"They will always have Nazi Lineage" *)

ZonaEuropa.com translated an entry of April 1 at chinaren.com by a 20 year-old Chinese intern in Germany. She describes how she is mobbed by a German colleague, who is most likely her senior.
» Please read for yourself (new window).

I choose to believe every word of the intern´s report. It is nothing verified, but I can tell that it is nothing unlikely either.

I agree that to be a Chinese student in Germany can hardly be easy. No foreigners have it easy when staying and working in foreign countries. (And interns usually don´t have it easy, either. Even many   » German interns have grievances at work within their own country.) When I worked in China, I met a lot of difficulties. Whenever Chinese people found that my country had done wrong (like when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO), I had a hard time to avoid discussions at work that would almost certainly have got out of hand. Work is not the right place for such discussions.

On the other hand, I did have some interesting, sometimes fierce, and often enriching discussions with Chinese friends outside my workplace.

It seems that the starting point of mobbing the intern is really that she is Chinese. It is an unequal fight between two women of different age, experience, and nationality.

I sure feel sorry for the intern. She is only 20 years old, and her colleague is acting irresponsibly.

Then again, this is a quarrel between two people of whom neither is smart in my view. And I suspect that one reason of the intern´s lack of smartness is her background. She judges single people by their nationality, and she judges entire nations by single people. Her anger about her mobbing colleague – and alleged other encounters with Germans which are not described at length in her article – is turning into a line like this:
"The arrogance of the Germans astonished me time and again. I am only twenty years old and I can see the shadow of the German people from sixty years ago. They are the descendants of the Nazis. Nazi blood will flow through their bodies forever. *) What they regard as their correct insistence looks rigid to others, even very terrifying." How stupid is that?

And how stupid is her conclusion? "Several decades into the future, will China collapse like the Germans hope? Or will China be so strong that they will collapse?"

I believe that there are Chinese people who are over-demanding towards the rest of the world, not only towards Germany. They do not only want respect for themselves, but for their government´s policies, too. Once you dislike their government´s ways, such people call you an imperialist, a racist, [Link now defunct: club.chinaren.com/11/120367517] a German pig (see commentators underneath the intern´s entry), or a Nazi. I´m sure that a lot of cultural reasons can be cited to explain this attitude, and that not only the current Chinese educational system is to blame.

But to demand respect for oneself as an individual is one thing. To support the Chinese official line on Tibet and mix the demand for personal respect with politics is another. Anyone in this place has a right to criticise the Chinese government, though not necessarily at work.

If the intern can´t handle the situation by herself and needs to file a complaint against her colleague for bullying her personally, I wish her success. But if she files a complaint against her colleague because of a lack of admiration for the Chinese political system, I do not.

*) Original: "他们是纳粹的后代，也永远有着纳粹的血统。")
To me, "blood lineage" looks like a slightly closer translation. (But neither my Chinese nor my English is as good as the translator´s over there.)

2008-04-06

Update, July 1 2008

Probably an appraisal by the intern, added to the entry posted at KD52:
"From this it can be seen that there is still a lot of work to do. Let´s hope our ZF will not drop behind the backs of the West. We must not say Yes to everything again. We must make our own voice heard. Only if our own voice is strong enough, the West can know that we are right. By using the big sticks of the economy, of politics and culture, we must stand up together and fight them."

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