Another Thought on China and Nationalism

A brief reference back to China and the fact that we can get more or less everything we want there; we have our internet and we have our satellite television, and we have ..... well, we have more or less everything! However, a couple of home truths were sort of rammed home during the course of the day today. This will be the first China post from England!
On arriving back in the room this evening, I decided to watch some of the news on German television and there I was watching a live stream of from NTV and then some documentry stuff from ZDF and it was just like watching television at home and the connection was ever so fast and then there me was this morning having breakfast in a little transport cafe in the centre of Uxbridge and sitting with a hard copy of the Guardian, while munching my saugsages, bacon and egg.
There was an interesting conversation with a Chinese student who works in the cafe on campus and she, and the other Chinese, seem a little concerned about what people think about China. Now I couldn't really give much of a monkeys about the UK or certainly not about what people think about it and I think that this might just be indicative of a healthier relationship to my country, or rather to the passport hold, of course, I hardly define myself through my nationality. Anyway, the girl was nice and after seven years living in England and in possession of that, what the British authorities would perceive to be the most valuable thing in the world, a British passport, she seemed capable of very real criticism. Indeed, so much so that she wanted to criticise the "Zhonghua, Zhonghua, Zhonghuua" attitude of some of the Chinese around; a lot of them have their wee flags in their windows as the olympics apporoach. However, I am not going to look into the nature of that attitude in this post. Suffice to say that it is closer to that that we might have experienced in Germany around about 1933 than in Germany during the last world cup; closer to that that we might find from the petit bourgeoise with all their complexes than that of the person confident in and proud of, what he or she perceives to be, an important part of their own identity.
With China developing the way it is we will, no doubt soon have fast and completely free internet access, and the band played believe it if you like, and we will be able to pick up our hard copy of an international newspaper anywhere and, no doubt, the British transport cafe has already been cloned. One hopes that the Chinese attitude to their own nationality will not have to go through the growing pains of Germany and that a healthy confidence that respects others will develop rather than that meglomania that is born out of a big chip on the shoulder, out of a terrible inferiority complex. It will be interesting to see the Chinese on the university when the olympics begin tomorrow.