Odd China followup:
Beijing Theater Marks Orwell's Year of the Pigs latimes.com
The whispers hissing through Chinese theater circles these days center on a single question: Can pigs fly?
Some observers say yes, because they thought they'd never see the day when George Orwell's classic critique of communist excess, "Animal Farm," would be served up for mass consumption in China. Yet there it is, adapted for the stage, at the Central Academy of Drama's Experimental Theater in downtown Beijing.
Others, however, are waiting to see whether these particular pigs, the dictatorial leaders in Orwell's barnyard revolution, will fly with Chinese audiences -- and with the authorities in the last communist behemoth.
With unintended irony, the stage version of "Animal Farm" opened Nov. 15, just hours after the Communist Party unveiled the new leaders who will rule this country virtually unchecked for the next five years.
As China-watchers scrambled to parse the new party lineup, theatergoers in Beijing tried to interpret the meaning of a text familiar to high school students in the English-speaking world but practically unknown here.
Alternative anecdotal evidence to the New Republic story, fwiw: nytimes.com
These inland rural areas lag behind the coastal regions, and so the income gaps are growing. But lives are unmistakably getting better almost everywhere. (The only exception I saw was Henan Province, where AIDS is impoverishing villages.) Partly gains come because peasants in villages like Gaoshan go south to work in those sweatshops denounced by American students but treasured by Chinese workers.
The lesson, for me, is that China's transformation is trickling even into the poor interior, dragging all 1.3 billion people into the world economy. When historians look back on our time, I think they'll focus on the resurgence of China after 500 years of weakness — and the way America was oblivious as this happened.
Plenty can still go wrong in China, from a banking crisis (national banks are insolvent) to labor riots (laid-off workers are grumbling everywhere). The government is often brutal and is catastrophically mismanaging an AIDS crisis.
But it's possible for China simultaneously to torture people and enrich them. Human and financial capital are growing and being deployed more sensibly, and a ferocious drive and work ethic are galvanizing even remote nooks like Gaoshan.
The neighborhood is allegedly taking things seriously, as well they ought:
Asia Worries About Growth of China's Economic Power nytimes.com ( attached graphic on foreign investment, graphics7.nytimes.com )
Some interesting figures: census.gov
Compare the above to what I assume are the next 2 in overseas trade:
census.gov
census.gov
Or the more-or-less central element in our current foreign policy preoccupation: census.gov
Personally, I think the New Republic article is a little off base, with globalism the rage, the Chinese export economy is mostly what you got to watch anyway. What I mainly think about China is that the western multinational corporate honchoes were always pretty naive about China as a market. The overseas Chinese that run the "Asian Tigers" are a lot better positioned to take advantage of business opportunities in China than any US based business could ever be. Cultural sensitivities sometimes matter, and subtlety in such things is traditionally not an American strength. |
