preconceptions about China

No word yet on that nightly journal I'm supposed to be keeping. Be that as it may, I have some thoughts to share with you.

I'm researching China, particularly the eats, and I'm getting really jazzed about this little four-day jaunt. But some unsettling questions remain in my mind.

I have mixed feelings about China.

The government, not its citizens, mind you. So far I've found that people are people, no matter where you go. But China, and her communist leaders, have done some things that I find difficult to swallow. The country's history is more checkered than the flag at the NASCAR finish line. I'm trying real hard to be objective here, but I am and always was a subjective bugger, and that usually filters through to my perceptions about other places. Some of these issues that I have with China and its history are seeping in around the loose edges of my consciousness, and I have to get them off my chest before they're diluted by experience.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of China, of course, is the color red. Communism. Mao Zedong. The Great Leap Forward. Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, and other prominent communist dictators who've influenced or been influenced by China and its politics.

I have a problem with communism. What's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. I get that. China has a different moral code, a different work ethic, a different societal paradigm and a much different history than America or any other Western state. But still: the idea of communism itself seems, to me, fundamentally flawed and diseased. In my mind, human beings were not meant to exist in classless, moneyless, stateless societies. I'm no social Darwinist; there's times when I've despaired of the ossification of class in Western society and its total dependence on currency. But there's no denying that capitalism and competition encourage hard work and innovation. That, to me, seems preferable to the alternative: a society focused on production (at the expense of intellectualism)—a breeding ground for conformity, mediocrity, and stagnation, in which the group is superior to the individual.

Whether or not that's what's happened in China is debatable, because of the second problem I have with the place:

They're not even doing communism right.

I remember penning a passionate article about this in my high school's literary magazine back in 2002 or thereabouts. One of the basic tenets of communist theory is that the people have control, and that's that. Society is stateless: there is little to no concentration of power, no overarching authority. This is what makes North Korea's proper name so laughable: the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is four lies in one. It's anything but democratic, inasmuch as the power is held by one family and one family only, with the mere pretense of choice on the part of the people. The citizens do not own the means of production, nor do they have any say in the government—the Great/Dear/Outstanding Leader does. The definition of the word "republic" is a state in which political affairs are public matters and not the private concern of the rulers; as I pointed out before, the people have about as much say in (or knowledge of) political affairs in North Korea as do chipmunks or cucumbers. And finally, "of Korea" implies that the DPRK considers itself the rightful government of the entire peninsula, which is about as horrifying as it is hilarious.

Not my photo. This is China, not North Korea.

Though China's human rights record is far from spotless (I'll get to that in a minute), they at least seem to have empowered their citizens to a greater degree than the Hermit Kingdom. Even so, power is centralized and concentrated in Beijing, which means that the "stateless" part of communism is being openly flouted. Moreover, even a superficial glance at China's economy and society reveals that it is neither moneyless nor classless. At best this makes the Chinese government hypocritical; at worst, it makes them dishonest. I have no use for dishonest people—let alone a dishonest political system.

Setting that aside, let's talk about the biggest bee in my bonnet about China: human rights.

Here's a little preamble from Amnesty International's website:

Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People's Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.

Possibly I was biased by being born in a country where freedom of speech and freedom of the press actually mean something, are protected by a constitution (the supreme and inviolable law of the land), and are sacrosanct in the hearts and minds of the people. Thus it shocks me when I hear that the Internet is heavily censored in China, with social media sites like Facebook being routinely shut down or blocked. The Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is indefatigable at censoring news reports and filtering what information the people receive. The Chinese government is enormous, inefficient, bureaucratic, and callous. Petitioners cannot easily seek redress of grievances, and are often lost in the shuffle or crushed by the big wheels. The class system is not only extant but downright marginalizing, equal to anything seen in South Africa. In 2005, Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, stated that an apartheid-like segregation system was in effect in China. City-dwellers, he said, enjoy a wealth of social and economic perks while peasants, or "rural workers," are treated like second-class citizens. They require a portfolio of hard-to-obtain passes to work in provinces other than the ones in which they reside. Movement is restricted. Freedom of association is nonexistent, freedom of religion is a joke, and people are regularly stripped of their rights if they do something, anything, that causes the CPC to label them "subversive." And then of course there's the one-child policy. To me, a government that fines its citizens for having more than one kid is just plain tyrannical.

In addition to these documented transgressions, dark rumors abound of torture, brutality and degradation in China's arbitrary detention centers. Evidence has surfaced that Mao and his followers abused the science of psychiatry to their own political ends, declaring thousands of people mentally ill, thereby discrediting them. (Statistics hint that this practice continues to this day, especially in the persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, which the CPC has branded undesirable.)

Besides all that, we have the official Chinese policy of refusing to acknowledge North Korean runaways as political refugees. Instead, China calls them "economic migrants," captures them and deports them back to North Korea, where, as we all know, they face separation, torture, "reeducation," forced labor and execution.

And speaking of North Korea, let's not forget that China has abetted the existence of that oppressive regime with food and electricity for nigh-on 60 years now. I have a bit of a problem with that as well. For all I know, Chinese soldiers might have killed some of my grandfather's best buddies back during the Korean War, too. So I'm a little ticked off at the country on my granddad's behalf, silly as that sounds.

And do I even need to mention Tibet?

Not my photo.

I don't like any of this. No way, no how.

What really sticks in my craw is that China does (or allegedly does) all of this stuff even after signing UN-sanctioned agreements saying that it won't do it. China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but never ratified it. So they just do whatever they please. Hell's donkeys.

In a nutshell, my preconceived notion of China is this: it's a country, a big country, with a huge population and a long and storied history, which in the 20th century had some tremendous political and societal upheavals, during which a rather unscrupulous man came to power, espousing communism and imposing his vision upon the country and its people with varying degrees of success. What we have now is a country used to be doing told what to do, which is really too big to regulate, whose citizens are finally starting to get fed up thanks to the unstoppable influx of Western technology (and with it, ideology), and whose ruling party has all but abandoned the proper pursuit of dogmatic communism in favor of a corrupt regime based on absolute power, suppression of dissent, a single-party state, and strict regulation of economics, society and human life, thereby blighting a nation and its sovereign dignity.

The Temple of Heaven, one of the things on my Beijing to-do list. From Wikimedia Commons.

So, yeah. I'll visit their country. I'll peruse their monuments. I'll stand in their square. I'll tour their palaces. I'll eat their nibbles. I'll breathe their air and sleep in their beds and watch them go about their lives. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way they run their business.

We'll see how much this trip changes my mind.