by Rob Gifford
In his brilliant book, China Shakes the World, the former Beijing correspondent of the Financial Times James Kynge illustrates this point by standing outside a Wal-Mart in Rockford, Illinois, and asking the shoppers of Middle America whether they feel like thanking the Chinese for all the cheap goods they can buy, and for the low interest rates they pay on their mortgages. Not surprisingly, he gets some funny looks. But his point, and mine, is that, while China is certainly harming some areas of Western economies, it is also doing a lot of good to Western pockets in much less visible ways. So we have to make sure that, while we continue to stand up to China in important areas, we do not damage our own interests in the process.
For instance, the West needs China to revalue its currency because at present the yuan’s undervaluation gives it an unfair advantage in manufacturing. But proposing bills in Congress that would punish China with huge trade tariffs if it doesn’t make a massive, immediate revaluation could end up being counterproductive, perhaps reducing the flow of Chinese finance to support the dollar, with very serious consequences for the American economy. Too sudden a revaluation could also slow down the Chinese economy, with all the potentials for social instability that could bring. A strong China may pose problems for the world, but a weak or collapsed China would be many times worse.
In short, I think we need to get out of the “friend or foe?” line of questioning. In years to come, China could clearly become one of the two, depending on which way its domestic political situation plays out. For now, though, it is a mixture of both, depending on which area you look at. So it should be treated as a combination of the two, with a complex and nuanced foreign policy that looks to protect Western economic interests as much as possible, but also avoids the descent into overly emotional demagoguery that has sometimes characterized the relationship.
Militarily, China is growing fast too, though you won’t see much public bragging about that. Beijing is spending roughly $50 billion on upgrading its military every year. (The United States spends more than $400 billion annually.) But China is starting from a very backward position. Military experts say China is as much as thirty or forty years behind the United States in its military technology. And even when it has bought or developed new technology, it has huge problems coordinating it all. China has no aircraft carriers, and the ships of its navy (whose official name, the People’s Liberation Army Navy, gives you an idea of where its military’s priorities have always been) have managed to cross the Pacific Ocean only a few times, and even then with some difficulty.
The Chinese say they are simply upgrading their military to reach a level appropriate for a country of their size, and every Chinese person you speak to will tell you the same thing: philosophically, the Chinese are not an expansionary people. “We build walls to keep others out,” they say, “we don’t go out invading others.”
I’m not convinced China’s rise will be completely peaceful. Certainly, history doesn’t offer very reassuring lessons about the rise of new industrial powers. If China’s leaders can hold the country together, and if the Chinese economy keeps booming, there is a possibility in the long term that the new Chinese nationalism could lead to some kind of military problems with its neighbors (especially Japan). But at present, I don’t think the leaders of China are waking up in the morning and wondering which countries in the region they can threaten, now or in twenty years. I think they are probably waking up and wondering, How on earth are we going to hold this country together?
That is why they are so (quietly) ecstatic about the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. The new American enemy has been revealed, and it is not China, so Beijing can focus on making up the time economically that it wasted creating revolution under Chairman Mao. That is also why China has such an anodyne foreign policy in so many areas, wanting to avoid picking a fight with anyone (especially the United States) so that it can focus on its domestic issues. Stability domestically and peace internationally are its watchwords, as it seeks to present itself as a responsible player on the world stage. So we should also be careful not to exaggerate China’s military threat (it has the right to have a modern military, after all), but at the same time we should cautiously monitor how it behaves toward its neighbors.
The wild card in the whole situation is Taiwan. Beijing considers the island of 22 million people off its southeast coast to be part of China, and if a Taiwanese president does something silly, such as declare official independence, there could be real problems. But as I had seen in the town of Kunshan, just outside Shanghai, the $17 billion invested in the mainland by Taiwanese businessmen makes this unlikely, even though there are a growing number of Taiwanese who want to be separate from mainland China forever.
Taiwan aside, in the short to medium term, I think a bigger threat than any that China poses militarily will be the threat to its own environment.
The degradation of China’s land, air, and water has reached critical levels. Deforestation, desertification, not to mention the rising rates of cancer and birth defects from the polluted water and air, are becoming increasingly pressing problems domestically. Pollution has also become a major cause of protest among farmers whose land is near factories. The lack of an effective legal system and the contradictions at the local level of needing the money that polluting factories produce mean that local implementation or enforcement of increasingly stringent central government laws is spotty at best. Once again, this problem comes back to the urgent need to keep the economy growing in order to stave off social discontent—a truth about which both local and central government officials are all too aware. And on top of the pollution, there is the chronic shortage of water in northern China. How can a country continue without water? Several of China’s major rivers and their tributaries are running dry as smaller cities upstream divert water needed for their own growing industries.
China’s environmental problems are increasingly being exported. There is so much air pollution in southern China that Hong Kong is frequently enveloped in a shroud of smog. Even the effects of China’s deforestation are being exported: the government has banned logging within China, but it still needs tons and tons of lumber, so forests in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America are being depleted to feed the Chinese economic monster.
China is also the world’s largest importer of many metals and commodities, the consumption of which is single-handedly keeping parts of the world’s economy afloat. Base metals, petrochemicals, foodstuffs, anything and everything is being sucked in to satisfy Chinese demand. Mines are being opened up in Australia simply to supply China.
Finally, added to all the noxious substances that China pumps out, there is the issue of what China pumps in: the need for oil, and the possibility of conflict arising from that need. To keep its economy going, and therefore to keep its population happy, China must continue to import more oil. It has already overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest consumer of petroleum products after the United States. Its demand is rising by 10 to 15 percent per year; its own output of oil rises by only about 2 percent. China’s oil imports doubled between 2000 and 2005, and much of the reason for the huge hike in global oil prices during that time was increased Chinese demand.
The problem is that the world has become so reliant on the booming Chinese economy that we can’t afford for China not to keep on consuming this way, even though it is playing havoc with the environment.
And so here is one final contradiction to add to the pile: We need the Chinese economy to slow down at the same time that we need it to keep booming.
Right in the heart of Shanghai, supporting the intersection of two of the city’s busiest elevated expressways, is a massive steel pillar, about fifteen feet thick. Engraved on the pillar in relief is a huge, winding, weaving Chinese dragon. It stretches from the very bottom of the pillar to the very top and must be at least fifty feet tall. The dragon looks somewhat incongruous. Almost any other part of Shanghai’s new elevated road system could be in Los Angeles
or Chicago, but it is unlikely you will see a dragon wrapped around a pillar like that in an American city. There seems to be a lot of history gathered around that pillar, a lot of memories, and the legacy of a whole civilization caught up in the swirl of the dragon’s long, slender body and its sweeping tail. In the midst of a city trying, and succeeding, to be so modern, the pillar seems to be saying, “We’re still here, we, the descendants of the dragon, are still here, and we are still Chinese.”
From the time the Western powers arrived and started bullying China in the nineteenth century, the country has been determined to stand up in the world and become strong again. The Chinese were willing to do this at any cost, and finally they seem to be succeeding. But the cost has been high. The Communist Party blamed traditional teachings and philosophies for the country’s weakness and launched an extraordinarily fierce assault on Chinese culture, practically wiping it out.
While some frustration at the debilitating power of Chinese tradition is understandable, they need not have launched such a furious assault. Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea have all developed economically even though they too are Confucian-based societies. But the Communist Party believed that everything had to be thrown out. Now that the frenzied storm of Maoist destruction has passed, the Chinese economy is no doubt benefiting from the absence of ethical, religious, and traditional objections that could slow its pursuit of wealth. But Chinese culture has been decimated, and sometimes, as an outsider, one wonders if anything is left of Chinese culture. In trying to break the chains of history and restore China to its past greatness, has the Communist Party completely destroyed the country’s historical heritage, the very essence of Chineseness that it was supposedly trying to save?
I notice the dragon on the pillar again as I take a taxi underneath the elevated expressways to see Ye Sha, the radio talk-show host I had shared pizza with before I began my journey. We meet in a coffee bar in the lively Xujiahui district, just opposite the massive Catholic cathedral. I tell her about the dragon, and she smiles. I ask her about that indefinable Chinese essence, and whether it still exists or has all just disappeared. You don’t feel it anymore, I tell her, and for the outsider who comes wanting to experience China, and not a carbon copy of the West, that feels a little sad. Ye Sha has a different comparison.
“I think China is like a beautiful old house that is about to be knocked down,” she says. “People are living in it, and some of them want to put on extensions or make renovations. But in the end they don’t feel comfortable living in the old house; it doesn’t suit them, so they decide to knock it down. The residents take one final walk through the house, and suddenly they find something very precious, some treasures that they didn’t know were there before. It was only when they were going to knock the house down that they thought of looking. This is what I want to happen with China in the next few years, before we knock everything down—that we rediscover something precious in the rooms of the old house, something Chinese, something hidden that is waiting to be rediscovered.”
She can’t quite put her finger on what it will be except to say that, despite all the westernization, Chinese people will not be completely changed. She says simply that in a few years, once everyone has calmed down a little, when there is less frantic chasing after money, people will want to start rediscovering their Chineseness. She says it’s already happening a little.
“A lot of Chinese people don’t know what China is,” she goes on, concentrating on her words as she pauses to sip her fruit tea. “They look at it through Western eyes. But I think that if we go a completely Western route, we will not succeed. We need to find a way that retains something of the Chinese essence. Lots of people agree with me. They just don’t know where to look. I don’t mean returning to the past, but I mean retaining an element of the Chinese approach. If we see what we are losing, then maybe we will recover it. We’re in this very painful and difficult transition period, when the power of old values has declined and the system of new values has not yet taken hold. But I think we can find our own road, which will be specifically Chinese.”
Like so many Chinese people, Ye Sha takes the long view, talking in terms of decades. Despite being young, modern, and apparently very westernized, politically she does not believe that China’s future will follow the Western example either. Nor does she think it should. “I don’t think that the democratic system, the multiparty system, is the best for China,” she says. “I’m not saying it will never happen, but I just don’t think it will necessarily happen.”
I ask her finally about all the new propaganda the Communist Party is pushing out, and how much of it seems surprisingly Confucian, as though the Party has forgotten its hatred of Old China and is itself initiating something of a renaissance to try to instill some ethics in society. The concepts of moderate prosperity and harmony and a recent campaign that encouraged officials to “rule the nation by virtue” are all Confucian.
Ye Sha says she doesn’t like the government slogans. “They are external. They don’t get inside a person, so that the person can act on them, and be transformed,” she says.
Ye Sha wants very much to be Chinese. She is Chinese, of course, but she wants that Chinese essence to be more a part of her and her country’s future, in a deeper way, a way that seems to have been misplaced temporarily. While many rural people are still caught up in the basic needs of feeding their families, in the cities it seems as though more and more are feeling this way, as a reaction to the blitz of Western materialism that has saturated China and the increased sense of nationalism and patriotic pride that has come with it.
A hundred years ago, many Chinese intellectuals believed that China had to destroy itself as a culture in order to save itself as a nation. Now, somehow, that feels reversed. After a century of cultural iconoclasm, many urban Chinese people are saying, “Enough! We want to be Chinese again. We want to save ourselves as a culture, we want to save our Chinese identity, and perhaps only then can we rediscover ourselves as a nation.” This process is still very much in transition, as the country itself is in transition, and it’s hard to see what, or who, will come out the other end. But seeing some Chinese people trying to reclaim the heritage that their grandparents and parents were happy to (or told to) trash is fascinating and wonderful. Perhaps China in the end will not be so different from Japan and South Korea, full of modern people who are also proud citizens of their own country and proud inheritors of their own traditions, with a knowledge of who they are and where they’re going. And ideally that will be a kind of resolution to the century and a half of Chinese identity crisis that has claimed so many hopes and so many lives.
The next day I fly back to Beijing to say my final goodbyes. Before I fly to London I run the Beijing marathon, staggering through in a less than impressive four and a half hours. Chinese people cheer me every step of the 26.2 miles through their city. “Come on, yang ren! Come on, Ocean Person, you can do it! Jia you!”
I’m looking forward to seeing my family after a long summer apart, and in many ways I know it’s time to leave China. But I know I will miss it: the zeal, and the optimism of the cities and the despair of the countryside, and the sheer excitement of a nation in tumultuous transition. I will miss the calls on my cell phone late at night from angry peasants or laid-off workers. I will miss the energy and the dilemmas of life and death, and hope and tragedy, in which everything matters a great deal. And I will also miss the hopefulness, the yearning for a better future. In the West, our better future is supposedly already here, so life is no longer as much of a journey. We have (so we think) reached our destination, so we’ve sat down, put our feet up, and poured ourselves a large drink. In France, workers are restricted by law to a thirty-five-hour workweek. Many Chinese people work that in two days.
Most of all I will miss the Chinese people, the wonderful Chinese people. The Chinese heart is so very, very big, but it has always been so very constrained, first by Confucian culture, and then by Communism. Now, amidst all t
he problems, for the first time it feels as if the big, big Chinese heart will have some space to expand and grow.
Chairman Mao once said that the Chinese people were a blank sheet of paper on which he could write the words of socialism. I’ve never agreed with that statement. Surely the whole point about the Chinese people before 1949 was not that they were blank but that they had too much written upon them. Pages of history, pages of Confucian teaching that made it difficult for them to respond when the Western powers arrived and tried to write their own, very different words upon them.
It is only after thirty years of militant Maoism, and a total of sixty years of Communist Party rule, that the Chinese people are a blank sheet of paper, because Mao did so much to erase (or tear up) what was written there before. Of course, there is much writing that still remains. You cannot erase everything from the past. But the point is that Chinese people are now writing on the paper themselves.
Can the government change the political system and still hold the country together? Can we have a strong, united China and a changed China?
I hope so, for the Chinese people’s sake. Can there be any people in the world who deserve more to succeed, and to see and feel in their own lives the prosperity and freedom that we in the Western world take for granted? I do not think so. The Chinese people have suffered so long, too long, and now, in spite of all their country’s imperfections, many of them are on the verge for the first time of tasting some kind of progress.
It’s true, I have some major concerns about China and its future. I would go so far as to say I am rather fearful. China has more problems than people in the West realize, and the possibilities for progress are always tinged with the huge price that is paid by the losers in the whole economic reform process. Whatever happens in China, I have a feeling the country’s development will continue to be a bumpy ride.