Postcards From Tomorrow Square (30 page)

Even as the top leadership tries to expand its international exposure and experience, much of the country’s daily reality is determined by mayors and governors and police. “It’s like the local sheriff in the old days in South Carolina,” said Sidney Rittenberg, who grew up there. “He’d say, ‘They can talk and talk in Washington, but I’m the law down here.’” Thus one hypothesis for the embarrassment of the “authorized” protest sites during the Olympics: Hu Jintao’s vice president and heir apparent, Xi Jinping, was officially in charge of all preparations for the Games. Hobnobbing with the International Olympic Committee, he would see the payoff to China of allowing some people to protest. But the application went to the local police, who had no interest in letting troublemakers congregate. A similar mix-up may well have led to the embarrassment over whether to open the Internet during the Olympics, and could also explain many of the other fumbles that get so much more attention than the news the government wants to give.

The Communist Party schools that train the country’s leadership are constantly expanding their curricula to meet the needs of the times; but for advancement in party ranks, predictability, ideology, and loyalty are what matter most. The United States saw just how well a similar approach paid off in local and worldwide respect and effectiveness when it staffed its embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone mainly with people who followed the party line in Washington.

The frustrating consequences for China are obvious—though apparently not yet obvious enough to its leadership. For outsiders, the central problem is that a country that will inevitably have increasing and perhaps dominant influence on the world still has surprisingly little idea of how the world sees it. That, in turn, raises the possibility of blunders and unnecessary showdowns, and in general the predicament of a new world power stomping around, Gargantua-like, making onlookers tremble. The world has known this predicament before: It is what the previously established powers have feared about America, starting a hundred years ago and with periodic recurrences since then, most recently in March of 2003. Maybe that puts America in a good position to help China take this next step.

J
AMES
F
ALLOWS

POSTCARDS FROM TOMORROW SQUARE

J
AMES
F
ALLOWS
is
The Atlantic Monthly
’s national correspondent, who has been based in China since 2006. He is a former editor of
U.S. News & World Report
and a former chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. His previous books include
Blind Into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq
;
Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
;
Free Flight
;
Looking at the Sun
;
More Like Us
;and
National Defense
, which won the American Book Award for nonfiction. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award four times, and his article about the consequences of victory in Iraq, “The Fifty-first State?” won that award in 2003.

A
LSO BY
J
AMES
F
ALLOWS

Blind Into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq

Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel

Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian
Economic and Political System

More Like Us: Making America Great Again

National Defense

Inside the System: The Five Branches of American Government
(with Charles Peters)

Who Runs Congress?
(with Mark Green and David Zwick)

The Water Lords

Footnotes

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A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2009

Copyright © 2009 by James Fallows

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

These articles in this collection were previously published in
The Atlantic Monthly
:
“Postcards from Tomorrow Square” (December 2006)
“Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town” (March 2007)
“Win in China!” (April 2007)
“China Makes, the World Takes” ( July 2007)
“Macau’s Big Gamble” (September 2007)
“The View from There” (November 2007)
“The $1.4 Trillion Question” (January 2008)
“‘The Connection Has Been Reset’” (March 2008)
“China’s Silver Lining” (June 2008)
“How the West Was Wired” (October 2008)
“Their Own Worst Enemy” (November 2008)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallows, James M.
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: reports from China / by James Fallows.
p. cm.
“The articles in this collection were previously published in The Atlantic Monthly.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-47262-5
1. China. 2. China—Relations—United States. 3. United States—Relations—China. I. Title. II. Title: Reports from China.
DS706.F3 2009
951.06—dc22
2008028083

Author photograph © Deborah Fallows

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