The Other China
McGurn, William
William McGurn The Other- 3 6 July 1999 The American Spectator Nanchang n a dreary provincial office four flights above street level, a government functionary enters the room, seats...
...The PLA museum, where the explanation cards still wax indignant about "landlords" and "rightist deviationists...
...As we return to our seats and the next couple takes their place in front of the table, an unknown band practicing on the sidewalk below suddenly delivers itself of a rousing edition of the Ode to Joy...
...The churches too are more relaxed...
...ver the course of a decade I had been in Beijing any 0 number of times...
...One of them is amused by her breath, little blown clouds made visible by the cold air...
...Of course, there remain many Christians harassed for their faith, and the thaw is purely tactical in intent...
...In a nation where the main lever of government control has been the work unit—in A Mother's Ordeal, Steven Mosher recounts how factory doctors and nurses kept track of the menses of their female workers on large chalkboards, the better to prevent any deviation from the one-child policy—liberalization and a floating population of perhaps between 8o-13o million workers is fast making the work unit a relic of the past...
...A look at the dishes dotting Chinese city rooftops confirms that I cannot have been alone...
...In the taxi back to my hotel to pick up my bags, we pass Mao's mausoleum on Tiananmen Square...
...There is none of the desperation I used to sense in Chinese I'd met...
...from neighboring Hong Kong, allowing millions of ordinary mainlanders to watch American police officers reading the Miranda warning to those they arrest...
...This will not prevent Jiang Zemin and his government from thuggish behavior when they sense a threat to their power, but it will force an accountability...
...The key question is not simply whether the reality of today's China is good or bad, but compared to what...
...After Mass at the South Church in Beijing in 1988, the congregation dispersed quickly, reluctant to be seen talking to foreigners...
...Or take He Qi...
...As much as intellectuals would like to believe otherwise, it is not just the Wall Street Journal and the BBC that have their salutary effects...
...This is not the China you read about, the one getting an aircraft carrier, locking up dissidents, persecuting Christians, aborting their babies simply because they are girls...
...But such fame as Nanchang retains is as a Communist footnote, the site of a hotel-cum-museum whence sprang the People's Liberation Army...
...The evidence, as even the State Department reports concede, inclines to the Friedmanite view...
...He pauses, and refills a glass tumbler of tea leaves with hot water...
...In these parts, however, fashion lags and the Mao pendants hanging from the taxi mirrors suggest the same sort of pride Hoosiers of a certain age take in John Dillinger...
...presidential election...
...Even for someone whose first trip to China did not come until 1988, the changes are striking...
...I know, I know...
...witness Huntington's aside about confusing the Magna Carta with the "Magna Mac" or Gary Bauer's warning about selling out American ideals "in hopes of selling a few billion Big Macs...
...People on the streets are better dressed, better fed, and (most under-appreciated) better informed than they've ever been...
...At the top of the pyramid are the Hong Kong or Taiwanese managers, who run the China-based ventures for the multinationals...
...It makes for good sound bites...
...He is good model for China's relations with the West...
...To an American idea of what we would like China to be...
...We have never valued ingenious articles," the emperor Qianlong wrote to George III, "nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufacturers...
...Presently we finish our tea, the professor wraps a scarf around his neck and takes me out back...
...So it had to be William F. Buckley:' —JOHN KENNETH OALBRAITH LIB r*, THE REDHUNTER • A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy IN BOOKSTORES NOW...
...Even the foreign brand names that pepper the main shopping street incline to Hong Kong rather than Paris or Milan: Giordano, Bossini, Fairwood...
...In the pews where I have knelt, people are suspect of sudden change, which experience has taught them may be preludes to large reversals...
...In the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the June 4 massacres, clearly Party chieftains would rather have students throwing rocks at the U.S...
...the main boulevards were so bereft of cars they looked like airport runways...
...What we look to see is whether the public consensus affects decision making...
...Daisy's only request is for more Willa Cather novels...
...Full of poison," says the Chinese addendum to The Road to Serfdom, just in case there is any doubt...
...Today there are 51 McDonald's restaurants in Beijing alone, accompanied by Kentucky Fried Chicken and, now, Starbucks...
...What has changed is the China around them...
...She admires my new daughter and asks if I think the pope will come to China...
...Like virtually everyone else there she first apologized for her poor language skills but then delivered her question in perfect English...
...The accumulation of little experiences such as this has left me with intimations of a Chinese people increasingly gaining a life of their own...
...In China, she says, things move slowly...
...must encourage...
...By day I painted Mao but at night I returned to the Madonna," he says, carefully unwrapping a copy, done on old newsprint, that he had sent to his sister...
...But in China we have an obstacle called the Communist Party...
...He became obsessed...
...And today the battle for China's soul continues to be contested by a human-rights community that thinks the answer lies in congressional legislation and a claque of equally naive businessmen who believe they could manage everyone if only the busybodies would just butt out...
...But two years later I found the city now has public phones that accept widely available prepaid cards, from which anyone could dial up New York or Paris or Singapore with no record on their home bill...
...I suggest that China's regard for Ricci as a fit model of East-West relations may be because Ricci gave everything to China and China gave nothing in return, but either he doesn't quite grasp what I'm saying or lets it pass...
...NORMAN PODHORETZ, AUTHOR OF EX-FRIENDS" "To redeem even by fiction the career of Joe McCarthy is a challenging task for a truly brilliant writer...
...Nor only did he commission a Chinese translation of Hayek's The Constitution ofLiberty (see an interview with the translator at www.tpectator.org/799TASIdeng.htm), he subsequently organized a conference to discuss the work, a conference attended by what my then-colleague, the Far Eastern Economic Review's Matt Forney, represented as a "Who's Who of liberal thinkers in the capital...
...None of this is coincidence...
...Outside the French-built church in Nanchang, an old lady sitting on a bench peeling vegetables motions me over...
...Later I regret the remark because there is nothing cynical about the professor, who says that despite being a dedicated materialist himself he has grown to love the garden full of missionary tombstones...
...What makes him most intriguing, however, is that Mao is a fan of Friedrich Hayek...
...In 1989, those of us in Hong Kong received information from fax machines...
...To what we might reasonably hope for...
...embassy rather than the Great Hall of the People...
...On the square itself we pass little girls all bundled up, beautiful northern girls with ruddy red cheeks...
...His final resting place, on ground originally donated by the Wanli emperor, lies in the courtyard of the Beijing Administrative College, a training school for the city's cadres...
...I was captivated by her smile...
...It is a trend the U.S...
...About two years back he became something of an icon among reform-minded Chinese for an article entitled "Liberalism, Equal Status and Human Rights," the gist of which was that what China needs most is equality before the law...
...In one of Beijing's most exclusive apai hi lent blocs, a 70-year-old man puts it this way...
...In the middle are local Cantonese, who have moved up to lower management or better-paying skilled work...
...In its own day Nanchang was a center of Chinese learning and poetry, but you don't have to spend too much time here to recognize that its own day was some time ago...
...Though rehabilitated in the 198o's Mao declined the invitation to rejoin the Party...
...Four hundred years ago in this city the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci—the man who introduced China to Western mathematics, cartology, astronomy, art, etc...
...But talks with workers reveal a clear hierarchy...
...Today, however, up to three-quarters of the Catholic bishops in the government's patriotic association have secretly reconciled themselves with the Vatican...
...Six million people are getting and sending e-mail...
...All of those things are true...
...when I was living in Washington ten years ago, one fellow called me collect from Shanghai begging me to find him an American girl to marry so he could emigrate...
...A few years after this, the New York Times carried a piece about a small town in Sichuan province where new-found affluence meant that families could get around the one-child rule by paying a fine...
...The Clinton administration has demonstrated that commerce is no substitute for a foreign policy, especially when it comes at the expense of American credibility...
...The place looks like William McKinley High, complete with wooden desks...
...N one of this is to say that America shouldn't be firm with China, since the hard old men in Beijing are acutely sensitive to criticism...
...In Beijing in January 1998, a man in a Pittsburgh Pirates hat was selling Internet service outside the Trader's Hotel...
...Mao himself (no relation) is no Hayek expert, he warns me...
...Difficult as modernization is on its own, in China's case it is further complicated by the way in which it finds itself brushing against all the raw nerves of American politics, whether they be trade, human rights, religion, abortion, national security, or even the integrity of a U.S...
...even the pandas in the Beijing Zoo looked run down and pathetic...
...The delusion of both right and left is the notion that we can come up with some legal blueprint for China and sell or bully Beijing into adopting it and — hesto presto—China is free...
...There we were charged an extortionist rate for the meanest of accommodations...
...At a 1998 speech at Fudan University in Shanghai, students listen politely as I relate what lessons the Hong Kong 150-year liberal experiment might have to teach China about the concerns that so bedevil the mainland: efficiency, corruption, opportunity...
...To what it was 20 years ago...
...Obviously not...
...Stirring declarations of rights and justice will always enjoy the dramatic advantage, but for those who have to live under these regimes priorities are typically different...
...They are relaxed and friendly, without a trace of the surliness that generally constitutes the face of Chinese officialdom...
...But inside was a kind of oasis, with new Japanese appliances such as a JVC color television and Mitsubishi air conditioner...
...Five years ago...
...In 1996, when we flew to Nanjing to adopt our eldest daughter, Grace, there were no public phones to speak of...
...For Hayek, liberal progress was less the result of legislation than evolution, akin to the common law, where legislation is the ratification of what society has already learned rather than some advance guard for new rights...
...In the decade since Deng Xiaoping sent the tanks rumbling into Tiananmen Square, the battle lines have hardened but have been twisted out of ideological coherence...
...Nor is the challenge to the state machinery confined to tomorrow's technology...
...An artist in Nanjing, the former southern capital infamous for the Japanese Rape during WW II but also a one-time center of Chinese Protestantism, He Qi was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution because his father was a mathematician...
...In America "Doonesbury" and the like spend much time on the conditions of Nike factories, and the factory I visited across from Hong Kong in Guangzhou (Canton) looks the part: concrete, crowded, monotonous...
...Though not completely bereft of the Western influences most visibly on display in, say, Beijing and Shanghai -- the glossy Leonardo di Caprio posters dominating the sidewalk markets, for example—unmistakable signs of the province's second-rate status abound...
...At the bottom, the grunt work tends to be done by the io million desperate immigrants from outside provinces, not infrequently women...
...Almost immediately a young woman raises her hand...
...Inasmuch as the authorities caught up with the man, the implication was 38 July 1999 • The American Spectator that the couple were forced to abort...
...In two decades the part of China most open to outside influences has "graduated" the local Cantonese to the point where they no longer are grateful for the sweatshop jobs...
...Is this freedom...
...The papers tell us of a leadership whose spots have not changed much in the twenty years since Deng Xiaoping opened China's door, and the papers may well be right...
...Communications control is impossible...
...At the front gate I tell the uniformed guard I'm here to see the grave of Li Mato (Ricci's Chinese name), and he calls a professor, who invites me up to his office for tea...
...Surely the point is not that opening markets is the same as opening China, but that in doing the former the Chinese are making the kind of control Chinese knew in their worst days impossible...
...The idea that we should expect the sudden arrival of freedom is simplistic...
...One day he stumbled across an old Life magazine or some such, with a photo of Raphael's Madonna...
...In The Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington asks whether modernization must always equal Westernization, a particularly embarrassing question for a Chinese leadership which joined the Party when Communism was itself thought to be the future...
...I recall a Taiwanese manager at a Pepsi plant, who told me about a junior Chinese manager of his, who had to be fired when his wife got pregnant with their second child...
...What is true, however, is not the whole story...
...fleet, stealing nuclear secrets or menacing its neighbors in the Spratlys...
...During an earlier incarnation in Hong Kong in the mid-198o's I had loathed going into China, the glowing reports of which I could never square with first-hand experience of a Chinese toilet or train...
...Look at Russia...
...And in moving from sewing machines and bicycles to video recorders and refrigerators, millions upon millions of Chinese now have come to take a long-suppressed upward mobility for granted...
...At tidy little conferences in America, it is easy to conceive of a China that gets openness without burgers...
...To get out of manual labor, he started drawing revolutionary images and likenesses of Mao...
...Little, Brown and Company www.littlebrown.com • Also available as a Tme Warner AudioBook' • ©1999 Time Warner Trade Publishing, Inc...
...39 The arrival of a McDonald's heralds a margin of opporfunify fNaf wasnl fflere before, not leasf in ffle disposable income if assumes...
...But in the process of enriching both our countries, trade has proved itself the most effective means of expanding the margin of the possible...
...When she speaks about the government, it is in the tone of a D.C...
...resident complaining about the Bureau of Motor Vehicles...
...Occasionally the government flexes its muscles, as if to remind people that what the Party giveth the Party can jolly well taketh away...
...He points to the sky...
...I look down at my beautiful new daughter, and at the tears streaming down my wife's face...
...But clearly he has the basics down...
...But it has its effects...
...Ricci, who spent his entire life seeking to infiltrate himself into the imperial court, would enjoy the irony...
...And so I well understand the welter of conflicting emotions brought about by news of China's theft of U.S...
...Blue" beamed in 37 Repression an d corruption continue, yet China grows freer, more prosperous, and more modern each day...
...of the Soviet expertise in preserving dead Communists, occasioning the need for frequent repairs to Mao's corpse and the occasional substitution of a wax dummy...
...According to Li Conguhua, author of China: The Consumer Revolution, Shanghai's consumers now enjoy a living standard comparable to that of Taiwanese in 1969...
...Yet we also ought to recognize that a country where the Golden Arches now look across Tiananmen Square from the balcony whence Mao once addressed throngs of Red Guards, where several million now have e-mail and access to foreign web pages, where Christianity can no longer be dismissed as a foreign import, that such a China exhibits possibilities lacking only a few years ago and which ought to be encouraged and pushed...
...Indeed, it was just this corruption that helped bring down the Kuomintang in 1949...
...Pointing to her own granddaughter, she says things will be better for her...
...he man's name is T Mao Yushi, and he is no Party hack...
...For me it is a relatively new feeling, and a long time long in coming...
...In the more prosperous regions along the South China coast, Red Guards have long given way to Rolex and Christian Dior...
...I have felt it...
...He called this spontaneous order, and even in China it might be found for those who care to look...
...The American Spectator • July 1999 What an apt metaphor for today's China, the omnipresent shoddiness punctuated by moments of beauty and exhilaration...
...In the messy realities of a modernizing dictatorship, however, the arrival of a McDonald's does herald a margin of opportunity that wasn't there before, not least in the disposable income it assumes...
...In general, however, attitudes toward McDonald's are a fairly good indicator of attitudes toward development...
...Indeed, I never would have come except to collect our second daughter, Margaret Mei-sze...
...completed his first work in Chinese, the classic On Friendship...
...Is it better...
...Measuring progress by the number of McDonald's and prostitutes...
...He had many friends who were scholars and officials...
...In the long run, however, Chinese officials know that, much as they might resent it, they need America if they are to modernize...
...What that poor Pepsi manager and his wife would have given for that loophole...
...As the recent State Department country report for China noted, in 1998 "the government's human rights record deteriorated sharply" over the year before...
...The West always considers who is in jail and looks at the release [of dissidents...
...The government and paperwork just can't keep up...
...The Redhunter is a riveting and complex evocation that will fascinate even those who, like me, believe that Joe McCarthy did far more harm than good, including the cause of anti-Communism for which he so ruthlessly fought...
...Today there are not only more fax machines and websites, there are more telephones...
...On my last visit, however, I made a special effort to see the tombstone of Matteo Ricci, who arrived in the Chinese capital in i6oi...
...Take my friend Daisy (not her real name), a Shanghainese...
...And no one with any regard for liberty could wish a China controlled by the existing regime, much less an Asia dominated by it...
...He knows of at least two: The Road to Serfdom, in 1962, and The Fatal Conceit, in 1991...
...As one China-born missionary told me when I asked about conflicting reports of church-state relations, "Whatever you read about China is undoubtedly true for some part of China...
...The Times concluded that "economic growth is eroding the old system of control over ordinary people's lives, creating loopholes large and small...
...William McGurn The Other3 6 July 1999 The American Spectator Nanchang n a dreary provincial office four flights above street level, a government functionary enters the room, seats himself at a small desk, and pulls out the official chop that constitutes his power...
...Li Ma-to respects very much the Chinese culture," the professor tells me...
...After answering a few questions about our income and endeavoring to impress upon the notary our abiding gratitude to the Chinese people, the man writes our names in the ledger and we receive our papers—complete with the chop bearing the familiar red star...
...the South China Morning Post even printed a page designed to be faxed into China...
...And he notes with some irony that this is by no means the first Chinese translation of Hayek...
...And they know too that however much it may be possible to whip up resentment against Uncle Sam, the endemic corruption and favoritism that plagues the system today is likely to be a more potent incitement to protest...
...Looking out at the Chinese people today, at their traffic jams, their cellular phones, their credit cards, it is impossible to say of today's Chinese that they are uninterested in what the rest of the world has to offer...
...But the cracks in the state cement widen...
...On that first visit, a holiday with my brother and a college friend, we stayed at the Beijing Hotel just offTiananmen Square...
...The not-quiteas-fashionable young women...
...Two centuries later Mao would advance much the same argument...
...In a book called The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao's former doctor explained that the Sino-Soviet rift had left the Chinese bereft Now Chinese car, callfreelg abroad from public phones...
...But it is easy because we can do all these things without thinking, and we have no experience of not being able to do them...
...These previous translations, however, were done secretly and meant only for the eyes of The American Spectator • July 1999 high government, Party, and military officials—to help them recognize bourgeois thought when they saw it...
...He is not a believer, he says—he wouldn't be teaching cadres if he were —but he says he has come to take an interest in the cemetery, and the five dozen priests originally buried here (their bodies were lost in the Cultural Revolution...
...40 July 1999 The American Spectator "AS A NOVEL THIS BOOK DELIGHTS AND AS HISTORY IT INSTRUCTS...
...What you say is very good," she states...
...But the accusation itself suggests the impossibility of the Party task of controlling all messages in a country where there are already some 6 million people getting and sending e-mail...
...In my room I watched the breaking Monica Lewinsky scandal andthe pope's visit to Cuba on CNN...
...embassy...
...The truth is something the Party needs to fear, not us...
...He is instead a retired member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who in 1957 was purged as a rightist...
...nuclear secrets, its continued bullying of dissenters at home, and the Third World pique we saw most vividly portrayed in the photograph of a forlorn James Sasser staring out through the broken glass after Chinese students—responding to NATO's bombing of China's Belgrade embassy—were permitted to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the U.S...
...some of it is yesterday's...
...Today Asian Communists no longer boast, a la Khrushchev, of "burying" capitalism...
...Kill the chicken to frighten the monkey," the saying goes, and in March the authorities jailed a Shanghai businessman named Lin Lai for providing 30,000 e-mail addresses in China to an online dissident group outside the country...
...the China clamp-ing down on Hong Kong, testing a missile launch against Taiwan, simulating a war exercise against the U.S...
...oi-,' The American Spectator...
...I call them fallen stars," he says, pointing to the heavens...
...To the contrary, they now recognize that development has forced them into a damned-if-they-do and damned-if-they-don't situation: between the risk of a South Korea if they open up and the certainty of a North Korea if they don't...
...The apartment she showed me —she has since moved, twice—was on the 3rd floor of some kind of factory, with a shared kitchen that looked like a back alley...
...In America it is easy to poke fun at these modest freedoms: to buy a hamburger, to choose an apai tment, to paint a Nativity...
...And yet the argument persists that it will all come without any social and political consequences...
...For Chinese, we don't see it as important...
...In April Communist officials were taken completely by surprise when more than io,000 adherents of a quasi-Buddhist movement of breathing and healing exercise, the Falung Dafa, surrounded the compound where Party leaders live and work, demanding that the government recognize their sect...
...A Chinese I met in Guangzhou once confided to me that the most revolutionary things he ever saw on TV were the reruns of the American cop shows like "Hawaii Five-O" and "N.Y.P.D...
...Stylish prostitutes ply their trade at the disco in the basement of the Great Wall Sheraton...
...WILLIAM MCGURN, formerly a senior editor with the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong, is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
