I first met Ru Sin in 1981 when she was a junior cadre in the Second Bureau of the Communist Party. It is an agency specializing in uniting and serving overseas Chinese who are knowledgeable about the world, and who also hold an unyielding affinity with the motherland. She was looking after my daily needs in my visits to Beijing and other parts of China, where I was consulted with and lectured on world affairs. She was 23 years old and very intelligent.

China was just beginning to reform and open up to the outside world. The Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four had left deep hurts and wide ranging doubts in the minds and souls of everyone in the country

Continue reading

It is easy to be trapped by public opinion and the media, and develop an image that the Chinese people are selfish and corrupt, craving for easy money, and only caring for enjoyment of the here and now. You would think otherwise by using common sense. People are different. There are far more good people than bad ones in any society, including China.

China had gone through monumental and extraordinarily conflicting experiences in the last seventy years. They had left damages and scars in the people to affect their mental and behavioral needs and expressions. Changing from a closed society to an open one takes a lot of adjustment. Time and education are needed to facilitate and guide the process. As things happened there was no time but only leap-frog progression, largely led by a free strife to get rich. Education did not change much. It stayed controlled by a central authority, based on administrative will rather than wisdom.

Please click the image to continue.

Tradition and Passage 

Could a Buddhist temple, established at the time of the Tree Kingdoms (247 AD), be standing and thriving in the center of Shanghai today?

To seek the answer one needs to pass through West Nanjing Road, the old British Concession, to see the gold pillars and tilting roof corners in the midst of a forest of the glass-front sky scrapers. The Temple Jing An 靜安, meaning serene comfort, has a name that tells its lasting and respected presence in China’s most flamboyant metropolis, nick-named, once upon a time, ‘The Paradise of Daring Explorers’.

Read more …

Introduction

I wrote China Meets the World, a series of eight articles on the occasion of the 30^th Anniversary of China’s opening policy. They had documented the historic and individual events surrounding the change from a closed China to her wish to connect with the world. The first article indicated the immense difficulty of educating the change pioneers to adjust to a world of diverse possibilities, when they were trained to believe that everything must be measured by a dichotomized scale of rights and wrongs.

I am writing this series of China Meets Herself now, three years later, to mark out some of the behaviors and questions that have emerged among the different generations of people of urban China today. They reflect their response to the huge change that is taking place, as China attempts to live with herself, and to play a pivotal role in the one-world reality.

Read more…