By Mark Kitto aka Ang Moh Chinese :-))
Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I would like to add a third certainty: You'll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to.
I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream. "But China is an economic miracle: A record number of people lifted out of poverty in record time ... year on year 10-per-cent growth ... exports ... imports ... infrastructure ... investment." The superlatives roll on.
But don't you think, with all the growth and infrastructure, that China would be a happier, healthier country? At least better than the country emerging from decades of stultifying state control that I met and fell in love with in 1986 when I first came here as a student? I do not think it is.
DENG'S LEGACY
When I arrived in Beijing for the second year of my Chinese degree course, from the London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, China was communist. Compared with the West, it was backward. There were few cars on the streets and scant streetlights. The necessities of daily life: Food, drink, clothes and a bicycle, cost peanuts.
We had the time of our lives, as students do, but it is not the adventures I remember most fondly, not from my current viewpoint, the top of a mountain called Moganshan, 161 kilometres west of Shanghai, where I have lived for the past seven years.
If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress.
One man was largely responsible for the optimism of those heady days: Deng Xiaoping, rightly known as the architect of modern China.
Deng made China what it is today. He also ordered the tanks into Beijing on June 4, 1989, of course, and left a legacy that will haunt the Chinese Communist Party to its dying day.
It did not take long for Deng to put his country back on the road he had chosen. He persuaded the world that it would be beneficial to forgive him for the Tiananmen "incident", as the Chinese people call it, and engage with China, rather than treat her like a pariah.
The world obliged and the Chinese people took what he offered. Both have benefited financially.
When I returned to China in 1996, to begin the life and career I had long dreamed about, I found that familiar air of optimism, but there was a subtle difference: A distinct whiff of commerce in place of community.
The excitement was more like the eager anticipation I felt once I had signed a deal (I began my China career as a metals trader), sure that I was going to bank a profit, rather than the thrill that something truly big was about to happen.
A deal had been struck. Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they had not known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The party said: "Trust us and everything will be all right."
MONEY TRUMPS ALL
Twenty years later, everything is not all right. I must stress that this indictment has nothing to do with the trajectory of my own China career, which went from metal trading to building a multi-million-dollar magazine publishing business that was seized by the government in 2004, followed by retreat to this mountain hideaway of Moganshan, where my Chinese wife and I have built a small business centred on a coffee shop and three guesthouses.
That our current business could suffer the same fate as my magazines if the local government decides not to renew our short-term leases (for which we have to beg every three years) does, however, contribute to my decision not to remain in China.
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: Money and the acquisition thereof. The politically correct term in China is "economic benefit".
The country and its people, on average, are far wealthier than they were 25 years ago. Traditional family culture, thanks to 60 years of self-serving socialism followed by another 30 of the "one child policy", has become a "me" culture.
Except where there is economic benefit to be had, communities do not act together, and when they do, it is only to ensure equal financial compensation for the pollution or the poisoned children. Social status, so important in Chinese culture and, more so, thanks to those 60 years of communism, is defined by the display of wealth.
Once you have purchased the necessary baubles, you will want to invest the rest somewhere safe, preferably with a decent return - all the more important because one day you will have to pay your own medical bills and pension. But there is nowhere to put it except into property or under the mattress.
The stock markets are rigged, the banks operate in a way that is noncommercial and the yuan is still nonconvertible. While the well-connected transfer their wealth overseas via legally questionable channels, the remainder can only buy more apartments or thicker mattresses. The result is the biggest property bubble in history.
When that bubble pops, or in the remote chance that it deflates gradually, the wealth the party gave the people will deflate too. But there will still be the medical bills and pensions. The people will want their money back, or a say in their future, which amounts to a political voice. If they are denied, they will cease to be harmonious.
FORGOTTEN HOW TO LEAD
Meanwhile, what of the ethnic minorities and the factory workers, the people on whom it is more convenient for the government to dispense overwhelming force rather than largesse?
If an outburst of ethnic or labour discontent coincides with the collapse of the property market, and you throw in a scandal like the melamine tainted milk of 2008, and suddenly the harmonious society is likely to become a chorus of discontent.
How will the party deal with that? How will it lead? Unfortunately, it has forgotten. The government is so scared of the people it prefers not to lead them.
In rural China, village level decisions that require higher authorisation are passed up the chain of command, sometimes all the way to Beijing, and returned with the note attached: "You decide." The party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat.
"China is the next superpower," we are told. "Accept it. Deal with it." How do you deal with a faceless leader, who when called upon to adjudicate in an international dispute sends the message: "You decide"?
It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear. While there is no dispute that China was once a world superpower, there are two fundamental problems with the idea that it should therefore regain that position.
A key reason China achieved primacy was its size. As it is today, China was, and always will be, big. If you are the biggest you tend to dominate. Once in charge, the Chinese people sat back and accepted tribute from their suzerain and vassal states. If trouble was brewing beyond China's borders, that might threaten its interests, the troublemakers were set against each other or paid off.
INWARD LOOKING,
ANTI-FOREIGN
The second reason the rightful position idea is misguided is that the world in which China was the superpower did not include the Americas, an enlightened Europe or a modern Africa. The world does not want to live in a Chinese century, just as much of it does not like living in an American one.
China, politically and culturally, is inward looking. All non-Chinese are, to the Chinese people, aliens, in a mildly derogatory sense. The polite word is "Outsider."
The Chinese themselves are on "The Inside." And like anyone who does not like what is going on outside - a loud argument, a natural disaster - the Chinese people can shut the door.
There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones.
To award a Nobel Prize to a Chinese intellectual is to "interfere in China's internal affairs" and "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people". China's citizens are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.
Fear of violent revolution or domestic upheaval, with a significant proportion of that violence sure to be directed at foreigners, is not the main reason I am leaving China, though I will not deny it is one of them.
Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China.
I want to give my children a decent education.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them.
In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take "business studies". Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
There is little, if any, extra-curricular activity. Athletic children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically-gifted children are rammed into the conservatories, where they have all the joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered a failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays.
China does not educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The party does not want freethinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place.
The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible.
The party does include millions of enlightened officials who understand that something must be done to avert a crisis. I have met some of them. If China is to avoid upheaval then it is up to them to change the party from within, but they face a long uphill struggle, and time is short.
I have also encountered hundreds of Chinese people with a modern world view. People who could, and would willingly, help their motherland face the issues that are growing into state-shaking problems. But it is unlikely that they will be given the chance, and I fear for some of them who might ask for it.
I read about Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangchen and Liu Xiaobo on Weibo, the closely monitored Chinese equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, where a post only has to be up for a few minutes to go viral. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese citizens who "follow" such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail.
21 August 2012
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