| Who but the Chinese would have had the grit and the tenacity to build a 4000 mile long wall - the only man-made construction visible from the moon? And who but the Chinese would have thought of inventing the fortune cookie - a message within a palatable casing? Anyone familiar with China’s 5000 year old civilisation would know that nothing the Chinese do is ever impetuous or unplanned. One cannot achieve such a continuum unless one covers that stretch of time in careful, measured, premeditated steps. For this reason alone, if for no other, we in Pakistan - the only nation that China has befriended with a constancy we perhaps do not deserve - need to re-visit our conversations with the Chinese and to see whether there are, within the palatable casing of diplomatic niceties, more serious messages to which we should be paying heed. |
| Our relationship with the Chinese may be 'all-weather’ but it is not one of equals. It cannot be. Giants are never comfortable in the company of pygmies. But for reasons which giants know better and pygmies dare not question, we and the Chinese over the past fifty years have remained together, in awkward tandem. We on our part love them, for what they can do for us. They on their part love us, despite what we do to ourselves. Over the years of our eccentric relationship they have shown magnanimity of a level we have never merited, and never reciprocated to the level of their expectations.[EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 24 July 1999, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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