Day 3, Fuding

All views and opinions written by these tea adventures blog entries, of course, are solely my own, and not a reflection of Teance or anyone else in the company. Disclaimers are useless in the age of the information overload- anything can be lifted, copied, and twisted for the benefit of whoever. However, in the tradition of freedom of speech, which is a rapidly diminishing treasure for one of Chinese descent, I have to post at least one blog entry per trip on the subject of ‘How China became China’.  I could just report about the tea, but you can’t have the tea without the people, and you can’t have the people without the land. It’s all inter-connected. There are more than 1.5 billion Chinese in the world, and anything the Chinese does, affects the entire world. But as usual, the good never makes its way rapidly while the bad spreads like wildfire. The good teas are still staying in their mountains, and I have to make my trip every year to access them. The bad, though, is pervasive and permeable to the extreme. How, indeed, did it become this crazily chaotic, ruthless, unruly, country? I am sitting in the small town of Fuding, waiting to go taste the first batch of the harvest this morning. People in China are tired of struggling against the invisible forces that suppress them, the problem going back a couple thousand years. Of the three ancient philosophies that founded Chinese thought, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, only one made no sense whatsover and that’s the one allowed to flourish, like a latent undetected tumor. What Confucius did was to equate morality and ethics to be the same as respect and absolute obedience to authority. The authority though, is conferred to one out of  age hierarchy. Above that, you have the absolute moral obligation to obey authority based on—–get this, the authority of the authoritarians. Someone should have told Confucius he was confused, but of course, authoritarians just loved his philosophy. Wouldn’t you? Your right to rule and suppress others does not result from merit, or even morality, yourself. Your right to rule is defined by the moral obligation of others to support your rule. And so,  against the true wisdom of Buddhism, which seeks realization through seeking truth, compassion, and development of one’s wisdom, and against the freedom of Taoism, which seeks liberation through understanding and merging with the way of nature, you have Confucianism instead, which became wildly popular with the rulers for thousands of years through today, till the Communist philosophy of autocracy took over. So in a nutshell, there you have it. China is lawless, chaotic, frustrating. Your life and whatever freedom is not yours to have. But if you sink into the lull of good food, materialism, money making, and frequent bribes to the authorities, you will survive another day to enjoy that fine Dragonwell or oolong of choice. And now, we bring you-  the Great Firewall of China, over that wall where some people have some freedom to explore different viewpoints, and can actually choose a ruler based on merit. Though with the U.S., that choice might be based on entertainment value, but that’s an entirely different blog entry to never make its way.