The late Sardar Khushwant Singh, who passed only a year short of a century thanks to his robust lifestyle and his daily dose of the tipple, was well known as a formidable and outspoken character, full of wit. Indian of my generation would probably remember that in the last couple of decades of his life, having given up editorship of venerable newspapers and magazines and mostly focusing on writing his later books, he still used to pen a regular column in newspapers such as the Hindustan Times. In the moniker for that column, his image was shown sitting inside a light bulb, almost as if inviting brickbats to be thrown at him, and fittingly the title of the column was 'With malice towards one and all'. So Singh was very upfront about his views and hardly gave two hoots that people would accuse him of writing maliciously.
In the same vein, let's get this out of the way first thing: This post is written with a pronounced bias as regards the Chinese character, and yes, it has a lot of generalizations. So those looking for some politically correct and totally balanced narrative, kindly look elsewhere. The titular question I'm asking today is: When was the last time you met/read about/heard about a generous Chinese? A down to earth Chinese, yes. A gritty Chinese, yes. An aggressive Chinese, by all means! A crafty Chinese, of course! But a generous Chinese? In real life? In anecdotes? In literature? Ummm.... well... Is that a contradiction in terms? An oxymoron, perchance?
More seriously, does it have something to do with the ethos of 20th and 21st century Chinese people? In the early part of this century, when I traveled to China a few times on work, I was intrigued with certain expressions used by English-speaking Chinese. To be fair, they stated that the English terms they spoke were only close approximations of certain Chinese language terms, and not really equivalent. Even so, one particular expression that I remember is: "clever". So where in the normal course of conversation someone in another part of the world may use a term like 'intelligent' or 'wise', my Chinese interlocutors invariably used the term "clever". I was fairly new to the country and its people at that time, so didn't consider it polite to either point out the dissonance or ask their reasons too clearly. But the few times I referred to it, they just couldn't make out any difference between 'clever', as they used it, and intelligent or wise, one who could have a thinking mind yet not use it for personal advantage, for instance.
Much later, it struck me that the Chinese considered cleverness as the singular facet of intelligence. For certain Chinese, not to generalize, it's the cleverness, or perhaps the ability to use intelligence for personal gain, which is the foremost. And perhaps they just cannot fathom why someone who has the brains would forego personal gain and use it to benefit someone else, which is the hallmark of generosity.
And this is not to trivialize how the Chinese thinking may've evolved to such ethos. They've doubtless passed through many travails since the ancient times that Chinese civilization was one of only four, along with India, Mesopotamia and Egypt, progressing westwards. After their empires petered out into weak monarchies, like many others before and around them, they were dominated by a series of forces. Even as late as 19th and early 20th century, they were pushed around by such powers as the British, with the Opium Wars imposed on them and turning a few generation of Chinese into addicts, and the Japanese during the second World War with a series of untold horrors including Nanking.
So have such travails inculcated in the Chinese a core ethos of cleverness, a conviction that the world will take them for a ride unless they deal 'cleverly' with all? Is that the reason that the Chinese are so dichotomous, spouting homilies for peace and a just order with a straight face and then turning around and heaping exactly the opposite on their supposed opponents? Is that why they've been at loggerheads increasingly with everyone, starting with Mao who was an expert in pitting Chinese against Chinese to foster an internecine war in the interests of a communist 'Cultural Revolution', another complete contradiction in terms as there was nothing cultural about it but only a revolution by the seemingly uncultured with a thin veneer of intelligentsia? And it's not only in the geopolitical arena that the Chinese have acted 'cleverly', but also in the commercial arena, lulling the then world economic powers by providing a 'factory to the world' and later trying to dominate the very economic machine of the world by leveraging its demography.
Know thy enemy, the 'clever' advised, perhaps including that mythical Chinese general Sun Tzu. So any effort at first understanding deeply the psyche and ethos of the Chinese, before engaging with them in any arena, seems the most 'clever' strategy to adopt for anyone...
With Malice towards... (with due apologies to Khushwant).
