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Prospects
An iconic billboard in the quintessential boom city of Shenzhen features Deng’s famous statement that China's “basic line will not waver for 100 years.” If Deng was right, we are less than one-third of the way into the era of “reform and opening.” But four challenges identified by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, that growth becomes “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, or unsustainable,” threaten the boom. The key to balance lies in increasing the consumer share of GDP, allowing China to create a modern consumer economy. Stability will depend on the government's ability to address grievances as the gap between winners and losers widens. Coordination is the great test facing the ruling Communist Party, of whether it can manage the politics of growth without fundamental changes to the system. Sustainability is an issue that has global implications, as citizens of a warming planet watch anxiously to see if China is successful in greening the boom. The fifth great challenge, left out by Premier Wen, may be the external one: whether the world is successful in making room for China. |
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The Paradox of Chinese NationalismPeriod: Prospects
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Click to expand 2008 was really a remarkable year for all this, because it’s the first time where, in an unmediated setting, we have Chinese netizens and American or other Western, Anglophone netizens encountering each other. Enough Chinese-speakers now, enough bridge bloggers, enough Western media where there’s room for comments, that in these comment threads, there are these really vicious battles going on between what I call the Rednecks and the Red Guards. They’re standing nose to virtual nose, for the first time, and seeing anything but eye to eye on all these issues. There’s a gaping chasm between the way that they see things and, in 2008, with the Tibet protests, and with the torch relay, and all the problems that the torch relay had in various Western cities that it went through, and, of course, the Olympics itself. It got really, really ugly. It got very, very ugly, and there’s this assumption on the part of the Westerners that any time they see defense of China, that it’s necessarily the product of brainwashing by the Chinese educational system, or it’s these so-called 50 cent, (wumao dang) Party-paid posters who are given 50 Chinese cents for every pro-China post they put up there. This happens, I don’t say that it doesn’t happen, I’m sure that it does happen, but it’s certainly not as widespread as they imagine. And what this has its roots in is, and I’m sure you’ve seen this before in your travels here, but every time there’s a big flare-up, whether it’s about Tibet or any other human rights issue, people are astonished that these seemingly Westernized, cosmopolitan, quite liberal-minded Chinese, who may have been educated abroad, who may have, or may be, living or working abroad, who have American friends, who watch American movies and film and television, how these seemingly cosmopolitan people can still have, within that worldview, this rabid strain of nationalism. That’s one thing that I think needs to be understood in an historical context. Liberalism and nationalism in China developed very much in lockstep, with the former serving the latter. People embraced classical liberalism at the end of the 19th and in the early part of the 20th century, not because it was seen as a noble end in itself, the end of history, but because that was perceived as the way that Western powers had become rich and powerful. And so, the liberal worldview was always in the service of nationalist ends. And that remains true to this day. People accept the inequalities visited on China by capitalism because it is creating wealth, it’s making China stronger, it's not seen as an end in itself. So, that explains this seeming paradox in the worldview of so many of these Chinese people.
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