The China Vortex

The west never seem to tire of telling the Chinese, especially Chinese government, about how China should become a more open society, and the Chinese never tire of telling the west to shut up and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs.

The great irony is that for the most part, both sides agree on one thing: that China should become more open. It’s just that many westerners think that they should set a timetable which the Chinese should march to, and the Chinese believe that they should make the changes according to their own internal considerations. I believe that by publicly criticizing the Chinese government and policy, many well-intentioned western critics (and some not so well-intentioned), actually slow down the pace of China’s opening up because if the Chinese government and society changed more quickly, they would be seen as bowing to western pressure. That is something no Chinese government can afford to seen doing.

This is the core reason why I have so little time for most western critics of Chinese government and Chinese social reforms. At the end of the day, the Chinese government and people will have to proceed at a pace they are most comfortable with.

Some say that this is a naive approach which favors the government since, after all, they are in power. I don’t agree with this view. Thirty years of reforms have unleashed social forces which not even the Chinese government can hope to control and completely contain.

One interesting story is that of Fan Paopao, the teacher who ran away from his classroom, thinking first of his own personal safety, ahead of those of his students. Then, he wrote about it in his blog. This week, he was fired from his school, and has now become the subject of widespread ridicule.

But the true significance of the story is that Fan Meizhong is alive, and can freely speak and defend his actions and views in China. If he had had the temerity to do this 40 years ago during the Cultural Revolution, or even 20 years ago, there is a good chance that he would have been publicly denounced for the very least, and maybe have even been killed.

But he has not, and continues to defend his actions on his blog.

China has changed a lot.

It is becoming a much more open society, where different views can be heard. There are borders where the government will not countenance criticism, but as the society changes, those areas are becoming fewer and smaller. The society is becoming more and more what was called in Taiwan 多元化 or what is known in China as 多角化. This means that there are more different groups and subgroups, some of which will evolve their own subcultures within Chinese society.

Mao was never comfortable with this approach, he wanted society to be the same, right down to the dress code, not thinking and not criticizing, just obedient to him and his apparatus. Those days are gone. Like Fan Paopao, people are much more individualistic, and are not afraid to speak their minds. And they are willing to stand up for their views and take the consequences.

Without a doubt, there are groups and individuals in the Chinese government who are not comfortable with some of the changes this is leading to, but they cannot turn back the clock of reform and opening up. There may be many admirers of Mao Zedong in China, but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would want to have another Cultural Revolution. (In the Chinese government’s official version of history, the Cultural Revolution is referred to as a “national disaster”.)

I think of the past eight years in the US as being much like America’s version of the Cultural Revolution. After 9/11, this administration tried to push its own agenda on the American people and on the rest of the world. Their interpretation was that those who attacked New York on that day hated America for its freedoms, and that the world is divided sharply between good and evil, with no room for anything in between. This meant that there must be a confrontational struggle which will end in final victory for good and defeat for evil. Ironically, in order to defend freedom, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus and other means which most Americans abhor had to be used.

Most Americans don’t subscribe to this view any longer. We’ll find out in November.

So maybe looking past all the political and social rhetoric, the west, America and China are not that different from each other after all? The challenge is that these changes are evolving in China, and do not make the western press because they are not “news”. This is why many western critics are hopeless ignorant. They don’t understand the social context of China, choosing instead to focus media attention on single issues.

In China, most of the most important things which happen do not make news, but in the aggregate, they are indeed revolutionary in scope.

If the west and China understood each other better and looked at each other in these terms, maybe there would be a lot less misunderstanding.

Technorati Tags: 9/11, China, Chinese, culturalrevolution, Fanpaopao, maozedong, media, rhetoric, social, society

In the past month, there has been much discussion about how the Chinese government’s policy to Tibet has been intransigent and shows that China has not changed and reformed and become a more open society. Either deliberately or by implication, there is this myth that China is one big country with an authoritarian government which has a great plan to gobble up the world and take away the world’s natural resources, only to turn them into cheap products exported all over the world.

And China will not change, or make any effort to accommodate the rest of the world.

Many in the western media have not only failed to take into account changes in Chinese society, they persist in putting forth this outdated myth which many unknowing observers in the west continue to believe. One favorite is when speaking about China to always put it in the context of events of 1989. News images in the west routinely use an image of a man standing defiantly in front of a tank. The subtext of the message is simple: this is a government which does not care about rights and is not open. The result is that western audiences’ image of China is frozen in the past, and does not update to reflect current realities, and that is the reality of what China is today.

This would be as wrong, unbalanced and irrelevant as showing an image of a shackled African slave to show how racist American society is. Yes, there are injustices in society, but selecting extreme examples and implicitly citing them as fact do not contribute to the conversation. In fact, they make it much more difficult to reach some kind of understanding which can traverse cultural and linguistic boundaries.

In fact, Chinese society in 2008 is vastly different from 1989. For the most part, people have more freedoms than they did in 1989: they are free to choose their jobs, buy their own homes, where they live, who they marry and even to travel (with some restrictions) outside of China. Politics has taken a back seat, and most care more about their grocery bills (which have been rising precipitously) than what is going on in Tibet and adjacent regions.

Are there injustices? Yes, just as there are in any society which is undergoing rapid change. Just as there is no child who can learn to walk without taking some falls, there are sometimes setbacks. But let’s put things in context. The general trend is forward and to more openness, to a society which more closely resembles any modern society, warts and all.

Now there is another side to the recent Tibet events. If the Chinese government is indeed so powerful and all-knowing, why were they so taken off-guard by the events of March 14, and the other events which took place inside and outside China in the days and weeks after?

Does this sound like a government which knows everything about its citizens? I don’t think so.

My experience is that governments are incapable of performing very smart, or even halfway intelligent, acts. On an operational level, nineteen hijackers successfully pulled off the 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 3,000 people, caused lasting damage to the American economy measuring more than 100 billion dollars, not to mention the American psyche. This was all done by nineteen highly-motivated individuals who were willing to die in the process of causing lasting damage to America. There was no government involvement of any kind.

Then contrast this with the current US administration’s decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. So far, this war has cost more than 4,000 American lives, thousands of Iraqi lives, and according to Joseph Stiglitz, has cost more than three trillion US dollars (most of it borrowed money; this is probably the first war in world history where the expense was put on the tab to be paid off by future generations) without any end in sight.

Who was smarter? Who is dumber?

This is the trouble with government conspiracy theories. They imply a level of secrecy, coordination, cooperation and intelligence which are almost impossible to find in any government.

The Chinese government is no exception to this rule.

Technorati Tags: 9/11, authoritarian, China, Chinese, conspiracy, economy, government, monolith, politics, reform, Tibet, travel