An excellent article, followed up by the sort of brainless commentary one sees far too often in Western media. China is not just a vast stalinist prison camp for the production of consumer goods. China is in fact a fast developing country that is more free and more democratic than most western countries were 50 or 60 years ago. I have one other message for those who reflexively hate and fear everything Chinese. They will be a superpower, they will run most aspects of the world economy and they will likely be the dominant explorer of space for the foreseeable future. Get used to that too.
A very thoughtful and accurate portrait of China today , not unlike Sasha Trudeau's video documentary on CBC before the Olympics.
One hundred years ago China was nearing the end of Qing Dynasty under the control of Cixi , a horrible woman who had murdered her son the emperor. China was a nasty place after the opium wars of western exploitation and Europeans had burned down the summer palace in Beijing. All things western were hated.
This was followed by 40 years of war and revolution and then 30 years of Mao , and more revolution......
Today she has spacecraft circling the moon and is becoming a freer and richer place daily with dozens of TV channels and high speed internet.
Universities have grown like weeds, the one I teach at has just built a huge new campus outside of town.
The point is, China has had an absolute emperor and no western style rights or freedoms for thousands of years, yet its moving into the future in it's own way at it's own speed.
There has never been democracy in China so people cant miss something they never had.
Things are changing in China and progress is being made.
Patience.
It was with great pleasure that I read Tom's article "Life after Deng".
In my view the Media has tended to paint China using McCarthian colours while Mr. Grimmer's approach, in my view, is a perfect example of responsible, objective reportage.
I recall the news reports during the summer Olympics : all the stories about police brutality towards (mainly foreign) demonstrators.
From what I could see, chinese security people and police showed more restraint than our own counterparts would have under similar circumstances. Our security people or police would have been armed with semi-automatic pistols and been wearing flack jackets. I watched, very closely, every film clip that involved Chinese police during the Olympics and in virtually every one the police were armed like English Bobbies (no guns) and I witnessed no abusive behaviour.
In my opinion the West came out looking very bad during the Olympics. They are supposed to be about friendship and
brotherhood, no? The Chinese did their best to make them
work while we (the west) tended to use them as an opportunity to play political games.
Thank heavens for the Globe amd Mail.
I was in China for only a few weeks in September, visiting my father who has been working there for just under a year, visiting Changchun and Dalian in the north, and Shenzhen and HK in the south. Arriving both times (once at Beijing Airport, and again at HK/Shenzhen), with the visa, it was easier than going through US customs at Pearson. It would be tough to gloss over the human rights abuses occurring, but while not to excuse it, some of our western democracies aren't exactly perfect either. But the fact that these they make the news here, I think, reflects a slow relaxation of state control. After all, this is a developing country - the CPC still wants control, and is more interested in economic growth and fears anything that would jeopardize either. So transition will be slow. Though people there are just like us, have the same basic values, needs and desires. When I travel - I try to meet people, and it helps one understand the place you are better. I think more westerners should learn more about China, or go themselves. I was lucky as we know immigrants here in Toronto and I stayed with their friends and family there. I got to visit the floor of a auto plant in Changchun - as modern as any here in North America, safety taken very seriously (though construction sites were much more lax). I traveled on two domestic flights, and was amazed to hear quite passable English from everyone I encountered but disappointed I had less opportunity to practice the bit of Mandarin that I tried to learn before leaving. Shenzhen, the city that Deng built, is as modern as any city in the world. Changchun was not in the same league (still horse and donkey carts on the streets, the city poorer than those on the coast) but there are easily twice as many cranes in a second-tier city than in all of Toronto. It's a huge country, still going through economic transition at a break-neck speed, and in another 30 years, I would expect to see more political relaxations.
China is different. I was in the USSR in 1980 and in Beijing and Tangu in 1986 - several times. The contrast was remarkable. China was still backward in our view but was definitely entrepreneurial. There were Chinese stores in which to buy things and food markets in the streets. The USSR (Russia) had non of this, although their transformation has come later. We returned to China in 2007 and the transformation was shocking. Freeways and skyscrapers exist where non had 20 years earlier. Bicycles and horse drawn carts were replaced with cars.
Not a bad article, but to really understand China or the Chinese, you have to understand the psyche of the Chinese people. Yes, they are pragmatic. Yes, they entrepreneurial. Yes, they are resourceful. But remember, the way one arrives at a decision is as important as the decision itself. The Chinese are the epitome of the Nike slogan 'just do it'! In Western education, children are taught by being provided with options, usually with the phrase 'what if'? In Chinese education, children are taught 'what is', with a pre-determined set of values! One must remember that 75% of the current population of China have little or no education. So, what is yet to develop within China is a level of sophistication that can sort through the BS! In turn, the Chinese will gradually develop a more confident attitude toward the West, make political decisions based on sound humanitarian, and environmental consideration. Only when a sophisticated level of thought is achieved, will the hundreds of years of an inferiority complex be removed. I have lived here for the past 15 years, and have experienced just such a change taking place. For now, it is important to realize that there are a hundred different China's and one experiences a hundred different China's everyday!
This is a great article by Mr. Grimmer. For those who holds a rather out dated view on China, or believes that westerns can prescribe a better medicine for China, I will not even trying to argue with you. But I want to make two points.
First, if you haven't done so, you should go to the country and live there for a year. And let us know when you come back whether you still want to make the same argument.
Second, it is dangerous to over estimate yourself, or under estimate others, such as the government of China, in the business of running a country with 1.3 billion people.
As someone who spent a year working in China, specialized in political science in undergrad and is now slogging away in economics, I think I am in a pretty decent position to say...
This is about the most accurate piece about the real picture of developments and the present state of things in China that I recall reading at any point in time in the mainstream media.
China certainly faces its unique challenges (particularly in rural areas) and there are no shortage of problems for the citizenry and government to work through. However, I can now raise a third finger when counting the number of intelligent things that George Bush has said (I'm sure there are plenty of others, but I'm certainly not ware of them). The people of China are wealthier and more free than 30 years ago. There is no question about it. (Whether this trend continues is another question altogether, Bush is hardly the right person to comment on that).
The thing that concerns me the most is the 'psychological insecurity complex' that is illustrated by China's unwillingness to tolerate criticism from other countries. However, their typical response points to the hypocrisy of many of our criticisms, which suggests that this could grow into a mutually beneficial criticism as China and its people become more secure in its newfound position.
The Chinese people are, if I may say so, pragmatic. They will do what they need to do to survive and ultimately prosper. And they will do it with an alacrity unknown in Western societies. While the West stubbornly clings to tired old cliches- Capitalism, Good; Communism, Bad- China goes about its business in whatever manner they need to. The proof is in the pudding, for them. If it works, they do it. And when it stops working, or a new system will work better FOR THEM, they will change.
Forty to fifty years ago, China couldn't even feed its own people. Now they're the world's third largest economy and expected to challenge for the top spot before long. The problems that China has finding the balance between the collective welfare of all its citizens (via the state) and the rights of the individual are common to every country on the planet.
The rapidity with which China is opening up both internally and externally are remarkable. China is changing so quickly that by the time some Westerners bring their opinions of the place into this decade, the country will have moved on much further still.
For those who can read Chinese, you should go to the Chinese web sites. The same bunch of nasty, rhetoric people attack their government constantly. How many Chinese officals were forced to step down in the past, by these nasty web users? A few weeks ago I remember a Chinese city's mayor has to come out to persoanlly post reply to his attackers on the web, as a regular user.
It will be a lot of fun if you know another language, and have a more balanced view. Even Chinese officials are much thick skined than many thought, that's the life.
China through hopeful eyes
By Annie Osborn
Monday, December 15, 2008
BEIJING: I came to China expecting to find what the Western media has been harping on for ages: a stifling political climate, even more stifling pollution and indescribable poverty. But though I looked hard for proof of what I'd read, I finally had to conclude that Beijing is not that scary. Of course, China has human rights and pollution problems, but life here isn't just a series of catastrophes.
I am awed by Beijing's skyscrapers that hold their noses up too high to see the pickup-sticks mess of hutongs and razed areas that barely come up to their second levels.
Beijing is gray, but there is an eerily colorful combination of old-fashioned neon lights that start to glow as the day dies and the garish, outdated Olympic propaganda banners. On the sidewalks, a few elderly men and women wearing simple button-down Cultural Revolution jackets brush shoulders with clumps of teenagers with spiky blue hair, piercings and designer (or counterfeit) jeans. Vendors sell open-fire popcorn beneath colorful, curvy, glassy architecture.
All of this is part of a new Beijing, and to see it grow and change every day is exciting for me, not frightening.
My Chinese host family and I talk about sensitive issues (Tibet, Taiwan, the dairy scandal) at dinner in our 12th-floor apartment. The living room looks out over the western side of the city; my host parents' room is partitioned off from the living room. My Chinese sister's room is plastered all over with David Beckham posters. My bedroom is all white except for my bed, which has a big pink spread covered in pictures of the animé heroine "Princess Rose."
My house is nothing like the courtyard homes with no plumbing or heat in which some of my classmates live; nor is it one of the shoddy, teetering high-rises to which so many former courtyard-home dwellers have been relocated. It is neither the worst place to live in Beijing nor the best.
A few weeks after I moved in, I listened to my Chinese host family's description of the dairy scandal. When my Chinese mother described the scandal over noodles and stewed asparagus, she did not directly blame the government; rather, she said that the small farmers hadn't been paid enough by the companies buying their milk, and so they had tainted their products with melamine to make more money. "Everything else," she said, "came from that."
Recently, the economic crisis usurped the dairy scandal. The view is that this isn't America's fault or the government's fault; it's a misfortune that must be faced while going about life normally. In middle-class China, a layoff means it's time for a new job. A stock market crash means it's time to reinvest. Besides, recessions and depressions are part of life, and Chinese people have all seen worse. "What goes up must come down," my Chinese mother reminded me.
On a drive to Hebei province with my host family one day, the pollution rendered visibility so bad that traffic was stopped for hours, and the highway became a ghostly, never-ending parking lot. But what fascinated me wasn't the gauzy sky. On one side of the highway were ancient, forgotten graves crumbling among the tall, slender trees of a newly planted orchard.
Across the road, willows shook their seaweed tresses over a trickling, dirty river. Everyone got out of their cars and walked around, chatting with strangers or surreptitiously snapping pictures of the 6-foot-tall foreigner in their midst (me). There was more to see than unclean air.
Part of what makes me hopeful in China is that people make the best of situations. A dairy scandal with disastrous health repercussions is also an opportunity to rethink the way farmers work, or to reassess a family's diet so that it's not only safer but also healthier. A bulldozed historical district can become a new arts center. My Chinese family isn't passive or apathetic, but optimistic. Everything else comes from that.
Annie Osborn, a junior at Boston Latin School, is studying with School Year Abroad in Beijing.作者: 不朽的神话 时间: 2008-12-29 13:57
TOM GRIMMER 原文：
As I was casting about for some way to sum up the 30 years in China since the start of the open-door policy, George H..W. Bush saved me the trouble. In a recent interview with the China Daily, an official newspaper, he said: "I think it's not even questionable that people have more freedom than they used to have. Now some people [in the United States] don't understand that. They still regard the Chinese as a bunch of communists."
This is the sort of thing an old guy who doesn't care just blurts out. But it's also true; Western perceptions of China are quite skewed. Moreover, it appeared in a Chinese newspaper. Okay, the China Daily is an English-language paper of small circulation, but the fact that the quote made it into print shows how far China has come since Mr. Bush first set foot here. It was certainly a communist country then. What is it now?
Thirty-four years ago, Mr. Bush came to head up the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, an outcome of Richard Nixon's opening to China and a precursor to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. It would be four more years before things really began to change.
The event marking that watershed moment — arguably as big a moment as the Communist revolution of 1949 — was the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It concluded in December of 1978, 30 years ago this month. Few grasped that the cardboard speeches of that plenum would change not only China but the world.
By then, Mao Zedong had been dead for more than two years. A power struggle had raged. In the end, Deng Xiaoping prevailed; the tectonic plates of Chinese politics had shifted. The open-door policy was born.
Other things happened that month. The United States and China announced the resumption of diplomatic relations; Boeing sold its first airplanes to the People's Republic; Coke said it was going into China.
Thirty years on, we know what Mr. Deng set in motion. By now, we can almost recite the gee-whiz statistics: the world's third-largest economy, 40 million new Internet users every year, 600 million cellphones, $2-trillion (U.S.) in foreign-exchange holdings and — my own favourite — the planet's biggest consumer of cement. This country has seen the greatest poverty-alleviation effort in history. Yes, yes, we've heard it all. But somehow, knowing this does not quite do this place justice.
I arrived in China seven years after Mr. Deng's triumph, in the fall of 1985. I was employed by a Chinese "work unit." My local colleagues lived in cold-water flats they didn't own, rode ancient bicycles and looked forward to the annual train ride to see their parents in another province. Getting a passport was next to impossible, and you needed permission to read certain papers containing foreign news. Now they own their apartments, many have cars, and they go online to book their holidays abroad. Most surprising, they don't seem to find this transition, in less than a generation, the least bit jarring.
China's rise exhibits many interesting phenomena. One is the often skewed view of China beyond its borders, which is equal parts awe, greed and fear.
Awe, because it's so vast and so old and so storied; China has an enduring mystique (which its tourism promoters hope never fades). The greed comes from thinking that there's something in the China miracle for us: Can we sell them resources, can we produce more cheaply there, can we tap that supposedly bottomless consumer market? And finally fear: What if they not only want to buy our oil and minerals, but also the companies that produce them?
The self-contradictory attitude towards China is now at a peak because of the financial crisis. The Economist asked a few weeks ago: "Can China save the world?" It was an economic basket-case 30 years ago, but we're now counting on China's engine to keep the global economy ticking over. Its recently announced four-trillion-yuan ($720-billion) stimulus package has everyone hoping.
Despite the saturation coverage that China gets, what I hear from most first-time visitors is "I had no idea." That normally refers to China's pockets of affluence, its stunning infrastructure and just what a simply cool place it can be. For whatever reason, after 30 years of China's open door, people don't fully get it unless they've been here.
Part of the problem is the nature and tone of the coverage China gets in the international media. The other day, CNN carried an item on Chinese golf schools. Halfway through, up popped those hoary old images of communism so beloved by the cliché machine: a grainy Movietone News-style clip of Mao Zedong, inspecting something or other. The voiceover said ominously that the bourgeois indulgence of golf was once banned in China, and that recently there have been renewed calls for limiting course construction. Well, that's probably true; they banned everything fun, we all know that. Buit in the clip, Mao wasn't anywhere near a golf course, and the reasons for wanting to limiting them these days are quite prosaic: Golf eats up farm land and uses too much water. That's it.
China has an image problem, and that old communist tag doesn't help. Of course, the Chinese Communist Party runs the place, but it could just as easily be called the Chinese Pragmatist Party these days. Old-school congresses with waves of clapping delegates are still de rigueur, as are the stars and hammers and sickles. It all makes for great photo ops — and perpetrates the myth that today's China bears any resemblance to our Cold War-forged notions of communism.
Of course, China has many deep-seated problems, too. For starters: a paucity of human rights, a growing gap between rich and poor, the environment, Internet censorship, a crumbling social-safety net that isn't being repaired quickly enough. Pretty much anyone you talk to in China these days will frankly acknowledge all these points; that's the difference between now and when I arrived in 1985.
China is a place of contradictions and contrasts; it was a contradiction, after all, that set this chain of events in motion. What used to be called "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," that hybrid of communism and capitalism, is what sparked this place to life. Its architect, Deng Xiaoping, was a contradictory character himself. His vision created the freer China of today, but he was a disciplinarian — and the Tiananmen debacle happened on his watch.
Politics and economics are the two areas where there's the greatest disconnect between foreign hopes and Chinese reality. For 15 years, various commentators have been saying China is ripe for political change. It hasn't happened. In any event, China is not going to be a liberal democracy in our lifetimes and whatever system does evolve here will probably never suit Western tastes. Get over it.
As for economics: Just what is China's system, and why has it managed to create such vast wealth in such a short time? The combination of authoritarian politics, state capitalism and a frenetic private sector has been a potent wealth-creator. China is at the same time highly entrepreneurial (the private sector accounts for up to 60 per cent of GDP now, depending on whose numbers you use) but also very state-directed. There are far fewer state-owned enterprises in China today than a decade ago, but they are leaner than their predecessors, have healthy balance sheets and, importantly, are profitable. Many have been partially privatized through stock-market listings, but the central-planning hand remains strong.
This makes people outside China uncomfortable. They picture backrooms full of cadres scheming about world domination. What they should be picturing is boardrooms full of suits, scheming about their companies dominating the ones down the road. These are big, strong companies, some of which want to play on the world stage. If you want to play with them, you have to come to terms with the government factor, because it isn't going away. It's been amusing to watch the waves of paranoia that have rippled out every time China Investment Corp., the sovereign wealth fund, has raised an eyebrow about an acquisition. This is a passive equity investor just looking for a place to park cash; it's not Dr. Evil. (So far, CIC has taken a bath on the likes of Morgan Stanley and Blackstone stock; they are not seers.)
So here we are, 30 years into Mr. Deng's complex and often fraught experiment. Look at it this way: China has now been longer in the Deng mode than it was in the Mao mode. Is this communism? Yes, but let's call it Communism 2.0. That separates it from those days when Mao banned golf — and leaves open the tantalizing prospect of the upgrades to come.
