The unfeasibly young and brilliant Matthew Franklin Cooper writes:
I realise that it is very difficult for Anglo-American expats like me to
write about China – one can write a book about a day spent here (so the
saying goes), a short paper about a month spent here, and maybe a
sentence if we choose to linger for a year or more.
As members of a
hegemonic society which still manages to retain a vast degree of power
internationally, facing what may or may not be an up-and-coming
hegemonic society, our writing is due to be examined from many angles;
it is therefore imperative that we write with care and perspicacity.
And it is imperative that we speak as much of the truth about China that
we can comprehend. It is enough to deter many from contributing. But
write we must.
Much as I may disagree – occasionally vehemently – with Charlie Custer at ChinaGeeks, the contributors to Tea Leaf Nation, Dr Sam Crane over at The Useless Tree, Gil Grundy over at Fear of a Red Planet and Richard Burger at The Peking Duck, not to mention Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn, Dr David Moser and Didi Tatlow over at the excellent Sinica Podcast,
I nevertheless have a profound respect for what they do, and often
stand amazed by the sheer quality and depth of what they put out.
It is
really, really difficult for someone who has been here long
enough to write about China without becoming jaded or superficial. I
certainly don’t always succeed. I often feel like a lot of my work
takes on a needlessly confrontational tone, to the government, to the
dissident community and to the expat community – the art of smoothing
over conflict in conversation is a Chinese talent I have yet to master.
And often I feel like I’m only catching a part of the truth in my
hermeneutic.
Which is actually one of the reasons I’m writing this article.
It strikes me that when one arrives in China for the first time, one is
immediately struck with the impression of a deep divide between the
outward face, the ‘official culture’ of Party pronouncements and People’s Daily
articles, and the inner convictions of a lot of China’s people,
particularly the young people one is most likely to meet in
Beijing-Shanghai or the Guangzhou megalopoleis.
My friends at Capital
Normal University certainly fit the mold. I remember two of my
classmates in particular – Jessy and Alex are their English names – who
did not identify at all with the ‘official culture’, and who were eager
to study abroad themselves and hopefully find a culture, perhaps in the
United States, that they could better identify with. They got along
better with those of us in the CET exchange programme, it often seemed
like, than they did with their own countrymen.
I certainly do not blame them in that. That’s the story of my life,
after March 2003, when (as a tenderfoot of seventeen years) I began to
lose faith in the inherent rightness of democracy qua democracy,
began to look with a jaundiced eye at the supposedly ‘free’ press which
was very decidedly closed to the opinions and questions of those of us
in the anti-war movement, and generally began to despair of American
culture. There is absolutely no shortage of foul play in the Chinese
‘official culture’ to prompt such cynical reactions amongst young
people, particularly the technologically-savvy denizens of Weibo who are
the most likely to have access to information from beyond the Great
Firewall.
At the same time, though, I think there is a tendency in the expat
community to oversimplify. Sure, there is a broad swathe of China’s
East Coast urbanites who have beefs with the government (and naturally
the ethnic minorities in the China’s west), who tend to look toward the
political and economic doctrines of pseudo-Western modernity as their
nation’s salvation.
And sure, this broad swathe of the Chinese
grassroots gets pretty roundly ignored by the mouthpieces of official
culture. But, having made more Chinese friends both here and in the US,
having married a brilliant and wonderful Chinese woman, having worked
with Chinese colleagues and having gotten past a lot of the inhibitions
people have to discussing politics in China, I feel that this is also
only a small piece of the larger picture.
Graduate students who come to the United States to study are often taken
aback by the ease of access to information. Once they use it, however,
they will often come to see that what is said in the ‘free press’ is to
be doubted every bit as much as what is said in China’s state-run
media. Often they will come away with an appreciation for the way their
government does things that they did not have before. Which is
naturally not to say that they become fifty-centers, by any stretch of
the imagination. But, as my wife put it, ‘the more I read about the
United States, the more respect I have for China’s government; if the
United States had as large a population as China, its problems would
certainly be far worse’.
One of my colleagues, Vivian, said that living in the interior of China
is very different from living in Beijing or Shanghai. People here tend
to be much more traditional, much more reserved. Parents and
grandparents are respected – the word ‘孝順’ is not mere empty piety. In
part, that is due to necessity: Inner Mongolia is traditionally quite
poor, particularly when compared to the rest of China, and people depend
on their family members for support.
Another interesting aspect to note is the resurgence of religion in China. I have remarked
on some of the ways in which the Christian message gets really
distorted here, with really ignorant and destructive exponents of
Christianity like Yu Jie. But one has to bear in mind that we are
witnessing resurgences of Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism in
post reform-and-opening China, in part because of the growing
dissatisfaction with both the dialectical materialism of Mao and its
logical successor in the consumerism which flourished under Deng.
Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism all, of course, provide very
different responses to these excesses, but they are apparently finding
wide enough audiences for scholars to perk up and take note.
The China which I see around me, and with which I interact daily, is
neither the ‘harmonious society’ of Hu Jintao nor the liberal
Western-leaning anti-society desired and embodied by ‘public
intellectuals’, the Weibo commentariat and (most of) the expat
community. Both of those elements are there, of course, alongside
another pull which is not fully satisfied with either one.
This pull
may or may not be appropriately labelled ‘Confucian’ – I think Sam Crane
makes very valid points when he critiques the reductive nature of many
amateur commenters on Asia attribute all cultural distinctions, real and
perceived, between China and ‘the West’ to the work of Confucius –
though certainly it has Confucian elements in what it marks off as
‘shameful’. Among these elements are: a respect for the elderly and
for familial duties, a non-negotiable value placed on community and
relationships, a desire for an egalitarian-leaning (if not necessarily
egalitarian) just social setup, and a growing scepticism toward profit
merely for profit’s sake (if not necessarily toward profit itself).
Those who subscribe to this pull face a false choice – and the same
choice is offered them by both the CCP and the liberals. The CCP would
put it to them that to choose the liberal path would be to reject a just
order in favour of an undisciplined, decadent licence; and the liberals
would put it to them that to choose the CCP’s path would be to reject
freedom in favour of totalitarian tyranny.
Each presents itself as the
‘only way out’ – just as, between the Soviet Union and Reaganite /
Thatcherite neoliberalism, each presented itself as the only
alternative. TINA still appears to be dogma amongst the young coastal
elites: China must adopt liberal-democratic capitalist modernity in the
Western mold, or die. This was Liu Xiaobo’s entire intellectual
conceit – along with a visceral bigotry against Muslims and a
cringe-inducing enthusiasm for the Bush doctrine.
As Wang Hui noted in The End of the Revolution, there is a de facto,
if not necessarily intentional, collusion between China’s neoliberal
and neoconservative ‘dissidents’ (whose voices are magnified by
attention from the press and funding from Western governments) and
China’s own government to ensure that the range of acceptable political
discourse operates solely in the field between these two poles.
Criticism of China’s prevailing social and economic setup from the
(non-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) new left is always hogtied rhetorically,
both by the government and by the liberals, to the Cultural Revolution;
criticism from the (non-capitalist, non-liberal, non-interventionist)
old right are hogtied rhetorically to a benighted and inegalitarian
Chinese past and made to carry the legacy of the 國恥 – the ‘national
humiliation’ of the Qing Dynasty by the West.
And yet, even as the local experimentation of Bo Xilai has been
ruthlessly and extralegally stamped out (at the hands of China’s
government, with the broad blessings and support of China’s liberals and
the Western press), it must be emphasised that China needs these
alternatives. As Cambridge institutional economist Chang Ha-Joon has
pointed out on numerous occasions, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea became successful economies because, and only to the degree that, they did not
conform, in full, to the dictates of the neoliberal Washington
consensus; that they did not follow Mao’s path in its entirety either is
a point not worthy of mention. China’s current economic and political
model is not sustainable, as an increasing number of Chinese people, and
– to be fair – the government, both realise.
If and when procedural democracy does come to China, we may indeed find
that the third-direction pull is stronger than either the government or
the Western expat community anticipates. I have a strong suspicion that
it would do so in Baotou. It is a pull which may find itself in
sympathy with either the Chinese neoleftists, or the political Confucian
movement, or both – but as these movements are both largely academic
and as yet hold no mass appeal, they are unlikely to gain immediate
traction.
Still, it is this third-direction pull which has to find an outlet of
some kind in public policy. History shows that when this pull is
ignored, those subscribing to it will create their own (the White Lotus,
the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxers, and more recently the Tian’anmen
Square protests); and that the consequences can be quite disastrous.
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