Well, it cannot be in the sheer number of Chinese bodies on earth. In my childhood, I used to hear elders talking about how, if only every Chinese simply spits, the flood would have drowned out Taiwan, or the British Isles, or wherever they want to vent their nationalist rage.

True enough, every fifth person in the world is a Chinese. But to boast of that fact as an achievement will only invite the equally racist retort that the Chinese breed like rabbits. Believe me, I have scoured websites that are supposed to promote inter-ethnic debate, and comparison of the Chinese people to fast multiplying rodents is not rare on those sites.

However, a more articulate Chinese person will declare that he prides himself as the Descendent of the Dragon, a link in the chain of 5000 years of superior culture. When confronted with a hairy barbaric towering aggressive Foreign Devil, this self-consciousness of cultural superiority tends to fill his chest, almost like a psychological knee jerk reaction.

In any case, there is no dearth of writers extolling the superiority of their 5000 years of refinement in the Sin Chew Jit Poh and the Nanyang Siang Pao . In fact, Chinese intellectuals and scribes engaged in the culture and education industries see, as their main mission in life, the study, research, teaching and transmission of their long and rich cultural heritage.

Certainly, the Chinese Studies Department at Southern College, New Era College, and TAR University etc have been established with this objective very much in mind. A popular slogan is: Handing on the Torch. (It is this most deep-seated aspiration of the Chinese community that Umno has tried to suppress for many decades, and which PAS and Keadilan has simply neglected to understand.)

First, let me clarify my stand. I for one believe that every one of the 70 ethnic groups or so in Malaysia has the right to receive active government support and recognition in the furtherance of their cultural heritage in a meaningful way, because, at the end of the day, ethnic diversity is an asset, not a liability.

Having said that, I still feel ambivalent about the relationship between your average Chinese person in Malaysia and his 5 millennia of cultural traditions.

Rich and complex

Certainly, the Chinese civilisation is a rich and complex depository of some of the finest intellectual and artistic achievements in the world. What is more striking, is that - unlike their early counterparts in Egypt, Mesopotamia and India 5000 years ago the full bloom of Chinese culture that emerged from the Neolithic dawn on the plans of the Yellow River has since continued uninterrupted to this day.

Nevertheless, my lingering perplexity is this: exactly how many of those who proudly declare themselves as "we Chinese" understand and appreciate the most elementary aspects of their great and ancient heritage?

It is not easy. The vehicle for the sustenance and propagation of Chinese culture is the Chinese language, which is difficult to master at the best of times, even for the Chinese.

To make it worse, right up till the beginning of the 20th century, the treasure trove of Chinese literature and philosophy is in the format of classical Chinese, which may be extremely provocative, but which is so condensed and obtuse that it has always been accessible only to a small handful of erudite mandarin-scholars. For many Chinese people, it may as well be Greek or Sanskrit.

Likewise, the mountains of classical texts that mark the pinnacle of Chinese achievement, and give expressions to the quintessential Chinese soul, will forever be beyond the reach of your Chinese men-on-the-street, because of this difficult format in which they were written.

In truth, the teeming millions of Chinese humanity who throng the shopping complexes and restaurants of Kuala Lumpur are unlikely to have read and studied the original works of philosophers like Lao Tze, Chuang Tze, Confucius, Mencius, or any of the other Hundred Schools that flourished during what Karl Jasper called the Universal Axial Age, about 5 centuries before Christ.

(The May 4th Movement of 1919 discarded this archaic form of written language, and adopted the modern version of conversational language in its written form.)

I suppose there are also many Englishmen who would not give two hoots about Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare. So, it is no big deal for any Chinese person not to have pored over I Ching, except when he needs a spot of fortune telling, and as long as he does not boast loudly often about his 5000 years of cultural heritage.

A more important question to ask is: what is the proper relationship between an individual and his cultural traditions?

Of course, nobody is born into a cultural vacuum; everybody is engendered, nurtured and brought up within the context of his communal cultures, like a word finding itself flung upon a page of pre-existing writing. The life-world of cultural traditions, values and belief system is what gives meaning to the existence of any individual human being up to a point.

Nevertheless, the life of an individual or a community is not frozen in space and time. In the river of flux that flows through the immanent scheme of things, all things are connected to the yet-to-be-realised universe of possibilities.

In other words, the cultural traditions inherited by the individual born into them are but the givens, the raw materials for the continuous self-creation of the individual and the community, rather than dead ossified fossilised stones, to be passed from generation to generation like family heirloom.

Traditions must be lived through the individual, who, when he transforms and transcends those traditions, also transforms and transcends himself. It is not always true that one ought to see one's children perish, in preference to seeing the death of one's traditions. Traditions are meant for human beings, not the other way round!

Not accomplished fact

If this is the case, one cannot deny the hermeneutic nature in how cultural traditions are perceived by individual members of the cultural community. In truth, we do not accept all our traditions as an accomplished fact. Inevitably we interpret our traditions according to the contingencies of our lived experience.

This interpretive act is a manifestation of our freedom as moral agents in choosing how we shall live our life both as individuals and as members of a community. The freedom of choice liberates us from the shackles of traditions, and enables us to make use of past traditions in the eternal present, towards self and community creation and re-creation in the future.

If this is the case, we cannot avoid make moral judgements about our past and our corpus of cultural traditions. The interpretive subjective judgements entailed in living out our traditions make our culture plural. It does not lead to the nihilism of absolute relativism. Instead, it gives life to the dialectical interaction amidst the multiplicity of Being.

Therefore, all ethnic cultures, taken singly and individually, are plural, alive and open in nature. The idea that there is something called a pure frozen unadulterated Chinese culture, which is 5000 years old and superior to other cultures, is a dogmatic myth.

The problem here is not merely in determining the objective standard by which we can compare the merits and demerits of different cultures. Neither is it relevant to point out here that the Chinese culture per se , is in fact a conglomeration of many indigenous cultures in China, and that in the long historical process, the so-called Chinese culture has absorbed much of the cultural influence of the surrounding lands, especially that of Indian Buddhism. Essentially, ethnic and cultural borders can be pretty blurred.

In the spirit of interpreting critically his traditions for the all-important purpose of living a meaningful life, a more important question for a self-conscious Chinese person to ask is this: What can be wrong within that massive imagined entity he calls "Chinese culture"?

Could it have been the very exclusivist ethnocentricity manifest in those immortal words

Those not of our race

Their hearts are bound to be different?.

As far as I can trace back in time, these words were first uttered in the time of the Spring-Autumn Period (771-476 BC) in China, and generally attributed to Chi Yoon Tze according to the history classics, the Zuo Zuan, purportedly written by Zuo Chiu Ming, a disciple of Confucius.

Apparently, that ethnocentric sentiment had long existed in china, among the predecessors of the late Chou people during the Spring-Autumn Period, when the Chinese referred to themselves as the Hua Siah race.

That sentiment of ethnocentric superiority had since been inherited by the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD), from which the idea of Han Chinese is derived. The lines above have since enjoyed a long life, lasting till to-day.

This idea that the Han Chinese people are destined to a place at the centre of the universe, by virtue of their heavenly decreed superiority, may be one of the reasons leading to the decline of the great Chinese Empire in recent centuries.

And now, with the possible emergence of China as the new hyperpower of the 21st century, how shall we rethink this perennial ethnic/racial sentiment weaving in and out of the long history in China?

To be continued next Saturday

WRITER'S NOTE : I wish to acknowledge with appreciation the correction made by reader Kuangxin, and it is the national flag of the People's Republic of China that has the five stars, and not that of the Taiwanese flag.