Derb Does China, Part IX
Nearing the end.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
August 14, 2001 8:50 a.m.

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.