Rethinking China

BEIJING – Most people I talk to in the states are curious to know what China’s like. How’s the food, have you seen the Great Wall and, oh yes, has the government abducted anyone you know recently?

My answer never changes. China isn’t what you think it is – at least it isn’t what I thought it would be. Everyone has visions of roving vans distributing propaganda, military police goose-stepping down the sidewalk and a population afraid to stop smiling, lest they spend the next few years in a re-education camp. And if what I used to think now strikes me as ridiculous, it strikes most Chinese even more so. To them, it’s downright offensive.

After I’d been here for a week, I made it a point to ask professors and other Chinese citizens I had the chance to speak with about what it was like dealing with the government. I sugar-coated the question, but it essentially boiled down to asking about the ins and outs of dealing with an oppressive regime.

Their reply was also always the same: The government might have been a problem 20 years ago, but not anymore. The party has mostly left its citizens to the task of making money.

This isn’t a democracy by any means, but it also isn’t what it’s usually portrayed as.

You can buy copies of Western newsmagazines on street corners and log on to CNN.com from public computers. At an everyday level, you don’t see much difference between here and the West.

The Chinese realize this, too, and their response to Western criticism has been mostly a wave of nationalism that offers some fairly good points.

The first of which is that China has, until recently, always been an authoritarian state.

We take it as a boon to democracy that the splendors of Rome happened under the senate, but China had no trouble making largely parallel advances under emperors who could conscript manual labor and execute potential rivals whenever they so chose.

The second is that democratic tradition doesn’t look so good right now. The approval rate for both Congress and the president is appallingly low, and the general election has brought out immature, foot-dragging partisanship in virtually every participant. If these are the yields of self-determination, they ask, who wouldn’t choose the alternative?

And that’s a shame, because there are certainly things China would gain from a more open system with a greater respect for human rights. But what to liberalize and how to do so are complex questions, especially across cultural boundaries. The proposal from unwanted Western contributors seems to be that once China has an electoral college, Beijing’s smoggy skies will part and everything will be OK.

Democracy might be a good idea here (or it might not), but as of right now it’s a diamond hawked by a used-car salesman. It’s a prescription blindly offered, even if it would turn out to be a good idea. And while we ask the Chinese to question their government, it seems we’ve been unable thus far to question what we think about China.