Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Soap operas too are popular, so the Chinese have begun producing their own with considerable success. In 1991 the fifty-part series Aspirations created a sensation and gave serious competition to the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mexican soap operas already on the air. In boom cities like Shanghai, there are few signs of the local culture that fuels Jihad, subtle or otherwise. Shanghai is not “like” Hong Kong and Singapore: it is Hong Kong and Singapore, except the traffic is worse. Chu Chia Chien has returned from her New York exile to the city of her youth and says of her new neighbors: “They are very fashion-conscious, but now they like to have a name brand—it is very important because it says ‘I have money.’”10 Meanwhile, the China Culture Gazette, official organ of the Ministry of Culture, has gone slick and fashionable, featuring busty Western nudes and sincere discussions of sexuality and eroticism. Editor Zhang Zuomin uses Red Guard language of the cultural revolution to advance the interests of the market. “I believe we must smash open Chinese culture, and apply ‘the great fearless spirit’ to our newspaper work,” he says.11

  With such developments made rampant by official support for markets, it is not hard to appreciate why Asian authorities in Communist and non-Communist countries alike insist on state control over information and the media, though for the most part in vain. Indonesia has shown a radical intolerance toward its independent media in recent years, in the main to forestall political opposition. But the government clearly also feels some need to use media control in its struggle against foreign culture. The cola companies, after all, have declared war on Indonesian tea culture. And while free-market philosophy urges freedom for advertising, it is agnostic about intervention via censorship against the kind of free cultural lifestyles advertising promotes.

  China, no less culturally defensive than France, is tightening control over the production and screening of films with even more fer vor than the French. It has restricted foreign films to 30 percent of the total market. Yet though the government tries to retain absolute control over political ideas, in leaving cultural images and commercial information to the marketplace it flails at mosquitoes with a butterfly net. In the long run the cultural mosquitoes are more likely to bring down the regime than the political butterflies that are captured. Artists have learned to use irony in place of anger, while publications like the Cultural Gazette make sure that between the nudes and gossip no political criticism slips in. The authorities understand that what they keep out via locks and bars on the front door labeled politics often creeps in through the wide-open back door labeled markets, but what is to be done? For example, aware of how ubiquitous McWorld’s satellite transmissions have become, they have dutifully banned the use of satellite dishes to receive anything other than Chinese signals without, however, banning the dishes themselves—everywhere visible atop the sooty apartment blocks of Beijing and Shanghai. This is about as effective as making it illegal to look at pinups but licensing the sale of Playboy. They might of course have banned the sale and use of the dishes altogether, but that would have disrupted a highly profitable industry in which the Ministry of Electronics manufactures dishes and the Army General Staff Department as well as the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television sell them to the general public. And so while government officials rant against corrupt Western culture, their colleagues are busily selling the instruments of corruption. Economic success for the fledgling industry—a dish in every home—will signal cultural failure: McWorld in every home.

  Hot wars are conducted by force of arms; the Cold War put propaganda and images to the direct service of political ideas in a struggle for the hearts and minds of men. McWorld’s war proceeds by inadvertence, circumventing heart and mind in favor of viscera and the five senses, seducing peoples with the siren call of self-interest and desire where the self is defined wholly by want, wish, and the capacity to consume. Chinese spectators in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square “ought” to be interested in truthful journalism, but, exposed to McWorld’s videology, they avow to being far “more interested in sit-coms or cops-and-robbers shows than in news programs.” According to Zhang Zedong who runs a state-owned satellite-dish shop, “what people want is entertainment. They’re not so interested in BBC, but rather in MTV …”!12

  China has another problem as well: how to enforce its ideologically motivated centralist edicts on regions with a great deal of geographical autonomy that (as instructed) are motivated more by economics than ideology and that often ignore political edicts in favor of market edicts, since the two come from the same central government, but stand in sharp contradiction. In boom regions in South China, Shanghai and the Yangtze River, and Manchuria, the central government’s Jihad against Westernization is largely ineffective. Like Catalonia or Lombardy, such regions achieve some independence from the Chinese centralist regime through direct engagement in world trade. Orders handed down in Beijing commanding banks to stop speculating are flat-out ignored; orders to limit oil consumption enforced by local production controls are simply circumvented by increasing imports from abroad. A family-planning clinic run by the government recently reversed the ideological polarity (one child per family) set by the authorities when it discovered it could earn more as a fertility clinic.13 Some predict that regions on the extreme periphery like Tibet or oil-rich Xinjiang Province may try a Chinese-Quebec and secede from China altogether, although the brutal repression in Tibet suggests how committed the leadership is to retaining control.14 As in the West, the breakdown of a centralist Communist government can mean anarchy—an argument officials have been all too ready to use to oppose democracy since the time of the emperors. According to one official: “All the time in Chinese history, when you don’t have strong rule, you get chaos and warlords. If we try to get too much democracy, it’ll all fall apart again. China will disintegrate, and it’ll be worse than in the Soviet Union.”15

  Of course no perspicacious observer would want to argue that China faces an internal Jihad against central, modernizing rule on the scale found in Eastern Europe and the regions of the former Soviet Union; less than 10 percent of the population (less than 100 million people) count as members of the fifty-five ethnic minorities of China, and they are concentrated in the West. Yet there are fears that even as the Chinese nation struggles against Westernization, traditionally remote regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia will step up their own struggle against “Chinafication.” In predominantly Muslim Xinjiang, for example, ethnic Uighurs have more in common with neighbors across the former Soviet border than with cadres in Beijing. The central government has relied on force in the past in places like Tibet and will no doubt do the same again, especially in underdeveloped regions. In the south, however, where economic success coupled with regional autonomy is creating a natural catalyst for greater independence, the situation may be harder to contain. Moreover, the fear of “falling apart again” is deeply rooted in China’s pre-Communist history of warlordism and clan feuds, and the feuding has risen again in the provinces as Communist Party control has been loosened.16 The triple threat of secession by remote regions, clan feuds at the village level, and relative economic independence in the prospering provinces can only make the central government exceedingly anxious—whether or not it uses the language of Jihad to describe its potential adversaries.

  China is of course a very special case: huge, ancient, highly civilized, Communist, traditionally hostile to foreigners and their barbarian cultures, and, though historically decentralized with a strong village culture, never at any moment in its long history really democratic. Its variations on both Jihad and McWorld are likely to have a distinctive look. What is striking is that even here where a native culture might be thought to have its greatest chances against the children of the Western Enlightenment, McWorld seems irresistible. Like Catalonia and Quebec, the provinces waging the most successful struggle for autonomy from central government interference and Communist Party busybodiness are those that have joined McWorld rather than those that fear it. Suzhou
comes to look like Nanjing, Nanjing like Shanghai, and Shanghai like Hong Kong. And so, day by day, China looks more and more like it is fulfilling what the diplomat cited earlier called its dream: to become some elephantine version of Singapore where, as long as you keep your mouth shut and your politics neuter, you can do anything you want, above all make money by the boxcar.

  Certainly China has been more successful in containing both internal Jihad and external McWorld than, say, Sri Lanka, where the government of what was once the island paradise of Ceylon has been kept busy by a revolt of ethnic Tamils in the north (the so-called Liberation Tigers) and by an extremist counter-Jihad among its own Sinhalese majority;17 or Indonesia, a simmering Asian Yugoslavia where 350 distinct ethnic groups, most with their own language, occupy thirteen thousand islands in an archipelago held together primarily by the military force of an authoritarian regime under the command of its founder, Suharto.18 Suharto is the efficient dictator known equally for his early liquidation of a half million Communists in the 1960s, his bloody military invasion of East Timor in the 1970s (which has been compared to Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait), and his remarkable success in jump-starting the Indonesian economy in the 1980s. While perhaps best known as a site for the cheap-labor manufacture of Western apparel and shoes (workers make $700 a year), under B. J. Habibie, the German-trained minister for research and technology, Indonesia has also decided to pursue the high-tech end of McWorld. It already manufactures small commuter planes and helicopters, and is hoping to leapfrog other industrialized nations by stepping smartly into twenty-first-century high-technology domains. With its disparate multicultures, Indonesia is less worried about McWorld’s cultural values than about Western multicultural and democratic political ideals. Demography and topography favor fragmentation so that for Suharto the struggle is to hold the parts together by economic progress and military force.

  The Asian democracies Japan, India, and (recently) Korea are special cases for a different reason than China. As committed democracies, they have already acknowledged the power of Western ideology, whose ideals they prize—if only because they were once colonial subjects of or defeated in combat by the West. Their struggle is exactly the reverse of China’s. They distrust not Western political ideas but the kind of Western culture advanced by aggressive commerce and the kind of laissez-faire economics fostered by liberal markets. India faces an internal Jihad from both Hindi and Muslim fundamentalists who detest one another perhaps even more than they fear the encroaching McWorld, as well as from separatists in Assam.

  Japan would seem to be the Asian nation that has succeeded best in first modernizing its economy and then assuming a position of global economic leadership without succumbing to wholesale Westernization. Democracy has been inflected with a Japanese accent and even the economy has been nurtured with policies that temper crude Western market capitalism with a careful mixture of mercantilist state support and corporatist paternalism. Indeed, the more communitarian, consensual, even familial character of Japanese corporate style has been imitated in the West by bemused admirers of the Japanese economic miracle that once was. Though not quite as ethnically homogenous as some imagine, Japan has also managed to avoid even the gentler forms of Jihad we have seen in France or Italy or China. As James Fallows has persuasively shown, its powerful and insular culture has diminished the impact of economic theory and created a distance from the cultural artifacts of McWorld seen nowhere else.19

  Yet Japan is not wholly exempt and the case for its supposed immunity to McWorld may reflect Western fears of Japanese superiority rather than a realistic assessment of its cultural autonomy. After all, Japan has been assimilating American culture at least since the long and influential post—World War II American occupation. Karl Taro Greenfeld offers a stunning portrait of “gangsters, rock musicians, hostesses, porn stars, junkies, computer hackers, night-clubbers, drug dealers and bikers,” which suggests that Japan’s current Generation X—Greenfeld calls them the Speed Tribes—may represent a dividing point between a traditional and insular Japanese past and a startlingly assimilationist global (McWorldian) future.20 Japanese rock bands (with names like S.O.B. and the Blue Hearts) are multiplying, but in music critic Neil Strauss’s gloss they are “cultural sponges, soaking up Brazilian bossa nova, British hard core and American rockabilly … borrowing pop idioms from everywhere except Japan.”21 It should be left to those with a keener knowledge of Japan to judge how pervasive the changes signaled by recent Japanese music, literature, and pop culture really are, and to assess whether the behavior modification resulting from the climb of McDonald’s and KFC into (respectively) first and second place in Japan’s restaurant industry will trickle down into Japan’s cultural bedrock and rot out the ancient stone.22

  Like so many nations facing McWorld with a suspicion that impels them to struggle diplomatically (a kind of soft Jihad) against its cultural encroachments, Japan faces its own internal protests from minorities hoping to detach themselves from it. It appears to them as McWorld appears to it, and McWorld becomes their ally against it. Okinawa, for example, annexed by Japan in 1879 and returned to it by the United States (who had taken it in World War II) in 1972, has aroused anxieties in Japan with its attempts at reviving the Okinawan language and the practice of local customs. The Okinawan movement follows those peculiarly feudal dynamics we have seen elsewhere in cases where an ethnic fragment of a plural nation-state uses world culture and global economics to make its own claim for self-determination against a mother country that in the name of its own autonomy may be opposing world culture and global economics. In their struggle for an identity apart from Japan, Okinawans have turned to a hybrid form of rock music, drawing on Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bob Marley to “jack up” a local folk music “into a band context.”23 In marching resolutely backward into its own history, little Okinawa seems to be marching brazenly forward into McWorld. Such are Jihad’s ironies.

  What the general case of Japan suggests, even to casual observers, is that in the Japanese context Jihad—with or without its ironies—denotes not simply an internal struggle of minorities against a majority Japanese culture, but the struggle by official Japan itself against the corrupting influences of the global culture into which its economic success has thrust it. But what is true for most peoples struggling ambivalently against McWorld is particularly true for the Japanese: the carriers of corruption are finally neither outsiders nor barbarians but Japan’s own youth, who even as the indigenous culture works to socialize them as native Japanese, have proved themselves adept apprentices of the global practices of McWorld.

  Indeed, as we complete this brief tour of the struggle against McWorld within the nations where capitalism has been most successful, what becomes apparent is that the confrontation of Jihad and McWorld has as its first arena neither the city nor the countryside, neither pressured inner cities nor thriving exurbia, but the conflicted soul of the new generation. Nations may be under assault, but the target audience is youth. In Okinawa, in Tokyo, in every country around the world the young generation is being fractured by the contrary pulls of past and future. For it is the young who carry the guns for the I.R.A. and the Serbian militias and the young who wear the headphones of the Sony Corporation and Nintendo. It is the young who rock to the hard music of MTV and Star Television and the young who roll to the still harsher siren song of ethnic identity and other-hatred. They run to do battle with corrupting commercial colonialists on swift synthetic cushions manufactured by Nike and Reebok. They pause amidst the tribal carnage to refresh themselves with a world beverage like Pepsi or Coke. They shake their local folk zithers at a centralist and encroaching French or German or Japanese culture they despise, and then hammer out the tunes of an even more centralist and encroaching global culture on their quaint instruments. They hatch plots against immigrant foreigners via laptop computer modems made by foreigners and assembled by immigrants in their own land. They yearn for the collective intimacy of the tribe and the gang yet groove on
the anonymity and solitude of cyberspace. Fascinated equally by the blood that binds them and the blood they spill, they nevertheless navigate the bloodless world of promotion and product as if they were born to it (they were). Whether they hang with South Central L.A.’s Bloods or Cripps, belong to Berlin’s neo-Nazi National Alternative, or run with Tokyo’s Speed Tribes, whether they shoot at teens trying to get out of the Bosnian dead zones or are the teens being shot at, whether they are Hutu minors murdering Tutsis or twenty-year-old French paratroopers trying to come between the murderous brothers, they will be the twenty-first century’s makers—and its victims. They hold Jihad and McWorld suspended in rent souls that can neither eject one or the other nor accommodate both. Dragged reluctantly from a past defined by culture and tribe into a future where velocity is becoming an identity all its own, they are accelerating toward the limits of nature—the speed of light that defines the interactions of cyberspace—in quest of a palliative to (or is it a catalyst for?) their restlessness. The outcome inside their struggling souls will likely condition the outcome for global civilization, whose prospects, consequently, do not seem terribly promising.

  13

  Jihad Within McWorld:

  “Transitional Democracies”

  THE PARADOXICAL INTERFACE of Jihad and McWorld is nowhere more in evidence than behind the crumpled iron curtain in the “transitional” or “emerging democracies”—which though they most certainly are emerging from communism and in transition to somewhere, are for the most part neither democratic nor very likely to become so any time soon. If anything, they are regressing rather than progressing. Dragoslav Bokan, an editor and film director who became a leader of the Serbian private militia known as the White Eagles, confesses: “I don’t believe in democracy because I don’t believe any group at any time can change the course and goals of their ancestors by their own free will.”1 Another spent local academic concludes: “… too much history in too little room. There are no liberals here, there are only nationalists. We are victims of a long-lasting nationalist idea, impossible to get rid of.”2 The nationalist idea so many Eastern Europeans manage at once both to fear and to cherish is not the nineteenth-century ideal of integration and nation building. Yugoslavia, insists Zarko Domljan, Croatia’s Assembly president elected in 1991, “is not a nation—it is a mixture of ancient tribes,” and newspaper headlines regularly feature the region in terms of a “whirlwind of hatreds.”3