The Times has kicked off a massive series of articles under the scary name China Rules: How China Became a Superpower which reminded me - somehow I forgot - that they have never covered China as anything but a threat. When I was living there, the Times coverage was an important balance to the dearth of news (along with the Guardian, Los Angeles Times and South China Morning Post) but on its own it is terribly unbalanced. This series seems recklessly so, playing into a zero-sum understanding of US-Chinese relations the writers claim is the only thing on which Americans of left and right now agree. I've read the headliner "The Land that Failed to Fail," and its substories, appearing one a day all this week, "The American Dream Is Alive. In China," "How China Took Over Your TV," "How China Made Its Own Internet," How China Is Rewriting Its Own Script" and "The World, Built By China." Much more is on the way
over the next four weeks, culminating in the ominous "The Road to Confrontation," which should break about the week before Christmas. Indeed, the whole series seems to be describing a road to confrontation.The double negative of "The Land That Failed To Fail" describes the problems with the project pretty well. The story is that China has found ways to succeed which Americans didn't know existed, but the storyline never gets far beyond the aggrieved negative. I'm as disheartened as anyone at the growth of the oppressive Chinese surveillance state, angered at industrial espionage and horrified at the return of "re-education" camps in Xinjiang. But China's amazing turnaround since the 1980s, lifting more people from poverty than any society in history, happened before - and is arguably being slowed by - the recent crackdowns. The articles note the shift but wind up replicating the narrative of Xi's Chinese Dream, with a monolithic China, a monolithic Chinese Communism, and a single leader at the helm of a monolithic party and state. A few things missing from the story so far:
diversity within China
sources of Chinese vitality that are neither communist not capitalist
what we might learn from China.
And, relatedly, ways we might need to rethink our own position: by what right do we claim to be the hegemon of the "Indo-Pacific"? And didn't the American Dream die on our watch, as we allowed social mobility to be undermined by ever greater inequality? (Not long ago the story was that even Britain has greater social mobility than we do, a story of domestic social and political failure of which China was no part.) As China has "failed to fail," we have failed to succeed. A story like this lets us blame our own failings on China, and, conceding little that the two societies might learn from each other, makes confrontation seem inevitable.
