China, a country of contradictions

Having supervised a number of Chinese media students’ work at master’s level, most of which involved a reflection of some kind on certain aspects of their own culture — for example the effect of globalisation on the attitude of young Chinese people to traditional Chinese values — I was glad to be able to visit the country myself recently, when Andrea and I presented papers at two international conferences there. And, as usual, it turned out that nothing can replace first-hand experience, even if it takes the form of a relatively brief visit.

On our return journey we were wondering what word would sum up best what China had come to stand for in our minds, in the course of divergent experiences over a period of just more than three weeks. “Contradictory”, “puzzling”, “surprising”, and — borrowing a word from fellow blogger Rod MacKenzie, whom we met at a pub in Shanghai — “wacky”, were some of the terms we came up with, which should already intimate something about our experience of this country teeming with approximately 1.3 billion people.

The first thing that strikes one about China is just how hard-working the people are. From early in the morning (and I mean before six o’clock) until late at night, the sidewalks are filled with people selling their wares, ranging from an astonishing variety of food to clothing and electronic gadgets. And around all of this, alternating shifts of construction workers carry on with their work, building new subway stations, renovating buildings and repairing roads, in a virtually non-stop manner. I have the impression that South Africans are not nearly as industrious as the Chinese — if we had been, things in our country would probably run more smoothly.

And talking about “running smoothly”, the Chinese metro system — subway trains — in their cities (of which we experienced four major ones, as well as Hong Kong: Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi’an and Beijing), are an efficient, and cheap, way of travelling. In Beijing, for instance, a train trip to any destination in the huge city only costs two yuan (or RMB) — slightly more than R2. There is just nothing in South Africa to compare with it in terms of cost or efficiency; in fact, even the London Underground looks tawdry by comparison. The Chinese trains are clean (like their cities, especially Beijing and Nanjing, free of rubbish or trash), modern and super-efficient. (In Shanghai we rode in the world’s fastest train, the Maglev, at 450km an hour.)

But several things in China struck us as being potentially problematical for the country too, the foremost one being their appropriation of a capitalist economic system against the political background of a communist dictatorship and a fairly collectivist social history. Unlike a collectivist ethos, which encourages a sense of community-awareness, and the signs of which are still visible in China in many ways — for instance in the vibrant street life that goes on deep into the night — a capitalist ethos promotes an individualist ethos aggressively through self- or individual-centred economic practice.

The signs of the latter are everywhere to see, but are nowhere more striking than in the billboard advertising in and on the outside of buildings, along highways and especially on the walls alongside the metro stations. One of these, familiar to people living in capitalist democracies, captures the individualist spirit of capitalism perfectly. It consists of a series of glossy photographs, showing a handsome young man with a determined expression on his face, standing next to a new model luxury car, staring into space (presumably at some kind of challenge), followed by ones depicting him from the side in close-up behind the wheel of the car, all concentration as he negotiates traffic skilfully, and from the front behind the wheel of the impressive-looking car.

All in all, the series of photographs emphasises that this model car is suitable only for strong, motivated individuals who are determined to succeed at all costs, and highlights the element of doing battle with everything that may stand in their way. The value of heroic striving is neatly transferred from the young man to the car, however, so that viewers who identify with the young man as its driver, would automatically “see” themselves in the driver’s seat of this specific model, and desire to own (that is, buy) it. This is economic (capitalist) individualism at its most seductive, and to the degree that it succeeds in imparting the values of individualist economic competition to viewers, it undermines the countervailing value system which promotes a sense of community.

Needless to say, in South Africa we have seen the same process unfold: while there is an endless exploration, especially in academic circles, of the laudable communitarian values of “ubuntu” — “I am because others are” — the aggressive promotion of neo-liberal capitalism over the last 15 years has created a wealthy elite and middle class in South Africa which cares less about others than about its own material circumstances, that is, about the question, whether one drives the right model car, wears the right designer clothes and lives in a suitably upmarket area. The same process is already under way in China today, and I believe that, as is the case in South Africa, under its impact one may expect a gradual erosion of China’s traditional collectivist value system.

Apart from the fact that such a transition — from community-prioritising values to ones that are centred on the individual — tend to break up communities and families (a process witnessed in countries like Mexico), China has to face a potentially more serious consequence, because it is not a political democracy. The net result of introducing capitalist practices into its economy, while simultaneously maintaining (or trying to maintain) strict political control over the populace, is a growing tension between the experience of individual economic freedom, on the one hand (which cannot leave the need or desire for political freedom untouched), and the experience of totalitarian control, on the other. Such a contradictory situation is untenable, in the long run.

A friend with whom we shared several meals in Beijing pointed to another contradiction — one that is even more interesting in a global context. The way he formulated it was to say that, although China is not a democracy, and therefore ostensibly lacked the “freedom” enjoyed in the world’s democracies, in many ways the people there were “more free” than in the latter. When we inquired about the meaning of this claim, he cited the contrast between his experiences in Britain, and those in Beijing, where he now lives with his Chinese wife and their child. In Britain, he pointed out, a teacher is not allowed to be in a room alone with a pupil, for suspicion that “molesting” may occur (overlooking the fact that this “rule” equates “being alone with a pupil” and “molesting a pupil”). And a parent who smacks his or her child in public, may incur the wrath of the establishment in the guise of being reported to Social Welfare, and in the “worst” cases having their child removed from them.

His point was, I believe, that such constricting rules stifle democracy (which flourishes on experimentation and inventiveness), because they take away individual responsibility, in the place of which a dizzying web of policies and bureaucratically enforced rules orchestrate social behaviour. If this is what he meant, it is consonant with my own experience of the growth of bureaucracy at university level, which tends to replace individual responsibility and accountability with an impersonal layer of “do’s” and “don’ts” in terms of “policy” and “rules”. The moral of the story? We are not as “free” in our supposedly “free” democracies as we tend to believe, and in some ways, a politically “unfree” society such as China is more “free” than we are.

To this one may add our friend’s claim that Beijing is the safest city in which he had ever lived — their 4-year-old son is allowed to walk around freely without any fear for his safety, and one sees old people, with wads of notes stuck in their pockets, in the streets. Clearly, there is no fear of being robbed on their part.

We had the opportunity, between the two conferences we attended (in Nanjing and Beijing, respectively), to climb a beautiful mountain of more than 2 000 metres called Hua Shan (“famous mountain”) near Xi’an of terracotta soldiers fame, and to go on a 27 kilometre hike in the mountains about 90 kilometres outside of Beijing, where remote parts of the Great Wall are still visible, sans the touristified facelifts. Hua Shan is beautiful — have a look at it on Google Earth — with near perpendicular rockfaces and five different peaks. We climbed to the summit of the highest one at five in the morning from where we had slept on the mountain to see the sun rise, to find that many Chinese had gathered there for the occasion, and eagerly photographed one another “holding” the rising sun in the palm of their hands. The difference between climbing this mountain in China and climbing comparable mountains in South Africa is that, in the course of centuries, the Chinese have carved steps into the rock going right up to the highest peak (South Peak), even if some of these steps are at an angle of about 80 degrees, with chains on either side to assist one in climbing up and down. Moreover, at regular intervals there are kiosks or little restaurants along the way, and the cost of water and cooldrink escalates as one gets into the higher reaches of the mountain — traders have captive customers anyway; if you need water, you have no option but to pay for it, although a certain degree of haggling is possible.

But while certain aspects of Chinese society and the country’s landscape are admirable, there are others that are less so, chiefly the enormous levels of pollution of the atmosphere. From the top of Purple Mountain just outside of Nanjing, which should afford one a clear view of the city and its medieval wall of more than 35 kilometres, we could not see the buildings because they were covered by an impenetrable smog-haze. Nor could we see the sun in Nanjing — it was as if there was a permanent solar eclipse, and all that was visible was a bright spot through an obscuring veil of smog. In fact, the only times that we saw blue sky, were on top of Hua Shan, when we were hiking in the mountains near Beijing, and in Beijing itself, where the air had been cleared by good rains and wind before our arrival.

But flying from Beijing to Hong Kong (on which alone I could write another entry), one could see a layer of dirty brown-grey smog stretching across the entire distance from the North of China to the far South. Their dependence on (and ongoing expansion of) coal-generated electricity is no doubt to a large extent to blame for this, and one would want to witness a change of heart on China’s part in this regard.

In conclusion of this brief overview of our Chinese adventure, I should point to another observable contradiction, which concerns the Chinese attitude to nature. On the one hand one witnesses what could be remnants of the Taoist (nature-friendly) philosophical tradition in the shape of buildings and walls around imperial gardens, which are characterised by flowing, undulating lines, instead of the geometrical principle of what the artist Hundertwasser has lamented as being Western society’s addiction to straight lines. But on the other hand there is a countervailing tendency perceivable in the availability, for purposes of eating, of anything from snake meat (on a skewer), silk worms, sheep penis, scorpions (still alive and wriggling on a skewer, before being cooked over a flame), bugs of various types, starfish and dog meat (certain kinds of dogs are apparently bred for this purpose, while others are bred as pets). And although we did not witness this ourselves, friends told us about certain “snack alleys” where one could have a live monkey’s skull chopped off to be able to eat its brain while it is still alive. Personally I find this attitude to animals hard to comprehend, but I grant that there are some comparable practices in Western and African societies, to which we have perhaps become so accustomed that they do not seem repulsive (such as selecting a live crayfish for your dinner, and witnessing its speedy, but probably painful demise in boiling water).

All in all, China was a fascinating experience, complicated by ubiquitous difficulties in communicating, and yet similar to Western society in many ways — partly due to effects of globalization — but also very different in many others. The overwhelming impression remains one of contradictions and tensions, however.