Spring Break 2010

In 1999 I came to China on a family trip. I remember that much of the trip seemed to be oriented around sales—folk arts souvenirs, crafts, silk weavings, tea. We would go to a temple or museum, and then be directed to a gift shop. Then we would go to a fancy restaurant and be treated to local delicacies. It seemed that the tourism industry more than anything was designed to get wealthy professionals working in the vibrant American economy to pump money into places where the artistic traditions of the Middle Kingdom are preserved.


I've been teaching in China for three years, based around the Pearl River Delta. I've traveled to many places within about four hours: Zhaoqing where the first Jesuit mission in China was set up, Kai Ping with a local tradition of tall tower buildings found nowhere else in China, the supermodern superdense city of Hong Kong, and the village my grandfather emigrated from a century ago—living in a small, brick one-storey shed without electricity or running water, forty feet away from the four story dwelling filled with flat screen televisions, where my cousin now lives. This year, for the first time, I went to other provinces. In Fujian province, just northeast of Guangdong I ended up on another Chinese-run tour. Once again, after the museum and puppet performances, we were ushered to fancy restaurants, specialty tea shops, local handicrafts. The Chinese economy has surpassed the American one in terms of vibrancy, but the techniques pioneered with foreign tourists seem to work equally well with native-born tourists. The circulation of currency which is the lifeblood of these places continues in the same manner—even now that transfusions from the US economy are no longer necessary.


Walking around urban China I am struck by how similar it seems to America—more walkable, more urban, more bicycles. Boys follow the NBA and play basketball around the campus. Looking out bus windows as we travel the highways I notice many of the same things: rest stops, roadside attractions, which sprang up along American Highways. Basically, China seems to be living out the American Dream, from the time when your future dream was a shopping spree. I remember hearing once about a plan by the Russian communists to build a set of small towns where people would learn to think and act like people in small town America, so that the Bolsheviks could infiltrate and take over the US—I think John Travolta starred in a movie about this. Here in China it seems that not just one town, but almost the entire country, has been made part of such a project. The major difference is that America was and continues to be riven by a culture war that keeps our two main political parties in business, but because it chose the more efficient system of having only one corrupt political party, Chinese political thought has not been cloven in the same way.


Not long ago I stayed at a youth hostel. It is a sort of funky place, I stay in a room where the décor , bed, and even the door and lock had been designed in a style local to the area. At breakfast I chat with people from Europe and Australia, some using wireless Internet, then I begin to wander around. Soon I am walking a narrow footpath with old tin-roof buildings on either side. No automobiles ever venture here, but I saw lots of chickens in wooden baskets. The path is several hundred feet above a body of water and as I look down I think of how my journey in space resembles a journey back in time. This time the youth hostel was in Chongqing city and the water is the Yangtze River, but those sentences could almost equally well describe visits to Guatemala and Lake Atitlan. The sentence could have been written a century ago, and, I hope will still be possible to write centuries hence. Hostel-related tourism has a different rhythm than professional bus tours, but there is also a familiar global style in the design of the flyers and the sights they advertise. These types of funky businesses are also significant because in order to survive, they have to embrace both the multi-cultural values associated with US liberals, and goal-oriented values associated with US conservatives.


I like China. I like the people I meet at all socioeconomic levels, from the businessmen to the beggars, the people running fancy restaurants, or the people selling fried tofu from the back of a bicycle. On my trip I bought some 70s era socialist realism magazines full of pictures of smiling peasants striding confidently toward the future. I compare it to the pictures in my head before I came to China: people barred from demonstrating, jailed or beaten for making political statements. I think about Chiapas and Guatemala and the world I saw with my own eyes and the bloody pictures in the newspapers. And I think it's simplistic to assume that either set of pictures: the smiling peasants or the bloody peasants, represents the “true” story—both are true for the individuals involved. Every system for maintaining order facilitates one group of people achieving their dreams and stands in the way of other people doing so. To maintain order a government must ensure that both those whose dreams are fulfilled and those whose dreams are thwarted share some unifying symbols.


In the West the standard conflict is between a worldview advocating elections and capitalism and a worldview advocating elections without capitalism. Here in China the solution seems to be capitalism without elections. Of course, the American system of elections and lobbying tends to lead to government by businessmen and lawyers skilled in working with people, whereas the Chinese system leads to government by engineers skilled in working with objects. Capitalists have power within the sphere of business, and as a class, they are no longer officially enemies of the people. But though they can now be members of the Communist Party, the lack of lobbying means that the things which make things easier for businessmen rather than for all the classes who want enterprises to be successful, probably have less influence within the sphere of government than they do in the West. Businesses have to deal with a floor saying they must employ a minimum number of people, not that they have to pay them a minimum wage. But after both working in engineering and thinking about governmental policy, I feel it is important to point out that it is not clear that any government has ever had the choice of imposing a “0-harm alternative” in which no citizens have to suffer. Generally the choice is between policies with the harms distributed in different places, to different groups of people. Everyone in government recognizes that certain orders will be obeyed and others will not be—and in a nation of millions of people, an order that there be only smiling peasants and never bloody peasants is the type which probably can not be obeyed. King Cnut in England, tired of people talking about how much power he had, once commanded the waves to cease. The waves continued to break against the shore. It is of course possible to stop the pounding of the surf—by building a breakwater. But this is a problem for engineers with an understanding of materials science and fluid mechanics, it takes time and false starts to come up with a workable solution, and certain things about the sea will never be changed. Whatever the motives or emotions of the man in charge, the real problem is one of design.


When I worked on an organic farm one thing which struck me was how many of the people who ended up working there had been vegetarians at one point in their lives. We woke up to the fact that eating was a moral act, and refraining from taking life, for us as for the Siddharta Buddha, was a way to organize our lives to change how our needs as living beings impacted the rest of Creation. If you make the moral commitment to vegetarianism you also become aware of all sorts of patterns and connections—there are questions you have to ask, and situations in which your initial moral choice forces you to behave differently than if you had not made it. At one point in my moral journey, a Muslim friend pointed out that if it were not for the instant of violence the human race uses when they kill and eat beef, lamb, and chicken, millions of animals would have no lives at all. This is the argument Peter Singer derides as “Species Fascism” but it stuck with me. And that insight is part of why I ended up on the organic farm, trying to raise animals which had healthy lives and minimally traumatizing deaths. In mathematics: multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, problems have only one correct answer. But once Al gebra appears, the interaction of variables means that for some problems, more than one answer can be true. And that is how I feel about meat-eating: there is an integrity to both the stance of Buddhist non-involvement that of the Halal butcher's directed involvement. But while I recognize the value of the monastic vision in which portions of society adopt Buddhist principles to design lives free of violence, I am wary of a vision of social change which is achievable only if the entire human race adopts Buddhist precepts.


Shortly I will be teaching a class on American History, including a discussion of the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow in the Southern States. I think about this issue a lot, both because of my uncompensated work with an organization touting Human Rights as a response to events in the 1980s, and my current position in the People's Republic of China, which has declared that Human Rights are a tool of Western Imperialism. When Dr King appealed to people from places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to come South to witness and accompany the Colored peoples' struggle for self-determination, he spoke as the representative of an oppressed race—some one embedded in a particular struggle, a multi-generational struggle which neither he nor his children could by conscious choice escape. Under Jim Crow, a very high percentage of human beings in Dixie were marked from birth with second class status in all areas of their lives. Emmet Till was hung from a tree for just whistling at a white woman. Large numbers of people were willing to risk physical beatings just to sit at lunch counters. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and people mustered locally available resources to provide alternative transportation. I contrast all this with a recent report I read by Human Rights lawyers in China complaining about how dependent their movement is on outside financing. From everything I have seen, Chinese citizens face far fewer limitations than Negroes during Jim Crow. Small groups face limitations, but unlike the color of ones skin, being a member of the Falun Gong or a House Church is a chosen identity, and limits enforced against such people impact the lives of far fewer citizens than suffered under Jim Crow. And it is legitimate for governments to view foreign belief systems as a threat to stability—many people believe that the spread of Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire, or Eastern blocs dissidents to the downfall of the much shorter-lived Soviet Empire. And it was an outside perspective, such as the Northerners who gave their lives in Philadelphia Mississippi, and Dr King's exposure to ideas from India which brought down Jim Crow in Dixie. This is why Imperial China conducted occasional campaigns against Buddhism (which originated in India), and why Chiang Kai Shek was often more concerned with fighting the Communist Party than with fighting the Japanese bandit nation. Of course Both Chiang and Mao incorporated Western beliefs into their leadership philosophies, so it may be easier for the Middle Kingdom to recapture its pre-Western traditions given that neither great military leader of the twentieth century was forced to accept Unconditional Surrender. Some belief systems muster enough local resources to survive government persecution, like the followers of the Cross in Rome and the followers of the Hammer and Sickle in the Middle Kingdom--others wither and die.


During the Cold War, Human Rights provided a way of evaluating the geopolitical situation distinct from the power politics of Washington or Moscow. At that juncture it provided a Third Way. The basis for this third way was the standpoint derived from the secular Enlightenment, and it provided a framework of values distinct from the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Concern for Human Rights led Jimmy Carter of the State of Georgia to withdraw support from the Shah in Iran, and from Somoza in Nicaragua. (He also, incidentally, removed a law barring a man named Jefferson Davis from holding future political office). Human rights provided a rallying point against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. All of these governments in non-European countries ended up falling to local opposition figures. Human rights are a development of the progressive movement which led to food safety laws and health inspection. The reason people listen to a health inspector is because he has the power to have some one's license revoked, and have the restaurant shut down—which is analogous to what happened in these three cases during a period of dominance by Washington DC.


But this is not the end of the story. The government which arose after the fall of the Shah embraced values, but local ones rather than those of Human Rights. The regimes which arose were less subject to the dictates of the West. They are no longer puppets of the West, so they are less likely to worry about a visit from the health inspector. Many western progressives object to Ayatollah Khomeini's views on gender differentiation, Thabo Mbeki's views on infectious disease, and Daniel Ortega's views on legalized abortion. They also object to the Peoples Republic of China's views about the Death Penalty. The human rights community has systematized one set of principles—in line with the progressive tendency of Western European governments after the Second World War. However no one has proven that it is possible to govern a country without some actions which violate the ideas of human rights, or that aspiring to a European standard is what governments outside Europe ought to aspire to. It has not been demonstrated that a transformation other than the one from the Shah to Khomeini, de Klerk to Mbeki, or Somoza to Ortega is actually possible outside Europe. It is the nature of a triangle that the angles always add up to 180 degrees, any change you make at one place must be compensated somewhere else. It may be that there are similar rules governing what is possible within a human society. In many Maya languages, it is possible to use the same word Kej, to describe both horses and deer--and in fact all four-footed animals. The symbol resembles the way your right hand looks when held in a particular way. Some languages encourage you to notice one sort of patterns, others encourage you to notice others. In 1920 the US had twenty million horses (Kej), by the endof the second World War, the rise of automobiles and tractors meant that that numver had fallen drastically. The idea of progress dominant in the West generally involves a lack of animals with any role other than that of neutered pets. But it may be that traditions developed outside Europe and sustained in areas where functional animals are still part of peoples' daily lives retain as much knowledge about the limits of a society of homo sapiens as those held to be self-evident by the people of the automobile.


In one village I worked in in Guatemala a group of masked men called the limpieza social was going out and killing transient men on a list of undesirables, and most of the college educated Guatemalans I worked with were surprised that the village families did not express great concern about this. Both attitudes seemed to me to be products of their educational background, but I was not sure that the attitude of the people who had lived in the village their whole lives represented ignorance. And since all the men involved were the same race, it did not have the same significance from the standpoint of fighting white supremacy as the actions of the Klan. I always worried that some of the aspirations we were encouraging people in Guatemala to have were really just leading them on. It may seem an odd metaphor, but Human Rights felt more like the package bus tour designed to solicit money from professionals, than the funky low-budget hostel drawing on local traditions. At some point the focus shifted away from empowering men of color to something else. And sometimes the mutterings of the progressive white women sounded more like the people with the Klan than the people working to get rid of them. When our clients received death threats, I was never sure that what we could offer for embracing the role of victim was superior to what would happen if they just “got the hell out of Dodge.” I cared but was not empowered to act—the Police were empowered to act, but did not seem to care. When I questioned the progressive white folks about this, I was simply told “I don't see why you're even asking these questions.” The people who worked with lawyers seemed to be uncomfortable with any attitude other than unquestioning obedience—which is different than what I got when I worked at the Engineering firm. Sometimes I felt that what we were doing, was just asking people to rely on reports filed by freelance health-inspectors without any enforcement authority backing them up. In Iran we are witnessing the power of such freelance revolution to transform society--as it did over time in Dixie, but both require people who embrace a claim to legitimacy distinct from the established Authority, not ones who accept Law as the ultimate arbiter.


Meanings and alliances change with the situation. In the 1750s George Washington helped add New France to the territory of the City of London, two decades later he led a successful secession movement from that city by places like Virginia and Georgia. In the 1840s Robert E Lee and Thomas Jackson helped add parts of New Spain like Utah and California to the territory of the City of Washington DC, two decades later the attempt at secession they led was less successful. The Mexican-American War also inspired New England's Henry David Thoreau to engage in the Civil Disobedience which helped inspire Mohandas Gandhi to lead his people in successful secession from the City of London a century later. A change in orientation over the decades can also be seen in human rights. During the Cold War, the Human Rights perspective allowed Western dissidents uncomfortable identifying with standing armies to organize and work to weaken Western Imperialism. In the Cold War context, it was a coherent framework by which they could avoid being either running dogs, or useful idiots, in the dichotomy formulated by Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia (the one with its own alphabet). It was also an umbrella which attracted people from a variety of political perspectives and moral frameworks: people whose moral ideal is the Buddhist monk, and those whose moral ideal is the Halal butcher. But now that the Cold War is over, this meat-eater believes that criticism of non-European governments from a Human Rights Perspective reinforces the hegemony of values originating in Europe. What Human Rights meant during the Cold War is different from what it means now that, in the wake of its defeat in Afghanistan, one of the major parties to that conflict has experienced a political and economic crisis and dissolved into independent Republics based on historical divisions of language and culture. In 1989 Erich Honecker discovered that the things he had relied on for decades were no longer backing him up, and Wall Street securities traders discovered the same thing in 2008. It may be that despite their universalist aspirations, all three Great Western hopes of the Twentieth century: Moscow-style communism, Washington-style elections, and International Human Rights embody a vision which can lead people only part of the way towards liberation, perhaps because the principles they held to be self-evident, are in fact not so.