ON CHINA AND THE CHINESE - “Ways That Are Dark” - Extracts from a 1933 Travelogue about China 🇨🇳

🧵 “Ways That Are Dark” is a 1933 book by Ralph Townsend, a US Consul in China, in which he presents his observations on the state of then-contemporary China. The book has been called exaggerated, sinophobic and racist and was banned by the Chinese Government.

Townsend asserts that the cause of China's miseries lie in the fundamental defects that exist in the Chinese people - and goes to great lengths to explain what he believes these defects are.

Townsend claims dishonesty is the most prominent characteristic in the Chinese mentality and gives many examples of being lied to by Chinese employees, coolies, shopkeepers, and government officials, and notes that many other consuls were driven out of the service by this relentless and “aimless lying”, with each lie merely a pretext for another. The other highly salient trait of the Chinese is their “indifference to fellow suffering”. Through a large number of personal and second-hand anecdotes, Townsend argues that the Chinese may be the only people in the world who are close to unable to comprehend the basic human impulses of sympathy or gratitude towards other people. He claims the Chinese struggle to feel empathy toward others and sometimes behave in sadistic and cruel fashions towards one another -
and they view altruistic foreigners as targets to be mercilessly taken advantage of.

Other traits Townsend identifies as being typically Chinese are cowardice, lust for money, lack of a sense of personal hygiene, lack of critical thinking skills, insincerity, and obsession with hollow rites. Townsend believes that these traits are as notable among China's leaders and educated strata as much as they are in the poor masses, and his analysis of historical documents leads him to believe that they are not a recent product of the chaos in 1930’s China, but rather are deeply ingrained traits of China's national character. He concludes that the “outstanding characteristics” of the Chinese people “neither enable other peoples to deal satisfactorily with them, nor enable the Chinese to deal satisfactorily with themselves”.

This thread is a compilation of passages from the book and is not intended to be an uncritical endorsement of the claims Townsend makes 🧵

China is not built for permanence and is always falling apart

On the contradictions in Chinese society

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Oct 19

REASONING, MAGICAL THINKING AND EVIL WIZARDS IN AFRICA

From Polish Author Ryszard Kapuściński’s Book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’, about Reasoning and Magical Thinking in Africa:

“Suddenly, I heard murmurs, steps, then the rapid patter of bare feet. Then silence once more. I looked around, but at first saw nothing. After a moment, the murmurs and steps again. Then silence again. I began to study the features of the landscape--a clump of thin shrubs, several umbrella-shaped acacias in the distance, some rocks protruding from the ground. At last, I spied a group of eight men, carrying, on a simple stretcher made of branches, another man covered with a piece of cloth. They moved in a peculiar fashion. They did not walk in a straight line, but advanced furtively, creeping in one direction, then in another, maneuvering. They crouched down behind a shrub, looked about cautiously, and then scurried to the next hiding place. They circled, swerved, stopped, and started, as if they were children playing some elaborate game of espionage. I observed their bent, half-naked silhouettes, their nervous gestures, the queer, stealthful behavior, until finally they disappeared for good behind a ridge, and the only thing around me again was the silent, clear, inviolate night.

At dawn we drove on. I asked Sebuya if he knew the name of the people in whose village we had spent the night. "They are called Amba," he said. Then, after a moment, added: "Kabila mbaya" (this means, roughly, "bad people"). He did not want to tell me any more--here, one avoids evil even as a subject of conversation, preferring not to step into that territory, careful not to call the wolf out of the forest. As we drove, I reflected upon the event I had inadvertently witnessed. The nocturnal drama, those puzzling zigzags and twists of the bearers, their haste and anxiety, concealed a mystery to which I had no key. Something was going on here. But what?

People like the Amba and their kinsmen believe profoundly that the world is ruled by supernatural forces. These forces are particular--spirits that have names, spells that can be defined. It is they that inform the course of events and imbue them with meaning, decide our fate, determine everything. For this reason nothing happens by chance; chance simply does not exist. Let us consider this example: Sebuya is driving his car, has an accident, and dies. Why exactly did Sebuya have an accident? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars reached their destinations safely--but Sebuya had an accident and died. White people will search for various causes. For instance, his brakes malfunctioned. But this kind of thinking leads nowhere, explains nothing. Because why was it precisely Sebuya's brakes that malfunctioned? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars were on the road and their brakes were working just fine--but Sebuya's were not. Why? White people, whose way of thinking is the height of naivete, will say that Sebuya's brakes malfunctioned because he failed to have them inspected and repaired in good time. But why was it precisely Sebuya who failed to do this? Why, that very same day, a million . . . etc., etc.

We have now established that the white man's way of reasoning is quite unhelpful. But it gets worse! The white man, having determined that the cause of Sebuya's accident and death was bad brakes, prepares a report and closes the case. Closes it!? But it is precisely now that the case should begin! Sebuya died because someone cast a spell on him. This is simple and self-evident. What we do not know, however, is the identity of the perpetrator, and that is what we must now ascertain.

Speaking in the most general terms, a wizard did it. A wizard is a bad man, always acting with evil intent. There are two types of wizards (although our Western languages do not differentiate adequately between them). The first is more dangerous, for he is the devil in human form. The English call him witch”

The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behavior betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power with which he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections; it brings him no special pleasure. He simply is that way.

If you are near him, he need only look at you. Sometimes, you will catch someone watching you carefully, piercingly, and at length. It might be a witch, just then casting a spell on you. Still, distance is no obstacle for him. He can cast a spell from one side of Africa to the other, or even farther.

The second type of wizard is gentler, weaker, less demonic. Whereas the witch was born as evil incarnate, the sorcerer (for that is what this weaker sort is called in English) is a career wizard, for whom the casting of spells is a learned profession, a craft, a source of livelihood.

To condemn you to illness or bring some other misfortune down on you, or even kill you, the witch has no need of props or aids. All he need do is direct his infernal, devastating will to wound and annihilate you. Before long, illness will fell you, and death will not be far behind. The sorcerer does not have such destructive powers within himself. To destroy you, he must resort to various magical procedures, mysterious rites, ritual gestures. For example, if you are walking at night through thick bush and lose an eye, it is not because you accidentally impaled yourself on a protruding yet invisible branch. Nothing, after all, happens by accident! It is simply that an enemy of yours wanted to exact vengeance and went to see a sorcerer. The sorcerer fashioned a little clay figure--your likeness--and, with the tip of a juniper branch dipped in hen's blood, gouged out its eye. In this way he issued a verdict on your eye, cast a spell on it. If one night you are wending your way through dense bush and a branch pokes out your eye, it will be proof positive that an enemy of yours wanted to avenge himself, went to see a sorcerer, etc. Now it is up to you to uncover who this enemy is, go visit a sorcerer and in turn order your own revenge.

If Sebuya dies in a car crash, then the most important thing for his family now is to ascertain not whether his brakes were bad, for that is of no consequence, but whether the spells that caused this death were cast by a wizard-devil (witch) or an ordinary wizard-craftsman (sorcerer). It is a critical question, entailing a long and intricate investigation, into which will be pressed various fortune-tellers, elders, medicine men, and so forth. The outcome of this detective work is of utmost significance! If Sebuya died as a result of spells cast by a wizard-devil, then tragedy has befallen the entire family and clan, because a curse like that affects the whole community, and Sebuya's death is merely a foretoken, the tip of the iceberg: there is nothing to do but await more illnesses and deaths. But if Sebuya perished because a wizard-craftsman wanted it thus, then the situation is far less dire. The craftsman can strike and destroy only individuals, isolated targets: the family and the clan can sleep in peace!

Evil is the curse of the world, and that is why I must keep wizards, who are its agents, carriers, and propagators, as far away from myself and my clan as possible; their presence poisons the air, spreads disease, and makes life impossible, turning it into its opposite-death. The wizard, by definition, lives and practices among others, in another village, in another clan or tribe. Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt toward the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune

Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me--they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore the Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.

The Amba are a highly unusual social group. Like other tribes on the continent, they take seriously the existence of evil and the danger of spells, and thus fear and hate wizards, but contrary to the widely held view that wizards dwell among others, that they act from without, from a distance, the Amba maintain wizards are among them, within their families and villages, that they form an integral part of their community. This belief has resulted in the gradual disintegration of Amba society, corroded as it has become by hatred, consumed by suspicion, confounded by free-floating fear. Anyone can be a wizard, brother fears brother, son fears father, a mother fears her own children. The Amba rejected the comfortable and comforting view that the enemy is the stranger, the foreigner, the man of a different faith or skin color. No! Possessed by a peculiar kind of masochism, the Amba live in torment and distress; at this very moment, evil can be under my own roof, asleep in my bed, eating from the same dish as I. And there is a further difficulty: it is impossible to determine what wizards look like. After all, no one has seen one. We know they exist because we see the results of their actions: they caused the drought, as a result of which there is nothing to eat, fires keep igniting, many people are sick, someone is always dying. Plainly, wizards never rest, endlessly occupied as they are with raining misfortunes, defeats, and tragedies down upon us.

The Amba are a homogeneous, cohesive community who live in small villages scattered in sparsely wooded bush; often they suspect a neighboring village, inhabited by their kinsmen, of harboring the wizard who has caused them misfortune. They declare war on the village they judge to be evil. The besieged community defends itself, and sometimes undertakes a war of retaliation. The unceasing wars the Amba wage among themselves leave them thoroughly weakened and defenseless against aggressors from other tribes. Nonetheless, they are so preoccupied with the internecine threat that they are oblivious to this danger. Paralyzed by the specter of an enemy within the gates, they tumble unrestrained into the abyss.

The depressing fate that has come to weigh upon them at least unites them, makes possible a paradoxical solidarity. If I become convinced, say, that a wizard hiding in my village is plaguing me, I can move to another one, and even if that village is at war with my own, I will be hospitably received. This is because all Ambas appreciate how much a wizard can torment you. Consider the paths along which you walk: he can scatter on them pebbles, leaves, feathers, twigs, dead flies, monkey hairs, or mango peelings. It is enough merely to step on any one of those things--you will at once sicken and die. And such small nothings can be found on every trail. So, practically speaking, you cannot move? That is correct, you cannot. You are afraid even to step out of your mud house, for right there on the threshhold might be a piece of the bark of a baobab, or a poisoned thorn.

The wizard wants to hound us to death--that is his objective. There is no medicine against him, no protection. That is why the people I saw that night, carrying a sick man on a stretcher, were moving so furtively: they were escaping. A wizard had cast a spell on the sick man and they were trying to conceal him from the wizard's view, save his life

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Oct 18

AFRICAN CITIES - ON ANGOLA’S CAPITAL

A Short Story from Travel Author Paul Theroux’s Book ‘LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE’ about his travels in Africa and his first impressions of Luanda, 🇦🇴 Angola’s Capital, and of its ‘awfulness’, as he entered it:

“In the afternoon we crossed the Kwanza, a wide river for which the Angolan unit of currency is named. The bridge over the Kwanza had been blown up many times and was being improved again - Chinese design, Chinese laborers, Chinese money.

Though I didn't know it at the time, this was a significant boundary, the river somewhat mystical for Angolans, a setting of myths and folktales and many battles. The land surrounding the Kwanza seemed almost idyllic. But not long after we passed it - thirty miles from the capital - the Luanda blight began.

Soon there were no trees, only shacks and people and bare soil. The blight was not simply the small shacks, cement-block houses, roadside dumps, and stricken villages sitting in a sea of mud; blight was also evident in the new, larger cement structures, unfinished or abandoned or vandalized and sitting in seas of mud.

What appeared to be a modest building boom was in reality cutthroat opportunism, random and shoddily put-together real estate ventures - ugly houses and grotesque skeletal structures projected to be hotels. Why would anyone stay in these hideous buildings surrounded by slum huts? The building boom had been outstripped by the growth of squatter camps, hillsides of shacks.

Buildings were rising, but slums were also growing - the buildings vertically, the slums horizontally. Like the South African pattern of migration, people from rural areas kept coming - the burgeoning shantytowns outstripping any slum improvements, the low mean city of new arrivals visibly sprawling.
In a bus that stopped in traffic for twenty minutes at a time, and with the continual dropping off of passengers, I thought I must be near the center of Luanda, so I got off with some other riders. The place was called Benfica, a district of heavy traffic and ugly buildings, stinking of dust and diesel fumes.

Africa, yes, but it was also a version of Chechnya and North Korea and coastal derelict Brazil, places without a single redeeming feature, places to escape from. As I stood at the roadside, tasting the grit, a small car intending to avoid the clogged traffic sped past, banged into a road divider, flew sideways, and, deformed by the crash, swerved off the road. A man with a bloody face and hands pushed the driver's side door open and, seeing him, bystanders laughed. The bloody-faced man staggered, his arms limp, his mouth agape, like a zombie released from a coffin. He was barefoot. No one went to his aid. He dropped to his knees and howled.

"Idiota," a man next to me said, and spat in the dust.

I became conscious of entering a zone of irrationality. Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness. Everything looked crooked or improvisational, with a vibration of doomsday looming. I would have been happy to get on a bus going in the opposite direction, but I had a dutiful sense of needing to follow through on my plans, continuing north into the insanity.

Many places I'd been in the bush - Tsumkwe or Grootfontein or Springbok - had been described as "nowhere." Yet that was not how I saw them. They were distinctly themselves, isolated though they might be, settlements with a peculiar look-the look of home. But this Benfica was the very embodiment of nowhere, and on the way to nowhere, the twitching decrepitude of urban Africa. Standing next to the sheet-metal shop, the blowing dust, the big trucks and fumes, the noise and the heat, I thought how this was in microcosm the whole of the city experience in most of Africa, though up to now I had avoided facing the fact. And at that point I hadn't yet seen the full extent of Luanda's awfulness.”

From the immensity of the slums, the disrepair of the roads, and the randomness of the building, I could tell that the government was corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people - fearing them for what they saw, hating them for what they said or wrote. Though the regime was guilty of numerous human rights violations, it was not outwardly a politically oppressive place. The police were corrupt, but casually so - Angola was too busy with its commercial extortions to be a police state. It was a government of greed and thievery, determined to exclude anyone else from sharing, and Angolan officialdom had an obsession with controlling information.

I knew of many instances when investigative journalists were arrested for doing their jobs - two of them around the time I was in Luanda. In one case, a print journalist, Koqui Mukuta, was beaten and locked up for reporting on a peaceful demonstration, and twenty of the activists were also arrested. In another example, a radio journalist, Adão Tiago, was jailed for reporting episodes of
"mass fainting," possibly caused by the release of toxic industrial fumes. But the Angolan government does not actively persecute the majority of its people; it is a bureaucracy that impoverishes them by ignoring them, and is indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions.

A society of shakedowns and opportunism is inevitably a society of improvisation. That came across vividly in Luanda: the improvised bridge or road, the improvised hut or shelter, the improvised government, the improvised excuse. Angola was a country without a plan, a free-for-all driven by greed. It was hard to travel through the country and not feel that the place was cursed - not cursed by its history, as observers often said, but cursed by its immense [oil] wealth.

A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I'd stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this.

The xenophobia that characterizes Angolan officialdom in the remote provinces, small towns, and coastal cities is the prevailing mood in the capital, where hatred of outsiders seemed intense. Individually Luandans were friendly enough, sometimes crazily so, screeching their meaningless hellos. Nancy Gottlieb, in Benguela, saw this as "happy, laughing, energetic, smiling," but it seemed to me nearer to frenzy. In crowds they pushed and jostled with the mercilessness of a mob, and anyone with a uniform or a badge or any scrap of authority was unambiguously rude or downright menacing.

Friendliness is helpful to a stranger, yet I could manage without it. Being frowned upon or belittled is unpleasant, but not a serious inconvenience - no writer or traveler is a stranger to hostile or unwarranted criticism. But xenophobia of the sort I found in Luanda, and on an official scale, institutionalized alien-hating, was something new to me. It seemed odd to be disliked for being a stranger, and while the foreigners I met in the capital had their own explanations for this behavior (slavery, colonialism, civil war, the class system, tribalism, poverty, the cold-hearted oil companies) and had ways to cope with it, I found it inconvenient to be so conspicuous and developed a general aversion to being despised.”

“When Luanda does get into the news, it is usually a hooting headline to the effect that the city is practically unaffordable to foreigners: "The most expensive city in Africa!" The Economist, the BBC, and other media outlets have run such stories, with grotesquely colorful details, about the unreasonable sums you had to pay to get very little, which caused expatriates to complain. The people who suffered most from Luanda's high cost of living were not the expatriates but, of course, the urban poor, the people huddled in the musseques. They were mainly a silent class. Not a sullen class, though; Luanda's slums were characterized by blaring music and high spirits bordering on hysteria.

And when I heard of the foreign expatriate couple who paid many thousands of dollars for a tiny room in which the electricity often failed, or hundreds of dollars for a modest restaurant meal, I suspected that they were obliquely boasting, because what kept them in Luanda were their huge salaries. "My rent is seven thousand dollars a month," an expatriate in the oil industry told me. "And there are people who pay eight thousand a month who don't have water half the time." The only reason foreigners came to the city was to make money, and they stayed because their salaries kept growing as oil profits increased. Oil production figures had just been revised upward, output approaching two million barrels a day, at $100 a barrel: a billion dollars of gross revenue every five days, an almost unimaginable cash flow.

Luanda was a hardship post - it had been that way throughout its history but it had become a boomtown based on oil. No traveler had ever praised Luanda in its poor days of the past, but it was much the worse more recently for its wealth: the bad restaurants where it was impossible to get a table, the stinking bars where it was hard to order a drink, the expensive neighborhoods with potholed streets, the traffic jams in which people sat for hours in their unmoving BMWs, Mercedes, or Hummers - I saw more bulky, overpriced Hummers in an average day in Luanda than I saw in a month in the States. Or the bad hotels where locals said I'd be lucky to get a room.

I found my way to the city center, and at the reception desk of a newish but already seedy hotel I was told they might be able to fit me in for three nights. I thanked the clerk for her hospitality.

Unsmiling, being busy, looking away from me, she said, "Pay in advance.
Three nights. That will be eleven hundred dollars. Cash please. No credit cards."

"And you might not have hot water," came a teasing voice behind me.

I had no alternative. The whole of Luanda was a convergence of oil and mining interests, vying for the city's few hotels and restaurants (and prostitutes). The guests at my hotel were foreign workers in the national industries - some rough types in old clothes, especially rowdy in the evening, and the slicker, nastier-looking operators of all nationalities in their new suits, making deals in oil, diamonds, and gold. The words "oil, diamonds, and gold" have such allure, and suggest glitter and wealth in a fabled city fattening on its profits. But this was not the case. The city was joyless, as improvisational as its slums - hot and chaotic, inhospitable and expensive, grotesque and poor.”

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Oct 5

TIME AND FORGETTING IN AFRICA 🧵

A Short Story from Author Paul Theroux’s Book ‘DARK STAR SAFARI’ about his travels in Africa, on his visit to a School he used to work in as a younger volunteer in Malawi 🇲🇼 established by a charitable, well-meaning older British Couple to educate the local African children. After retiring, they had decided to devote their lives to uplifting the Malawian Community there. Returning decades later, Theroux finds the elderly couple dead and their graves overgrown and abandoned. Very few people in the town remember them. The school itself is still functioning but is falling apart and has nearly been stripped bare. Theroux remarks on the lack of a sense of the past in Africa and how quickly things are forgotten there 🧵

On his retirement from the British civil service in 1962, Sir Martin had come to Nyasaland to run a teachers' college. The frugality that World War II had imposed on the British people had made many of them misers and cheese-parers but had inspired in others an incomparable ingenuity, turning them into inventors and self-helpers. He was of the old breed, an educator, not an evangelist, someone who had come to Africa to serve, to call it home, and to die in the bush.

His wife, Lady Margaret, was the same: sporty, intelligent, resourceful, and able to mend the water-driven stirrup pump that generated their electricity. I would sometimes see her bent over a greasy machine tweed skirt, hair in a bun, argyle socks and muddy sandals, waving a socket wrench and saying, "Crikey!" Sir Martin had died in his nineties, Lady Margaret lived on, and in her widowhood she ran Viphya Secondary School in Malawi. I had always seen these people as admirable, even as role models, vigorous retirees I might emulate in my own later years.

"Lady Margaret, she is dead," an African girl told me at the school. The place was looking rundown in a way that would not have pleased its scrupulous late headmistress. She had passed away two years before, at the age of eighty-seven.

"Where is she buried?"

The girl shrugged--no idea. The Roseveares were not proselytizers but they were churchgoers, so I went to the Anglican church in Mzuzu and asked the African vicar if he had known them. "Vicar general," he said, correcting me.

Yes, he had known them. They were wonderful, he said. They had helped build the church. They were buried right here. Their graves were rectangular slabs set side by side in the muddy churchyard, Lady Margaret's unmarked, Sir Martin's inscribed Beloved by All. The graves were overgrown with weeds and looked not just neglected but forgotten. As serious gardeners, haters of disorder, they would have been dismayed at the sight of this tangle of weeds. So I knelt and, as a form of veneration, weeded their graves for old times' sake.

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Oct 4

ANGLOFUTURISM AESTHETICS THREAD - “A Better Future IS Possible!” 🧵

Glistening Spires Amidst Pristine Natural Beauty - Industry and Nature in Perfect Harmony

Enemies of Britain - Brought to Justice!

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