Postcards From Tomorrow Square (3 page)

Why should this be surprising, given the centuries of tension between China and Japan? Mainly because of the people who expressed their hostility in the most vehement form: students in their teens and early twenties. They had not been born, nor had their parents (nor even, in many cases, their grandparents), when Japanese troops seized Manchuria in the 1930s, bombed and occupied Shanghai, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians during the Rape of Nanjing. Wartime memories die hard, but you expect them to be most intense among actual participants or victims, and therefore to fade over time. Israeli teenagers aren’t obsessed with today’s Germans. I was not able to spend much time at universities talking with students when I was in China in the 1980s, but I don’t remember anything comparable to today’s level of bile.

The breadth of hostility surprised me for another reason. For years I have been skeptical of the idea of an anti-Japanese resurgence in China, viewing it as government-manufactured sentiment designed to deflect potential protest toward external enemies and away from the Chinese regime. In a new book called
China: Fragile Superpower
, Susan Shirk of the University of California at San Diego gives a detailed account of occasions when the Chinese government has deliberately drummed up anti-Japanese sentiment—or damped it down when it seemed to be getting inconveniently robust.

In a country where media and education are as carefully controlled as they are in China, all public opinion is to an extent manufactured. “The students are excited,” a professor at a leading Chinese university told me. “They can be calmed down.” Still, I don’t view anti-Japanese sentiments as a ploy anymore. “You say anything at all about Japan [on a blog or computer bulletin board], and there will be ten thousand posts immediately,” an official of a Chinese high-tech firm told me. “The mob effect can get out of control.”

Partisans of Baidu, the main local search-engine company (which is listed on NASDAQ and has Americans as its main investors) recently ran a blog campaign touting it over Google. One illustration was Google’s supposed inability to return any results for searches on “Nanjing Massacre” (or “Nanking,” the older Western spelling), whereas Baidu returned plenty. There was a technical reason—Google’s servers are outside China and thus must cross the government’s “Great Firewall” to send results to users in China. The firewall routinely screens out references to “massacre,” as in “Tiananmen Square massacre,” and so it blocked Google’s results. Baidu’s servers and resources are all inside the firewall, and have been pre-scrubbed to remove references to Tiananmen and other prohibited topics. Google has since made adjustments so that it too can report on Nanjing, but the episode showed the sensitivity of the issue.

The main trigger for renewed Chinese protest against Japan has been the (idiotic) persistence of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan’s former prime minister, in paying ceremonial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo, where 14 Class-A war criminals from World War II are among the 2.5 million Japanese war dead the shrine honors. Koizumi recently stepped down after five years in office, but his successor, Shinzo Abe, has refused to rule out continuing the visits. When I’ve asked Chinese students what they want from Japan, they often say an end to the Yasukuni visits and “an apology.” Formal apologies have in fact been offered many times by Japanese officials, and even by the current emperor. If the Chinese are looking for something like German-style ongoing contrition, this is not in the cards. Twentieth-century history, as taught in Japan, holds that Japan itself was the ultimate victim of the “Great Pacific War,” because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is one tantalizing further twist to the syndrome. When I have asked young people why they should be so wrapped up with events seventy years in the past, the reply is some variant of: “We Chinese are students of history.” There are certain phrases you hear so often that you know they can’t be true, at least not at face value. Yes, China’s years of subjugation by Western countries and Japan obviously still matter. But the history that is more recent but less often discussed is that of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, when the parents of today’s college students were sent into the countryside and often forced to denounce their own parents. In an eloquent new book called
Chinese Lessons
, John Pomfret of
The Washington Post
recounts the ways that his classmates from Nanjing University, where he was an exchange student in the early 1980s, bore the emotional and even moral imprint of those years. They’d been made to do things they knew were wrong, and they found ways to rationalize away that knowledge. So far every student gathering I’ve been to has included a volunteered reference to the evil Japanese, and none has included a reference to the evils of Chairman Mao (whose picture is still on every denomination of paper money) and his Cultural Revolution.

CAUTION TWO:
WATCH OUT, OLYMPIANS!

If you’ve ever doubted the impact of big international spectacles, consider the examples of Beijing and Shanghai. Beijing will of course host the Olympic Games in less than two years; Shanghai will have a World’s Fair in 2010. In Japan, I often heard that the 1964 Olympics represented a turning point in world opinion. I saw a similar effect in South Korea during preparations for its 1988 Olympic Games. In the mid-1980s a countdown clock in Seoul’s main square showed the number of days until the Olympic opening ceremony. The clock was a dramatic sight during the antigovernment protests of 1987, when the number of days remaining was barely visible through drifting tear gas.

I’ve seen countdown clocks in Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdao, the coastal city that gave its name (with a different English spelling) to Tsingtao Beer and where the Olympic sailing events will be held. China certainly seems to be taking the spectacles as a major turning point. Posters with morale-building slogans are everywhere—and the English versions that appear beneath the Chinese characters are often touching. (This is the place to say: While trying hard, I still have no working command of spoken Chinese and rely on interpreters. I can generally read posters or newspaper headlines because of similarities with written Japanese.) “If the world gives us a chance, we will return it many splendors,” reads the English line of an Olympic poster in Shanghai. The English on Qingdao’s poster reads, “Civilized Qingdao Greeting the Olympic Games.”

The construction and refurbishing under way for the Olympics and the World’s Fair are phenomenal. Shanghai has five functioning subway lines now—and functioning very well, with better features than I have seen on any public-transportation system anywhere in America. (Plasma screens in all stations show the seconds until the next train’s arrival; an advanced E-ZPass–style fare system lets you pay with one card for subways, buses, taxis, and ferries; LCD screens in the subway cars show entertaining short advertising videos; there is cell-phone coverage in the subways and just about everywhere in Chinese cities; etc.) The city is supposed to have
thirteen
lines by 2010. During several days in Beijing, I found it hard to look anywhere without seeing a road, sewer, stadium, or hotel being built.

Many aspects of the new, improved China will be up for the world’s inspection during the Olympic Games. But there is one little catch: the air. Unless something radical changes, I do not understand how athletic events can take place in air as dirty as Beijing’s. I am not a sissy: I grew up outside Los Angeles and have been to Mexico City, Bangkok, and other environmental hellholes. During the first few weeks my wife and I were in Shanghai, we wondered whether the pollution talk was all a big scare, since the skies were beautiful and blue. Then the typhoons that had been freshening the airflow over China (and drowning thousands of people in the southern provinces) petered out, and Shanghai developed a serious haze. But I’ve never, even in the worst ozone-alert days of my youth, seen anything like Beijing.

There are reasons for its problems—Beijing, like Los Angeles, sits in a sunbaked basin that traps pools of air. There are also solutions. Big industrial plants are being moved out of town, and everyone assumes that when the time comes for the Games, the authorities will do whatever they have to—closing factories, banning private traffic—to bring pollution down to an endurable level. On my first drive into the city from its Capital Airport, in the summer of 1986, I saw pathetic little rows of saplings. Now impressive stands of trees line that same route. Throughout the city, gardens and green spots have been created, and they appear to survive.
Still.
If the marathon runners, or even the archers, can finish their events without clutching their chests and keeling over, the Chinese authorities will have accomplished something special.

CAUTION THREE:
WATCH OUT, AMERICA!

One thing I have learned through travel is that every country is unhappy with its school system. The reasons for unhappiness in America are familiar. In Japan, China, and South Korea, the complaint is that memorization for national university admissions exams creates a generation of unimaginative zombies who are so overstressed by the time they reach college that they sleep, shop, or play video games through the next four years. “America is heaven until you are eighteen,” a Chinese professor said, using a slogan I later heard from others. “China is hell.” Despite a memorization-and-exam system as onerous as any country’s, South Korea is enjoying a vogue right now as a source of creativity. Its cartoons, its televised soap operas, its clothing fashions, even its Samsung mobile phones are popular in both China and Japan. South Korea’s recent pizzazz, however it has been achieved, has only intensified long-standing and often-voiced dismay in China and Japan over how to make their students not just technically competent but also “imaginative” and “creative.” The distress is particularly acute in China, because, contrary to what most Americans would assume, the Chinese government spends so little on education, and so much of what it spends is concentrated on a handful of elite schools. Overall, China spends just over 3 percent of its gross domestic product on education at all levels, about half as much as the average for developed countries. “Most of the money goes to the top ten schools, and what goes to the top ten mainly goes to the top few,” a professor at one of the favored schools told me. This makes getting into the “best” name-brand schools—like Tsinghua and Peking universities in Beijing, and Fudan and Jiao Tong in Shanghai—all the more important, which in turn increases the need for students to cram for tests and the advantage for those who go to high-fee private high schools.

I think I’ve seen the answer to China’s education problem—and in a way, to America’s. It is to make sure that young Chinese people keep coming to the United States—some for college, and very large numbers for graduate school and for work.

It is possible to feel an abstract generational envy—oops, I mean a vicarious excitement—for educated Chinese in their teens through their early thirties. They know that their country is on the rise, and while its political problems are enormous, their prospects are brighter than those of any previous generation in the long history of their culture.

Within this favored group there is a smaller set that seems particularly fortunate. These are the native-born Chinese who have spent a few years studying or working in the United States. An American software entrepreneur I met here (when he was visiting his company’s subsidiary in Hangzhou) explained his theory that modern economies and cultures are driven by “tribes” of people on the move. The tribe of Jewish scientists and intellectuals who fled Hitler transformed America’s intellectual life after World War II; the tribe of graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology is heavily represented in Silicon Valley and has greatly contributed to innovation and enterprise there. Young Americans who served overseas during World War II or in the peace corps in the 1960s had a lasting effect on America’s relations with the world—and the hordes of young Mandarin-speaking Americans I keep bumping into in China could do the same.

The tribe of “returnee Chinese” seems very important to today’s China. My impression may be skewed, since I have met so many of these people at universities and in technology or financial companies. But I think anyone would find them, on average, a formidable group. From growing up in China, they learned (apart from the language) how to operate in this culture. From being in the United States, many of them learned (apart from the language) traits still very difficult to cultivate in China itself. These include professional managerial skills; the idea of open academic debate, even with one’s elders; techniques for funding start-up firms and other organizational structures that encourage innovation; and a sense that bribery, petty or grand-scale, is at least in principle wrong.

And most of them seem to have liked the process. The African students who trooped to Moscow and Beijing in the 1960s and 1970s often returned grumbling about mistreatment and racism; Americans who spend time in Japan often come away with love-hate feelings because of that culture’s exclusiveness. Chinese returnees, based on all available evidence, are at least subconsciously pro-American. They have made friends and followed sports teams; many have raised culturally Americanized children. Despite obvious differences of culture and language, and despite obvious exceptions to the rule I am about to propound, on the whole Chinese people get along with Americans, and vice versa. Because returnees have usually been part of either a university or a company in the United States, when they come back to China they’re more likely to think of working with General Motors (a huge success here and the leading automaker, with the locally manufactured Buick its most prestigious brand) or UCLA than with the counterparts from Japan or Europe.