Why is China so Strange to Americans?

By Rachel Burger|Opinion|7 Comments

Selling children to play online games. Apple store knockoffs. Form-fitting black rubber wetsuits. These are the articles that continuously haunt my newsfeed on China, and I’m sick of them.

It seems as though America has a tabloid interest in Chinese culture. We consistently crave to hear about strange behavior from Chinese citizens or government officials, thus the creation of websites like Weirdchina and Weird Asian News. Few people outside of academia recognize names like Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and Xi Jinping, even though they are the superstars of America’s most important relationship.

I argue that the reason behind this is not solely because Americans are obsessed with villainizing the occult—look at our energetic relationship with Japan. Instead, our issue remains in the deeply engrained notion that communism is good for no one.

The press that we read does a number on the American way of thought on China. It creates a simple formula where the Chinese government is always the bad guy, Chinese citizens are always the victims, and that the American people always have it right. The stories that we hear coming out of China prove one thing: that the American way of life leads to success, and that the Chinese way of life leads to blind ignorance and failure.

Take the recent stories about infringement of copyright in fake Chinese Apple stores. A Chinese employee explains in his defense, “There is no Chinese law that says I can’t decorate my shop the way I want to decorate it.” A customer adds, “As long as their products are real it’s okay—after all, you enter a store not to look at anything except their products… If the products you buy are real why do you care whether the store is a copy?”

Outraged? This is a cultural difference between Americans and the Chinese. China is comparatively not strict about copyright law and patent infringement because the country believes in shared profit (especially in intellectual property). Americans, on the other hand, believe in allowing businesses and individuals to profit from their hard work. China is about the whole, America is about the one. Communism vs democracy. Are our differences really this simple? No, but its a beginning to understanding.

This does not explain away all strange behavior coming out of China, of course, but try to remember that Americans have their quirks too. Regardless of how interesting the “weird news” coming out of China is, their government still holds a large portion of our debt. For that reason alone, Americans should give the Communist country our respect regardless of their idiosyncrasies. Weird China news is little more than self-perpetuated propaganda against the Chinese government and Chinese way of life. Remember that when next reading about the strange happenings on the other side of the world.