Watching the world turn upside-down
When I first moved to China in 2007, I expected to witness a color revolution with the Communist Party of China being replaced by a Western-type liberal democracy. Thinking back on this gives me a sense of vertigo, a world turned upside-down.
A decade later, everything is topsy-turvy. China has become a leader in green technology, and now leads major economies fighting global warming as the US has isolated itself among nations, denying the problem exists.
When I arrived, China was said to be facing a property bubble that would imminently collapse and bring down its economy. But in the last decade, the US really did bring the world economy to the edge of disaster, and at the moment it is the US economy, not China’s, that seems to be suffering from overheated stock prices.
Ten years ago, foreign countries were pushing for China to adjust its market to match Western free market principles and make its currency fully convertible. Now few people question the wisdom of protecting the country from flows of hot currency that have triggered financial crises elsewhere.
The government’s decision to keep control over the levers of the economy has not only promoted strong growth, but allowed it to cool down hot property markets without triggering a panic or a collapse in housing prices.
When I first arrived, China was heavily criticized for its control over the internet. In the meantime, the Russians have been accused of using the US internet to influence an election, using programs banned in China such as Facebook to spread rumors and socially divisive and false news. “Fake news” first spread over the internet, then from the White House, has destroyed public confidence in the news media, poisoning the national narrative and creating two polarized realities.
Chinese, on the other hand, feel their fortunes are improving and are united in supporting their government’s policies. China’s ban on porn was seen as puritanical, but New York Times columnist Russ Douhat recently suggested banning porn in the US amid concern of how it is warping the perceptions of children and teens.
The US government now seems hopelessly corrupt, poisoned by dark money and lobbyists with a self-dealing president who has installed his relatives as top officials, and faces an investigation so toxic that one of his former top advisors has called a meeting attended by the president’s son and son-in-law “treasonous.” The voting map is hopelessly gerrymandered, with no hope for a remedy in sight. We have the second president this century who was elected despite losing the popular vote, and a vote for president in Wyoming is worth more than three votes in California.
Partisan gridlock is preventing the simplest bills from being passed. The most extreme gun violence is unanswered by government. Some families are having a hard time sitting down for a meal together because of political differences. The president has announced there are “good people” among hate groups that have the stated aim of sparking a civil war.
In contrast, a four-year-old crackdown on corruption in China has surprised skeptics who labeled it a partisan purge and instead caused a sea-change in the way officials operate, with few officials daring to accept even a pack of cigarettes from the public and a noticeable improvement in quality of service and accountability to the public.
It is the fabric of the US that seems to be fraying, with many pundits speculating the traditional party system is dead, while China seems to be a model of stability.
Obviously China is far from perfect, and like all nations has a lot of room for improvement. But as someone raised with the idea that the US is a bright mansion on a hill for others to emulate and aspire to, the spin of the wheel since Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics has been dizzying and hard to align with my unquestioned core beliefs. China is expanding its national interests by developing infrastructure and trade across Asia, Africa and eastern Europe, while the US continues to pursue its interests by growing its military, entering a new nuclear arms race and continuing its second decade in two armed conflicts. I have to re-evaluate a simple, indoctrinated narrative of the world’s “heroes” and “villains.”