Postcards From Tomorrow Square
Read Postcards From Tomorrow Square Online
Authors: James Fallows
Tags: #Political Science, #International Relations, #General, #History, #Asia, #China
POSTCARDS FROM
TOMORROW SQUARE
CONTENTS
Postcards from Tomorrow Square
Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town
“The Connection Has Been Reset”
For Deb
INTRODUCTION
T
he chapters in this book were written between the summers of 2006 and 2008, when my wife and I were living first in Shanghai and then Beijing and were traveling through many other parts of China.
This was not our first experience in the country. We had visited China in the mid-1980s, when we were living in Malaysia and Japan with our elementary-school-aged children. Getting into China was tricky at the time. We had finagled a visa by studying the invented language Esperanto, as a family, so we could be part of the U.S. delegation to the 1986 World Esperanto Congress in Beijing. (A friend was head of the U.S. Esperanto League.) There we spoke with Chinese intellectuals who had been assigned to learn Esperanto rather than English at the height of anti-Western sentiment under Chairman Mao.
The country then was still dark, poor, and monochromatic. Big city streets had few lighted signs or storefronts at night. Wardrobes were drab blue or gray. The idea of China becoming an economic and financial powerhouse seemed highly speculative.
In Shanghai we met a Chinese man in his late seventies who seemed eager to use his British-accented English, dormant for decades, in conversation with us. During Shanghai’s racy and European-controlled era in the 1930s, before the Imperial Japanese army arrived, he had been a clerk in the Shanghai office of a London-based brokerage house. He showed us a brittle stock certificate from that era, which he had hidden through all those years, and said that he hoped to live to see the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopen. Five years later, it did open. I never learned whether his hope was fulfilled.
After this first exposure, I visited China again on reporting trips in the late 1980s and 1990s. Then, after several years of planning, in 2006 my wife and I moved from our home in Washington, D.C., to Shanghai and other cities for three years or so. It has been just over two years now as I write this introduction. For me this meant writing a series of articles for
The Atlantic Monthly
, for which I had also been a correspondent during our previous time in Asia. My wife continued her work for a U.S.-based Internet research firm, studying the Internet’s evolution and effects in China.
Most of the material that follows appeared month by month in
The Atlantic
, starting late in 2006. It is presented here in its original sequence, as an unfolding report on China’s changes during this period—as it solidified its role as a dominant manufacturing and financial influence on the world as a whole; as it coped with increasing domestic and foreign criticism about its environmental problems; and as its press, people, and government prepared for the Olympics and responded to a series of crises prior to their start. These included a freak snowstorm that paralyzed travel in the southern half of the country, just as tens of millions of people were joining their families for the Chinese New Year holidays; international protests and disruptions as the Olympic torch relay passed through; and of course the devastating Sichuan province earthquake on May 12, 2008, which killed perhaps 100,000 people and left many millions homeless.
Naturally, the sequence of articles also reveals the changes in my own attitudes and conclusions over these two years. And they illustrate the two different approaches I have taken in trying to explain what I have seen.
Some of the articles collected here deal with questions that I had in mind before coming to China. But many of the articles are about people, trends, and events that I had not known were interesting or significant until I came across them after we had arrived. This opportunity for discovery is the real payoff of life as a reporter: the chance to answer questions you did not previously know you wanted to ask.
For instance, until I happened to visit his hometown of Changsha, in Hunan province, I had never heard of Zhang Yue, the entrepreneur described in the second chapter of this book. On the home campus of his air-conditioning company in Changsha, Mr. Zhang has built a replica of the Palace of Versailles plus a 130-foot high golden-colored pyramid. He also operates one of China’s first corporate air fleets—and meanwhile reveres Al Gore for his attempts to deal with climate change. I ended up thinking not just that he was intriguing in his own right but also that his story would give outside readers some sense of the wild variety of personalities, interests, and visions among the new business class in China.
Similarly, I had not known about the dominant role of reality shows on China’s state-run TV networks until I had a chance to watch some of them. When I did, I became fascinated by the drama and the implications of a show called
Win in China!
that was modeled on Donald Trump’s
The Apprentice
but was more earnestly pro-entrepreneurial in its approach. It is described in chapter three. The same process of unintended discovery led me to the story of how two Taiwanese-born business executives undertook the mission of reducing poverty in China’s dry, remote western provinces, as portrayed in chapter ten, and of the Irish-born entrepreneur Liam Casey’s emergence as “Mr. China” in the southern manufacturing center of Shenzhen, described in chapter four.
H
ere is the main thing I hope readers will bear in mind in considering the variety of these chapters—short or long, “policy”-oriented or devoted mainly to portraying interesting cultural developments: The most important fact about them is, indeed, the
variety
of the aspects of China they present.
I suspected before coming to China, and now know for sure, that no one can sensibly try to present the “real story” or the “overall picture” of this country. It is simply too big and too contradictory.
The point may seem obvious, but I emphasize it because I believe that many people who lack firsthand experience in China have not fully taken it to heart. A central problem in the way the outside world thinks and talks about China is that it assumes there is a single, comprehensible “China” to discuss.
Every country varies; the challenge of China is that its internal variations are truly enormous. Given China’s scale, they are probably greater than those of any other country. They are certainly greater than what outside politicians and citizens usually assume in discussions about China’s economic and strategic potential and their own future dealings with it. Yes, press and politicians in other countries routinely refer to the huge and widening gap between China’s haves and have-nots. But that is only one of countless important cleavages within the country—by region, by generation, by level of schooling, by rural versus urban perspective, even by level of rainfall, which determines how many people a given area of land can support. The situation of entrepreneurs in Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong, has almost nothing in common with that of subsistence farmers in Sichuan or Hebei provinces. People who lived through the Cultural Revolution have a different sense of how perilous “rapid change” can be for China than do their children, who have known only the current boom. The millions of Chinese people who have returned after living abroad have a different sense of their country’s situation than the billion plus who have never left. And on through a very long list of other differences.
All of these are intensified by a factor evident to most people on the scene but omitted from much outside discussion: the tremendous individualism and nonconformism of Chinese culture. In this sense, the spectacular opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, which featured huge regimented masses (most of them soldiers detailed for the task) performing in perfect synchronization, may in the long run prove damaging to China’s cause. They increased the impression that the country is one big supercoordinated hive; as I hope this book conveys, the reality is much the reverse.
Why does this matter? I think that even now the Western world’s limited familiarity with China, especially its underappreciation of the cleavages within the country, leads to two important problems: an overestimation of China’s power and a misestimation of its strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities.
A clear sign of overestimation is unrealistic bullishness about where China is heading—and its converse, unrealistic fear about what its rise might mean for everyone else. Both assume that the people and systems in charge of China’s development are more foolproof and farsighted than they could possibly be. The impression of perfect control over all things at all times was another of the implied messages of the Olympic ceremonies, but it matches very few of the daily realities that I have seen and that I describe in this book. In chapter six, “The View from There,” I quote Susan Shirk, of the University of California, San Diego, who in 2006 published a book on China called
China: Fragile Superpower
. The writer Frank Gibney had used the same term thirty years earlier in a book about Japan; it seemed even more apt for China, given its much greater scale. But Shirk said that when she discussed the book with Americans, they always asked, “What do you mean,
fragile
?” When she discussed it with Chinese, they always asked, “What do you mean,
superpower
?”
Behind that difference, as she explained, was a Chinese awareness of countless obstacles to the economy’s continued rapid growth: pollution, social unrest, commodity and water shortages, pricing itself out of the cheap-labor manufacturing market, and others discussed in the chapters that follow. It often seems that managing China’s growth through the last quarter century has been like steering a boat down treacherous white-water rapids. So far, the people in charge have managed to avoid each boulder just before crashing into it—but there’s always another boulder looming. That the Chinese leaders have dodged so many boulders so far is impressive; how many more they’ll avoid, no one knows.
Overestimating China is a particular political and psychological risk for the United States. If Americans believe that China’s rise is “unstoppable,” perhaps they will respond in ways that do themselves and their system credit: shoring up the weak parts of their own educational and economic system, trying to become the best possible versions of themselves. This was the best aspect of the “Sputnik crisis” of the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union seemed to have attained an unreachable lead in science and technology. But anyone who knows American politics understands the risk that Americans will respond by indulging a lesser version of themselves, becoming more impatient, closed, and accusatory. At worst, this could involve casting China as something that, in my view, it need never become: a military threat to the United States.
Whether or not outsiders overestimate China’s strength, they are very likely to misestimate it, which in turn can lead to blunders even if they do not consider China a threat or rival. The contention that outsiders need to stop and understand what they are really dealing with in China explains the contrarian tone of several chapters that address politics and policy. When researching “China Makes, the World Takes,” I started looking for evidence of how, exactly, China’s emergence as the factory of the world affected the places where factories used to be. The evidence I found convinced me that—so far—it had helped China and Chinese people without hurting
overall
most other countries, though some people in those countries have clearly been forced out of traditional markets, businesses, and jobs. China’s continued dominance of manufacturing could create new problems, for reasons I examine in this chapter; but I argue that to cope with those when they appear, or even to understand where and why they might pose dangers, people outside China need to think clearly about the positives and negatives of what has happened so far.