All Hail Mao Zedong...

I got to see my friend Kaman today, who I've seen almost none of since I got back from Beijing. She's from Hong Kong, and helped me out with a linguistics project by recording herself saying all kinds of ridiculous sentences in Cantonese. ("He gave us two ducks. Is that hen yours? No, it's not mine. It's his." Etc. etc. etc.)

She's always wanted to go back to Hong Kong once she graduated. She just got hired on with one of the big four accounting firms (Arthur Andersen, I think?) and she's graduating this spring. When I asked her if she'd be transferring back home in her newfound capacity as an Internal Auditor she just sighed and shrugged.

"I don't know if I want to," she said. "These days if you work at a big company there three weeks out of the month you're in the mainland. And you know how much I hate it."

I do. When we were there together it was hard to miss her less than favorable opinion of her homeland's Big Brother (pun intended). The food was bad. It was boring. The people were racist. (They were, actually, especially against her ironically enough, but that isn't really the point.) What is the point is that she, like most of her fellow Hong-Kongians, are now subject to a corrupt government that they pretty well detest.

It got me to thinking about two things: one, why? China gives all kinds of political justifications for its reunification of Hong Kong, and I suppose from a political science standpoint a lot of them are probably valid. But why should a people have to be subject to a government just because it had been at some time in the past millennium? Most of them call themselves Chinese, but they don't identify with China. They identify with Hong Kong, which until the past twenty years couldn't possibly have been more different. So why is it so necessary, under some vast and sweeping pretext of unity, to subject a people to anything they don't really want to be a part of?

Okay, so Hong Kong is at least understandable, because there's some economic benefit to China in its reintegration. But how about Tibet? That's just greedy. There's nothing there but a bunch of Buddhists, and as much as we all love the Buddhists, how much national benefit could come of its takeover? It's not as though they're contributing anything to the gross national product. We're talking about a whole race of people whose lives are based on sitting around staring at walls and humming to themselves. If they'd rather chant in Tibetan than in Mandarin, why stop them? Who are they hurting?

Which brings me to question number two: what is it about our own patriotism that makes us want to force it on others? Why is it that Abraham Lincoln was so obsessed with not letting the south break away? Why can't the blue states form their own countries, if they feel so underrepresented? These aren't rhetorical questions, either, but genuine curiosities. After all government is, at least to some extent, just an artificial social structure. A necessary one, but not one set in place by the forces of nature. George Bush is still just a man. Jacques Chirac is still just a man. And the Chinese are starting to figure out that Mao was just a man. We support the governments of the people we think share our morals, we pooh-pooh the people who do things differently, and in the meantime my friend Kaman doesn't feel safe raising her children in the place where she grew up.

Maybe I've been reading too much John Locke, but doesn't this defeat the purpose of government in the first place? Isn't the whole point kind of a safety in numbers kind of deal? And how did it end up that, even in America, in the end it's still just the rule of the many by a few idiots with really white smiles?