des fleurs, toujours & toujours

Not sure if I'm wildly off base here, but I suspect that the phrase "merchant people" used by Chen and others is a literal translation of 商人 or 生意人 in Mandarin? And it got me thinking about the "othering" of East Asia in this book's message about globalized capitalism.

I am really disappointed that this book sets up the "Far East" and particularly China as a mysterious place that is poorly understood and treated as a threat by Europe, yet the narrative never demystifies anything. Instead, "Cathay" is utterly secretive, technologically advanced, developing infrastructure at massive scale, and is strongly implied to be the force behind the "merchant people" who lack all imagination or spiritual side and are destroying the rose world and Lyra's world alike, not even out of greed, but out of their ruthless mechanistic drive for efficiency. I am uncomfortably reminded of Western writing that derides Asian people as conformist "automatons" incapable of creative thought while simultaneously threatening the world with brutal state-supported capitalism, utter disregard for nature, and dazzling technological prowess.

We do not meet any sympathetic people from "Cathay" or Central or Eastern Asia. And of course, any cultural, linguistic, or political specificity to Uyghur communities is ignored- imagine if this book had the knowledge and imagination to address some of the issues of spiritual repression, environmental exploitation, and atomization of community within the context of Chinese and Central Asian history and politics...

Finally, the people of the Rose World are all just Europeans (an Italian widow, a little old English couple) shocked by outsiders and victimized by all the horrid foreigners coming in! Who else would you find at an interdimensional Silk Road nexus on the other end of the richly painted Chinese-style marketplace that flourished as a portal of exchange for generations? Who else would Pullman portray as the ultimate victims of global capitalism and resource exploitation?