Poor China!
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which runs the place, is like a river, thousands of miles wide and an inch deep. Like the emperors of old, the Party waves its scepter, expecting the people in the distant provinces to fall in line, but a funny thing happens between the headwaters and the mouth. No one listens.
Well, they listen, but do not always obey.
The saying in Mandarin is to the effect that no matter how fearsome the Dragon in Beijing, it can be, and often is, subverted by the local Snake(s). Local corruption is the game in China.
Right now China is hosting the Olympic Summer games, focusing world attention on the Middle Kingdom. This means a lot of reporters will be talking to people and sending home reports. It also means that rebel separatists will be plotting acts of terror. Yesterday two Uigher (pron. Wee-gur) terrorists drove their vehicle, loaded with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) into a group of border patrol who were out in a group performing a running exercise, killing sixteen. That occurred in Kashgar, 3,000 miles east of Beijing. Security is tight on the ground in Beijing. Red arm-banded citizens have been deputized to report anything amiss in the streets and hutongs of the capital.
Security is good.
Too much is bad.
China is sensitive, too sensitive, to perceived slights, the failure of foreign devils and Ocean People to give proper respect, to criticism over human rights, and to issues over provinces having a tendency to go their own way, such as Xinjiang and Taiwan. The Uighurs, Muslims in Central Asia, seek independence. A few resort to terrorism, as in the Kashgar border patrol massacre. The result is a crackdown on all. China goes nuts over rumblings out of Taiwan that it might not like to be considered a province of the People's Republic of China. Missiles point. Codes are dialled. Buttons are pressed. Rockets fly north of the Island. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, which patrols the strait between the Island and the Mainland goes on higher alert.
China has been at peace.
The Revolution of 1912, which brought in first the warlord, Yuan Shi-kai, and then Sun Yat-sen, overthrew the last of the imperial dynasties, the corrupt and inefficient Manchu (called the Ching), which in turn had overthrown the corrupt and inefficient dynasty of the Ming. The Manchu were foreigners from the north, over the border, in Manchuria. They had picked up the pieces in 1644 when the Manchu were collapsing and being overthrown. China is 91% Han, not Manchurian.
When a country collapses, the people starve. Landlords extort. Local officials extort more. Peasants are angry. One spark can ignite a prairie fire. The spark after 1912 was provided by the firebrand Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), who took his inspiration from the successful Communist Revolution in Russia, which in 1917, overthrew the Czar.
Mao began his revolution and fought the government headed by Chiang Kai-shek. Mao was in grave danger of losing when Japan invaded, diverting the attention of Chiang. Mao and Chiang fought the Japanese, but not very effectively or cooperatively. When Japan lost the war to the U.S., Mao and Chiang were free to resume hostilities against each other. Chiang fled to Taiwan. Mao controlled the Mainland.
Mao was mad.
His Great Leap Forward (1958-196?) ruined China, killing tens of millions in famine. Beijing policies actually do count for a lot, especially when popular and enforced at the local level, as sometimes they are. His Cultural Revolution 1966-1976) sent intellectuals from the city to the pig farm and iron mine to be re-educated. Teachers were beaten and murdered by students. Parents were denounced by children. Totalitarian China had gone crazy.
The plan of Mao and his generation of iconoclastic leaders was to free China of the weakness of the past which allowed European nations such as Britain, France, Germany and America to carve up China into separate spheres of influence. Britain ruined a generation of Chinese by introducing opium. China resisted and lost, and was forced to give a little island called Hong Kong to Britain as a result.
The carving up of China didn't just dismember China. The disgrace humiliated Chinese thinkers, which covers a lot of people. China had been accustomed to thinking of itself as quite self-sufficient, thank you, and not in need of outside interference, including trade. The Qianlung Emperor, when the U.S. was in its first decade, rebuffed the British emissary, Lord McCartney, telling him, and his principal, the king, that China was pleased at the honor of a visit and the tribute and submissiveness, but please, we really don't need your mechanical devices. Sent him home, allegedly humiliated.
The problem China was experiencing was that it looked backward on an alleged golden age of harmony, as exemplified by the Confucian system of doing honor to one's parents and ancestors, and the harmonious court paintings that depict a wondrous world of mountains, trees, and birds, with very little of the human. China looked back while the West looked to the future. The West saw China as a future of trade. The lamps of China became the watchword for free-traders in the Adam Smith tradition of aggressive mercantilism. Just think, they reasoned, if China has hundreds of millions of people needing light, we can make lamps and sell them all over China. Not only that, but we can sell them the kerosene to make them glow. We'll be rich. This was how Rockefeller's Standard Oil (now Chevron), got its foothold in China. Rockefeller money founded any number of Chinese universities and hospitals.
Mao tried to eliminate the iron-cage of Confucianism, and to a considerable extent, succeeded.
Mao died in 1976. China was in bad shape. Deng Xiao-Ping, whose son was thrown out a window and crippled by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, led next. What difference does it make whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice, he famously asked, in 1978, suggesting that if the Socialist (Communist) experiment had failed, why not let the people work and trade for themselves, so long as you don't call it Capitalist?
Thirty years have now elapsed with the government largely off the backs of energetic entrepreneurs. A hundred-fifty million people have migrated from farms and small villages in the interior to the coastal cities where they now manufacture my pots, pans, and electronic equipment. A new generation has arisen which did not live through the carve-up, the overthrow of the dynasty, the Japanese invasion, the war, the Communist Revolution, and Mao. Confucianism has been relegated. Communism has been relegated. Chasing the dollar, or yen, is the goal. China is now manufacturing its own lamps. They're importing the oil.
Deng started new economic zones. Shenzen, abutting Hong Kong, was among the first. Thirty years later, this farm village is bigger than New York City, complete with skyscrapers.
If you'd like to read about modern China and its relation to its past, there are a number of current volumes I can recommend.
China Road (Random House, 2007, paperback) by Rob Gifford, a National Public Radio (NPR) correspondent, who is British and h as spent much of the last twenty years in China as language student and reporter, traces his recent journey from Shanghai on the east coast to Korgaz on the western border of Xinjiang, along National Highway 312. Gifford stops and talks to people along the way. He sees not only today but yesterday and has a clear eye on the future. He's not so sure that the Party can keep the circus together. It can try, but there is always the risk of an explosion in China, or a prairie fire in the words of Mao, when the peasants are angry. And they are angry, as he shows. It's just a question of who gets there first with a solution, the angry, poor, rural people who can't make it on their own, or the CCP, throwing them a sop to keep them quiet while another day rolls on.
China has contradictions. It wants to be modern but it doesn't want the people to think, much less talk, of what it means to be modern. In the West, this means to be able to do what I'm doing, thinking and writing, speaking to others, about which values are worth advancing. That would include the freedom to think creatively without fear of government intervention, something that doesn't exist in China. People are forced to resort to subterfuge to communicate news and its hoped-for consequences.
The Internet is controlled in China. At least the CCP hopes it is controlling the Internet. Unfortunately for the Party, Internet savvy users have devised ways of getting around government restrictions on Web access. See the SFGATE.COM article, below.
John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China; Henry Holt, 2006.
Simon Winchester's The Man Who Walked Through China, about John Needham, the Cambridge don sent by Winston Churchill to China during WWII to provide aid to academics who fled the Japanese. Needham then wrote a series of volumes studying China's development of technology such as movable type, gunpowder and many other technologies. His question is now known as the Needham question, which asks why, if China was capable of doing all this, long before Europe awakened, did it stop and become the world symbol for a backward nation, at least until now. There are many answers offered by observers with varying standpoints and perspectives, but at bottom the blame seems always to be places on the Confucian straightjacket of the mind, the looking back instead of forward, the disdaining of not-invented-here improvements to science and technology, and a complacent, self-satisfied "we've arrived" mentality such as that displayed by the Qianlong Emperor to Lord McCartney during his 1797 embassy.
When living in China and using the Internet, you have to use proxy servers in order to work around the government firewall. Some call doing this using a fire-ladder. SFGate.com had an article listing workarounds which interested parties offer to contest the CCPs effort to restrict access to information and ideas.
Which do you think is the more challenging task, for a resident of China to find a way around the censor, or that of the censor, trying to keep 1.3 billion Chinese in an information cage?
I'd place my bet on the creativity of the 1.3 billion rather than the million consisting of the party.
Meanwhile, I'd keep a sharp eye peeled for the authorities. They may not be everywhere, but betrayal has long been a big game in China.
Remember, you cannot get betrayed unless and until you trust in someone or something.
You could ask Jesus, if you have any doubt, so watch your step. They don't have any law in China, remember, at least not anything you'd recognize as due process.
I've got it!
Let's sell Due Process to the Chinese, all 1.3 billion of them. Here, try this little package.
If that sells, we could try Equal Protection.
And the First Amendment, that should go over big, don't you think? In a little red envelope?
Human Rights, that should be a big seller.
Kits. We'll sell kits.
Let's see, at a buck a pop, times 1.3 billion?
We're set for life!
From the lamps of China to the law of China, in one easy leap forward.
Chairman Mao would love it, if he loved liberty.
He did, didn't he?