Demonizing China
April 24, 2008
1.
AS THE FURORE about China’s handling of Tibet continues, I had this funny idea of writing something nice about China for once. I was stuck in the Jianguomen tube station, contemplating the stinking cocktail of sweat and garlic and baijiu that emerged from an impossibly voluminous crowd of commuters, kids, peasants and old timers who had the impertinent, inconsiderate audacity to take the train at the same time as me. Outside, the smog hung over the traffic and the tailbacks stretched towards the dim horizon. And here I am, in my ninth consecutive year in China, taking the good for granted and searching - as any journalist does - for examples of abuse, oppression, hypocrisy, backwardness and general unpleasantness on the part of my host nation. If you don’t like it, I heard the Norman Tebbit in me snarling, then get out of here and go home.
George Steiner, I remind myself, used to say that one should always regard oneself as a guest in every country one visits, and China, in many ways, couldn’t be any more congenial as hosts.
The foreign media has been accused of demonizing China. And even when the conditions in Tibet are excluded, one can see China’s point. China’s failures are always seen as a unique legacy of the Stalinist planned economy system, and when it changes its system and opens up its economy, it is accused of prioritizing economics over everything else. China is polluting the environment? It’s growth gone mad. Sheer, untempered greed brought about by, erm, abandoning the planned economy system. China tries to set targets to improve air quality and efficiency? They don’t have any chance of meeting them because the system is fundamentally flawed. They do meet the targets? But just look at the human cost.
And when China tries to wean itself off polluting fossil fuels? The Three Gorges Dam is an insane, grandiose and ultimately corrupt attempt to tame nature and its nuclear plans are dangerous and unsustainable, and its long-distance electric power lines - aimed at containing the sources of pollution in the remote west - are untested and doomed to failure. Meanwhile, its ambitious attempt to divert southern flood waters to parched northern regions are unfeasibly Promethean.
The Tibet question has led to quite enough debate. Cranky old Peregrine Worsthorne, a British columnist, took the direct moral equivalence route, saying that China’s activities in Tibet were no worse than Britain’s in Northern Ireland. It is not logical to disqualify anyone from making critical remarks on the grounds that his own government, which he may or may not have supported, did something equally unspeakable in the past. Still, we have a duty to contemplate these issues. The US was created out of the brutal decimation and genocide of native tribes by ruthless colonial exploiters, mainly from my own nation of Britain. That original sin can never be atoned. Does that mean that the US, or anyone who happened to be born there, is automatically disqualified from making any moral judgments whatsoever? No, but we are duty-bound to consider the possibility that China is not a historical anomaly.
Despite what the degenerate remnants of the John Birch Society might think, China is not a unique source of evil but an overpopulated, under-resourced nation teeming with conflicts and challenges.
In any case, there are a lot of things to be thankful for. China’s government, whatever you think of it, is secular and pragmatic on almost every issue other than that of sovereignty, national integrity and the dignity of its ruling party. It is, by now, accustomed to dealing with percentages, margins of error, trade-offs and balancing acts. That it is occasionally prone to outbursts of barely imaginable self-pity and dogged by a persecution complex is partly contingent on its history, and partly a gambling chip as it tries to expand and express itself on the international stage in the most economical way possible. China, in a self-interested way, does believe in ideas of moral equivalence.
Nevertheless, look at its achievements. The much-maligned “liberation of thinking” that emerged after the death of Chairman Mao - discussed at tedious length by Premier Wen Jiabao at the last National People’s Congress - has led to a period of unprecedented economic change and national enrichment. China’s cities have been transformed, and poverty has been reduced across the board.
2.
DESPITE what the government has told us about the unity of the Chinese people as they shudder beneath the waves of foreign hypocrisy and prejudice, dissenting voices do occasionally show through. Unfortunately, they are then drowned out by the white noise of mass patriotic indignation and the hare-trigger hypersensitivities of the country’s netizens, and we are left to wonder what rough beast now slouches towards Beijing to be born.
We are accustomed, by now, to seeing an angry bulletin board message comparing the recent errors of judgment by a number of foreign news agencies to the immolation of the Summer Palace or the seizure of Hong Kong, and we should now be used to the arguments that Tibet is as much a part of China as Texas is a part of the United States. But the atmosphere seems to have soured considerably in the last two weeks or so.
One author said that the “anger of countless members of the lower rungs of society in the face of stock market losses, commodity price surges and unemployment has been shifted instantly to western countries” and it will “ultimately and unavoidably lead to mass violence” against foreigners and foreign enterprises.
We have, of course, been here before, when the Olympic Games were still barely a twinkle in the government’s eye. In 1999, angry mobs surrounded the US consulates after NATO somehow contrived to blow up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Almost exactly three years ago, the authorities had to deal with around 20,000 frustrated youths marching through the streets of Shanghai with rising sun flags defaced with black crosses, T-shirts marked with the bloody visage of Prime Minister Koizumi and banners demanding the return of the disputed Senkaku Islands to China. By and large, the protesters remained on the right side of the divide between menace and violence, but a brief ripple of encouragement would quickly percolate through the crowd and lead to the destruction of a (Chinese-owned) Japanese restaurant or the defacing of a (Chinese-owned) Japanese karaoke bar.
The local media, by and large, have been forced to play to the crowds. A hapless journalist from Qianlong.com , channeling some of the messages coming from the Foreign Ministry, sought to expose the hypocrisy of foreign media outlets like Reuters by pestering their staff with questions about their coverage of the Lhasa riot and the ongoing Olympic flame-out. After being stonewalled at every turn, the journalist concluded that all this talk in the West of press freedom was hypocritical.
Tu quoque, as logicians would put it: the message from the state press is that foreign democracies have no right to criticize China because they themselves are not beyond reproach.
Patriotism tends to have an inversely proportionate relationship with democracy. People, as a rule, prefer to feel free, and in circumstances where liberties have been curtailed, they inevitably make psychological compromises and try to internalize the repression. They identify with the regime and conclude that they have freely come to agree with the regime’s crackdowns, injustices and patriotic spasms. By doing so, they identify a rare government-sanctioned space in which they are free to express themselves.
For this reason, the biggest threat to a cynical government - and all governments are, to varying extents, cynical - is the excessive zeal of their supporters. As the government stokes up national indignation as a way of shoring up their support and papering over some of their problems, the patriotic rebels - with their banners and their bandanas - are on the edge of ecstacy. They wholeheartedly approve of these outbursts of indignation and self-pity because it gives them a rare opportunity to shake off the dreary day-to-day yoke and throw bottles into the US consulate or smash Japanese restaurant windows. Their targets this time are American TV news channels and French supermarket chains, but these things very quickly spiral out of control.
The Cultural Revolution is a classic case in point. Fifteen years of frustration suddenly gave way to a massive, nationwide youth-led revolt that, at the same time, sought to identify with the biggest and most repressive authority figure in the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman Mao. Mao had spent several years in the political wilderness after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and was now trying to reclaim former glories by riding the waves of people power, but it quickly slipped out of his control, as mass hysteria tends to do. Naturally, the rebels - while clinging on to the idea that they were serving Maoist ideals - pushed hard against what was permissable and went far beyond Mao’s imaginings, sending the entire country hurtling towards anarchy.
This time, the media dishes out the propaganda and the Foreign Ministry disgorges its various condemnations of foreign media organizations and foreign politicians, and China’s rebels are given a small window of opportunity to protest in a way that the government itself - while obviously uncomfortable with the idea of mass politics - finds almost impossible to condemn.
People try desperately to escape the herd mentality from within the herd itself, always trying to take things one step further than anyone else by spending their life savings on patriotic advertisements in newspapers , picketing French supermarket chain Carrefour or leading consumer boycotts against KFC or Louis Vuitton or Coca Cola, prowling the streets in search of subliminal anti-Chinese messages in shop windows or on billboards in order to feed the monster inside them.
The government, by now, seems to have had second thoughts about the outpourings unleashed by their propaganda organs over the last few weeks and are now calling for restraint, ordering the jingoistic genie to return to its bottle. It isn’t going to be that easy.
Patriotic lynch mobs armed with PDAs and pitchforks... but in the end, they know that this isn’t good for them.
