(The Afternoon, 5 February, 2001)

The Chinese think that a wise man I does not say much. Certainly a wise man should not say much: in the long run, it is the best way to convince other people that you are wise. But Indians, as a nation, have a habit of excessive speech. Perhaps they feel that if you talk incessantly, some of what you say. will turn out to be relevant to the issue on hand, or else they hope to drown verbal opposition in a flood of words. The Chinese may not talk much, but they do a lot. Indians are the other way round. So the Chinese come out on top; all over the world, they are admired, if not precisely liked. Other nations want to do business with them. The Chinese always choose their business partners with care, whereas Indians accept any partner who will accept them.

Admirable adaptability: After these generalisations, one should remember that the nature of the Chinese depends very much on the country they live in. They adapt to the place in which circumstances settled them: ‘they are Americans in America, Indians in India. Adaptability is admirable, when it is sincere, as the adaptability of the Chinese is.. when they do not have to adapt, when they inhabit their homeland, they become’ a special race, and manifest special characteristics. The Chinese anywhere are Chauvinist. However much the expatriate Chinese may owe to the country of their j adoption, in the end they will go to extreme lengths to ensure that not only the bones of their ancestors but their own will rest in the earth of the country from which they all came.

The Chinese, then, are an admirable race. They have one of the oldest and cleverest civilisations on the planet. Over the centuries they have been ruled, by warlords, emperors, tyrants of all sorts. They seem to prefer a touch of the totalitarian in their rulers. What they have gained from this is patience and caution, an ability to suffer and endure. The rulers at present may be totalitarian, but they have achieved the aims that they started out with. They have controlled the population; the majority of it is able to live with dignity. They do not embark upon large projects without sufficient consideration of the consequences. All along the line they have succeeded where their neighbhour, India, has failed, and not only failed but lost face.

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