ACCS Newsletter
Fall 2004
Impressions
of China:
1999-2004
Herb
Simons, Temple University
What with three sojourns to China,
participation in ACCS-sponsored sessions at NCA, and a paper in progress on the
rhetoric of CCP leaders, my co-author for the paper, Lucy Xing Lu, has declared
me an “expert.” Rather than quarrel with
her, I’ve decided to do as I’m told and pose as an expert (which I’m not) for
purposes of this newsletter. After all, she’s ACCS President!
Last Spring semester I attended a
conference for China Fulbrighters in Guangzhou, returned to Tokyo to complete
my teaching obligations there, then headed to Beijing for two weeks at Peking
University followed by a Senior Specialist
Fulbright lectureship on political communication at four universities in
and around Hong Kong.
For the most part I refrained from
lecturing to my Chinese audiences about China—sticking, instead, to the
country I knew best—my own! But on two occasions—at BLCU in Beijing
with Michael Prosser and at Macau U-- I was foolish enough to test out
ideas for the Lu-Simons paper on CCP leadership rhetoric. Fortunately my
audiences were adept at face-saving, for they threw no rotten cabbages.
The China I experienced in 2004 was
kilometers ahead of the China
I reported on at NCA in an essay on my 1999 travels, entitled “Is China
Liberalizing?” Yet, in some respects, not much had changed. For purposes of comparison,
I will juxtapose brief selections from the “Liberalizing” essay (in italics)
with comments on my 2004 experiences (in bold). Here goes.
1.
Small
World
a.
1999
Just returned from two weeks in Hong Kong and
mainland China. Hosted in Beijing and Tianjin by my current doctoral student, Jun
Qiao, and in HK by former doctoral
student, Glenn Shive. On return to Beijing
from busy round of presentations in Tianjin,
I clicked on the TV to discover the Temple
vs. Purdue NCAA basketball game in progress..
b.
2004
About a week into my stay at Peking University, I happened upon a lecture on
public speaking by a good friend of mine, Wisconsin’s Steve Lucas. And in the audience
was yet another American visitor, from Western Kentucky.
Our host, Dean Gong Wenxiang, brought us together for a “light” dinner of a
dozen or so courses. Food was excellent, just as before.
2
Tolerance
for Dissent
a.
1999
My general impression is that China is
liberalizing: becoming more open, more democratic. The move toward a market
economy is certainly a factor. Another
impression is that the very terms in which we Westerners pose these questions
and understand the discussion surrounding them may be problematic Try this
question, for example: Can there be increased democracy WITHIN the party of a
one party state? The question may not be
intelligible to us Americans, but I think it’s a significant one
for the Chinese. And, yes, the Party is becoming more open if only as a
consequence of the internalization of its public posturing to the West.
b. 2004. Even
my previously skeptical Hong Kong informants
now concede that, while China
remains a one party state, the CCP increasingly brooks intra-Party dissent over
a wider range of issues. Moreover, there are many more opportunities for free
(or freer?) expression among friends and colleagues within what might be called
zones of privacy. But don’t try to host a conference on politically sensitive
topics in the nation’s capital; go to HK for that, and maybe not even there.
And beware of publicly criticizing the
propaganda ministry if you’re a university professor. Does that make China entirely
different from the U.S.?
No, not entirely. Would any among my America-based readers care to make the
argument, even in the university classroom, that the Arab-Muslim world’s
suicide bombers are akin to past U.S. war heroes who’d been
celebrated for “giving their lives to their country”?
3. Poverty and
Stability
a. 1999. Another
impression is that China
is still poor, with but pockets of wealth. This colors everything. When Jiang
Zemin calls for stability in the service of prosperity, this resonates in China. People
don’t want another Tiananmen Square. Many
progressive thinkers look back on the ‘89 protests with a sense of deep regret. I suffered
with the students back in ‘89, going so far as to arrange for the construction of
a Goddess of Democracy replica on my own campus. The smart thinking now is that
the students got out of hand, lost their sense of proportion. Bullets no, but
suppression, yes. Can I be writing these words? (A colleague explained that the
call for stability needs to be understood in a wider context. China has had
SO MUCH instability these past 50 years. ENOUGH, people are saying.)
b. 2004. China is richer by far, but inequitably so, with
the great majority of its citizenry still struggling to make ends meet. I
listened in Tokyo
to a BBC broadcast of Wen’s press
conference from BJ in March, following the CCP’s National Development
Conference. This guy’s a genuine
reformer, I thought. And isn’t it nice to see a premier in China fielding
questions from reporters, albeit pre-staged, mostly softball questions. President
Hu’s been something of a mystery, but both Hu and Wen seem dedicated to
combating the excesses of capitalism run amok. Will they concede that the
Tiananmen crackdown was a mistake? Perhaps not, but they probably won’t punish
those within the CCP who urge a public apology to the victims. That’s progress.
4. Media and Politics
a. 1999 I talk at length with the editor of an important
communist newspaper. He is accompanied by the executive editor, a woman, and by
the sports editor. The meeting is stiff and formal, even though unofficial and
off-the-record. I am interviewing him about the paradoxes (“sword-shields”) I
have observed during my visit. In their own way they reveal (betray?) a respect
for Western values. My recollections on
media issues follow.
Q. Is news from the West penetrating Chinese borders a
threat to China?
A. No, we journalists have long had access to it.
Q. But what if ordinary Chinese in Beijing had access to CNN or to a Chinese
language version of the NYT?
A. It would not have much impact. We’re much more open
already than we were ten or twenty years ago.
Q. But take the issue of reported theft by China of U.S. nuclear
technology. Your newspapers wrote the NYT
story off as mere surmise, unsubstantiated. They also explained it away as due
to U.S.
domestic politics.
A. Yes, we’ve come to a consensus here about that. [Consensus =
truth]
Q. Do you agree that entertainment, sports, shopping at
big department stores have far more influence on values than what gets reported
in the news?
A. Yes, but with exceptions. E.g., [Before the
bombing]: Kosovo doesn’t matter; U.S. charges of human rights
violations in China
do matter.
b. 2004. The world has changed so much since 1999.
China is now a powerful player on the world stage, working with the U.S. to
combat terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The strategic partnership with the
U.S. is fragile, and there are American policy experts who’d like to frame
China as an enemy, so China needs to exercise caution in asserting its
interests, but it is better positioned economically and politically to do so.
This, in turn, allows the PRC to relax its grip on the news and entertainment
media and on the Internet. CNN and Newsweek have come to BCLU; Peking U
shouldn’t be too far behind. CCTV 9 does a good job with news of interest to
me. Hong Kong journalists trained in the U.S. clamor for more press freedom and
worry about threats to the freedoms they now enjoy, but the market genie is out
of the bottle: there are and will be many choices, I suspect. Meanwhile, at
Beida, the big internet attraction for the co-eds I’ve met is re-runs of Sex in
the City. I worry that the next generation of Peking
U students will become too much like my consumerist, careerist, politically
disengaged students in the States. But that hasn’t happened yet, I am led to
believe—neither in Beijing nor in HK.
5. Beijng Vs. Hong
Kong
a. 1999. People in HK tell me that it has
changed little since the takeover in July, 1997. Totalitarians beware: The
religion of HK is still worship of the mighty dollar. A computer-generated
picture of the takeover/return that hangs outside a fancy Chinese restaurant in
HK joins leading lights in what looks like a marriage of two prosperous equals.
HK has suffered economically from the Asian meltdown, but I saw no signs of
extreme poverty. Major contrast here with the big, gray polluted cities of Beijing and Tianjin, long lines of
unemployed laborers just in from the countryside scraping by until they can get
work. HK is what mainland China
wants to be.
b. Beijing has become greener, less polluted,
more prosperous, freer—more like HK. And I’m told that English language learning
is more advanced on the mainland these days than in HK. Amazing! Another effect
of what everyone now calls the “handover” (not the “takeover”): more mainland
students studying at HK universities—even keeping some of them afloat.
6.City Vs. Countryside
a. 1999 From a meeting with
administrators at a teacher’s college:
Q. Is there a current Party policy on support for the
cities versus the countryside?
A. Yes. The cities require the bulk of investment
because they are the engines of economic growth.
Q. But wasn’t Mao’s a peasant revolution? Isn’t support for the
cities as opposed to the peasants a betrayal of Mao?
A. Oh, well, yes. The Party believes the farmers need
support. How else would they raise the food needed to feed us in the cities?
Q. But didn’t Mao have in mind something more than that? Not just
helping the farmers to better feed the city folk; rather, improving the quality
of their lives.
A. Oh yes, that’s a very high priority!
b. 2004 The
urban-rural, rich-poor splits persist in China, and the Hu/Wen regime may
not be able to slow down the growth-at-any-price express, despite their best
intentions to reduce inequities and encourage more sustainable growth. Elites
are entrenched, and too many of them have gotten their educations in market
economics from followers of Milton Friedman in the U.S. It seems clear that as
part of sustained development, China
needs improved public health programs as well as major investments in pollution
control and environmental preservation, basic education and job re-training for
the peasantry. It would be ideologically perverse for a nation that still
venerates Mao to abandon his egalitarianism completely. Perhaps Europe’s less growth-driven, welfare state capitalism
offers lessons for China
as well.
-------
I concluded my 1999
essay with these questions:
So who am I
reflecting on China? How open is the West to its own hypocrisies?
How open am I to the influence of my ideological upbringing and to my own “sword-shields”?
The questions are
equally pertinent to my 2004 reflections. But we can’t not make observations and render judgments. I thank Lucy Xing Lu for the opportunity to
share some of mine with you. Regards to
Fu-Fu members—wherever you are.
.