Is This How China Sees Things?

Why don’t the Chinese people rise against the lack of political freedom, the suppression of dissent etc? Westerners ask this a lot, and Anna Vignet tries answering just that question.

First, she says, history matters. The relevant history here started with the British forcibly creating a “market” for opium resulting in large scale drug addiction. Next, the betrayal at Versailles after World War I:

“The great powers handed to Japan the colonial possessions of the defeated Germany, despite China having entered the Great War on the side of the Allies.”

When your history with the West is like that, you don’t exactly embrace the values (liberalism, democracy) of the betrayer. Instead, you decide to get strong. Never again do they want a weak China that will be treated like dirt by the West. And so the average Chinese prefers reform within, not revolution.

Second, writes Vignet, is the America led West’s mindset after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, namely the desire to push “liberal democratic politics and capitalism” into every country. By any and all means possible, from soft power to covert ops to destabilize governments to outright wars. None of which is what “Beijing wanted done to it”. As China tried to adapt to a post-USSR world, it adopted a policy of “biding its time and hiding its power”. It lay low, and 9/11 helped: the US focused on Afghanistan, Iraq and terrorism, not China.

Until 2008. That was the year the Western financial system imploded while the Beijing Olympics showed how far China had come. A richer China was not exactly thrilled with having American troops in Afghanistan. They felt the US was inching closer to China, just as NATO was inching closer to Moscow via eastern Europe. And as China rose, the US increased its emphasis on (South East) Asia. And then came the Arab Spring. Something where the West openly engaged in its policy of “regime change”. All of which is why Vignet asks:

“Is Beijing so wrong, looking out on the smoldering wreckage of Libya and Syria, at the mess that Egypt still remains, to want to avoid that outcome at whatever price?”

Ok, you ask, but this is all foreign policy. Why would the ordinary Chinese care about any of this? Aha, what the ordinary Chinese sees is that his country is being threatened and/or criticized by the West:

“It’s the rare person who can truly separate, at both an intellectual and an emotional level, criticism of his or her country from criticism of his or her country’s government — especially if that government is not, at present, terribly embattled and is delivering basic public goods in a reasonably competent manner.”

And that leads to other rhetorical questions (in China): Does America’s military-industrial complex need an enemy post the USSR, someone who justifies their military budget? And is China just that excuse?

Last up, Vignet talks of the role of the Western press in how China is viewed (in the West). If Western journalists in China are threatened, harassed and surveilled, it would be crazy to imagine their reporting on China is unbiased. And journalists are journalists: would they report minor abuses faced by the average Chinese? Or only the worst ones and make them sound “representative”? And the most strident critics within China get maximum Western coverage: but do they really reflect the general mood? And the media over-simplifies things to the point where they are flat out wrong. Take this example:

“I see this especially in headline writing where “China Prosecutes So-and-So” turns out to be about one small city’s judiciary or mayor’s office prosecuting so-and-so; think how silly it would be if, say, a story about Harlan County, Kentucky banning the teaching of evolution were headlined “US Bans Teaching of Evolution.”

Vignet isn’t really going after Western media. Rather, she says:

“Authoritarian states like China tend to get reported on unfavorably because they behave like authoritarian states.”

The point is that how the Western media portrays China to the West isn’t necessarily how the average Chinese experiences Communist Party rule at all.

Lots of interesting points. A good read throughout.