Diary of A Mad Imperialist

We cannot and we must not become Chinese, and at heart we don’t want to either. We must not seek ideal or higher meaning of life in China or in any other thing of the past; otherwise we lose ourselves and adhere to a fetish.

--Hermann Hesse, 1921

SHANGHAI, March 2012 - About 111 years ago, the German emperor, Wilhelm II., farewelled the East-Asian Expedition Corps from Bremen’s harbor to China in order to crush down on Beijing’s resistance movement to European imperialism. His orders were unequivocal: Bring civilization to China; Show no mercy to reactionaries; and Teach China a memorable lesson so that “no Chinaman would ever dare to look askance at one of us.” Things of course have changed since then.

Airplanes have been invented. Germany’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Dr. Annette Schavan, and her delegation of top officials once again landed in rainy Shanghai. China’s Pearl River Delta’s megalopolis is more populous than Germany’s capital, Berlin, and Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and the next ten biggest German cities combined. It is gigantic.

The Federal Minister and her decorated entourage certainly preferred the icy north and Beijing, the head of the Chinese dragon, over the creature’s guts: the damp southern regions of Jiangnan. Yet, although Beijing was the center of China’s politics and educational policy, most of the schaffenden Germans, all those who actually produce material value since bilateral trade agreements began in 1979, had traditionally settled down in Shanghai or, farther down in the industrial south, in Shenzhen and Guangdong, China’s two supreme manufacturing bases. Today, over 5,300 German companies are active in China, and 8,000 German administrators are stationed in Shanghai alone.

The Tongji University of Shanghai is a German partner of choice. It was co-founded by Germans, handed honorary degrees to politicians like Gerhard Schröder, the former Chancellor, and invites German lecturers by the droves. That said, there are barely 250 German persons studying full-time in all of China; most of them staying no longer than a single academic exchange year or less, and sitting those notorious dui wai hanyu classes (“Chinese for foreigners”). Compare those figures to the 25,000 proper Chinese students who study in Germany for real. And, unlike the Chinese in Germany, the Germans in China aren’t obliged to provide evidence of 200 hours language work prior to applying for a student visa. The Germans treat Chinese as inferior; and the Chinese treat Germans as superior; that is the way it is; mainly so, perhaps, because both people are carrying themselves in their respective ways for centuries.

Over two dozen German professor chairs at ‘Tongji’ are currently sponsored by German corporations; most of those senior fellowmen don’t speak a word Chinese, of course: Not learning the language of the colonized is an old tradition that I will not explain here. Needless to say, Chinese translators –mostly females- are always cheap and plenty in supply: ten for the price of one German interpreter.

Meanwhile, the German political parties, the German media, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Max-Planck Society, the German Chamber of Commerce, the Goethe Institutes –all state sponsored, pro-government organizations- have arrived in the Middle Kingdom already with the single most important mission to make the Chinese do like the Europeans do, or else to start chinabashing the entire place.

Germany’s hostility against China is legendary. It is also official: German media constantly demonizes the country because it is too Chinese and too communist. According to the Asia-strategy-paper of October 23rd 2007, the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its junior partner the Christian Social Union (CSU) -you thought Germany was a secular place, didn't you?- named China a “threat to European values, and to economic and political developments.”

But let us come back to our Federal Minister: At Tongji’s ‘Chinesisch Deutsches Hoch-schulkolleg’, she gave a prominent lecture that day, or shall we say: she lectured the Chinese, on the sensitivities of “global responsibility.” It all amounted rather suspiciously to a Western monologue about how China should do itself after Europe. [...]