Foshan University Responds to James Fallows

I assigned my students to write a paper responding to a James Fallows essay (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/chinese-progress). Fallows was talking about the tone Chinese leaders take and how it is so unlike that in other countries. He said that in the early years, the Chinese Communist Party showed great skill at “roping the whale” to keep the American superpower from intervening on Chiang Kai Shek's side. Of course one reason China demonstrates less interest in roping the whale is that now, China is the whale. Former great powers like France need to think about how to rope it. China has great power status internationally and enjoys broad support at home. That support was obvious in my class, where all my students expressed anger at Fallows criticism—though mostly general without any of the in-depth analysis or insight into the Chinese psyche I had been hoping for. A few allowed that some criticisms were valid, but no one seemed interested in responding in depth them. It has occurred to me before that while English majors in the West are generally thought of as alienated or distrustful, most of my students seem happy and sunny, and extend that positive attitude toward their government and other authority figures (including me as their teacher).


In response, I decided to prepare a presentation on the political discourse in the West: Flag-burning, Bush=Hitler, and the general presumption of guilt we have applied to our nation's leaders, and all nations' leaders, since Watergate. And the way that among the commentariat in general—people are attacked for assertiveness or decisiveness. One of the things I noticed about attacks on George W Bush was that often they weren't really personal attacks, they were attacks which could apply to any decision any president could ever make. They were attacks upon sovereignty itself. “All he's doing is benefiting his friends in the oil industry.” If I were president, I would probably make decisions which benefited my friends too—because my friends are in businesses consistent with my values and whose success I believe will make the world a better place. It's not that he's benefiting his friends, it's that his friends are selling products with too many toxic byproducts. “He acts so certain that he's right.” And critiques of him were equally certain that he was wrong.


In my composition class I made a presentation on twentieth century painting as a metaphor for written composition: pointillism, abstract expressionism, Warhol—the deliberate loss of coherence after the second World War. Which could apply to writing as much as to the easel painting. In some ways I think the same thing has happened to our social criticism—people represent cubistic, fractured, wildly-colored visions in which harmony, beauty, proportion, and geometry became things to avoid rather than things to seek.


After Nuremberg in a certain sense Western Culture became an auto-immune disorder. We like to speak of War Crimes as a triumph of Law—but the reason we could try the National Socialists, or Slobodan Milosevic—was because of soldiers: because one group of men with guns and uniforms followed orders more effectively than theirs did.


Here in China, there is a concept called the Mandate of Heaven, that one regime is legitimate until overthrown by another in a Revolution or dynastic change. This is unlike the European concept of the General Will, or a “Right to Revolution.” It is not superiority in the Platonic realm of ideas, but logistical skill at achieving objectives in Geographic space which makes a revolution valid under the Mandate of Heaven. Good ideas can help, such as the three rules and Eight remarks for the Red Army under Chairman Mao. But there is no search for infinitely refined ideas—which would go beyond the margin of error of what can be achieved working with human beings. In a certain sense, armed conflict serves as a sort of Trial by Ordeal for new ideas and leaders.


After Nuremberg, some Westerners thought that a system of Laws could be the answer—putting us in the cubistic position of simultaneously arguing for the superiority of Obedience over Conscience in some cases, and Conscience over Obedience in others. This would allow our conflicts to be resolved by teams of middle-class lawyers instead of working-class soldiers—and we made our first stop along that highway in Bush v Gore. This bourgeois dream would be a triumph for people who never underwent Trial by Ordeal, and could freely scoff at those who had—what Orwell identified among many of his leftist compatriots in the thirties as the contempt for physical courage. This would be a new, antiseptic culture transcendentally superior to all previous civilizations, including those decapitated in the European colonization of the Americas.


But in the last analysis all Law—even International Law, implies recourse to violence, and implied coercion. There can be no Law without an enforcement mechanism. There may be powers which do not flow from the barrel of a gun but Law is not one of them. Gandhian satyagraha showed an alternative to the power of men with guns by refusing to be cowed by them—allowing people who believed in nonviolence to undergo trial by ordeal. In America we forgot this when Civil Rights marchers standing up to Alabama Sheriffs became asking segregationists to stand down before National Guard troops commanded by the City of Washington.


Of all the words ending in -ism, patriotism is perhaps the least idolatrous. It privileges Geographic over Platonic space, which means its discourse is less likely to degenerate into discordant ideological echo chambers. It causes people to put their trust in sovereign leaders with eyes and ears, rather than fearful demagogues most skillful at innuendo and dismissiveness. And one reason Beijing's rhetoric may sound so discordant is that in the West, governmental assertiveness has been muffled in favor of academic assertiveness. Much of our discourse is devoted to compiling statistics on negative effects to show how misguided previous governmental policies were. But even though the authors have twenty-twenty hindsight they almost never describe alternative policies in detail, let alone demonstrate that they were obvious at the time, or would have been without negative consequences of their own.


My students demonstrate their patriotism by accepting Beijing's line on the Dalai Lama and Taiwan—the way most of us accept Hollywood's line. This is in keeping with the Confucian ideas of order: obeying the father or ruler you have, rather than seeking far and wide for the very best one. And it seems that the rebellious element in society gravitates toward crime rather than revolution, just as Robin Hood saw his enemy as the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than the King.


There are many tactics to use when conflicts arise between worldviews: War, Law, Jihad, Direct Action, Satyagraha, Civil Disobedience, Symbolic Defiance, Silence, Complacency, “You're just like them.” Fallows, like many of his generation, seems to feel the best answer is to prevent voices from rising above a certain level. But his attitude also implies that ideas from the twilight of Western Civilization should be recognized as universally valid for the entire globe. And it may be that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Middle Kingdom, like Dar es Salaam is becoming strong enough to resist.

The way people communicated in the old days

The bottom floor of my apartment buildings contains three different photocopy shops—each about 3 feet wide and 10 feet deep and employing three or four people from seven in the morning until ten or eleven at night. During the warmer months I often see a young child and a grandmother. Often, when I go downstairs, the staff are glued to their computer screens: watching Korean Soap operas, Chinese MTV, or American movies over the internet. They close the windows so I can see and print my documents and the screen displays something very familiar. The old Microsoft background of a green hill with the icons for word, explorer, etc—all arranged along the left-hand side. A familiar dialog pops up on the right-hand side when I insert my USB port. Everything looks exactly the same: except that the words under the icons and the dialog box are all in Chinese.

I walk into a bank—there are glass doors, potted plants, people waiting in line behind those self-connecting ribbon dividers, tellers behind plate glass and consultants behind large wooden desks with flat-screen computer. The furniture and even the clothes are just like in the United States—or just like Guatemala. Only the writing on the forms and the people inside the clothes are different.

Outside the bank there are some differences. The traffic lights are arranged sideways and count down how much green or red time is left. The largest of the boulevards have a slightly different arrangement than in America and the bus stops are more likely to have cover for the rain. But the shapes of cars, of buses, all look exactly the same. There are Chinese chain stores with round wooden stools instead of McDonalds style booths—but they have similar illuminated menus, cash registers, and offer food on brown rectangular plastic trays.

In some restaurants, things are different. I notice that in many upscale places the wait staff wear older, traditional outfits, as do some of the chefs. Meanwhile, the people supervising them are wearing Western style suits. This is an interesting metaphor for the current stage of development, in which it seems the Chinese who have adopted Western forms, are in charge of the Chinese who have retained their traditions. Western practices and rituals are dominant for the moment, even though it is Chinese people who perform them.

Sometimes, I watch television. The commercials for Laundry detergent, or alcohol all utilize a familiar vocabulary. A four wheel drive vehicle gets stuck in the mud and splatters all o a young girl's white clothes. A giant javelin splits open an skyscraper so that bored office workers can peer down at a giant dance party twenty floors below. They all feature Chinese faces, advertise products which will enlarge the bank accounts of Chinese capitalists, and were presumably designed in Chinese ad agencies, but the pacing and style all follow conventions which, like the Microsoft start-up screen—are familiar wherever Cathode ray tubes are found. During the age of typewriters, there was a point when the party thought about having the adopt an alphabetic system to write the Chinese language—severing a link more than three thousand years of tradition. Instead many aspects of the modern Western communication system: Soap-operas, commercials, web-pages, phone-texting have been voluntarily adopted, but the traditional writing system has been retained: in Karaoke bars, it appears on TV screens so people can sing along with pop songs—something no one would have imagined thirty years ago.

Last year one of my tasks was to judge a contest based on the phrase: “Good Good Study, Day Day up.” It's an interesting example of Chinglish—the vocabulary is English, but their arrangement follows the rules of Chinese grammar, when repeating a word: person person for everyone—is a way of emphasizing its universality. The types of mistakes my students make in English, or even when they write things which are grammatically correct, but contain unfamiliar juxtapostions, they reveal the assumptions of Chinese grammar and thought patterns.

As I look at the banks, and the streets, and the computer screens, it occurs to me that in Urbanized China too, you see the proliferation of a worldwide cultural vocabulary present wherever skyscrapers, freeways, and men in suits are found. But, like Chinglish, the arrangement of this cultural vocabulary is not identical to the west.

Of course, a generation ago, Chinese people did not practice capitalism or wear Western-style suits. They wore Mao-style jackets without lapels. In between the commercials you sometimes catch glimpses of that. Some shows on TV are modern drama or game shows, or cartoons with fuzzy animals. I even saw what appeared to be a Chinese version of Buffy the Vampire slayer—featuring Chinese actors chasing Chinese vampires through the streets of Shanghai. But some of the shows are historical dramas, featuring people in ornately embroidered ancient dress and hairstyles interacting around ancient courtyards. It occurs to me that these may be the equivalent of the old Cowboys and Indians serials—an attempt to ensure that the lessons of a time when people used their hands to fight and sew and carve wood will not be forgotten in an age when so much of our economic and military life is under the dominion of machines and people who use their fingers mostly to press buttons.

Thee is a mall in Foshan where I go to practice archery. On the third floor of a galleria featuring clothes and makeup, I found a place sort of like a batting cage or a bowling alley. In the middle is a climbing wall, where people can practice rock climbing. Elsewhere in the mall I see hiking gear, so people can head for the mountains carrying backpacks and supplies. I suspect kayaks and surfboards are not far behind. Although these might be seen as European cultural domination, like the banks and the restaurants, there is something else at work too. What people do to earn a living while wearing suits and sitting in front of computer screens imitates the nineteenth European cultural model—though the businesses sell different things from from whale oil and opium. But kayaks and surfboards use the designs of native Americans, though they were constructed of different materials. Even the modern sport of archery owes much to native Americans, and of course has long roots in China and Korea. Here in China people put on suits to play games designed in Europe, but when they take off the suits, they may play games invented somewhere else.

There was a time when people believed that developing our cultural commonalities would create a War-free world, one in which there was no need for soldiers. Or at least, only blue-helmeted UN troops acting as police forces. Here in Mainland China, lots of college kids sing pop songs from Taiwanese idols--you can recognize them easily at Karaoke bars because the characters people sing along with are the older style. But their embrace of Taiwanese pop culture doesn't seem to have lessened their willingness to accept their government's position that Taiwan is part of China. Or their acceptance that military force might be necessary if Taipei gets too far out of line. The notion that national boundaries should dissolve is implicitly a continuation of the Pax Romana, the notion that a single council can decide what is legitimate for the entire known world. And thanks to the dream of Woodrow Wilson, former governor of the state of New Jersey, that primacy passed from the Senate in the Imperial city of Rome to the UN in the Imperial city of New York. The Mediterranean world provides a different model among the Greek city-states, however. Even when there was cultural commonality: they spoke the same language, watched the same plays, and read the same authors--they still recognized that princes and soldiers would occasionally need to kill each other to work out their differences. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Sparta all represented fundamentally different ideas about how human societies should develop, and being true to those multicultural ideas, meant that they occasionally chose war rather than submit to Roman policing.