Why I Just Can’t Become Chinese

August 31 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, China, Socialism

Isn’t it interesting. Consider the metric: Population vs % Naturalized Citizens.

And now, ask yourself “Why?”
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Try as I might, I just can’t become Chinese.

It started as a thought experiment: I wondered what it would take for me, the son of Chinese immigrants, to become a citizen of China. So I called the nearest Chinese consulate and got lost in a voice mail maze with nobody at the end. The consulate’s website explained the process for getting visas but not for naturalization.

Then I realized why it was so difficult to get an answer: Beijing doesn’t ever expect to hear from foreigners who want to become Chinese citizens.

As it turns out, a naturalization procedure is found under China’s Nationality Law. But precious few people pursue it: The 2000 Chinese census counted just 941 naturalized citizens.

But let’s say that I decided to become fluent in Mandarin, brush up my knowledge of Chinese history and culture, move to China and live the rest of my life there. Even then, even with thousands of generations of Chinese genes behind me, I would still not be accepted as truly Chinese.

All this crystallized for me why, in this supposed age of a rising China and a declining U.S., we Americans should worry a bit less. No matter how huge China’s GDP gets, the U.S. retains a deep, enduring competitive advantage: America makes Chinese Americans. China doesn’t make American Chinese.

China also isn’t particularly interested in making American Chinese. It isn’t in China’s operating system to welcome, integrate and empower immigrants to redefine the very meaning of Chinese-ness. That means that China lags behind the U.S. in a crucial 21st-century way: embracing diversity and making something great from many multicultural parts.

Consider, for instance, the way that a Chinese state media organ earlier this year mocked the departing U.S. ambassador, Gary Locke, as a “banana”: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. What did Mr. Locke—the first Chinese American ambassador to Beijing, Eagle Scout, former governor and cabinet secretary—do to earn such an epithet? Merely his job: representing U.S. interests and values even when they conflicted with China’s.

The episode suggested that some ruling elites in China were unwilling or unable to distinguish between someone Chinese and someone Chinese American. The premise of the “banana” diatribe was that an ethnic Chinese—even one born and raised in the U.S.—must be essentially loyal to the Chinese motherland. That assumption could be called romantic or racial. It can’t be called modern.

Meanwhile, just a few weeks after Mr. Locke returned home, ABC greenlit a new sitcom called “Fresh Off the Boat,” based on the memoir of iconoclastic restaurateur Eddie Huang. Many Chinese Americans beamed: It was the first time any major network had focused on a family of Chinese or Taiwanese ancestry and the first time since Margaret Cho’s 1994 sitcom “All-American Girl” that Asian-Americans had anchored a prime-time show.

Even more satisfying is the three-dimensional life behind the sitcom. Growing up in an immigrant household, Mr. Huang was a rebel, a hip-hop aficionado and an indifferent student who defied labels like “banana” (if only because he thought himself more black than white). He briefly succumbed to his parents’ expectations and became a lawyer—then quit and opened a Lower East Side street-food joint rooted in the Taiwanese home cooking of his childhood.

The point of American life is to take Eddie Huangs and let them fuse the styles of rappers and foodies and hipsters and more—and thereby redefine “American.” This is the great U.S. advantage. But there is nothing automatically self-renewing about our inclusive civic ecosystem. It must be cultivated continuously.

People like me can offer what I call the Chinese American way—tempering raw individualism with a sense of community; adding a corrective dose of duty and propriety to a society rooted in rights and self-expression; paying heed to context and history, not just what’s shiniest here and now.

This fusion is perhaps best embodied by the second generation, children of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants who grow up at the intersection of cultures. Consider Ai-jen Poo, the New York-based founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She advocates fearlessly for a workforce of poor women of color. How American. But she does so using the language of love, intergenerational care and family responsibility. How Chinese.

Or take Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of Zappos.com, who moved his company to dilapidated downtown Las Vegas and put $300 million of his own fortune into revitalizing it. His goal is to foster community in perhaps the country’s most atomistic place—audaciously American, profoundly Chinese.

Let China make it hard for outsiders to become Chinese. The great competition today isn’t really between China and the U.S. It’s between the static illusion of purity and the propulsive reality of hybridity. If we choose well, my country will still prevail.

—Mr. Liu is the founder and CEO of Citizen University and the author, most recently, of “A Chinaman’s Chance.”

Why I Just Can’t Become Chinese – WSJ.

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