Whoa! Not so fast. Above, the statue of Confucius boxed up and being removed from Tienanmen Square in April. I bet somebody got a time-out over that.
I think it was in Henry Kissinger's new book, if not somewhere else recently, that I read of a Chinese government official lecturing an American official over American outrage at the Tienanmen massacre and saying, "You think you know Chinese people better than Chinese people do." Well, sometimes actually the hardest person to know is oneself; more likely though, of course, an American will understand Americans better and Chinese will understand Chinese better. Chinese don't understand themselves. They have had an extremely difficult time adjusting once they determined to their satisfaction that China was not the center of the universe (about 300 years ago). They don't know how to deal with who they are in a world context, they don't know how to relate to the rest of the world, they don't know how to interpret their past. They don't know themselves.
