As Beijing braces for its full plunge into global trade, a cautious realism is replacing the old illusions
John Gittings
The Chinese phrase for joining the World Trade Organisation which should finally take place in the coming year is rushi or “entering the world”. After more than 20 years of economic reform and “opening up”, China is already very much part of the world from which it had been previously excluded by the United States and Maoist chauvinism. Yet in a deeper sense the phrase is apt for the new millennium. For Beijing insists that 2001 is the first year of the millennium: 2000 was, officially, only the first year of the new century.
After the past century and a half of being “opened up” at times forcibly to the West, the debate that began in the late 19th century between Chinese modernisers and traditionalists is not over yet. There is still a tension between Chinese and foreign identities that needs to be resolved, and a spectrum of attitudes ranging between extremes of xenophobia and uncritical acceptance. The positive feature today is that more people now opt for a position in the middle.
The practical results will be felt by hundreds of millions who do not spend their time debating the theory of globalisation. Let us take two model examples from different layers of Chinese society it is still not politically correct to talk of classes.
Raymond Wang is a mutual-fund manager in Shanghai. He lives in a 1980s condominium near the Hongqiao airport, but is planning to move to a newer one in the Pudong economic zone. His wife teaches in a private school where the children start English at the age of seven. There is a piano in their front room: his daughter has been learning to play it since she was five. Last month they took her to hear the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing in the ultra-modern Shanghai Grand Theatre. She sat gripped by the music while Wang read business messages on his pager.
Wang hopes to get a better job if, as most people expect, Shanghai’s cluster of multinational companies expands with WTO entry against competition from Beijing and Guangzhou. He and his wife are eager to buy a car: the new condominium has its own carport. But they are waiting first to see if foreign competition brings down the price below the magic threshold of 100?000 yuan ($11?000). Once they have a car, they should benefit from an anticipated price war in an oil market which will also become more competitive.
Wang and his wife shop every weekend in one of Shanghai’s new malls. For a treat they take their daughter to the new branch of Toys ‘R’ Us. Before visiting their families they always buy a gift of some kind: Swiss chocolates, or kiwi fruit from New Zealand once even a pack of Norwegian salmon. The prices of such consumer items will come down too after China “enters the world”.
Another Wang lives 1?500km away on a tributary of the Yellow river in Shaanxi the same province where Mao Zedong built up his wartime revolutionary base. Old Wang, as his neighbours always call him, is now in his mid-50s and is no fool. A former village head, he moved smartly to leave government and took over the local orchards when they were semi-privatised in the 1980s. His son trucks the tangerines and apples to the provincial capital, and even down into Henan province.
Old Wang first learned the habit of reading newspapers closely during the Cultural Revolution and has several cuttings pinned on the wall. One is an article from the China Business Times, which ends with the words “American oranges have arrived, and now Chinese fruit farmers are beginning to worry”. Another from a Beijing newspaper says that Chinese agriculture is too small-scale and should learn from the US: “One US farmer can cultivate 100mu (6,5ha) of land with the help of machinery, while a Chinese farmer can only handle less than 10mu.”
The argument is not much help to Old Wang, since it is still impossible to buy or sell land. Nor will it help him to improve the quality of his fruit, which are cheap but not smooth and shiny like the imported fruit.
Many suggestions are being made to strengthen Chinese agriculture against the influx of cheap, mostly American, farm products. Farmers should stress quality against quantity, says conventional wisdom. They should improve seed stock, and study the market. They should organise marketing cooperatives to improve their bargaining power. One bright agronomist has recommended chestnuts as a profitable export. Yet all these initiatives would require active measures by Old Wang’s former colleagues in the county government the ones without the energy to “plunge into the sea of commerce”. He knows they are only interested in exploiting the collective assets, wining and dining, and riding in official cars. Others know it too: some reformers urge abolition of township governments (one stage up from the county) to reduce the peasants’ burden of bureaucratic corruption.
Old Wang knows the world is changing, but sometimes he recalls with affection the simpler years under Mao, when he did not need to bribe a doctor or pay taxes and his sons could not watch pornographic movies in the county town. He is well aware of Beijing’s new plan for “large-scale development of the western region”, which includes Shaanxi, but deeply sceptical whether it will do much more than enrich the local bureaucrats.
Far away from Old Wang’s tangerine orchards, senior party officials and senior scholars in Beijing argue over the future of a global system dominated by one superpower. In the Mao era there would have been nothing to argue about. China needed to stay on its guard and rely on its own resources in order to resist the aggressive policies of US imperialism joined at a later date by Soviet social-imperialism.
The language now is very different, except when used by angry students after the 1999 US bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, or by a very small number of diehard party veterans. China as an emerging great power is still bound to take the dominance of the US seriously, but thoughtful advisers to President Jiang Zemin treat it much more calmly. Imperialism itself is now seen as an outdated concept from the last century, along with colonialism and fascism. Cooperation has replaced conflict as the motor of international relations.
Jiang’s advisers argue that even if the US is number one, it cannot stand alone. “Everyone knows that the US has superiority,” the Chinese foreign ministry’s head of policy planning, Cui Tiankai, said recently, “but it still needs cooperation from other countries … We cannot forget history but cannot [either] live in the past.”
Cui also reassured China’s Asian neighbours that “we feel confident and open-minded and will treat others as equals … As China develops it will be more self-confident, not [in order] to seek dominance but equality. This has been an ideal ever since Dr Sun Yat-sen.”
Finally, Cui acknowledged that China does not always give the best impression of itself. “We have to do a better job in presenting our true image to the outside world; we have to learn to be more effective … But even so, reality is reality. Most people in the West do want to know more about China. Most Chinese people are just concerned with the environment, their kids, their jobs. It is counter-productive to put labels on everything.”
These sentiments reflect Chinese thinking at the most tolerant and open-minded end of the current spectrum. Chinese leaders, beginning with Sun Yat-sen, founder of the first republic in 1911, have urged their country to stand up proudly, but to acknowledge the need to learn from outside and “make a greater contribution to mankind”. The problem remains how to draw the line between positive pride and negative chauvinism. Critics point out that national sentiment veers too often between asserting that “everyone else in the world are bastards” and the belief that “everything is brighter under a foreign moon”.
Chauvinistic statements are not uncommon in the popular news- papers and on the new website discussion groups, where young Chinese can sound off with relative freedom. Yet these outlets also feature more cautious voices. “Our national pride is too easily hurt,” a recent contributor to the Beijing Youth Daily argued. Why accuse Japan of racial discrimination because of a dispute over a computer bug in a Japanese laptop sold in China? Does it really matter so much if a Chinese movie star plays a prostitute in a Western film? Such complaints, says the writer, show that “our sense of self-esteem is still too vulnerable”.
Another debate has been provoked by recent research that pushes back the origins of China’s written language to the third millennium BC or even earlier. Some historians regard the discovery as a refutation of “Western colonialist history”, asserting that Chinese civilisation should now be ranked ahead of Egypt and Babylon. But others argue that patriotism should not be confused with scholarship: historical truth is not established, says Professor Li Fang, by “merely shouting slogans”.
With luck there will be progressively less slogan-shouting in the next year and the coming decade, as China continues to become more sure of itself and its place in the world. When we do hear the stale rhetoric we can take Mao’s advice and ignore what he called the “empty cannons” of propaganda. There is a world of difference between talking to one of China’s younger perceptive diplomats and sitting through tedious briefings given by the representative of their own ministry.
But how far and how fast will China’s expanding relations with the outside world modify a domestic political culture that continues to lag behind the pace of change? The muffled debate on the nature and future of the Chinese state is constrained by obvious inhibitions. Past history cannot be challenged if it raises the slightest revisionist whisper about the events of 1989. Nor can the hegemony of the Communist Party be examined even in the mildly critical terms of the inner-party debate which was extinguished then. At the most, this issue can only be dealt with by asking coded questions about whether “rule by law” can eventually lead to the “rule of law”.
On the positive side, there is a broader consensus now among Chinese intellectuals on the need to identify and defend the interests of the poor, and to probe the roots of corruption among the rich. These issues, along with those of the environment, are now explored vigorously by a new generation of Chinese journalists writing for a more competitive media.
Yet it remains difficult to make a balanced assessment of the economic reforms launched by the late Deng Xiaoping, which ripped across the land with such uneven results. Too many people in authority have benefited from the construction boom over the past 20 years.
The image of mankind transforming nature with its joint antecedents in Marxism and capitalism is still dominant. China’s lone environmentalists now fear that the mistakes of the Three Gorges Dam may be repeated in grand-iose schemes for the development of China’s west and in the new hubristic plan to divert the Yangtze’s waters to the Yellow river.
The Prime Minister, Zhu Rongji, said last year that China’s environmental pollution “still remains rather serious”. This is to seriously understate the emerging crisis that may in the end subvert China’s economic reforms and could also bring down Zhu’s ruling party.
As China enters the World Trade Organisation the Western nations will applaud Beijing’s final embrace of economic globalisation.
But they should look beyond the lure of a market of 1,2-billion people, and recognise that China is paying a price for its headlong modernisation. The developed world has made its own mistakes, and it should help China not to go down that same road.