How can i be proud of china if

Ma has spoken publicly about the push-pull relationship between private companies and the government, though there is one piece of his advice for entrepreneurs that Mr. Living in Boston, Ms. Hua had received an elite education in the United States, landed a consulting job and even contemplated applying for American citizenship. She loved jazz and American pop culture. Part of it was opportunity: a job prospect at a consulting firm in Beijing. And part of it was something deeper: a desire to help the country catch up with the West and to reconnect with her Chinese roots.

Now a partner at a venture capital firm, Ms. Hua, 44, has a daughter whose elementary school offers a steady dose of Tang dynasty poems, calligraphy lessons and excursions to ancient sites. Exposed to liberal democracy, Ms. Middle-class Chinese students poured into universities in the United States and Europe — then seen as the most promising path to wealth and prestige — and some Western analysts predicted that they would return to China as a force for political change.

Like many other middle-class parents, Ms. Hua worries about repression and rampant materialism in Chinese society. It is a volatile mix that the party skillfully manipulates to stir the feeling that China needs to stand up in the world. Xi has selectively revived traditional Chinese culture — an effort, experts say, to give people something to be proud of. That approach, however, is rich with historical irony.

Both the modernizers who overthrew the Qing dynasty and then Mao and his communists once blamed Chinese tradition for holding the country back. But with communist ideology long ago having lost its appeal to the public, Mr. Xi is drawing on Chinese tradition to reinforce the idea that the country needs a strong leader to prevent chaos and to guard against outsiders.

That leaves some worrying that he could be leading the country into a new period of isolation. Unfortunately this is a minority point of view. But if she has grievances, she still believes society is moving in the right direction — and has made peace with waiting.

Hua has started to take her daughter on trips to poor parts of China, to show her the vast inequalities that still persist, even in an age of mobile payments and self-driving cars. She hopes her daughter will live in a more tolerant China, one still open to the outside world. She grew up here. She will always need some understanding of who she is and what it means to be Chinese, from the very beginning. She has been writing about the intersection of culture, society and politics in China since Javier C.

Amy Qin reported from Hong Kong. Karoline Kan contributed research from Huining County and Beijing. Please upgrade your browser.

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The nation has hope. The state has strength. Hua Yijia, second from right, studied in the United States, but moved back home in part to reconnect with her Chinese roots. Recently, a very simple question became widely circulated online: In today's China, what is worthy of national pride? A foreign girl living in China gave a very touching answer. Lanlan, whose real name Negar Kordi, is of Iranian and Canadian descent.

She came to China five years ago and is now in her senior year at Ningbo University as a Business Mandarin major. Lanlan's charm comes from her fluent Chinese. Not only can she can understand and use Chinese online slang, some netizens say that her Chinese is truly top-level. Some admitted they would do the same — for fear of getting into trouble and fear of facing another "Nanjing judge". Let me explain the story of the muddle-headed Nanjing judge.

In , in the capital of Jiangsu province, a young man named Peng Yu helped an old woman who had fallen on the street and took her to a hospital and waited to see if the old woman was all right. Later, however, the woman and her family accused Peng of causing her fall. A judge decided in favour of the woman, based on the assumption that "Peng must be at fault. Otherwise why would he want to help? Since that incident Peng has become a national cautionary tale: the Good Samaritan being framed by the beneficiary of their compassion.

It's true that in China you can get into trouble when you try to help. Weeks ago I spotted an accident on the fourth ring road in Beijing as I returned home one night. A man was hit by a "black car", an "illegal taxi", and his face was all bloody. Watched over by a crowd, the injured man behaved aggressively towards the driver.

I got off my scooter. As I tried to pull the two men apart, I was struck myself. When I asked if anyone had reported this to the police, the driver said no. I couldn't believe that people just stared as if enjoying a free show, without doing anything. I called the helpline and the policemen turned up soon after. The fundamental problem, in my view, lies in one word that describes a state of mind: shaoguanxianshi , meaning don't get involved if it's not your business.

In our culture, there's a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi , family and friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially if such kindness may potentially damage your interest. Fei Xiaotong, China's first sociologist, described Chinese people's moral and ethical characteristics in his book, From the Soil , in the middle of the last century.

He pointed out that selfishness is the most serious shortcoming of the Chinese. He offered the example of how the Chinese of that period threw rubbish out of their windows without the slightest public concern. Things are much the same today. Under Mao, citizens were forced to behave themselves in both public and private spheres. Every March, people were obliged to go into the street to do good deeds: cleaning buses, fixing bicycles and offering haircuts.

Now relaxed social control and commercialisation over the past three decades have led people to behave more selfishly again. People are enjoying, and sometimes abusing, the vast personal freedoms that didn't exist before. To start with, it is now safe to be "naughty".