James Fallows in Shanghai

On Sunday, as part of the 2008 Shanghai International Literary Festival, I was able to go hear Atlantic Monthly columnist, author and blogger James Fallows speak on the Iraq War, the 2008 US Presidential campaign, and China to an audience of mostly Western foreigners. The venue was an opulent establishment called, quite rightly, the Glamour Bar, which sits astride the famous Bund water front of Shanghai with a front row view of the space age Pudong financial district skyline.

Fallows said that the next President , be it Clinton, Obama, or McCain, will have to make an impossible decision on Iraq, whether to stay or to go, both of which are no-winners for the many reasons most Americans are already aware of. Presidents only get to make these impossible decisions, Fallows noted, because “that’s why they are President. If the decisions were easy, somebody else already would have made them.” His new book, Blind Into Baghdad, essentially predicted all of the events which sadly took place in that country. The other ‘winner’ of the conflict, after Iran, was China, who was able to deflect the then rising Neo-Con move to paint her as the next looming American adversary.

His own insights on the campaign, on the American press and its treatment of the Big Three candidates, on the fratricide between the two Democrats, were all interesting, insider stuff, (among the points he made was that the American electorate has been divided into competing ‘fact universes’ where one group only believes certain facts and news sources and distrusts all others, think Limbaugh ‘dittoheads’ and Al Gore ‘global warmers’) but all the more so as Fallows has been living in China since 2006. Cable news and the Internet have permitted him to stay connected to events at home in a way that would have been pure science fiction 10 years ago. The influential drudge Report would have been a mimeographed newsletter put out by a crank and read by no one. In Japan in 1991 I myself had to follow the first Gulf War on a now long-lost shortwave radio

This segued into his formal remarks on China. We Westerners who live here, he said, have a hard time explaining the nature of Chinese control to people back home who still think China is still a place like East Germany where they check everything at the border and run mirrors under your car. It used to be like that when Fallows first got into China in the mid-80s under the (almost comical) sponsorship of the International Esperanto society. They had minders and they were followed and watched but all of that is gone now. The control is still there but it subtle and superbly refined and it permits far more than it controls, something North Korea and Cuba have yet to learn.

I like to remind people who question ‘human rights’ in China that you have the freedom, for example, to be a gay person, that ‘banned’ movies, even ones from Eastern Europe recounting the overthrow of Stalinism there, are freely available in street markets, and that you can openly criticize the Communist Party in conversations (you just can’t organize against it). The crushing of the Tienanmen Square Demonstrations in 1989 coupled with the rise of the Chinese economy had a two fold effect – it gave the government and the army the confidence that they could control the heights of society while at the same it showed the populace that if they agreed to this and did not openly resist it, they would be rewarded with the opportunity to get rich. Quickly. Which many, perhaps 200 million if you believe the current estimate of the size of the middle class, have done.

If you are reading this on Blogspot.com, that website is blocked in China. Using a stupid human trick, I can get around this and make a post, but the Great Firewall- the system of Internet policing the Chinese have devised with the open assistance of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems is effective for most Chinese, who are sometimes unaware the Firewall is even there. Tibetan and Taiwanese Independence are the number one No-Nos, followed by pornography, but other big chunks of news and information get through in a way the government feels, perhaps rightly so, is harmless to their rule. The numerous small internet cafes have been replaced by giant dark halls with rows and rows of terminals that resemble something out of the science fiction movie The Matrix, easier to monitor and shut off if necessary. They are used as a second private room by mostly young people who go there to chat, play multi-player on-line games like World of Warcraft or the stock market, and watch cable and satellite TV.

I freely admit to buying pirated DVDs on the street here, but I look for the older and more obscure films I might never other wise see and I found a gem, a 4 hour documentary by the Italian director Antonini for RAI TV on China from 1972. The film is nothing but long episodes of Chinese reality, seen close up, of the masses going about their daily lives in their collective society then frozen in binding slogans of the Great Cultural Revolution. The film was later denounced by the Chinese who had permitted its making for unknown reasons, as the Italian commentary is the sympathetic travelogue you would expect from European leftists from that era.

My Chinese in-laws, with whom I don't share a common language, watched it with me with great interest as they lived through this period and it is their life then that appears. The People are seen marching and singing together, commuting in the back of trucks, hoes on the shoulders like rifles, raking, scrubbing, and engaging in Criticism/Self-Criticism. My father-in-law was a Military Policeman in the Peoples Liberation Army and my mother-in-law worked in a state textile factory here in Shanghai, which was the crucible of the Revolution. A ‘Peoples Committee’ ran the city for two months in 1966, having run off the Mayor in a dunce cap, and they actually tried to change the street lights so that Red meant ‘go’ and Green meant ‘stop.’ Today, happily, it is a locally produced GM car or a Rolls Royce stops at red and goes on green. I call my in-laws Old Believers, but more in the past tense, as they have adapted to the new changes quite well, in the same way Shanghai people have traditionally adopted and enjoyed Western introduced customs, fads and products.

The Chinese government can still produce old-style Communist rhetoric and denunciations, as it did when denounce, of all people, the goofy Icelandic singer Bjork, performing in an packed auditorium of young trendies here, sang an ‘unapproved’ song called ‘Declare Independence’ and shouted “Tibet!” at the end. She of course won’t be invited back, and perhaps payment of royalties will be delayed. I had no trouble, however, bringing in the Dalai Lama’s bestseller ‘How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life,” and I even read it on public transport here. The local press also gets into the act. Headlines this week accused Uighur Moslem ‘terrorists’ from the far West of China of trying to bring down an airliner flying to Beijing this week. A young girl from that region, possibly trying to impress her boyfriend with a suicide attempt, was caught in the toilet with a flammable liquid. A bigger story was the planned opening of a Disneyland in Pudong. On TV the news stories of the heroic Army soldiers helping grannies across the street quickly jumps to a commercial for a new washday miracle or a must-have mp3 player before the latest racy soap opera or ‘Supergirl’ reality show kicks off. If you want Communism these days, you can still find it in Pyongyang.

As Fallows noted in his concluding remarks, people in the West who ask if China is ‘opening up’ or ‘becoming more democratic’ learn, once they are here, that these are not the questions on the minds of Chinese these days. He suggested what Westerners back home, especially news writers and policy makers, should do, is not fear or ignore China, but to learn to pay attention to events here without fear or preconceived notions. That’s still hard to do but it is becoming more and more possible thanks to information, trade and the one-to-one meetings between Chinese individuals and Westerners, both in China and in the West, where Chinese in greater and greater numbers are traveling to, both as students and regular, middle class tourists.