Blackburn’s Twitter attack on China is inaccurate
Country’s history is long and complicated. Marsha Blackburn’s tweet is short and simplistic.
There are many reasons why U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s recent tweet attacking China as having “a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing” is wrong, not the least because it’s not true.
Well, that’s unless Blackburn could explain what China did in 3000 B.C. that offended her so much until today.
A nuanced history
China as an imperial state did not officially exist until 221 B.C. Before that, there were thousands of years of history of Chinese people and culture, such as Confucius, born in 551 B.C., and your favorite Chinese food, but not a unified state.
So history 101 would tell Blackburn to say China has 2,000 years of history of stealing and cheating, instead of 5,000, which is not quite true, either. It is because there was not much for China to steal from when Rome, England, Russia or the U.S. did not exist.
Jumping forward another 1,800 years, when Blackburn’s home state, Mississippi, gained statehood in 1817, China accounted for more than 30% of world gross domestic product and was the world’s largest economy. The U.S. now accounts for 24% of GDP. Basic logic would reduce China’s “stealing” to at least after 1817.
America’s humanity helped China
The rest of 200 years of China history is probably more complicated than the broadest brush can paint. In a large sense, more is given by America than stolen by China. Americans helped to build the first modern university, Tsinghua, and the first modern Chinese hospital, Hunan-yale. During World War I and World War II, Americans and Chinese fought side by side.
At the same time, there are undoubtedly a great number of thieves and cheaters among the 1.5 billion Chinese population worldwide. Unlike Blackburn, probability and math are undiscriminating in race or nation.
Now Blackburn’s ground has shrunk from 5,000 years to the most recent several dozens of years. I anticipate she would still claim victory for only 1.5% of her statement is possibly but unlikely to be true. She is learning from the best, the one who mocks the “kinder and gentler” generation of conservatives, George H.W. Bush, who rode bicycles with his only wife in the alleyways of Beijing and called Chinese people his love and friend.
I suspect many Americans, living or dead, will be more insulted by Blackburn’s “stealing” comment than Chinese Americans, the so-called silent model minority, because it suggests they gave less than willingly and selflessly. I know such people.
Pearl Buck, writing about China based on her life experience, “pave(d) the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals,” the Nobel committee said in 1938. If reading is a hassle for Blackburn, locally we have Scott and Beth from Brentwood, missionary kids who met in China, speak Chinese and love China in spite of intimately knowing its flaws.
George and Ophelia from Nashville, without speaking a word of Chinese, always open their house and host Chinese law students for Thanksgiving so they don’t feel lonely on the holiday. An iconic Tennessee family never stops trusting, loving and supporting Chinese people even after being frustrated by some, not all, Chinese government agencies again and again.
Heed the softer voices
I also know dozens if not hundreds of Tennesseans that marry Chinese spouses or adopt Chinese children, which might be the only guilty verdict for stealing; they do steal your heart if it is warm and soft.
So Marsha, when you are not too busy courting the ignorant and the angry, you should get to know the loving and kind voices, too, whose votes also count.