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May 22, 2010
Amid the Noise of China - U.S. Relations,
I Hope To Hear Some Music
China-American relations will be big news the next few days, when senior U.S. officials descend on Beijing Monday and Tuesday for the second bilateral economic and strategic meeting between the world's superpowers.
Known as the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, these meetings bring together U.S. cabinet secretaries and their Chinese counterparts to talk about all the problems of the world that, it's increasingly clear, can only be solved by the U.S. and China working together.
The media in both countries have begun referring to the U.S. and China as the world's most-important bilateral relationship, as if suddenly Europe, Japan, Russia, India and Brazil don't matter, and maybe they don't. I expect media in China and the U.S. will have something else in common the next few days, also: They will do an equally poor job, for different reasons, of making sense for their readers and viewers of the news coming out of the dialogues.
With so many issues to discuss (the global economy, the valuation of the Chinese currency, North Korea, Iran, energy, climate change, trade), it will be difficult to get past the noise in the media coverage to hear what I hope will be the music coming out of Beijing.
The Chinese media will cloak their subjectivity in the Chinese journalistic style of assembling a numbing array of facts that offer no insight into anything other than the official government point of view.
The U.S. media, meanwhile, will report about conflict, because conflict is an easy story to tell and the story that the editors back in New York and Washington best understand.
The nationalist drums will also be beating on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, within social media in China, where voices will call for the Chinese government to stand tall in the face of bullying Americans, and among the cadre of fringe bloggers in the U.S. who believe the only good U.S. foreign policy is one in which we push everyone else around.
I was at a luncheon last week at which U.S, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke spoke about the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, being led by Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts Dai Bingguo and Wang Qishan. Locke is a smart, savvy Chinese American who in many ways is a human metaphor for the future that these meetings between China and the U.S. could represent.
He spoke about the troubling trade issues facing the two countries (theft of intellectual property, currency valuation, and market protection), but made a compelling point that is worth keeping in mind when reading or watching reports about the upcoming talks.
The two countries are locked in a death grip, in which the future of their peoples are inseparably linked. If one goes over the cliff, down they both go. China is the world's largest holder of U.S. debt. About $895 billion or so in U.S. Treasuries are in China's investment portfolio. The U.S. owes the Chinese a lot of money. On the other hand, the U.S. is China's largest trade partner. The country has moved from the rice paddy to the center of the world's economy in 30 years largely because Americans have an insatiable appetite for Chinese manufactured goods, and that social and economic progress stops if Americans stop buying.
Locke's point: The U.S. and China are in a unique position to work together to insure their common future, and just maybe the future of the everyone else on the planet.
Success coming out of the meetings this week will not mean the U.S. has trumped China on issues like currency valuation and Iran, even though these will be the primary focus of U.S. media. It will not mean that the Chinese have fended off the bullying tactics of the U.S. and stood proud in protecting the welfare of the Chinese economy, even though that will be the primary theme in Chinese media.
Success will be more subtle to judge. It will be linked to whether the two countries seem headed toward a shared view of energy independence, for example. (Both have an unhealthy and unsustainable dependence on Middle East oil.) It will be tied to whether they find a way to work together to commercialize clean energy technologies that allow economic growth without the climatic destruction.
These are the important questions, the harder stories to tell. So, while you're listening to media reports in coming days about these two superpowers haggling over the day-to-day issues that separate them, try to determine if, amid the noise, any music is being played.
Posted by markhass at 9:50 PM
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May 12, 2010
When Children Are Murdered, What Do The Media Do?
China was shaken again Wednesday by news of another violent and murderous attack on schoolchildren by a psychopathic adult. The latest took place at a private kindergarten in China's northwest Shaanxi Province. Seven children and a teacher died, 20 were wounded, and the perpetrator committed suicide -- the fifth such attack in two months in various communities across the country.
Medical workers treat an injured child in Shaanxi Province, May 12, 2010.
This flurry of violence, atypical in a China that values harmony and respect, has government officials and others baffled about what to do to stem the violence. Some towns and cities have beefed up security around schools, but acknowledge that is not really a scalable idea. There are millions of schools across this country. How can the police protect them all?
The violence would have a familiar feeling to Americans and Europeans who collectively lived through the school shootings of the past several years, when each one triggered a wave of national mourning and introspection.
I suspect the questions being asked by parents across China are similar to those that got asked during the school shootings in the U.S. and Europe. How could this happen -- again? Is my child safe? How can we protect them at school?
The big difference in China is that there are few, if any, forums in which to ask those questions, to express communal shock and mourn as a nation. U.S. media, with all their flaws, still serve as a shared public experience when something horrible happens in America. It's one of the key roles that media in a free society play: Creating community, shared values and a common experience, while acting as a watchdog to drive change and reform.
During my days as a newspaper journalist there was a special energy that filled the newsroom when we were covering a major breaking news story, like a school shooting or stabbing would have been. We knew how to surround the story, explore its every angle, ask questions like "why did this happen" and "what can be done to prevent it from happening again."
Chinese media, given their lack of independence and their inexperience covering the big story, have simply been absent in filling that role in coverage of the school stabbings. The stories have not been ignored, for sure, but the coverage has been non-critical of the official explanation for these acts: the perpetrators are crazy. Full stop.
Undoubtedly that is true, but much too oversimplified to explain five such attacks in two months.
It's been interesting, though, to see what's happening in China's dynamic internet bulletin boards and blogs, where the knife attacks have received extensive discussion. I do the best I can to understand these conversations by using online translation tools, and the subject of many posts is sharply different from what's being said in traditional media.
Alongside the grief and the expressions of disbelief, there is also a group of commentators who blame the nature of Chinese society under one-party rule.
“In a society that has no release valve, killing the weakest members of society has become a release,” wrote Han Han, a prominent Chinese blogger.
The China Daily reported on this post in one of its online forums, and said that it was eventually deleted by government authorities. This is a strange example of how it is permissible journalism to report about what's being said by China's netizens, but not OK to actually raise similar questions in the original coverage or even to give the original stories the coverage they deserve.
I'm not sure how a nation works through the questions associated with tragedies like these school stabbings without a vibrant and aggressive media asking the right questions and providing the nation with a shared sense of mourning.
It seems to me that the emotions and issues generated by such national tragedies need a bottom-up outlet in which to be aired and examined. With China's traditional media unable to fill this role, the nation's social media have rushed in.
Posted by markhass at 4:34 AM
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May 7, 2010
Loa Wai
It's what people in Beijing sometimes call me. It's not derogatory. It means "foreigner" and is a generic term that Chinese people use to describe expats. In a city of upwards of 22 million people, there are fewer than 120,000 Lao Wai, about .5% of the population.
Living and working here as part of a tiny minority group has sensitized me to differences: In culture, in language, in business practices and especially in perception. There is a huge gap between the China I'm experiencing and the China presented in the U.S press. This is equally true for the America I know and the way it is presented in Chinese media. Americans and the Chinese do not know each other, so don't believe everything you read or hear on TV.
This worries me because there is no more important issue in international affairs than the bilateral relationship between China and the U.S. "Dispatches from China" will be my small effort to bridge those gaps, to provide a voice from the middle between the sharply contrasted American view of life here and the Chinese view of the U.S.
It will also be my personal effort to rationalize the gaps in my own thinking. Because despite a decade of travel and work in China, I moved here with a set of erroneous beliefs that are quickly being altered. Two core ideas I had about China have been proven false, and are fundamental to understanding the reality of China versus the view of it from outside.
The Chinese economy is Communist; it isn't, certainly not in the Cold War sense that most Americans still view this place. Deng Xiao Ping, the Chinese Communist Party leader that 35 years ago set China on its path from a nation of 1 billion peasants to world economic power, said to "get rich is glorious," and the Chinese people have taken that advice to heart.
The country is teeming with entrepreneurs who approach their lives with a passion about the future that is inspiring and energizing to Lao Wai like me. There are more small businesses, more individuals carving out a better life for themselves and their families than in New York, Chicago, London -- anywhere. There are more luxury vehicles on the road in Beijing than most cities in the world, more luxury brands in more high-end malls than anyplace I've been. There are an enormous number of publicly traded companies, on two stock exchanges, most Americans have never heard of that have grown into powerful economic players poised to emerge on the global stage.
Make no mistake, while the Beijing government is active in managing the economy, in many of the same ways Washington manages the U.S. economy, China is about making money in the best capitalist tradition. The over-emphasis by U.S. media on stories about trade disputes and currency valuation tends to distort this vital truth.
The Chinese government controls the lives of its citizens. It does not. The government has been a skillful orchestrator of the emergence of Chinese society, but the evolution and ultimate direction of the country feels like it is being driven at a grassroots level. China is no western style Democracy, but give credit where credit is due. When you consider how far the Chinese nation has traveled in just 35 years of reform, you can't help but admire the central planning that allowed so many individuals to improve their lives, pursue personal dreams and collectively create the modern China.
John Naibitt, in his book "China's Megatrends," writes about the "bottom-up top-down" process through which China has experienced social reform and how that reform was channeled by government policies that placed the welfare of the nation over that of individuals. China is not a good place to be a discordant voice, for sure, but a fine place to be someone who values family, community and personal opportunity.
There is evidence everywhere that citizens are expressing themselves personally in the way they dress, the lifestyles they choose, in the emergence of a vibrant contemporary art scene. But there is also a line that people usually don't cross: It is not a good thing to make waves for everyone else, to disrupt the sense of community harmony that the Chinese so value. The large majority of citizens, it seems, are OK with that. Western media favor stories about dissent, creating the wrong impression that the American thirst for individual freedom is shared by China's citizens. That doesn't square with what I see, read and experience each day.
That's happening to me a lot these days.
Posted by markhass at 11:20 PM
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