Jihad vs. McWorld (31 page)

I
N AREAS OUTSIDE
of Europe and North America that have been relatively successful in both economic and political terms, what is most offensive about McWorld to local protagonists of Jihad is its cultural aggressiveness. Indeed, in many Asian nations Jihad proceeds without fear of offending democrats since democracy has had little to do with modernization. The trick in that part of the world has been to figure out how to exploit the benefits of economic modernization and capitalist markets without capitulating to either the political values (openness, rights, liberty, democracy) or the cultural habits (suburban, materialist, consumerist) attached to them. On the whole it has been easier to counter the West’s political ideas than McWorld’s seductive lifestyles. The authoritarian experiments, Communist and non-Communist alike, in Vietnam, Singapore, Korea, and China are proof of how easy it is to sever free markets from free political institutions. Democratic India and Japan are proof of how difficult it is to sever free markets from McWorld’s way of life.

In nondemocratic Asia, markets have been cautiously welcomed in the setting of a prudent, background mercantilism where governments
first establish and then try to control the inchoate but productive forces markets unleash. The democratic institutions that (Westerners argue) are necessary to the operation of markets remain wholly unwelcome. Market liberals of Milton Friedman’s or Jeffrey Sachs’s persuasion have assured us that the two cannot be uncoupled in the long run, but the long run here may be several lifetimes—far too long to sustain the credibility of their argument.
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Indeed, there is no better refutation of the libertarian argument than the wildly successful controlled capitalist economies of Vietnam, China, Singapore, and Indonesia. “China’s dream,” says a Western diplomat in China, “is to become another Singapore,” where the attraction is “that it has achieved Western living standards without being infected by Western political standards.”
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China has had the fastest growing economy in the world in recent years, despite—or is it because of?—the brutal repression of individual rights and political liberty during the horrendous events at Tiananmen Square and ever since.
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China, like its neighbors, struggles against Westernization at the same time it struggles for economic market productivity and for trade with the rest of McWorld. Understanding the priorities of its trading partners in Japan and the United States, as well as the logic of markets, which demands autonomy from politics and is thus indifferent to state organization, it refuses to budge on political rights. For rights, along with their accompanying ideology of political individualism, are seen as appurtenances of the resistible culture (easily separable from the irresistible market) and China’s successful pursuit of the latter without yielding to the former is proof of the accuracy of its leaders’ perceptions. As Perry Link describes it, the happy bargain Deng Xiaoping offered the Chinese was basically “Shut up and I’ll let you get rich,”
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a formula that worked not only for his own subjects but with the American State Department as well.
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In the spring of 1994, China won extension of its Most Favored Nation status with the United States (without which its exports to the United States would be subject to tariffs at least twice as large as they are) without it having to make a single significant political concession. Ironically, it was only its obstreperousness with respect to intellectual property rights (it refused to shut down pirate video and cassette operations) that finally elicited American trade sanctions and a clamp-down on the pirates in 1995.

China specialist Thomas B. Gold is probably right to believe that “the Communist Party is going to concentrate on the things it thinks it can do best—presumably political control, media, education—and allow the economy to function by some of its own logic.”
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Yet ironically, while the struggle against democracy has so far succeeded, the struggle against lifestyle and culture is failing, precisely because the economy’s “own logic” is the logic of McWorld and seems far more likely to bring with it the vices of the West (its cultural imagery and the ideology of consumption as well as a “logical” tolerance for social injustice and inequality)
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than its virtues (democracy and human rights). Russia has acquired a Mafia well before it has established a free press. Vietnam is still governed by a hegemonic Communist Party, but also sports a five-star Hilton Hotel and seven golf courses to which its ranking members receive free memberships. You can buy almost anything in the world you want in Singapore other than a fair trial. The one thing that can be said with certainty about post-Deng China is that KFC will continue to open franchises at a record pace; there are twenty-eight in place in over a half dozen cities already.

The struggle for partisans of cultural autonomy within ruling circles and among cultural elites beyond it, then, cannot just be against a democracy that has made few inroads but must be against a foreign culture that has made many. The real threat of the “barbarians”—the term the Chinese have used for foreigners for hundreds of years—is less their explicit campaign for democracy than their stealth program for McWorld. The Great Wall built millennia ago to keep the barbarians out now swarms with their heirs, the ever more ubiquitous tourists who are becoming the basis for a vital Chinese industry. The Chinese have responded to the challenge of McWorld with what the Chinese like to call “market socialism,” what the former
New York Times
Beijing bureau chief dryly calls “Market-Leninism.”
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Leninist political institutions can initially coexist very nicely with market capitalism, and the thirty or forty Rolls-Royces imported in each of the last few years have not shaken Communist rulership. However, Chinese-Communist and pre-Communist Chinese cultural values are vulnerable to the messages played in the CD players and to the images conveyed by the internal appointments of the Rolls-Royces (and Land Rovers and Mercedeses) being brought in. The Chinese
hope to make foreign cultural imports their own, welding together the artifacts of McWorld and the images of traditional Chinese communism—as artist Wang Guangyi has done in his canvases integrating Western advertising logos into revolutionary posters or Feng Mengbo did in his Video End Game Series in which Mao’s revolutionary-model operas appear on canvas as video games.
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Soap operas too are popular, so the Chinese have begun producing their own with considerable success. In 1991 the fifty-part series
Aspirations
created a sensation and gave serious competition to the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mexican soap operas already on the air. In boom cities like Shanghai, there are few signs of the local culture that fuels Jihad, subtle or otherwise. Shanghai is not “like” Hong Kong and Singapore: it
is
Hong Kong and Singapore, except the traffic is worse. Chu Chia Chien has returned from her New York exile to the city of her youth and says of her new neighbors: “They are very fashion-conscious, but now they like to have a name brand—it is very important because it says ‘I have money.’”
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Meanwhile, the
China Culture Gazette
, official organ of the Ministry of Culture, has gone slick and fashionable, featuring busty Western nudes and sincere discussions of sexuality and eroticism. Editor Zhang Zuomin uses Red Guard language of the cultural revolution to advance the interests of the market. “I believe we must smash open Chinese culture, and apply ‘the great fearless spirit’ to our newspaper work,” he says.
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With such developments made rampant by official support for markets, it is not hard to appreciate why Asian authorities in Communist and non-Communist countries alike insist on state control over information and the media, though for the most part in vain. Indonesia has shown a radical intolerance toward its independent media in recent years, in the main to forestall political opposition. But the government clearly also feels some need to use media control in its struggle against foreign culture. The cola companies, after all, have declared war on Indonesian tea culture. And while free-market philosophy urges freedom for advertising, it is agnostic about intervention via censorship against the kind of free cultural lifestyles advertising promotes.

China, no less culturally defensive than France, is tightening control over the production and screening of films with even more fer
vor than the French. It has restricted foreign films to 30 percent of the total market. Yet though the government tries to retain absolute control over political ideas, in leaving cultural images and commercial information to the marketplace it flails at mosquitoes with a butterfly net. In the long run the cultural mosquitoes are more likely to bring down the regime than the political butterflies that are captured. Artists have learned to use irony in place of anger, while publications like the
Cultural Gazette
make sure that between the nudes and gossip no political criticism slips in. The authorities understand that what they keep out via locks and bars on the front door labeled politics often creeps in through the wide-open back door labeled markets, but what is to be done? For example, aware of how ubiquitous McWorld’s satellite transmissions have become, they have dutifully banned the use of satellite dishes to receive anything other than Chinese signals without, however, banning the dishes themselves—everywhere visible atop the sooty apartment blocks of Beijing and Shanghai. This is about as effective as making it illegal to look at pinups but licensing the sale of
Playboy
. They might of course have banned the sale and use of the dishes altogether, but that would have disrupted a highly profitable industry in which the Ministry of Electronics manufactures dishes and the Army General Staff Department as well as the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television sell them to the general public. And so while government officials rant against corrupt Western culture, their colleagues are busily selling the instruments of corruption. Economic success for the fledgling industry—a dish in every home—will signal cultural failure: McWorld in every home.

Hot wars are conducted by force of arms; the Cold War put propaganda and images to the direct service of political ideas in a struggle for the hearts and minds of men. McWorld’s war proceeds by inadvertence, circumventing heart and mind in favor of viscera and the five senses, seducing peoples with the siren call of self-interest and desire where the self is defined wholly by want, wish, and the capacity to consume. Chinese spectators in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square “ought” to be interested in truthful journalism, but, exposed to McWorld’s videology, they avow to being far “more interested in sit-coms or cops-and-robbers shows than in news programs.” According to Zhang Zedong who runs a state-owned satellite-dish
shop, “what people want is entertainment. They’re not so interested in BBC, but rather in MTV …”!
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China has another problem as well: how to enforce its ideologically motivated centralist edicts on regions with a great deal of geographical autonomy that (as instructed) are motivated more by economics than ideology and that often ignore political edicts in favor of market edicts, since the two come from the same central government, but stand in sharp contradiction. In boom regions in South China, Shanghai and the Yangtze River, and Manchuria, the central government’s Jihad against Westernization is largely ineffective. Like Catalonia or Lombardy, such regions achieve some independence from the Chinese centralist regime through direct engagement in world trade. Orders handed down in Beijing commanding banks to stop speculating are flat-out ignored; orders to limit oil consumption enforced by local production controls are simply circumvented by increasing imports from abroad. A family-planning clinic run by the government recently reversed the ideological polarity (one child per family) set by the authorities when it discovered it could earn more as a fertility clinic.
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Some predict that regions on the extreme periphery like Tibet or oil-rich Xinjiang Province may try a Chinese-Quebec and secede from China altogether, although the brutal repression in Tibet suggests how committed the leadership is to retaining control.
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As in the West, the breakdown of a centralist Communist government can mean anarchy—an argument officials have been all too ready to use to oppose democracy since the time of the emperors. According to one official: “All the time in Chinese history, when you don’t have strong rule, you get chaos and warlords. If we try to get too much democracy, it’ll all fall apart again. China will disintegrate, and it’ll be worse than in the Soviet Union.”
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Of course no perspicacious observer would want to argue that China faces an internal Jihad against central, modernizing rule on the scale found in Eastern Europe and the regions of the former Soviet Union; less than 10 percent of the population (less than 100 million people) count as members of the fifty-five ethnic minorities of China, and they are concentrated in the West. Yet there are fears that even as the Chinese nation struggles against Westernization, traditionally remote regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia
will step up their own struggle against “Chinafication.” In predominantly Muslim Xinjiang, for example, ethnic Uighurs have more in common with neighbors across the former Soviet border than with cadres in Beijing. The central government has relied on force in the past in places like Tibet and will no doubt do the same again, especially in underdeveloped regions. In the south, however, where economic success coupled with regional autonomy is creating a natural catalyst for greater independence, the situation may be harder to contain. Moreover, the fear of “falling apart again” is deeply rooted in China’s pre-Communist history of warlordism and clan feuds, and the feuding has risen again in the provinces as Communist Party control has been loosened.
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The triple threat of secession by remote regions, clan feuds at the village level, and relative economic independence in the prospering provinces can only make the central government exceedingly anxious—whether or not it uses the language of Jihad to describe its potential adversaries.