The Contest of the Century (22 page)

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Burma is an important test in another way. The sort of politics that emerges in countries like Burma will influence the kind of Asian regionalism that develops. Asia will be much more immune to the machinations of great powers if the region is dominated by well-run, independent, and stable states that are free from the sort of crony-vested interests that outsiders can manipulate. States with strong institutions are better able to stand up for themselves. A strong consensus behind transparency and good governance can place limits on the worst elements of the Chinese system—the more ruthless, cash-rich state-owned companies, which support extravagant projects that appeal to some elite interests but have little popular support. Through the remaining sanctions, the U.S. still has the leverage to nudge Burma toward introducing stronger rules for monitoring huge investment projects, such as large dams. In the process, Washington might lose some of its new friends in the Burmese elite, but in the long run it will help Burmese society. If the U.S. appeared to be trying to impose democratic reforms on a reluctant
region, it would be breaking the Asian iron rule and creating problems for itself. But the reality is that, across the region, there is strong popular pressure for more transparent and less abusive government. Indeed, if China tries to push back against this trend, it will only intensify the backlash against its influence. Even from a realist’s point of view, promoting good governance is also good politics for the U.S. It plays to American strengths and Chinese weaknesses.

If Washington really wanted to “flip” Burma to its side against China, it would fail, if for no other reason than geography. The U.S. is thousands of miles away, but China is right next door—a consumer market of 1.3 billion that is still growing fast. Burma’s leaders do not want the Chinese breathing down their necks, but they also realize that China’s economy is one of the main keys to Burma’s own future prosperity. The controversial Myitsone Dam is only one of a string of major investments that China is conducting in the north of the country, including the twenty-eight-hundred-kilometer rail-and-pipeline project to Burma’s Bay of Bengal coast. The government has been eager to gain the good graces of Washington to help dismantle the sanctions that have strangled parts of its economy, but Burma cannot and will not close the door on China. As Aung San Suu Kyi put it: “You must not forget that China is next door and the U.S. is some way away.”

The real irony is that the foreign government with the biggest stake in seeing improved human rights in Burma is China. Even though the political opening in Burma has allowed an outburst of anti-Chinese sentiment, there are actually good reasons why China would want a more representative and liberal government in Burma. China’s investments in the country have given it a direct stake in several of the uprisings and conflicts between the government and ethnic minorities that have scarred Burma for decades, including the pipeline that runs right across several areas of unrest. Geography also makes China a party to some of these disputes, given both its long, loosely policed border with Burma and the fact that some of its own ethnic minorities in southwestern China are related to groups within Burma. In early 2012, tens of thousands of refugees from Burma fled across the border into China after fighting escalated between the military and the Kachin Independence Army. If a civilian and more representative government can bring
some stability to these regions and begin to draw the poison out of long-standing ethnic conflicts, China would stand to gain enormously.

More than any other issue, the promotion of human rights and democracy has to be done with a light touch. Preachy rhetoric does little to change minds, in China or anywhere else. But in the long run, the promotion of more transparent and open government is a central U.S. interest. The more well-governed states there are in Asia, the more resilient and stable the region will be.

Section II
POLITICS AND NATIONALISM

A
S MIDNIGHT STRUCK
to usher in the Chinese New Year, the firecrackers were almost deafening, but Li Yang continued to teach his English class as if nothing were going on. Outside the school gymnasium, the local residents were celebrating the most important holiday of the year, the one day when Chinese families make a special effort to be together. As many as 150 million people return to their hometowns, making the Chinese New Year the biggest annual human migration on the planet. It is also the largest spontaneous fireworks display; the next morning’s streets are lined with ash and debris. The roar did not prevent Li Yang from holding his three hundred students in thrall. Standing below a basketball net on an impromptu stage, he shouted out English words in his raspy voice, which they then repeated. “Success!” he called. “
Success!
” they called back. “Sux—sess,” he boomed, pausing between the two syllables. “
Sux-sess
,” the enthusiastic audience replied. Li uses a method of language teaching that involves shouting the words—“exercising the tongue muscle,” as he calls it—which he believes is essential to overcoming the awkwardness of learning a foreign language.

“Opportunity!” Li shouted. “
OPPORTUNITY!
”

“All right,
bu cuo da jia
. Well done, everybody.” He joined them in a loud round of group applause.

Li is at the forefront of the “English fever” that has been sweeping China for the last decade. Learning English has become one of the main paths to social mobility—the key to getting a good job, getting married, and getting on. Researchers estimate that there are between two and three hundred million people studying English throughout China, not far short of the population of the entire U.S. The British Council has calculated that there may be more English speakers in China than there are in India, even though English is the secondary official language of India. English has become the touchstone for the ambitions of China’s aspiring middle class. Li Yang, who speaks with an almost pitch-perfect American accent, is the best-known popular English teacher in the country, a cult figure who is treated like a film star, stopping to give autographs to young fans in airport lounges.

The class was taking place in a suburb of Guangzhou, the main city in the south of the country, where the students were attending a week-long “boot camp” that Li runs over the Chinese New Year. Some had traveled from as far away as Xinjiang in the west and Inner Mongolia in the north, a four- or five-hour flight. Throughout the year, Li tours schools across the country to give seminars, visiting as many as two hundred cities each year. His blog was the most popular education-related Web site in the country before he lost interest in daily postings. In the past he has filled entire sports stadiums with his classes, an improvised performance of jokes, advice, and interactive shouting—part teasing and part scolding his students. Beside the stage, one of the teachers wrote a series of inspirational slogans that were projected onto a screen, and Li then used these as the basis for his classes. “Education is the secret to success!” the teacher wrote.

Li has won a broader fame in China for two reasons. His unorthodox teaching methods have attracted a good deal of attention, especially during
China’s pre-Olympics burst of learning English. More recently, he gained a different kind of notoriety when his estranged American wife won damages in a Chinese court for assault, a 2012 case that broke new ground in the prosecution and discussion of domestic violence in China. Kim Lee, originally from Florida, had helped Li build up his teaching business. She
posted pictures on the Internet of her damaged face and ear and described in detail how he “beat me” and then
“slammed my head into the floor ten more times.” But when I met Li, he had yet to be accused of wife beating, and I was curious about a different aspect of his teaching style. Along the wall in the main classroom were a series of large photographs of soldiers in uniform with slogans such as “Integrity!” and “Duty—It is our Duty to give something back to our great country.” The schools are called “boot camps” for a reason. The group of three hundred students is divided into classes of around twenty, each of which is assigned a monitor dressed in army fatigues. The monitor wakes the kids at 6:30 a.m. and brings them downstairs for their first, pre-breakfast shouting exercise. For the large sessions in the main hall with Li Yang, the monitors march the different classes of students in at precise times, with a military anthem blaring, and each monitor carrying a red flag. The cosmopolitanism of “Crazy English” is laced with a harder-edged nationalism.

Li peppers his talks with casual put-downs of America and the English-speaking world. “We Chinese are victims of English—so difficult, but we have to learn it,” he tells the audience. He is obsessed with what he sees as the growing softness of young Chinese. Over the New Year holiday his company ran two boot camps—a cheaper version in downtown Guangzhou, and a more expensive, “platinum” camp at a private school in a distant suburb. While driving between the two campuses, he told me that he much prefers the students at the cheaper program, because they work harder. “Chinese kids are becoming spoiled,” he says. “We cannot become like the West.” Li exhorts his classes to improve their English not just as a means to self-improvement but as a form of patriotic duty. He wants to use language training to stiffen the national backbone. Every one of the students in his courses wears a red windbreaker with Li Yang’s signature motto on the back: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”

The literary quote most often repeated to me by Chinese friends and acquaintances is not from Mao or Confucius, but from the novelist Lu Xun. “Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners,” Lu wrote in the 1930s. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.” One of the most interesting, perplexing, and important aspects of the rivalry between Washington and Beijing is modern China’s simultaneous admiration for and resentment
of America. The three decades of economic reforms have created a tidal wave of Western influences in Chinese cities, from the cars that people drive, to the supermarkets they shop in and the suburbs they now flock to, with their wide roads and neatly spaced uniform houses. The “English fervor” is one part of that mindset. There is no prouder parent in China today than one whose child is studying at a brand-name American university. But there is a parallel instinct that is equally powerful, a desire to stand up to the West, to make up for past injustices, and to restore China to its natural position of superiority.

Every nation’s nationalism has a blind spot, a raw nerve that is all too easily tweaked, which reveals a deeper angst. Post-colonial societies have an obvious and natural sense of injustice that colors their view of the West. And rising powers are often particularly touchy, hypersensitive about condescension from the established players. But none of this really captures the potentially toxic quality of modern Chinese nationalism, the nervous energy that is constantly just beneath the surface. China’s worldview is being nurtured by an often abrasive brand of nationalism that is informed by deep historical wounds, and which is infused with a desire for payback. “A weak country will be bullied and humiliated,” warns one popular Chinese history textbook. China’s sense of itself as a great power is closely wound up in this parallel feeling of victimhood. This brittle nationalism provides the emotional underpinning for the emerging contest with the U.S., a constant psychological tension which is shaping many of China’s interactions with the world. As Peter Hays Gries, author of a book on modern Chinese nationalism, puts it:
“The West is central to the construction of China’s identity today: it has become China’s alter ego.”

Li Yang has positioned himself exactly at the sweet point of this identity crisis, the on-off romance with American-style modernity. The first day I visited the school, Li was wearing a brown suede jacket over a mauve turtleneck sweater, smart jeans, and brown lace-up boots. Along with the designer glasses he was sporting, it was the sort of moneyed, smart casual you see more often in Santa Monica than in mainland China. His classes can sometimes feel like an American civics lesson. Before one of Li’s teaching sessions, the screen on the stage was filled by a large video of Barack Obama giving his first election victory speech
at Grant Park in Chicago. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible …” Obama pronounced. Li provided the simultaneous translation when Tony Robbins, the American “life coach,” came to China, and there is a strong element of self-help philosophy in his teaching. The students carry around marker pens and ask teachers to write a comment on their “Crazy English” windbreakers. On the shoulder of one of the students, a teacher had written: “Don’t forget me when you become President!”