9th July 2010, Somewhere over Turkey heading towards Iraqi airspace

I think I should start my first post explaining why I hark back to the paradigm that has been out of vogue with the liberal intelligensia since Said wrote his seminal treatise on the subject. Despite his initial consternations in Orientalism concerning the representation of Arabo-Islamic people in Western academia, his ideas can (and have been) extrapolated to encompass not only the Near East but the actual Orient- China, where my travels are taking me.

Whilst my upbringing has been influenced both by, what orientialists call, the Orient and the Occidental world it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge it is the West where I have been raised and where most of my values and notions of justice hail from. I am very much a product of Great Britain (despite my fanciful illusions of being a citizen of The World). And as I begin my travels I can’t help but feel a sense of compulsion to take on the attitude of a nineteenth-century Englishman heading to the land of peoples less civilised than my own.

Irony aside, my alter ego taking over in the previous paragraph was all in the way of making a point. For months I have been asked by other people “why China?”, “why Mandarin?” and to those people I should have answered “why not?”. We in the UK have been plagued too long with the mindset fostered partly through our education system that European languages, languages of the Occidental world, are the only ones that it makes sense to learn. My only regret is sometimes answering these people with justifications expounding the growing role of China in a globalising world and vague allusions to changing geopolitical paradigms. I don’t hear people asking about why I studied French at GCSE and even if they did, explanations exploring the power play between sovereign states would be greeted with confusion by even the most ardent orientalist.

And so my voyage begins with a plane, manbag in hand and a healthy dose of irony.

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There really isn’t much to report on today. As I write, I’m on Qatar Airways flight QR12 from London Heathrow to Doha International from where I will catch a connecting to Shanghai PVG. I’m hoping to meet a couple of people on the Study China Programme at Doha because there are about five of us taking the same flight from there.