It seems that everyday when I hear talk about China in the U.S. it's about how to make money evident as well by university institutes created to help students and companies make money in China. Yet when I was in China I told people that I wanted to learn more about China because I felt that my country was afraid of China, or at least does not have a hard time making it the enemy when it comes to justifying trade barriers or buying weapons. Theoretically I now struggle to understand the separation of the Chinese people from the Chinese government. This matters to me because my academic work, professional work and personal work rests on trying to find ways of creating connections between people in different countries as a way of creating less opportunities for war. At a young age when I tried to sell knives and ending up losing money I concluded I was not meant to be a businessman, so I did not go to China with the intention of trying to figure out how I can sell something to 1.3 billion people. But now more than ever I cannot think of China as a large market, but rather a country of people facing many concerns that I also face. Yet now my biggest challenge is how to further engage with China. China is the first country I have visited that I decided I want to visit every 1-2 years. I think that for many in the U.S. it is easy to see China as a market for selling things to, it is much harder to understand China as a country of people because it is very difficult to understand a China that engaged in a very large and complicated social, economic and political state-building project in 1949. My feelings about this project have changed with time, yet I am now more driven than ever to understand China as a means of building bridges to address common problems and to experience common joys.
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By: Mariusz Rompicki (Guest) on 27-08-2010 23:40