Like just about everyone else I know, I am depressed by the news. I try to stick to a self-prescribed diet of only things that give me information I can act on and while that allows me to tune out some of the tragedy and political folly that saddens and enrages rather than informs it still leaves me with the responsibility to learn a great deal: to understand how it is that big money has come to play such an enormous role in this ostensible democracy and whether it can be reversed, how my government acts in international affairs, whether business can ever be entrusted with working to protect the environment and workers’ rights, or to improve global parity. Of course I fail miserably to grasp all of these things in their entirety, and not only because I am consumed with digesting all things China and that keeps me in overtime as it is. And while I can’t keep up with all the news and views on our red friends, I do follow trends and I do so with considerable dismay; there are so many attacks and insults and behind almost all of them is ignorance and fear. It is little consolation that my mission, if it can be called one, is to teach and mediate, to suggest simple shifts of perspective that mutually humanize and familiarize the people of the two nations. When my Chinese friends express their horror at what they see as the abdication of familial responsibilities by Americans who put their elderly parents in homes or cut off support to their adult children I do my best to explain the individualistic values that make these decisions not only justifiable, but prescribed. When I encounter taxi drivers shocked that I would dare to criticize my government I attempt to explain American civic values while expressing my respect for Chinese culture and politics.
I don’t know how successful I am in these attempts, but I do feel confident that my attempts to reach out have had a positive, if teeny tiny effect, on bilateral relations, if for no other reason than many people I’ve met had never before had an actual conversation with an American, and they liked and respected me.
But having spent half of the last five years living in Beijing (which of course cannot wholly represent China – even less than D.C. represents the U.S.), I’m much less concerned by the insularity expressed in Chinese attitudes towards America than by that visible in American attitudes towards China. The belligerence of politicians and talking heads astounds me: who, if they consider it for a moment, can believe that being openly critical of China’s domestic policies or its favoring of economic growth over revaluing the yuan or refusal to sign on to Kyoto will have any positive effect (aside from short-term political gains)? Do I agree with all of the policies of the Chinese party-state? Absolutely not. But I can say with confidence that if any Chinese politician or pundit visited the U.S. and criticized superPACs, fracking, or encroachments on abortion seeking to deny women’s rights over their bodies (I’m looking at you Virginia), or if Chinese citizens held protests against American racial profiling or police brutality it would have the very opposite of the desired effect on policy change, setting off instead a massive wave of reactionary nationalism and taking us very far away from the cooperation and mutual respect that is the only way forward.
To clarify, it’s not about the legitimacy of the complaints or the ethical validity of either side, it’s about the wrong-headedness of an attack that insults the other party and leaves them with no choice but self-defense.
What concerns me more immediately is that while going on the offensive in criticizing China, we (politicians and citizens both), seem to be losing touch with the ideas and institutions that have made this nation so great, those that continue to attract creative, ambitious, brilliant students, entrepreneurs, and artists, feeding back economically in the innovation and drive that are even now staving off economic depression.
On my last trip to China I had a long talk with a dear old friend about some of my most perplexing research/dissertating questions, expressing my thoughts about the expectations Chinese citizens have regarding the rights and protections owed them by a government which calls itself socialist, yet has a consumers’ association with 150,000 branch offices, and yet fails to significantly empower consumers to act on their established legal rights. My friend had spent a year in the United States teaching Chinese on exchange and told me that her trip helped her to understand both countries in a new way: Americans, she believed, expected certain things of their leaders as their representatives, while Chinese tended to see their own interests as divorced from that of the government (this echoed what I heard elsewhere on the subject of taxes: instead of seeing themselves as having vested interests and claims as taxpayers many acquaintances told me tax revenue was “the government’s money”).
The thing that had left the deepest and most positive impact on my friend was America’s public library system – there is simply nothing like it in China. She and her husband had been ardent users of their local library during their stay, checking out movies and children’s books to help them improve their English skills, and when they spent the holidays with me in Seattle I took them to our architecturally stunning and art-filled downtown library, after which they spent a considerable time in the gift shop finding souvenirs for friends back home. They joked later that they had been sold a false bill of goods: while socialism had promised a worker’s utopia it had never produced anything like the temple to the public good they saw in the libraries that capitalism built.
I hope we can continue to demonstrate that we as a nation still value equal opportunity by supporting schools, libraries, parks, and vital social services. The trends aren’t encouraging, but you can still make your voice heard in support of what you believe in and you can still inform yourself as a citizen, courtesy of your public library.
And should you wish for more extensive and erudite analysis on contemporary China I recommend checking out this fine book:
