The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World (7 page)

The issue of human rights and how to define them is a major point of contention in U.S.–China relations. Christian groups deem China’s one-child policy evil. Supporters of the Dalai Lama and the World Uighur Congress argue that China suppresses their right of worship. In 2010, Google accused the government of trying to steal its code and stopped offering its search engine services in the Chinese market after it refused to censor itself. Critics denounced the government for blocking access to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter after the Muslim uprising in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, which resulted in over 1,000 casualties, and after protests in Iran were found to have been organized via social media. In a crackdown at the height of the Arab Spring, the government arrested dissidents like the artist Ai Weiwei, who designed the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and kept Liu Xiaobo in jail even as he became the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Analysts like Elizabeth Economy from the Council on Foreign Relations argue that the government is cracking down because it fears being overthrown, like Mubarak in Egypt. In reality, it is more likely that China’s government is looking at decades of strength. Discontent bubbles up at times, but Economy and other analysts gloss over major differences between contemporary China and the conditions in the Middle East that gave rise to the Arab Spring.

Unlike corrupt regimes in the Arab world, the Chinese government has diffused its power, so one family does not hold too much. This has established a crucial system of checks and balances to prevent totalitarian leadership. Middle Eastern families, like Mubarak’s in Egypt or Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s in Tunisia, were able to rule for decades, but China has strict term limits and retirement ages for even the most powerful officials.

Enforcing retirement ages and distribution of power has allowed for peaceful transitions of power and competing interests within the Communist Party, even as it remains one party. Most senior leaders do not come from the most powerful families; their offspring go into business to cement wealth, instead of staying in government like the Mubaraks did to make money. No single person, family, or small group has the power to plunge the country into chaos as Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four did.

Corruption, especially at the local level, remains a concern, as it causes dissatisfaction and undermines legitimacy. Chapter 6 will explore how corruption is a problem that needs to be fixed, but is not serious enough to cause revolution. There is also no focus on a single ruling family, onto which the entire population might vent. They might dislike the system, but with over 60 million Party members, nearly everyone in the nation has a friend or family member who makes up part of the bureaucracy.

The government sometimes overreacts to potential threats of instability. To Americans, especially those with a limited knowledge of China, these measures can seem brutish. Critics like Richard Burger, a U.S.-based blogger who lived in China for less than three years and who lasted less than a year working for the government mouthpiece newspaper the
Global Times
, wrote on June 26, 2011, on his blog, The Peking Duck, that the government is “a giant squid, tentacles reaching across the nation to restrict all aspects of life in the land it liberated, silencing opposing voices and existing solely for its own perpetuation. Celebrate away, while people who know real freedom snicker . . . and once again [it has] made a laughingstock of itself.”

Undercutting Burger’s claim that the government is the “giant squid,” the nonpartisan, Washington, DC–based think tank Pew Research Center found in 2009 that 86 percent of the Chinese population supports the direction in which the Chinese government is taking the country. In a 2011 survey of 18 countries, the World Health Organization found Chinese are happier overall than any other population, including those in America and France. My own firm’s survey results echo those of the WHO and Pew: Chinese are generally happy with most measures implemented by the government.

If government policies were overly harsh, surely they would not garner such a high rate of support. Even if Chinese disagree with certain rules and take issue with widespread corruption, the Chinese people, as tracked by objective metrics, clearly support the overall direction of their government. Support is high not because people are brainwashed or cowed into submission, but because their interests are mostly aligned with the government’s goals, and they see how much better life is than during Jiang Qing’s reign of terror. Bloggers like Burger are
cultural imperialists
, as defined by Edward Said. Rather than understanding what Chinese people themselves like, they pedantically write off supporters of the government as being apologists, tyrants, or dimwits who just do not know any better.

In 2003, I was sitting in the drawing room of a large Beijing home in one of the main leadership compounds. Next to me was a senior government official, one who is often lambasted in the Western press. He had jet-black hair combed straight back and thick glasses.

We were both peeling oranges and sipping hot green tea. I was a little apprehensive. If this official was as bad as Western critics made him out to be—and rumors about him abound—he might be pure evil. Undoubtedly he was one of the most powerful people I had ever met. Pictures of visiting heads of state hung on the walls behind him.

“Little Mountain,” he said, calling me by my Chinese name, “you are American. Can you explain to me why the Western press is always criticizing us no matter what we do?” Before I could answer, he continued. He was used to taking charge and being listened to.

He told me about a concert by the Three Tenors, the name given to Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti, when they sang together as a group, that was held in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Tens of thousands of people attended the concert.

The Forbidden City is one of China’s most important historical places. Emperors lived there. Neighboring it are two of modern China’s symbolic administrative infrastructures—Zhongnanhai, where the top officials of the central government work and live; and Tiananmen Square, which is ringed by the country’s leading museums. Having the concert in the Forbidden City would be equivalent to having one with tens of thousands of attendees on the White House lawn, with the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty all relocated there.

A deranged man with a knife started dashing around Tiananmen Square during the concert, trying to stab people and screaming gibberish, the senior official told me. Like any competent police force, the police tackled the lunatic and took him away in a police van. The official told me a major Western newspaper ran a story covering the incident to the effect of, “Heavily armed riot police in Tiananmen Square, the site of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 where innocent people were slaughtered and massacred as hulking, brutish soldiers suppressed their drive for freedom of speech, arrested a knife-wielding man who was probably aggrieved by a power-driven government.” The last sentence of the article noted that the reason why the man was angry was not confirmed.

The senior official asked whether it would make sense to have a lot of armed security on such an occasion. Wouldn’t it make sense to arrest a clearly mentally disturbed man trying to stab people?

He asked what American police would have done. Probably Taser him or bludgeon him with a club before shackling him with handcuffs and throwing him in the back of a police van, I responded. Nearly a decade later I was proved right, when a New York City policeman pepper-sprayed and manhandled protesters during the Occupy Wall Street protests—yet Western media only criticized that single officer, rather than arguing that the whole political system was complicit.

It obviously pained the senior official to see how China was portrayed in Western media. But he defended his police that day. “Free speech is great, and I want it too, but not if it threatens stability. No one wants to go back to the dark days. Besides, this man was crazy and could have hurt people with his knife.”

At the end of the day in China, freedoms that are perceived to have the potential to bring the country back to the repression and destruction of the Cultural Revolution are not considered to be rights, but rather threats.

Even defining freedoms and the threats against them is not quite so black and white. When Westerners discuss basic human rights, the Chinese government (and, in truth, most Chinese people) thinks about a different set of rights. Take freedom of speech, for example. Most everyday Chinese citizens do not care about measures limiting Internet access, which Americans see as a violation of freedom of access to information. Blocking Facebook or Twitter is not enough to drive mass upheaval, because homegrown versions like Sina Weibo or Renren offer equally satisfactory alternatives in Chinese society. The lack of Western alternatives might limit Chinese firms’ ability to expand abroad and employ the Internet tools their competitors use, but it won’t cause massive internal protests.

Many Americans think there has been little progress in China on freedom of speech. This is not true. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the
Huffington Post
and the BBC’s website were blocked, but they are now accessible. Around 500 million Chinese actively access the Internet on a daily basis from computers and mobile phones, making it impossible to stop information flow.

The Chinese government is no longer nervous about letting its citizens travel and study abroad, or view information and content online. Just a decade ago, by contrast, they severely restricted overseas travel to a privileged few.

Now, the government does cast suspicious glances at Web 2.0 social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as possible tools to foment unrest. True, they might be overly concerned but even U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said during the 2011 London riots he would block and patrol those social media sites being used to stir up violence. There is probably a more elegant solution for China than simply blocking all foreign-run social media sites, but their concerns about how they can be used to foment instability are understandable. Few content sites are blocked today in China, and Chinese can get unfettered access to international news sites that run critical pieces on China’s government, like those of the
New York Times
,
TIME
, and
The Guardian
.

In online chat forums, Chinese people constantly criticize government actions, such as the corruption scandals involving high-speed rail investment and overspending on lavish government buildings. There is no shortage of opinions. If you walk down the street in China, it is even common to see people yelling at police who are trying to ticket them for some driving offense or jaywalking. Many Westerners think that the Chinese people are scared to express themselves, and shake with fear when police walk by—but that is simply not true.

The government understands that draconian limits on access to technology would be counterproductive for society, so it has pushed for domestic alternatives like microblogging on Sina Weibo instead of Twitter, and has even encouraged Chinese police to use these channels to communicate directly with the people. These vehicles provide the Chinese with the freedom of speech the West demands for every citizen of the world. The difference between Sina Weibo and Twitter, however, is largely that the government trusts the executives at Sina to delete within minutes a post that may cause unrest, whereas Western-run sites like Google or Twitter will not turn over information if the government legally asks them for it, much as these sites do in America without balking if the Federal Bureau of Investigation provides a warrant.

Younger Chinese might not like curbs on Internet access, or may even think they are silly, but giving up life’s comforts and turning to protest is not in their heads. The benefits that the central government brings far outweigh any negatives. They would rather complain about regulations in person and in online chat rooms, and hope that positive changes will be made as officials get less fearful, than try to overthrow the entire political system.

Given the tribulations of the postdynastic era and the impact of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps most Chinese people understand that a Western model of democracy is not necessarily the best system for China now—and potentially never, as Wu Bangguo, currently Chairman and Party Secretary of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and ranked second in the Party hierarchy, has stated. Chapters 6 and 10 will further explore reforms in the political system and what a future system might entail, but such a system is more likely to be shaped by Chinese voices rather than Western ones.

Many Westerners view spending on internal stability by the Public Security Bureau to be nefarious—the actions of a Big Brother–like government—yet do not view the installation of cameras in London, the German government’s use of online Trojans to spy on people, or wiretapping in the United States after 9/11 with such fear or anger. Many Chinese see internal security spending as a natural response to new threats to stability. Sometimes people feel certain steps are excessive and a waste of public funds, but nothing serious enough to cause mass unrest. They see progress over recent decades, and understand that for every two steps forward in the reform process, there is one step back.

China is a developing country, evident by the constant reform that government policies undergo. As the government updates them to reflect current conditions, human rights gradually improve, as they need to. There are both noticeable and subtle changes in the right direction, like the skyscrapers that go up yearly and the right to obtain a passport to travel abroad. The skyscrapers indicate the right to do business, something that was not allowed 40 years ago, and acquiring passports and the ability to travel indicate the right to enter and exit the country as one wishes and to learn what lies beyond China’s borders.