Recently I was back in Beijing. It’s always exhilarating to bounce around Beijing with a fresh perspective. Reconnecting with my network it seemed as though opportunity were everywhere, with each person I engaged.
My second morning there I had brunch with a gentleman whom I’d known years before. He is a seasoned European businessman whose been doing work in China since 1989. We were laughing about old times and trading notes on friends, when he mentioned something that caught my ear.
“Sometimes living here is odd. I mean at times one can get down about all the corruption and craziness and then, other times, I just sit back and laugh and say: “that’s China. You can’t take it all too seriously. Many people do take it way too serious. You have to treat it like a movie. Otherwise it can drive you crazy.”
The crazy thing is . . . I could never treat it like a movie. Here is this person who has spent more of the last fifteen years than me in China. But to make it all work, he tunes-out, like a tired salary-man at the end of day, switching-off the world around him with a remote control. China for him is like reaity TV.
Unfortunately for me, as I suppose it is for many of you, China can never be a reality TV show. It is simply, reality. I can’t help but tune-in and there is no way to filter what I live, when I am back in my homeland. My European friend could see people fighting in the street and all he could do was observe. Here they go, those crazy Chinese. They’re tearing themselves apart. Fade back if it gets too crazy.
There is no “they” for me when I am back in Beijing. It is “we.” We can be sad. And we is inescapable. We can never be passive. I can’t watch we on TV. I live we with everyone around me. Everyone looks to me as if I am part of we.
I remember a famous song of the late 1960’s. The name of the song was “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and the singer, Gil Scott Heron was making fun of not only rich, white America, but phony Black radicals for their tendency to tune-out on all around them. The message, as the song title suggests, is that when real change comes, it will not be possible to tune-out. The final line of the song, answers the challenge posed in the title: “The revolution will not be televised . . . because the revolution brothers, will be live.”
It has often been said that China’s has been in revolution for the last 150 years and this may well be so. But when I return to our industrial revolution, our modern revolution, our unfinished egalitarian revolution, it is always live. It is always immediate and painful and inescapable. It is always we.
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