Subtlety is the best policy

By noon on Tuesday, a story about China’s collapsing exports industry was the fifth-most commented story on Economist.com, down slightly from its ranking as No. 3 just days earlier. It had beaten out stories on the financial crisis and was runner-up to a story on the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

And it was only the explanation of a graph.

Better yet, the graph wasn’t even referenced in any of the comments I read. Instead, people who left comments merely did what goes on in most China-related English language discussion boards – expend vitriol, get frustrated and eventually give up.

Part of the reason for all the political animosity in these internet discussions comes from the simple fact that it’s the Internet, and most people who comment are by nature contentious and unreasonable.

But part of the reason is also cultural, and might be the reason that in all this debating, we aren’t coming to any shared understanding. Instead, China and America are getting further apart.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao can certainly sympathize with the cyber-nationalists frothing through their fingertips at The Economist’s Web site. Last week while giving a speech at Cambridge a student threw a shoe at him in an apparent critique of his so-called tyranny, while outside, protestors clamored for Tibetan independence and the reform of human rights.

In some way or another, China has been fending off errant shoes since the Olympics began. We always believed that by criticizing the Communist Party, we’d be shining light into a country that does its best to make itself opaque, and democratic reforms would result. 

In retrospect, it was an easy mistake to make. We thought we’d be greeted as liberators. 

At this juncture in our relations with China, however, it makes sense to take a step back and wonder what went wrong in our discourse. And the answer, in my experience, is that we went about it in the entirely wrong way.

Trying to fix something in China by bluntly pointing it out is about the worst way possible; whether a broken light bulb or a broken executive branch, subtlety is the best way to go. That means economic incentives, private pressure and leadership. 

That isn’t how we’re used to functioning, but we can see that our current methods haven’t helped. And at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves: Is our role in the world to try and lead or to simply call it like we see it and let people react?

The American preference for openness and directness might, in this situation, be precisely what’s poisoning our discourse with China. Some might say that toning down our outward criticism of China would be simple acquiescence to a regime that many Americans frankly don’t like.

But communication is about more than just translating sentences, and by changing the format in which we influence, we’ll be able to take the same message to an audience that will be much more receptive, a far more important goal.

If our diplomats are just speaking to hear themselves talk, they might as well type.