Understanding China

I guess the challenge for us, in Australia, is to try to comprehend a massive civilization beyond our understanding that has had 19 bordering nations with very fluid borders, for 5000 years and remains very intact and rocketing forward with workable peaceful deals with every border nation to the benefit of all. Brand new high speed trade-rail links between, Beijing and every border nation's capital city. All paid for by China. For trade, for peace.

We don't have any border nations so our understanding of the complexity required for dealing with countries like Indonesia or New Guinea etc is very very primitive in comparison with Chinese cultural survival methodology. Thus Tony Abbott, thus Bill Shorten. Elected by popular choice and yet Primitive, in a way we understand.

The other massive difference is that most of us here in Australia are not indigenous whereas all Chinese in all the Provinces of China are indigenous to China. We can never get our head around that. It is beyond our experience of life on earth here...but it's so fascinating to watch the future happening.

I've liked China since I was 16 and read Chinese poets. When a first year nursing student at Cessnock District Hospital in 1983, it was me who received delivery of 100 copies of Mao's Little Red Book straight from the Chinese Embassy to my room at the Nurses Home. In the beginning was the Little Red Book, and verily, it was well distributed.

As my talk on the high speed rail between Beijing and Shen Yang, with a retired Colonel of the PLA, when I told him I was trying to learn Thai language, he advised, in earnest..."Don't worry about the language of Thailand. Learn the language of the Chinese people. Thailand is a border town of China, and a factory. China is Asia. Later on, that night, in the Karaoke Bar, he sang "For all the problems of myself, and my country, I would still beg from the Gods another hundred years of life in China."

Three days later in Liaoning, I recall being punched quite ineffectively in the street by a very Old Red Guard retiree who remembered what Australia did to hurt China and Korea in the Korean War. I doubt they'll be any need to build any Anzac Memorials there. They are a bright bunch and they remember quite clearly.