I have lived in the US for more than 10 years, and read/watch a lot, so I do not think I am ignorant about the US. And here is a good article, sort of long, which describe how the Chinese young people think of the US. I think a lot of what he said is true, unfortunately.
atimes.com
China-US: An ocean-wide divide
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - In 1992 my Chinese friend Xiaodong was preparing to go to the United States for one year as visiting scholar. He was very excited and before his departure we exchanged a few phone calls. Actually I was calling him in China, because he had been a very good friend for many years and I was working night shifts in Italy.
When I had just arrived in China some years before he had been extremely kind to me. Then, I could not really understand what people were saying in Mandarin to me, so he and his friends in the dorm would write what they were saying. I would look at the piece of paper and finally understand those sounds. Through this painful exercise I managed to improve my spoken Mandarin.
Xiaodong and his friends were very patient with and attentive to me. They were certainly curious about me, as I was the only foreigner in the dorm, and for most of them I was the first foreigner they had ever met. But curiosity and interest were not enough to explain the work they had put into communicating with me. They were being protective. They felt a sense of responsibility toward me: they were the hosts, and I was the guest, they had to entertain me, and provide me with a sense of warmth, as I was away from home.
For the day of the full moon, a traditional Chinese celebration, one friend insisted on taking me to his home with his in-laws. I'm not fond of celebrations or family reunions and tried to refuse, but he insisted. He felt that if I spent the day alone it reflect badly on him. It was something like if you were to invite somebody over for dinner you hope he had a good time, and you would be sorry if he didn't. More: my friend felt that if I had a bad time in China, the day of that celebration, he didn't fulfill his duties as a host.
When I talked to Xiaodong before he left for the United States I could hear he was expecting in a way the same kind of attention he had provided me while I was in China. But while foreigners, and especially Westerners, were a rarity in China in the 1980s, Chinese were no rarity in the US. I knew he was not going to receive the same kind of warmth and attention he and his friend had been ready to deliver to me, but how could I tell him that? Besides, I was hoping I was wrong.
I got in touch with a friend, an Italian-American, who happened to be in the same university where Xiaodong was going. I called her up, told her to look my friend up as he was coming over. She did call him, they met, they chatted a little bit, then she invited him to a party. Then she either stood him up or he misunderstood. From far away in Rome I was trying to monitor the development and I could see their friendship was not going anywhere. She complained that his English was poor, he could hardly understand what she was saying over the phone, at parties he was sitting alone, unable to follow conversations. She was behaving like a friend of a friend, nice but not over-caring. He thought that as she was the friend of a friend, that she was obliged to be the hostess, care for him, strive to talk to him even if his English was not good enough. Hadn't he done the same with another foreigner (me)?
Yet Xiaodong didn't know Americans do not behave this way. When he realized that, he drifted more and more toward meeting with other Chinese students, most of whom shared his feelings: the Americans were not taking care of them as they would take care of Americans back in China. Schoolmates did not share a fraternal bond, as in China, nor did teachers have a paternal aura about them, like back home.
Xiaodong had participated in the Tiananmen movement, he had shouted slogans for democracy, listened to the Voice of America, and thought that the United States was set on a mission to rescue the Chinese from a nasty government that was slaughtering its youth. But once in the United States, he realized the Americans actually didn't care much about the Chinese, not Chinese individuals anyway.
Was there something wrong with him or was it something more general? Certainly the personal American experience tainted his vision, as most Chinese are very emotional about their politics, but there was also a weird pattern that was appearing in Sino-US bilateral relations in those years.
The first thing had been the 2000 Olympic Games. Beijing wanted to host them and a gesture of goodwill had freed Wei Jinsheng, China's most famous dissident, from prison. The US opposed the Olympics bid and this angered many common Chinese. They felt that the Olympics were something the people wanted, and this had no political color, it was not something showing support for the government. Depriving the Chinese of the Olympics was like punishing the common folk for the mistakes of their government. But didn't the US say that the common folks had nothing to do with the government? Actually the Chinese people had been quite opposed to their government since then. Furthermore, if Beijing had been selected to host the Olympics, the government would have been forced to improve the human-rights situation. Without the Olympics there was no pressure, so the government could do as it wished, and human rights would go down the drain. Didn't Americans understand this logic, which appeared quite straightforward to the Chinese people? If the Yankees didn't get it, then they were dumb. But how could they be dumb with their technologies and advanced economics? A conspiracy was afoot, and it was not aimed at the Chinese government, but against the Chinese people, the reasoning went.
However, the Olympics did not turn the tide of popular feelings, which were quite pro-American - this took a couple more years to happen. The bitter and difficult negotiations surrounding intellectual property rights (IPR) provided the catalyst for this shift in sentiment regarding the United States. The US demand to protect IPR was hitting small enterprises, which were trying to make money by pirating US products. These companies were small factories established in China's commercially dynamic south, or small start-ups founded in Zhongguancun, a high-tech zone in Beijing's university area. Their managers and employees had participated in Tiananmen a few years before - they saw themselves as the paragon of the new pro-American capitalist spirit in China. However, the US trade representatives were branding them as pirates, stealing US IPR and opposing American values.
This commercial and political offensive was supported by the US media, who were accusing these Chinese of being enemies of democracy. They were enraged and offended: they were the same people who had braved the People's Liberation Army (PLA) tanks in 1989! Another friend, Xiang, was livid.
On the night of June 3-4, 1989, around 1am Xiang had called me from a telephone booth, his voice shaking. He asked what was happening in the square, he was going there riding his bicycle, as all his fellow students, because in that night they had to be ready to die. I had just come back from the square, I told him there was nothing more to do, maybe it was already too late to get into the square. At this point the soldiers were no longer afraid to kill if they had to. It was useless to go there and dare the soldiers, it would be better go back and wait for another opportunity, things would not be finished. When he hung up he still didn't know what to do, he wondered if the United States would intervene to defend the students. He hoped so.
Some seven years later, at the time of the IPR negotiations, Xiang argued that the real goal of the IPR negotiations was to smash small, efficient software companies and impose the tyranny of the US behemoth Microsoft. The Chinese platform for Windows was an example. The Chinese had developed software that could be enabled to work in Chinese on the basis of Windows in English. Microsoft later developed two platforms in Chinese, one in simplified characters, one in traditional. The two platforms were hardly compatible at the time. The people of Zhongguancun saw their products, conceived to adapt to the English Windows, threatened twice. Their software could be used all over the world, but now Microsoft parted the world in two, on one side there were those who were to use simplified Chinese and beside there were those using traditional Chinese and the Americans with their system were ruling it.
Moreover on the IPR, the Chinese companies found that the Chinese government was trying to defend the interests of the Chinese companies, while the US government was defending the interests of its own people.
The case of IPR is certainly complicated, and at the time the Chinese companies did not understand that they too had an interest in defending IPR, and certainly at the beginning, the US failed to clarify this point. It looked then as if IPR were good only for large, established companies that wanted to invade underdeveloped markets.
In a way many Chinese in those years stopped believing in the ideological divide between China and the US; they believed more that there was a concrete clash of interests. Strong US companies wanted to invade the weaker Chinese market, nipping in the bud the competition of Chinese companies. But these companies were the aspiration and the ambition of the most dynamic sectors of the Chinese society, the ones who had first fought their government, and now found out that the government was trying to oppose some resistance to the US invasion. And they saw that their government was giving in to the US pressure. They believed that the Americans were pulling strings in all the different administrations of the Chinese state to protect the interests of their companies. Chinese officials then would sell off, accept grants, junkets, jobs and go and work for the US or defend its interests against those of their fellow countrymen.
Yet those people who wanted to establish new companies, export to the United States, and become the Chinese Bill Gates were opinion leaders. They influenced many fellow professionals, who saw themselves as being short-changed twice: the United States would not buy them up, and would pressure the government to crack down on those irregular companies. They had read in his numerous Chinese biographies how Gates in a nutshell had founded his fortune: he said to IBM he had a program, DOS, which he did not actually have, but went to purchase from another company. He then managed through his relatives to ensure an ironclad contract with IBM giving him many privileges, which at the time IBM overlooked. These two actions were quite simple to Chinese; one sounded like old-fashioned nepotism, while the other, selling what you do not have, has a specific name in Chinese, daomai, and it is derogatory. To those people, who had learned the rules of primitive accumulation (wild, unruly, according to Karl Marx), it eluded them why Washington would allow Gates but not the Chinese to use such methods.
We can say that their perception was wrong, that there were many nuances to the IPR negotiations in the mid-1990s. But the fact was that there was this perception among Chinese, and this context explains the enormous success of books such as China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu) and its many imitations. The book may well have fanned anti-American sentiments, but if those sentiments had not been there the book would not have sold its millions of copies. Furthermore, it carried on being pirated, sold, and reprinted well after the government intervened and forbid its official circulation. The measure, the authors told me, served only to deprive them of their royalties, as the book went on being a best seller for years.
The book cooked all the worse suspicions and put them down on paper with a virulent prose: the Americans were giving aid and support to China only to spy and attack China. Another book, Containing China (Ezhi Zhongguo), used more scholastic research and in two volumes detailed the alleged US strategy to contain China and demonize it in the world press. The book took this conservative angle to be safer with the government.
In fact in all these cases the criticism was simple: the fault of the Chinese government was that it was not strong enough against the United States, it was not defending Chinese interests well enough. The Americans were much better at protecting their own interests.
There were a lot of personal feelings involved in my friends' criticisms of the US, the experience of feeling ill-treated in the US, the failure of one's company because of the overall US pressure. There was the new idea of a US conspiracy, easy to sell in the land of Zhuge Liang, the famous strategist of the 3rd century BC. According to the 13th-century novel Three Kingdoms (San guo yanyi), Zhuge was renowned for defeating his enemy by outsmarting him at every turn. In this novel, and the following tradition, every move hides a step made toward a secret ultimate goal as in chess, second-guessing is a daily business and you can't succeed without guile.
The United States was the largest economy and was the most powerful country in the world. Had it not attained this status without at least some deception?
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean voices inciting against the "Chinese threat" were gaining momentum. In January 1999 California representative Christopher Cox presented the so-called Cox Report, which detailed alleged Chinese spy activities in the US. It was a bombshell in the United States, dropping the political climate with China to Cold War temperatures, and in Beijing it confirmed the worst suspicions on presumed US guile. The report was a trick to demonize China: as Containing China said, if it were true there would have been dozens or hundreds of people arrested for spy activities, but this didn't occur. It was a ruse to whip up anti-Chinese sentiments in the US, and it also had a racist odor to it, as it pointed an accusatory finger at Chinese-Americans as accomplices of Beijing.
In China the Cox Report was viewed as proof of a large US conspiracy, aimed at containing China, stopping its rapid economic growth, and forestalling its becoming an economic giant. The Chinese were frustrated. The government put out a document rejecting all the accusations of the report. But it was not enough to stop the tide. One of the companies accused of spying even contacted the New York Times to print a paid advertisement to deny the allegations, but then gave it up. Would it work or would it incite more criticism?
In this atmosphere in 1999 the Chinese government decided to make a last effort toward the US and sent there the man it figured could provide the best face for Beijing. The then prime minister Zhu Rongji went to the US to offer Washington all it had sought from China in previous negotiations for access to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Shortly before his departure for the United States, students in some universities in Beijing held small demonstrations protesting his trip. The students were muzzled as Zhu took off.
Zhu's trip was a disaster, he had capitulated to Washington on all of the conditions they had long pressed, but Washington was not satisfied. The Americans apparently thought: "If the Chinese can give us this much they can certainly give us more." For the US it was negotiating, for the Chinese leadership it was a last-ditch effort to join the WTO and appease the domestic opposition's growing suspicion of Washington's intentions.
Furthermore, Zhu felt betrayed at finding his confidential offer posted on the White House website, which was coupled with Chinese feelings of betrayal at this evidence that Zhu had conceded so much to the US.
When Zhu Rongji came back, on April 25 he was greeted with the first large demonstration of Falungong practitioners in Beijing.
In the months leading to the religious sect's surrounding of the leadership complex Zhongnanhai, I had had many talks with Xiang on the subject. He spoke of a group of people who were so powerful that all Chinese reporters were scared to write about them. Beijing was intimidating anybody who would report about them, but the group just wanted to carry on its activities quietly. The group had powerful connections in the army, and in the state security among some of the top leaders. It was xenophobic, and taught that extraterrestrials were living among humans and took human shape to control humans. It sounded like a science-fiction story, but it was real. After the warning I could find traces of them everywhere - people practicing in the park, friends' relatives who had left home to follow their Falungong master and refused medical treatment, sure they would not die and that master Li Hongzhi, who lived in exile in New York, would come to their rescue.
A funny cult, had they not been so conservative. They rejected the Western sciences, and all Western concepts, including democracy of course. Some of the most conservative leaders, the ones who in 1989 wanted to crush the demonstrations, were Falungong followers. They wanted to reverse the progress of reforms, they wanted the expulsion of all foreigners from China, and some of them even said that non-ethnic Chinese could not understand the Falungong, which was intended just for Chinese people.
When I started digging into this story between the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999 the whole thing seemed too fantastic to believe. My editors thought I had lost it when I sent them my story regarding the Falungong. They were a party within the Party. The Communist Party had been infiltrated and controlled inside out by a group of fanatics who would have made the Iranian ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini look like a wimp, and were marching on a crusade to save China from Western science and influence and then perhaps save the rest of the world. It took me months to get my story out, and it finally appeared on April 25, 1999. I had been afraid that many other colleagues would have written about them at that point. The West didn't know about the Falungong, and knew even less about their goals.
As months went by positions changed. The demonstrations were a violent wake-up call for Beijing. On a larger front, as a senior official told in those days, the fact that people believed in the group's teachings proved that it was not the case that China was opening up too much; on the contrary, it was not opening enough.
For the liberals who had marched on Tiananmen the Falungong threat was a godsend: the cult proved to the leadership what they had been trying to say for a decade, that China had to liberalize on all fronts, and embrace modernization and democracy without doubts. Any hesitation would open the door not to the US threat but to larger, more dangerous threats from within, the dark souls of the past coming up hungry for Chinese souls, stirring new peasant riots and rebellions that once more would throw back China into the Dark Ages.
Did the Americans see this opportunity to promote its values? No. After a few months of hesitation, when Beijing made the Falungong illegal, the Americans sympathized with the group. For Americans it was natural: no matter whom Beijing was persecuting, it was wrong. This stance was true to American values. And even in China, among the stern critics of Falungong, the ban on the group was criticized as unnecessary and counterproductive. But again the Chinese felt the Americans were mistaking the ben (the trunk of the tree) for the mo (the tip of the tree). The crackdown was carried out in a bad fashion: this was evident as the tip of the tree, but the basic truth was that the Falungong were bad, for China and, even worse, for the West. This was the trunk of the tree.
Xiaodong felt frustrated once more. His voice and his argument reminded me of what he had said about his experience in the US, for which I still felt the pinch of guilt. "The Falungong are a cult? Yes, but so what?" said my American journalist friends. "No one deserves to be beaten up like an animal, or imprisoned for his beliefs."
They should not be beaten up, no, but they are a very dangerous cult threatening to subvert the country and possibly the world, answered my Chinese friends. One could say that the distance between the two positions was tiny, just a matter of stress on either side. But it made a world of difference. The Chinese stressed the danger of the cult, and the US was appalled by the violence of the crackdown. As time went by the difference became more important than the common points. The cult resisted any attempt to stop its demonstrations and the crackdown increased in violence. The two sides appeared, once more, to be on a collision course. The Americans started suspecting that the crackdown on the Falungong was a ruse to purge the Party of internal opposition within the leadership. The Chinese thought the Americans were focusing on the Falungong as a new excuse to pick on China and continue its demonization.
In a way, the Chinese felt the Americans failing to recognize that ridding the Party (more than China) of the Falungong was a step toward the democratization of China. Those conservatives supporting the Falungong were the single largest stumbling block to the democratization of China. However, the crackdown was characterized by a lot of violence and very little legal procedure.
Xiaodong argued that the confrontation between China and the United States was beyond communism or capitalism. It was about the US fear of the emergence of a large economic power to challenge its power. It would make no difference if China were to become a democracy. In fact a democratic China would give freer rein to the nationalist sentiments, which in turn would trigger stronger anti-Chinese feelings in the United States, and the Sino-US confrontation would become likelier.
The bombing of Belgrade seemed to confirm China's worst suspicions: the Americans were doing more than just picking on the Chinese.
In China nobody believes the Americans made a mistake bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The common sentiment is that it was intentional - part of a plot. They believed president Bill Clinton was not part of this plot, nor was his administration, but somebody had bombed the embassy on purpose. The Chinese had long admired the Americans and their technology to the extent that they could not believe they were capable of making such a stupid mistake.
But the missiles unveiled a bigger reality in China. The government had indeed taken an anti-American attitude after the bombing campaign began in Yugoslavia. The idea was to curry favor with the popular neo-nationalist sentiments in China, and to gain a bargaining chip for the bigger issue of Taiwan. As Washington could stir up trouble for China via Taiwan then China could cause some problems in Europe supporting Yugoslavia against the US offensive. But the missiles had awakened China to the threat of US military prowess and also proved the good heart of the Americans in their apology to China. No matter if the embassy had been bombed on purpose or not, what if the US president had said, through official or unofficial channels, "Yes, we did it on purpose, so what?" China would be put in a lose-lose position. What China could do then? Declare war on the United States? Then it would lose the war, and be destroyed. Not declare war? Then it would look like a loser, and face greater domestic nationalist protests. Chinese realized China was a paper tiger, of the kind Mao Zedong accused the Americans of being some 40 years back. The Americans had slapped China in the face with the bombs, and China could only take the slap, and be happy that the US had apologized. The Americans with their apology had saved the Chinese from worse consequences.
Xiaodong and Xiang agreed that China was in no position to challenge the US in any way. This point was confirmed the following year when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane and was forced to make an emergency landing on China's southern island province of Hainan. What if the US had concocted everything to put the Chinese on the spot? The Chinese were in no position to face a direct confrontation with the US, they had to play along or, even worse, accept some rules of engagement that Washington had devised with Moscow during the Cold War. But for Beijing this would be tantamount to a declaration of cold war with Washington, something Beijing dreaded.
The Belgrade embassy bombing proved to the Chinese that there were also Americans working to improve relations, to make things work with China, eager to save Chinese face. In fact, after a few months the US reached an agreement to accept China into the WTO. In a way despite the differences and misunderstandings, if the US had wanted it could have ripped China apart. And this was only one of many occasions: if the United States wanted to break China, it could enforce a strong policy of containment, it could whip up the Taiwan cause and force China into a war that would doom Beijing. In fact many Americans wanted to invest in China, that is, become rich while making China rich.
These perceptions were steps in a long march back to an improvement of relations. Chinese cooperation in the US "war on terrorism" further helped China move toward democracy, which Xiaodong hoped would convince the American people that China was not a monster.
But all this was done with the head rather than with the heart. In an article in the Heartland series China America, love and fear (2001), Yu Shicun described this:
"Chinese minds are full of a mixture of jealousy and admiration towards America. This means that, on the one hand, the Chinese envy the power and prosperity of America, and on the other, are fully aware of such leading position. This is the morbid mind of a weak nation, an attitude of contempt that reflects the desire to become a superpower which disregards ideals, values and principles. It has to be admitted that both before and after Mao's time, the Chinese have been obsessed with this attitude, which is quite typical in Oriental nations. Thus a trivial incident might trigger these nations' sensitive dignity and morbid mind. For example, in the 1940s, the rape of Sheng Chong - a student of Beijing University - by an American soldier, kindled nationwide demonstrations, just as the wrongdoings of American soldiers in Okinawa nowadays elicit once in a while protests of Japanese citizens. The institutions and individuals of these nations still dance to America's tune, for fear of being out of step. Japan often prostrates itself in front of the USA. But even in China those students who staged protests in front of the US Embassy might show up again a few days later applying for a visa to the USA. These examples convincingly show that the USA is and will be the most admired country by China and other Oriental nations for quite a long time."
But is this admiration love? The Chinese would love (or would have loved, now I'm not so sure) to be Americans, but as Xiaodong felt more than a decade ago, would the Americans let him be American? Or would the prerequisites for being American suit most Chinese? Could they give up the strange feeling and relations of host and guest that shapes the first meeting between Chinese and foreigners, and in a way sets the track for the following development?
When I first arrived in China the people who came to pick me up insisted on introducing me to half a dozen students who were around. I was very tired, I had not slept for almost two days, I was jet-lagged, but I felt that small reception was extremely important to my hosts. And in that situation in which I was nearly hallucinating from fatigue, I recalled when I was a boy in southern Italy and my grandmother was expecting a relative from the United States.
She ushered our guest in, and then opened the otherwise untouchable, almost holy glass cupboard, from which she took a bottle of untouched liquor that had been sitting there forever and which she dispensed generously to everybody present with a sense of religious ceremony. The guest was very tired, and his room was ready for him, but my grandmother felt she had to entertain him, even if but for a few minutes, to show him that he was welcome, and there would be warmth around him. That was the warmth Xiaodong missed when he finally made it to the States, I realized years later. The large group of people present to receive our guest smiled with satisfaction, sipping the liquor with care that afternoon in southern Italy, and their chuckles reminded me of the expression on those Chinese students, blowing the tea leaves still floating on the water in their cups.
The world of my grandmother has long disappeared, as have the trips by ship across the Atlantic. Xiaodong and Xiang now feel the price they have to pay to come to terms with the United States is to see their own world disappear. In their heads they know it is a necessary price. Xiaodong now understands that he needed to speak better English before going to the US and not expect Americans to nursemaid him. But can the Chinese make their hearts understand this? They try, I know, but hearts are notoriously unyielding to reason. So bitterness, hatred, disappointment surface toward the United States, mostly perhaps among the people who have taken the leap and actually gone there.
Will they be able to come to grips with their broken hearts? What the Americans perceive as sincerity in their intercourse with China could perhaps suffice to convince the Chinese that the yawning gap across the Pacific is one of culture, not intentions. But how can Chinese be reconciled with the dramatic changes imposed on their civilization, their culture, their most intimate feelings? In recent years two Chinese books have tried to address the problem of identity in great depth. One draws from antiquity on up to the 19th century (Ge Zhaoguang's Zhongguo Sixiang shi), while another by Li Shulei (1942, Zouxiang minjian) focuses on the debate in the Communist Party and among intellectuals in the 1930s. From both books emerges a necessity for a new sense of identity of China that has to be reconciled with the West without giving up its past. This is a most authentic voice, facing present reality, and not even caring to argue about the current bullshitting of neo-neo-Confucianism, the weird name Singapore has concocted to defend its independence, hooking up with other Asian countries, while protecting its weirder system. Perhaps from these books there could be the reconciliation of China with its modernity, and of Asia with the West. Perhaps from this my friends could once more sleep at night without tossing around thinking about who they are, and why they have been so wronged.
Then there is the thorny issue of communism. How much or how little is the Chinese Communist Party communist? How much do labels count in the United States? How labels like "communist" can hide reality, especially if communist China, despite calling herself so, is less communist than North Korea or Cuba, which do not have ruling Communist parties. But this is perhaps an American story.
Disclaimer:
This essay delves into the feelings and the perception of the Chinese, not stating what took place in the politics of the time. As for the American perceptions, the essay should be read by Americans who should know what they felt about China at the time.
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