China Airborne (29 page)

Such extensive knitting-together of China’s leaders with outside institutions makes it easier for China and the rest of the world to coexist in the long run. But it creates a deep strain inside the country. China’s leaders don’t believe enough in the country’s own school system to place their children in it.

Each nation has its guiding myth about the structure of opportunity that allows people to rationalize inequality of results. For America it’s the idea of a fresh chance. In Japan, opportunity is heavily weighted to success and effort in school. Through the ages in China, people have necessarily absorbed tremendous inequalities of result and have found philosophical and practical ways to cope. It’s not just a national-image cliché to say that the idea of endurance, stoicism, “eating bitterness” (
chi ku
,
) means more in today’s China than any corresponding concept would in most rich countries of the world.

The tension in China seems less based on absolute extremes of circumstance than with the
ways
people are getting ahead and becoming rich. A foreign professor at a Beijing university posted the following account online soon after the arduous
Spring Festival migrations at the beginning of the year (he felt he had to use a pseudonym in order to retain his job):

During those same Chinese New Year holidays in 2011, a writer named Yang Jisheng published an essay about the “different set of rules” applying at the top and the bottom of China’s emerging political and social structure.
²⁴
“Fair dealing is impossible,” he wrote, according to the translation by David Bandurski. “Under this system, power is on top, power is worshipped.
Everyone lives in a different power class. The power center is like a black hole that sucks in the wealth of society.”

One recent video that attracted millions of views on the Chinese Internet showed a young student at Dezhou University, a provincial school in Shandong province, being picked up by her boyfriend—in his family’s helicopter, which landed on the school grounds.
²⁵
Even at the snootiest Swiss or New England boarding school this would draw a second glance; at a second-tier university in a Chinese coal-mining province, with a beau known to be from a politically connected family, it opened a vein. The video of the girl being picked up received 3,300 comments in the first twelve hours it was posted, many to the effect of “this is what China has become.”

Part of the appeal and flexibility of Chinese society involves precisely the malleability of rules that, when abused, create the impression of a system that is rigged. People get around rules; they find ways to live with them; no one wants them to be applied too rigidly. But as the momentum has shifted back to the big state enterprises; as the penalty for violating the rules has increased; as the progress toward a more rules-based system has slowed and perhaps reversed; the larger question of whether China can become the best version of itself has returned.

These are the signals we will watch in all of China’s most ambitious pursuits, including in the skies.

When I first arrived in China, I wrote the one and only “I’ve just arrived, and here is what I’m wondering” article that journalistic convention permits each writer on first immersion in a country. Among the questions I said I wanted to answer was, What is the Chinese dream?

Nearly six years later, I realize that it’s a silly or meaningless question, since for the foreseeable future the country’s ambitions will be fully satisfied by allowing hundreds of millions of people to realize their individual and family dreams. Grandparents who can live in reasonable health and security to an old age? Great. Students whose education makes the most of their abilities and who have the chance to do their best around the world? Better still. After China’s centuries of seeming to move backward as a society and its more recent decades of tragedy and turmoil, the simple bourgeois comforts are much of what the modern Chinese miracle could and should provide.

But there is a way in which the question does make sense, as an expression of concern about what the rise of a “nonuniversal” nation will mean for the rest of the world.

Through the centuries of Western military, technological, and economic dominance, “universalism” of some sort has been so basic a part of international relations that it barely needed to
be discussed. The leaders of the French Revolution issued their Declaration of the Rights of Man—not the rights of Frenchmen. The Declaration of Independence began, “When, in the course of human events,” not “events in the colonies of North America.” With varying degrees of sincerity, Western colonialists tried to create replica British, French, or American citizens in their colonies. Long before the colonial era, Christian missionaries wanted to bring people worldwide to their view of the one true universal faith. The idea that anyone could—and should—“aspire” to Western standards is simultaneously the most and least admirable part of the Western tradition. Most admirable in advancing the principle that people of different origins, races, and religions should be judged and valued by the same standards. Least admirable in the gap between that principle and a discriminatory reality, and in the condescension it implied for the unfortunate non-Westerners of the world.

The best and worst parts of the American model are intensified versions of this Western universalism. In theory, anyone can become an American. Most Americans innocently, or pridefully, assume that in fact most people around the world want to become Americans, and would if they only had the chance. (And many do want exactly that.) The self-satisfaction of this view can make non-Americans roll their eyes, but it is connected to the factor that is the enduring secret of American national strength.

Modern America’s power is often calculated in material terms, from the size and strength of its military to the scale of its corporate assets. But everything I have learned convinces me that these are finally reflections of the country’s success in attracting and enabling human talent. That success, in turn, has depended on the fortunate interaction of many different circumstances, rules, and decisions. For the United States these
have included immigration policies that made it attractive for ambitious people to migrate and realize their ambitions within American institutions and companies. Persecuted Jews, Hungarians, Cubans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Ethiopians, Chinese, in periods of turmoil in their respective countries; highly motivated Indians, Mexicans, Dominicans, Russians, Nigerians, Irish, Poles, Pakistanis, and many others through the decades. At their best, the levels of America’s public-education system, from grade school through Ph.D. programs, created opportunities for the ambitious. A research establishment leveraged their work for public and private benefit; an American pop culture kept renewing itself with outside stimulus until it became for better and worse the pop culture of the world.

In its pluses and its minuses, everything about this approach—the approach that has created the world’s reigning power of the moment—is fundamentally different from the principles behind the rise of the aspirant great power, China.

America’s challenge is strangely conservative: Somehow it has to avoid destroying the cultural conditions that have been so important to its growth. China’s challenge is more complicated—which, of course, doesn’t mean that it is insurmountable. The country’s successes over the past three decades arise mainly from allowing more and more of its people to apply ideas, ambitions, and energies in ways that benefit themselves and their families, and that build the national economy at the same time. To take the next step in its development, it will have to alter that equation in subtle but significant ways, by granting broader scope to individual ambition than has been possible through the Communist Party’s decades in control. The institutions at the heart of such “soft” success have until now been areas of signal weakness for China.

At an individual level, and as an accumulation of daily interactions
over the years, my experience is of the great permeability of Chinese culture. People are easy to meet, to get to know, to laugh or argue with. And in its vastness, today’s China contains people who belong to a variety of universalist faiths, including Islam, Christianity, Baha’i, and Buddhism.

But in its international dealings as well as in most of its domestic operations, today’s China gives more weight to duties and ethics based on personal relations than on abstract principles of how people in general should be treated. It is too pat to put the ethical system the way one Chinese friend did: “Everything for my family and friends; nothing for anyone else.” But a variant of these sentiments goes through many aspects of Chinese life. Early in my stay in Shanghai I was amused to see that the first occupant of an elevator would instantly push the “close door” button. Then, for a while, I was annoyed; ultimately I acclimated. When my wife and I had been away from China for several months and returned for a stay, my wife saw a charming young boy walking with his mother on a street in a little enclosed neighborhood. He was eating a bag of potato chips. This was itself a sign of a different trend: the obesity epidemic now affecting China. The country is already dealing with one actuarial consequence of its one-child policy of the past generation—that its population will soon become on average so old. It is just beginning to cope with another, the long-term public-health problems, especially diabetes, coming from the rising rate of obesity in people under twenty, especially the often-favored “little emperor” boys.

As the boy finished the last chip, he simply let the bag drop from his hand, onto the sidewalk in his neighborhood. His mother briefly glanced over to see the bag’s fall and kept on walking and talking with her son about something else. The instant seemed not to register, since the sidewalk where their bag
sat was in no sense “theirs.” Of course, moments like this happen all around the world. At that moment in China it struck me as an illustration of the reality that the consciousness of a “general” public interest is underdeveloped, compared with interest that affects individual families in the here and now—and the country relative to other parts of the world.

The still-limited awareness of interests outside China’s immediate ambitions will, I think, affect China’s ability to project soft power and improve its standing in the world. One illustration of the tension appears in debates even inside China about the significance of a “China Model” for national development.

Starting around the time of the Beijing Olympics, as China’s economy seemed capable only of growth, and as people around the world began talking about a “Beijing Consensus” or a “China Model” in tones that assumed away all the uncertainties facing the country, some people inside China also took up the theme. One of the most highly evolved illustrations came in 2011, when a scholar at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations named Zhang Weiwei gave a lecture in Holland about the distinctive elements that would mark China’s new contribution to international affairs.

The central distinction, according to a careful translation and analysis
¹
by David Bandurski, of the China Media Project of the University of Hong Kong, was the entirely inward-looking and self-guided nature of the Chinese model. America might consider itself exceptional or unique as the first purely invented nation, but China was unique because … it was unique: “China is not a magnified East Germany, nor is it an amplified Eastern Europe,” Zhang wrote. “Nor is it any ordinary country.” He enumerated all the reasons that what was true of China was not necessarily true of any other society on earth. It was a “civilization-type nation,” where the boundaries of a culture
(supposedly) overlapped with the boundaries of a state. Japanese, Germans, Turks, and others might challenge the claim, but that was only one item on the list. It has a five-thousand-year history, and a language whose written form had lasted more or less through that time. “It is as though ancient Rome was never dissolved, and continued to the present day … with a central government and a modern economy … [and] a massive population in which everyone speaks Latin.” And on through other traits, until the clinching argument that China was the civilization of the “four ultras”: ultra-populated, ultra-vast in geographical scope, ultra-ancient in historical traditions, and ultra-deep in its culture.