Rachel, I have read the article of BBC news about the Polio in China’s western Xinjiang province in September. Actually, the Chinese media has reported the news and I have watched it before I read this article. My feedback on this article is that it is the same from what I have heard from the Chinese media and I do not have the feeling that China is looked down upon because it has Polio.  Several cases of Polio have been confirmed in Xinjiang province of China and we have to figure this problem out and that’s it.

In your post you mentioned two cases, one of which was that foreigners fear to travel to the US because of the violence issues especially issues with guns and the other was about the Chinese girls you met in Shanghai who thought that Americans were usually not slim. I think these two cases can be regarded as people’s stereotypes to other countries and nations which they are not familiar with and we could  give more examples of this kind of stereotypes. I think the stereotypes or even people’s  misunderstandings of other countries and nations are because they do not know much about what is really going on. Most of their knowledge about other countries comes from media such as newspapers, TV news, movies, etc., in other words, from what they have been told instead of what they have experienced by themselves. If your friend traveled to China with you this time, she would know that Polio was not as serious as she imagined. If foreign people had the experience of living or studying in America, the gun shootings which were hype depicted by the media would probably not prevent them from sending their children to the high schools in the US.  If those girls whom you met in Shanghai had ever traveled to the US, they would know that not all Americans are fat, but they come in all different sizes and shapes.

However, not all the stereotypes and misunderstandings of other countries are innocent but there are ideologies behind them. Sometimes it is not because we are not able to know what is really going on but because we do not want to know.  I have met a lot of people who would like to judge the political and social issues in China just according to what they have been told by the media and their personal imagination.  When I was studying in London for the pre-sessional English course,  a teacher from Scotland once said in front of all the students in his class including me that Chinese people did not drink milk because the majority of the country were rural areas, which were so underdeveloped that there were no milk there. I asked him whether he had traveled to  China or not and he answered no. If he was really curious about whether Chinese people drank milk or not, he could ask me at that time before he made the claim. But he just claimed the “fact” which was existing in his imagination with confidence.  Therefore, what is behind the misunderstandings and stereotypes can be arrogance, jealous and other ideologies.  There are many misunderstandings of China in the western world nowadays,  some of which are not because that western people are not able to know what the real China is but because they do not want to. There are some words from an American movie called “Swing Vote” which I could not agree more. “All the world’s greatest civilizations have followed the same path. From bondage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy back to bondage”. Back to 1100 years ago when China was in Tang dynasty (618-907), it was the strongest country in the world. At that time, Chinese people did not know the outside world and they did not care about what happened in other countries because they did not need to. 700 years later when China was in Qing dynasty (1644-1912), it fell behind most of the western countries.

Therefore, Rachel, we need to be open-minded because there are so much that we do not know about the world. Let’s communicate and share because we want to know each other better : )

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