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The
Three Gorges, Yangtse River
 Got
chatting to a high-school student from Beijing on the boat. She
was one of those determined young people who has her future all
carefully mapped out, and who will probably accomplish it all, step
by step. First, get to a good college in Beijing for a bachelor's
degree. Then, to the U.S. to do a Master's. Why not do her Master's
in China? "Oh, but I do so want to go to America! It's
my dream!" Why? Why is America her dream? "Because it's
the most modern country. The most advanced!"
Note, not:
"Because it's the freest country, the one with the most soundly
established constitutional system of government, the one with the
most long-standing devotion to human liberty." You never hear
that. The connection between liberty and progress, between liberty
and abundance, between liberty and the good life, is never made.
But why should we be surprised by this? The connection is hardly
ever made in America herself nowadays, either.
Shanghai,
Hangzhou, Suzhou, Zhouzhuang
Talking
to a Chinese friend about the Hainan incident of earlier this year,
he took a strong line against the U.S., and spoke glowingly of how
well the Chinese leadership had handled the matter. I had to laugh,
and pointed out that just a few hours previously, this same friend
had been telling me what corrupt, incompetent nitwits China's leaders
are. "Yes," he said firmly, "but in the 'spy plane'
incident, they were absolutely right. The whole country was behind
them."
I
am sure this is true. Chinese people feel about their leaders the
way black Americans feel about theirs. Any folly or incompetence,
any crime or cruelty, any corruption or malfeasance, is forgiven
when the leaders stand up to the hated Other. Jesse Jackson takes
advantage of female employees and uses his tax-exempt "charities"
as personal ATMs? So what — he knows how to jab his finger in Whitey's
eye, doesn't he? Jiang Zemin and his capos are shoveling
their nation's wealth into private Swiss bank accounts, torturing
middle-aged women who want to practice meditation, stifling intellectual
activity and persecuting harmless dissidents? Sure, but look how
they stick it to the foreign devils! I am not exaggerating here:
this is an actual frame of mind, and you do not have to scratch
a modern Chinese very hard to reveal it.
Behind both
instances is the same underlying phenomenon: a burning, aching sense
of racial inferiority. They created a great civilization, and believed
it was the only one in the world; but it collapsed in a cloud of
dust as soon as the white man touched it — a collective trauma from
which the mainland Chinese have not, even now, really begun to recover.
How could they? The Communists carefully keep that trauma alive,
tending and watering it with all the patient assiduity of hothouse
gardeners. Of course they do — it's the one thing they have going
for them.
Creeping
Singaporism (cont.) I was stuck for an hour in Shanghai's spanking
new Pudong airport, polished hallways stretching away to infinity,
dainty boutiques, soothing PA announcements read out by Stepford
Wives in carefully precise Mandarin, Japanese and English. I was
soon overcome with a desperate desire to find something Chinese
in this antiseptic place: a gob of spittle on the floor, a toilet
you could smell from three city blocks away, a thick fug of cigarette
smoke, the rattle of mah-jong tiles, a hilariously inscrutable sign
translation (my favorites on this trip: NO STRIDING at a Suzhou
park, and YOU ARE WELCOME TO GUILIN, on the road into that city
from the airport), a yelling match with each party threatening gross
sexual violation of the other's mother, grandmother, and female
antecedents all the way back to the Age of Philosophers, a toddler
with "split pants" crapping in a corner, or a clamorous
restaurant with half-drunk patrons playing finger-guessing games
at the tops of their voices. Nothing, nothing: only hair-moussed,
Polo-shirted, Dockered, Rolexed, orthodontized Last Men floating
to and fro, murmuring into their cell phones, on their way from
one fool business conference to another. The toilets were spotless,
the NO SMOKING signs scrupulously observed, the restaurant as genteel
as an English West-Country tea-room, the signs translated with an
attention to grammar that would make Prof. Jespersen swoon. The
feeling settled upon me, as it does rather often nowadays, that
I am not going to like the twenty-first century very much. I began
to lose the will to live. Then, peeking into a service area off
the main hall, I saw an airport worker taking a break, sitting on
some sort of motorized flatbed trolley, smoking a cigarette and
with his trouser legs rolled up! Memo to the management of
Pudong Airport: track down that man and give him a huge raise.
It
was at Pudong Airport that I picked up a copy of Hong Kong's South
China Morning Post and read of the release of those imprisoned
Americans ahead of Colin Powell's trip here for the first kowtow
session of the new administration. But here's the funny thing: I
didn't see a word about those prisoner releases in the Chinese media.
Not a word. How strange!
Guilin,
Guangxi Province
Conversation
with a Guilin cabbie.
Me: "They're
certainly doing a lot of construction in Guilin."
He: "This new mayor's got things rolling. He's all right.
The previous one — pei! — that son of a bitch! "Black"
[i.e. corrupt] from top to bottom. That airport road you came
in on, the one that's all patched up? That was a ten billion yuan
contract [US$1.2bn]. The bastard gave it to — who, do you think?
His son! Who of course pocketed half the money and skimped on
the construction."
Me: "How do you get to be mayor of Guilin? I mean, what's
the process?"
He: "What do you think? Diao-xia-lai [i.e. appointed
from Beijing]."
Me: "Oh. I'd read something about local elections. I thought
maybe there was a vote."
He: "In China? You're dreaming! There's no democracy here,
not a bit. None at all. If we had democracy, lao-bai-xing
["old hundred names," i.e. the common people] could
take care of all this corruption. Everybody knows what's going
on. But there's no democracy in China. No democracy, no law. Lao-bai-xing
have no way, no way at all. We just have to put up with it all.
Mei ban-fa [there's nothing you can do]. Mei ban-fa,
mei ban-fa.
Don't let anyone
tell you that dissent in China is limited to a few isolated figures
in intellectual circles. It's everywhere. You hear this stuff from
friends and relatives, cabbies, even waiters in restaurants. People
know what's wrong. People know what democracy means, and why they
need it. The propaganda of the Communists has done a good deal to
baffle and confuse them, but it has not altogether destroyed their
common sense.
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