The newspapers seem to be full of stuff about China, most of it querulous, if not hostile, and this applies perhaps more to Canada than most other countries, because of our government’s unfortunate and unnecessary arrest on December 1 of Meng Wanzhou, the senior Huawei executive, at the behest of Donald Trump’s United States government. The latest news hot off the press is that our Great Leader Justin “Happy Days” Trudeau, who, a few months ago was dreaming of concluding a free trade agreement with the fast-developing Asian economic giant, has recently hardened his attitude, no doubt in response to the negative things constantly appearing in our press.
I haven’t mentioned China in these
Chronicles since the beginning of March, but I make no apology for returning to
the subject now. It seems to me there are two ways of looking at China. The one
that is promoted by the corrupt government of the United States, supported by
many western world nations, and it would seem slavishly followed by our
government, is that China is a
repressive society, careless of human rights, brutal in its repression of
minorities either of race or of opinion, and that it is trying to foist these
attitudes on the rest of the world., and that, hence, it is a country that
should be shunned whenever and wherever possible.
Second viewpoint, however, is one that I
embraced when working for three months in China in 1978 making films. It became
obvious to me then that ever since at least 1949 the Communist government had
been doing its damnedest to improve the lives of the more than a billion people
over whom they had won control after a
long-running and brutal civil war. They were arguably the poorest people on Earth,
and were certainly living on one of the most thoroughly degraded landscapes on
Earth.
Clearly, some of their methods were
harsh and unforgiving (Mao Tse Tung had frankly written that there would be ten
per cent at the top who would support their programme, but ten per cent at the
bottom would oppose them, and they had to be eliminated, a pitiless doctrine
that only a convinced ideologue could espouse). But it led to their getting
control over a chaotic society, and setting it on the path to improvement. In
the 1970s, such methods were still being tried in the more developed nations of
eastern Europe, but they were unacceptable in developed societies, and were
abandoned in 1989. It seemed to me then that the epic nature of their struggle,
covering one out of every four people alive, made it of major significance to
every one of us. If the Chinese could be
lifted from the scourge of poverty, we would all benefit.
In those days, the Canadian
government was a leader among western nations in facing the reality of
Communist China, and in working to establish relationships with it that could
perhaps lead to a better world.
By 1978, the evidence was clear
before our eyes, as we travelled through the Chinese countryside for mile after
mile, surrounded as far as the eye could see, by hills that were terraced by human
effort, and behind which terraces green crops were growing in a profusion that
was amazing to witness. I remember a Dutch-born member of our crew who had
grown up under the Nazi occupation, and was certainly not a supporter of
Communism, remarking after a day of such travel that “that was the best journey
I have ever taken.”
I returned to China in 1983 to
research a film about child services, travelled even more widely, and witnessed
anew the phenomenon of the huge piles of food that were available for sale on
the streets of every city.
No one could claim that the Communist
government solved the immediate problems of every Chinese community, but so far
as we could tell, they had succeeded in
providing clothing, food, shelter and employment for most of their people. The
commune in which we filmed in 1978, Wushing, that lay on the North Chinas plain
(described at the time by a prominent
western expert as the greatest collection of agricultural communities on
earth), the poorest place in terms of income I had ever seen, but yet every child
was in school, every resident had a job,
and they maintained a standard of health that appeared to be almost
equivalent to our own in Canada.
It happened that 1978 was a pivotal year
in the history of modern China. Mao had died 18 months before, the Gang of Four,
responsible for the repressive and lunatic
Cultural Revolution, had been arrested,
and the government had embraced the programme of the Four Modernizations (in
agriculture, industry, defence and science and technology) that had been
enunciated by the number two man in the hierarchy, Chou En Lai, towards the end
of the 1960s. By the end of the year, a few months after we left the country,
Deng Xiaoping, the hand behind the throne, as it were, enunciated a new idea,
that it is glorious to get rich, and set the nation on the path to what has
turned out to be almost pure capitalism. By lifting hundreds of millions of
people out of the dreadful poverty to which most Chinese had been condemned,
this new path has resulted in one of the greatest transformations ever
witnessed in human history. This appears to have created a middle class whose
ostentatious grasping for the baubles of wealth seems to have reached new
levels of vulgarity.
If you doubt this, you should watch
the programme done by the late Anthony Bourdain, the food expert who made a
life traveling the world, and using his interest in food to open up a view of
the societies he visited. On Netflix, Season four, episode one, he makes clear his
bewildered view of the new China, which he was able to judge against his love
for the place gained from many earlier visits. He found, he said, an ancient
culture that seemed to have been driven mad by “a wealth that was unimaginable
by the most bourgeois of capitalist imperialists.”
He said: “The one thing I know about
China is that we will never know China.” Like myself, though in very different
circumstances, he was prostrate before the ancient history of the country,
seemed always conscious, as I had been, that his hosts had inherited thousands
of years of unbroken culture. At one feast after another he was served
magnificent dishes, native ingredients --- ginger, crab, scallops---
supplemented by oysters and shrimps from the Southern Ocean, Australian beef
that cost $150 a pound, French wine, of which one 30-year-old host, a real
estate developer, boasted that he had a cellar of 4,000 bottles, which came
from every wine-growing area of France and Italy. Bourdain said the Chinese had
cornered the market on red wine, of which they had imported two billion bottles.
Such ostentatious vulgarity staggered even Bourdain
who had seen everything the world of wealth had to offer, from almost every
country.
Today comes word that as the vulgar
and meretricious Trump is racketing up sanctions, tariffs and penalties against
the Chinese economy, Xi Jinping, the
Chinese president has visited a factory producing Rare Earth, a mineral of
which China produces most of the world’s supply, that is needed in every chip
made for use in the technological gadgets that are now indispensible parts of
the business armoury.
That seems to me like one of those
subtle Chinese hints: don’t mess with us, or we will strike back with the weaponry
that lies at hand.
As the western press rings with
warnings against the danger of Chinese subversion, only the occasional
commentator recalls that China has one overseas base, and the United States 840
of them, or according to another count, more like 1,100. That the United States
in 2016, according to the
New York-based Council of Foreign Relations,
dropped 26,171 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia
and Pakistan. Comparative Chinese total apparently --- 0.
It does seem to me that the western press should ease up on the attacks
on China, whose record as a member of the world of civilized nations at least
bears comparison with that of the United States.
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