, China began much more aggressively accepting and even recruiting foreigners, explicitly trying to harness the skills and technological know-how of Japanese, French, and Dutch managers, German archaeologists, Lebanese industrialists, Swiss architects, General Electric, Motorola, and the Getty Foundation, to name just a few. Today, China is more cosmopolitan than it has been since the Tang dynasty. Shanghai and Beijing have long ceased to be “hardship posts” for Western expats, who now live in tony Westernized complexes called “Soho” and “Chelsea” and drink lattes at Starbucks and mojitos (or Chivas and green tea) at trendy bars alongside wealthy young Chinese professionals. For better or worse, hummus, bagels, fresh mozzarella, and any number of foreign consumer products are now readily available in Beijing. In addition to the traditional McDonald's and KFC in China, one doesn't have to go far in Shanghai before stumbling on a Taco Bell, a Subway, or even a Mr. Softee truck.14
Nevertheless, the reality remains that foreign expats are…foreign expats. American Google software engineers and Boeing scientists living in China are not Chinese citizens. Neither are the Japanese technicians who work at Mitsubishi China or the German executives who work at Siemens China.
Could they be, if they wanted to?
This brings us to the fascinating puzzle of contemporary Chinese identity. In researching this book over the last five years, I posed different versions of just this question to numerous people from the People's Republic.
“Could an ethnic Malay or Filipino ever be Han Chinese?” The answer was always a resounding no.
“Could a member of one of China's fifty-fi ve ethnic minorities ever become Han Chinese?” When I was visiting Sichuan a few years ago, I asked this of a young man from the minority Yi community. To my surprise, he replied, “Oh yes. My parents are both Yi. But unlike them I don't speak the Yi language, so I'm not really Yi anymore. Also, I married a Han Chinese woman. So I am really Han Chinese now, and certainly my son is Han.” To my further surprise, I found that his attitude was confirmed by many others, both Han and non-Han.
Finally, I framed the question in terms of citizenship. “Could a Westerner who speaks fluent Chinese, loves Chinese culture, and wants to move permanently to the PRC ever become a Chinese citizen?” I asked this of numerous Chinese officials, Chinese lawyers, and Chinese visiting legal scholars. In a country like the United States, this kind of question would have an easily ascertainable answer. But the Chinese I asked all hemmed and hawed, looking baffled. Many pointed out that most foreigners do not want Chinese citizenship (which is probably true). In the end, no one was able to answer the question squarely, although more than one person said, “A foreigner? I don't think so.”*
These uncertainties and confusions reflect a millennia-old struggle over the meaning of Chinese identity—a struggle that if anything grew more intense in the twentieth century. During the tumultuous period leading up to the 1911 revolution that overthrew three thousand years of imperial dynastic rule, Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionary leaders championed an explicitly ethnic— indeed racial