I don’t know if I will come to love China one day. I don’t like ambiguity in life, be it individual, group, or nation. The late, beloved Amin al-Hafez always returned from parliamentary conferences around the world irked by the Chinese delegations. He said his Chinese colleagues would laugh, or force a laugh while complaining about a headache. When one of them asks: what is funny about the matter? A different answer is given in a louder voice.
For a while, I have had a voracious appetite for reading about what is going on in China, its history, literature, and humanities. A Belgian teacher by the name of Raymond Bliss, if I am not mistaken, fascinated me with the matter more than anyone else. The Belgians are something! They do not seek geniuses and greats, but when they do, they give us the best of them. Among them are the pioneering artist Rene Magritte, Jacques Brel, and Georges Simenon, the greatest detective story writers since Sherlock Holmes.
In everything you read, one thing stands out: numbers. If an earthquake erupts, around 660,000 lose their lives, as had happened in the sixteenth century. If a protest is suppressed, 40,000 people die. If Mao Zedong is accused of causing the deaths of a group of people, the total sum is 60 million. The reason for this is that China has always been the most populous country in the world. When the global population was about three billion, there were 100 million Chinese. If Mao Zedong had not determined the total sum of births, none of us would know how many Chinese there are today. These legendary totals turned China into the subject of legends as well. A Greek monk known for his astrology predicted that China would conquer the West with 200 million fighters this century. This monk has been living in solitude on Mount Athos for many years. This solitude has perhaps given him knowledge of numbers similar to that of mine.
Among the numbers, we also find the civil war that was fought in most of the country in the mid and late nineteenth century, leaving 20 or 30 million dead. It is not important that for the figure of 20 million to be precise or proven. In what was known as the Opium Wars, millions of civilians were lost. The Emperor wrote to Queen Victoria a letter asking her to stop drowning his country in drugs, telling her: “If you had not known how harmful this scourge is, you would not have prohibited it in Britain.”
At the end of the eighteenth century, the number of Chinese citizens exceeded 300 million, making its economy the largest in the world. It had 4,000 female poets alone. Shanghai has become the largest multi-ethnic and commercial city on Earth. It is now the third-largest financial center in the world, and only five cities are home to a higher number of billionaires. It also has the largest tunnel network on the blue planet. It draws more money from tourists than any other city. It has the second largest number of skyscrapers, following Dubai...and so on, and on...
