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Getting real about "Getting Real in China"

October 10th, 2007 · 14 Comments

UC Irvine history professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom has an article in The Nation this week about recent criticism of China. First off, let me say that I have enormous respect for Professor Wasserstrom and have enjoyed his essays a great deal. I also fundamentally agree with the general premise of his most recent piece.

Professor Wasserstrom argues:

I’m distressed by the tendency of so many Americans to assume that everything that goes on in China and everything about the treatment it gets is exotic and unusual. Often things that happen in or involve China are normal–even routine–and we can understand them without factoring in esoteric cultural traits or thinking of the country as a place that, in the global arena, always mysteriously gets handled with kid gloves.

Fair enough. I am no big fan of “Chinese exceptionalism” whether in the field of historical research or in the discussion of contemporary issues, but the examples that Professor Wasserstrom uses in his argument beg certain questions.

For example, he argues that, for all the talk of boycotts, China is hardly the first state with a poor human rights record to host the Olympic games:

Take the Olympics. To read some American commentaries, you’d think that the Games have virtually never been hosted by human rights-abusing authoritarian regimes–with Berlin in 1936 and Moscow in 1980 the only previous anomalies. According to this line of thinking, the decision for China to host the Games, despite the fact that the country is led by the regime responsible for the June 4, 1989, massacre, proves that it consistently gets coddled.But the list of authoritarian states that have hosted the Olympics is actually fairly long. Militaristic Japan got the go-ahead for the 1940 Games (though these were ultimately canceled). In 1968 the Olympic Games were held days after a massacre of students in MexicoSeoul got the nod to host the Games, South Korea was run by the same autocrats with blood on their hands from the Kwangju Massacre in 1980. (then a one-party state). In 1988, when

All true. But just because it was right in 1936, or 1940, or 1968, or even 1988 doesn’t make it right in 2008. In 1936, my marriage to YJ would have been illegal in dozen or so states and Jesse Owens had to sit at the back of the bus on the way to the airport. One could in fact take the opposite view: because several countries with questionable human rights record have hosted the games, it is all the more reason to look closely at the human rights records of current and future hosts.

Professor Wasserstrom uses the same argument later in his essay when contends:

Often, the things we want Beijing to stop doing–recklessly using fossil fuels, mistreating ethnic groups living in frontier regions, and so on–are much like things that America is doing or used to do, much as we wish now that it hadn’t.

Absolutely. And anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the China blogosophere has seen variations on this theme ad nauseum. There have been few things more deplorable in human history than the treatment of America’s native people. Throw in the centuries-long trade in African slaves and it would certainly appear that the United States would be a poor arbiter of human rights. But here’s the thing. Call me an optimist, a pie-in-the-sky idealist or whatever, but as a historian I’d like to hope (dim though that hope might be at times) that the world has learned a thing or two from the mistakes of the past.

As such, I don’t think that my nationality as an American disqualifies me from calling China on things like the treatment of minorities and fossil fuel usage. I actually think it makes perfect sense for me to do so. “Hey! Look at what we did and look at the gigantic mess we have made. Don’t be like us.” I don’t criticize because I look down on the Chinese. Far from it, I think the Chinese are capable of doing more, of doing better, and any anger I show is disappointment more than anything else.

Discussing the recent issues of product safety, Professor Wasserstrom quotes from Steven Mihm’s slyly humorous and thought-provoking essay in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago:

Troubling forms of corruption are endemic to China, making it easy for well-connected people to get away with flouting copyright and product safety laws. Still, as American historian Stephen Mihm notes in a recent essay published in the Boston Globe, chalking up the piracy and product problems to China’s unique features is “a tempting way to see things, but wrong.” That’s because what’s “happening halfway around the world may be disturbing, even disgraceful, but it’s hardly foreign,” Mihm writes. “A century and a half ago, another fast-growing nation had a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit, and it was the United States…. American factories turned out adulterated foods and willfully mislabeled products. Indeed, to see China today is to glimpse, in a distant mirror, the 19th-century American economy in all its corner-cutting, fraudulent glory.”

I liked Mihm’s essay when I read it and his point is well taken: I do think that we should be careful about suggesting that China is the only country to get rich this way. BUT…what troubles me is Professor Wasserstrom’s opening assumption:

Here the situation is fairly typical for a country at a certain stage of capitalist development, yet China somehow is regarded differently.

I hesitate a bit at the teleology here. Are we to give China a pass on the understanding that somewhere down the road, they’ll develop, become capitalist, and all these problems will go away? Maybe that will happen, but here’s the truly salient point: maybe it won’t. And here we get at the crux of Professor Wasserstrom’s argument:

We should try to work from a novel starting point whenever we want to criticize China–or indeed when we want to praise it or simply try to understand it. Namely, assume that despite its unusual size, distinctive history and other things that set it apart and make it anomalous (such as being run by a Communist Party that has embraced elements of capitalism), China has many features that are familiar, not exotic.

Again, as I said earlier, that’s a fair point.

But neither should we lean too far the other way. For example, criticizing media reports of Mattel president Thomas Debrowski’s apology, Professor Wasserstrom writes:

To explain Debrowski’s actions, many commentators felt compelled to invoke esoteric concepts and terms. The company had “kowtowed” to China (a term conjuring up exotic images of feudal obeisance). Debrowksi had apologized in a very public way, a business professor claimed in a widely circulated AP report, because “saving face…is very important in the Chinese culture.” Funny, when Imus and his employers made their apologies, this wasn’t referred to as “kowtowing” to anyone. Nor have the very public actions taken by Duke’s president been said to reveal an American cultural obsession with face-saving. Aha, a skeptic might interject–there’s still something culturally distinctive about the way Chinese officials recounted Debrowski’s apology. To protect the regime’s reputation, they claimed that Mattel had assured the world that China and its factories were completely blameless. That was misleading but hardly exotic. Can Americans really claim without blushing that spin control intended to “save face” and deflect criticism from government failings is unknown here? Doesn’t our President keep presenting reports of minimal progress amidst cascading disaster in Iraq as proof his policies are working?

I agree that the use of terms like “kowtow” is an indication that the America media still too often unthinkingly portrays China as the eternal Other, a habit that has a depressingly long history. But once again, I think the essay goes too far, and here a skeptic interjects that ‘face saving’ is an important part of the Chinese business, political, and social landscape. Is it important in other countries, too? Sure, I don’t dispute that, but I don’t know of anyone in the China field or who lives in China who would argue that there isn’t something special about the way face is treated here, it’s simply too much a part of our daily lives.

I respect Professor Wasserstrom a great deal and I think his heart was in the right place with this essay. I agree with him that exoticizing the Chinese does little to help us understand China, but neither does overlooking those key areas where China is very different. Assuming, for example, that China is simply at an earlier stage on the capitalist road may well turn out true, or it might not. Either way, it’s not unfair to point it out when China’s lax regulatory mechanisms and endemic corruption cause safety risks at home and abroad. There have been and still are nations with far worse human rights records than China has today, that doesn’t mean we can’t call Beijing on abuses when we see them.

Tags: Chinese History

14 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Anonymous // Oct 10, 2007 at 11:03 pm

    I think the main point of the article is that these problems are symptomatic of China’s current stage of economic development. Pollution, corruption, wealth disparities and even human right violation etc etc seems to be the same tired old tales told again and again for nations that had walked the same path before. Some of these problems are quite frankly inevitable.

    People are quite welcome to come up with this magic development model in which everything just works like a charm: equal wealth distribution, no pollution, no corruption, strong institution, full protection of copyright etc etc. All before the development start. Ya… perhaps if there exist such a poor nation in which all the inhabitants are lawyers and environmentalist instead of poor uneducated farmers who can’t read and their children can’t read either.

    Problem arise in China will be solved by China, at her own pace, in her own way. Doesn’t really matter what/how foreigners regard its problems… it ain’t going away any faster.

  • 2 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 10, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    Fair point. What I take issue with is “the same path” assumes a teleology that may or may not exist. It’s the same logic that asks “What was wrong with China? Why didn’t the industrial revolution happen there?” The answer of course is “Nothing was wrong with China.” Who is to say that an industrial revolution is an inevitable part of any country’s development path.

    I don’t dispute that these problems may eventually get better, but let’s find a better rationale for that assumption than hoary notions of “stages of capitalist development.”

    Agreed that problems arising in China will be solved ultimately by China. This doesn’t disqualify anyone, whether Chinese or foreign from commenting on them. But in some instances, international pressure on China–as in the case of SARS and public health transparency or on the issue of product safety–has actually resulted in beneficial changes inside the PRC.

    Thanks for stopping by. Next time, feel free to leave a name.

  • 3 無名 - wu ming // Oct 11, 2007 at 1:04 am

    the biggest problem with the whole rthetoric of stages of development is that it obscures the fact that chinese neoliberal economic policy is coeval with that of america. we’re reading from the same outsourcing, pollutant-spewing, union-busting hymnal, we just try to obscure some of it by placing a lot of the ugly stuff outside our borders in places like china. but the multinational corporations and the economic and legal structures that sustain them are of one piece, in china and the US.

    and in response to anonymous, the problems of pollution, corruption, income inequality etc. are not as much to be found in the illiterate farmers as in the literate and affluent businessmen and cadres that actually run the country. if blame is to be assigned, it is in the low suzhi of the people who spend the most time talking about poor farmers’ low suzhi.

    personally, i’m for reading everyone the riot act, as long as one ackowledges the beam in one’s eye first. as an american, that’s been a onorous burden to bear recently, but that’s the way things go when you’re a rogue nation.

  • 4 by Davesgonechina // Oct 11, 2007 at 1:06 am

    I think Wasserstrom really blew a good chance here. His new book apparently begins:

    “Americans curious about China feel they have only two options: accept the overly simplistic answers to big questions provided by a sound-bite-driven mass media, or look for alternatives in stuffy academic works that can be off-putting due to the style in which they are written. I want to offer a third option: a playful look at serious issues.”

    That’s about as close as any major China book has gotten to my own views outside Hessler, and so I find this doubly disappointing. Wasserstrom begins his piece by saying that Americans too often think that events in China are due to “esoteric cultural traits” - too often the key to understanding events in China is some cultural uniqueness, whether it be Confucian filial piety or Communist authoritarianism (and one is often suggested as the reason for the other). Instead of looking at these things as existing on a continuum of human experience, it is separated and labeled “Chinese”, distinct from all other cultures. Ironically, the Chinese are some of the best practitioners of this form of intellectual segregation.

    But instead of focusing on examples where these stereotypes and assumptions are automatically deployed (China an unchanging authoritarian society as opposed to a historically evolving one, fake goods as being the result of Chinese cultural idiosyncracies instead of market forces), Wasserstrom takes that old comparative route of “Other places have done what China has done”.

    And I completely agree that the teleological argument is a mistake. It smells too much of the “zombie error” Jonathan Dresner pointed out. For Wasserstrom, given his mission statement, to head into zombie territory, is almost unforgivable.

  • 5 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 11, 2007 at 2:44 am

    Wu Ming,

    Agreed.

  • 6 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 11, 2007 at 2:49 am

    Dave,

    Great points. Thanks for the comment.

  • 7 Jeff Wasserstrom // Oct 11, 2007 at 4:36 pm

    It is always gratifying to learn that something one has written has been read carefully, even when the result is a critical assessment (or, in this case, several critical assessments). So, I should start by saying I was pleased to see the original dissection of “Getting Real about China” on this site (where a gentler assessment of something I wrote some time back also appeared), as well as to read the first wave of comments about that posting.

    I do, though, want to try to clarify a few things–and also to suggest, if it doesn’t sound too much like crass marketing, that the person whose comment referred to my new book actually check China’s Brave New World out, despite feeling let down by my Nation piece, to see if I deliver the goods in that longer work. I think I do some things there that are along the lines he was hoping I would do but didn’t in “Getting Real about China,” which was, after all, and had to be, given the medium, a very short piece.

    One thing I want to stress is that in the Nation I wasn’t suggesting (as some who wrote web letters to the magazine’s website clearly think I was suggesting) that Americans should stop criticizing things being done in China. We can even be harshly critical of China when Beijing is doing something similar to what Washington is doing. I just thought that a bit more self-awareness when we make these particular sorts of criticisms would be in order.

    As for the 1936 Olympics, I agree that giving the Games to the Nazis at that moment, when their effort to legitimize their rule was underway, was a mistake. But I don’t think that the 2008 case is the same. Or, rather, I feel that good analogies might be drawn with 1968 and 1988 as well, and that ignoring instances in which some kinds of authoritarian regimes have been awarded the games is foolish. None of which means I would necessarily oppose calls for a boycott to achieve a quite specific end.

    After all, had the Kwangju Massacre occurred after the Games had been awarded to Seoul, that would have been a great moment to call for a boycott in order to put pressure on Seoul to do specific things. If the U.S. had invaded Iraq just before the Games were scheduled to be held here, I could have seen a lot of justification for a boycott being called. And I can see rationales for boycotting the 2008 Games. What I can’t see is why some commentators have suggested that in awarding the Games to Beijing, the IOC had somehow gone against a longstanding Olympic tradition, violated before only in 1936, of letting an authoritarian regime with human rights problem host.

    In general, I think we can give more play in our own rhetoric to some of the ideas used to particular effect in the “you did that too” line taken by some defenders of Beijing’s abysmal human rights record, without accepting the idea that the regime has nothing to answer for. To take one example, I don’t think that Beijing policies toward Tibet can be justified by saying that the U.S. once killed and took the land of a great many Native Americans. I do, though, find it curious when a contemporary citizen of the U.S. claims that it is boggles the imagination to understand how Mao’s face continues to grace banknotes in China despite the terrible toll his policies took, without thinking about how a Native American might feel about seeing Andrew Jackson’s visage stay on our $20 bills.

    Finally, I didn’t mean to imply that there was an inevitable progression from one stage of development to another. I just thought it worth keeping in mind that some similar problems have plagued many countries as they industrialized rapidly.

    I’m in danger now of making this comment as long as my piece in the Nation, so I’ll stop, reiterating again that it is very gratifying to be read so carefully. And the comments have given me much to keep in mind the next time I write a piece of this kind.

  • 8 ChinaHawk // Oct 11, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    pollution bad, corruption bad, hey what’s wrong with income inequality?

    If a kid A bust his a#$ in school whereas kid B spend all the time at the beach. Later in life, kid A makes more money than kid B by landing higher paying jobs. Should we take the extra income from kid A to give to kid B in name of equality?

    As long as we have a functional meritocracy where common man has social mobility and access to means to better his financial standings, inequality is good!

    as for comparison between China and Nazi Germany. Please! China might be comparable to pre-World War I Germany. But anyone suggesting that China in 2008 is a reincarnation of Nazi Germany circa 1936 has some other agendas.

  • 9 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 11, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    Professor Wasserstrom,

    Thank you for taking the time to stop by the site and for your very thoughtful response to my comments as well as for clarifying some of your examples. I think your point about increased self-awareness in criticisms of China is well said. I can understand in a medium such as a magazine essay, space can prevent fuller explications.

    Thanks for stopping by and I am honored that you took the time to read and comment upon my post.

  • 10 Phil // Oct 11, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    Great to see the author of the piece engaging with critics. I think I rather side with Jeremiah on this one, though. The “we did it too” argument is a good counter to China as the “other”, but the elided second half of that sentence, “…and we turned out alright,” is too strong to ignore. It’s not a logically necessary part of the argument, sure, but if that part is omitted, then what are you left with? “China is like the wild west, so your criticisms are not valid.” The guy you quote approvingly on Tibet in the next post even says this on religious controls in Tibet:

    “Before we explode in rage…we should remember that such measures are not unknown to European history. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555…”

    So, we’re not to be angry about hideous religious controls, because it’s no worse than the witch-hunting, religious genocidal, internecine, empire-building Europe of the 16th century? Well, that’s alright then.

    The vast majority of western writers on China are coming from the (often unspoken because so obvious) perspective of democracy/freedom of information/human rights good, totalitarianism/censorship/all-powerful state bad, and their readers equally so. Any argument you make is generally going to be interpreted in the light of this broader set of common positions, and the “we did it too” argument only makes sense (and makes extremely good sense) when readers fill in the blank, and understand it to mean we did it too, and we turned out alright, and so will China. To suggest that readers won’t make those logical connections is disingenuous.

  • 11 by Davesgonechina // Oct 12, 2007 at 12:50 am

    @Jeff Wasserstrom: If you do come back to read this comment, rest assured I still plan to read your book.

    In the China blogosphere, alot of us have become skeptical of any comparative argument (Mao vs. Andrew Jackson, for example), simply because it tends to be ineffective. Americans often react defensively (”it’s not the same” or “that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize them”) while Chinese nationalists will quickly take your points and push them towards their own foregone conclusions (”Yeah, you can’t criticize us, hypocritical imperialist!”). Both sides get more entrenched in parochial attitudes, and you end up spending all your time defending the validity of your comparison.

    Also, I find it interesting that you “find it curious when a contemporary citizen of the U.S. claims that it is boggles the imagination” vis-a-vis Mao and Jackson. Personally, it boggles my imagination that many historians still are surprised by historical illiteracy or national parochialism. Honestly, it’s been obvious for a real long time.

    Anything with a whiff of teleology is similarly problematic; it fits too snugly with both American exceptionalism and Chinese Communist doctrine. Again, anything that suggests this tends to reinforce existing viewpoints.

    It’s not that your points are completely untrue, or invalid points to make. But after a rather disturbingly long time as a blogger in China engaging in these sorts of debates, I can tell you that these approaches often don’t make a dent on either side.

    Personally, I tend to focus on concrete and specific examples of lazy or inaccurate reporting on China and point out nuggets of information that undermine such sloppiness or generalization. A good example would be your critique of the usage of “kowtow”. But the other points, unfortunately, will usually fall on deaf ears.

  • 12 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 12, 2007 at 4:04 pm

    Phil,

    I agree with your points. If, as Professor Wasserstrom commented, our goal is simply to be more self-aware when making these criticisms then that’s one thing, but to use the “You did it too” as a way of deflecting criticism is pretty thin beer.

  • 13 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 12, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    Dave,

    I do hope Professor Wasserstrom has time to address some of your comments, but let me just add two cents of my own.

    1 cent: Historians are continually shocked by historical illiteracy. Tongue in cheek, I might reply: We can’t help it. It comes in mild cases (You mean the whole world is as psyched about 19th century court records as I am?) to the classroom (Giving a sophomore in college a B because their paper didn’t reflect “the latest research in the field”) to hysterical posts on HNN that 75% of high school students don’t know who FDR was. You gotta remember, this is what we do, live, and breathe…you can forgive us if we’re a litte abnormal at times.

    Cent 2: I agree with you about concrete examples. It’s something you’re quite good at in your own writings and one reason I enjoy your posts as much as I do. I thought of your recent “Yellow Peril” posts as soon as I saw the kowtow reference.

    Thanks for stopping by.

  • 14 Jeff Wasserstrom // Oct 13, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    I continue to find interesting the posts that go up responding to my piece in the Nation and the previous critiques of it. You have all given me a lot to think about, particularly when it comes to how the same statements can be read or come across in different contexts.

    I was writing primarily with the readers of the Nation in mind (politically progressive Americans, for the most part), not particularly concerned (though in future I may be more so) with how Chinese bloggers, for instance, would take my arguments. But especially with the internet, an opinion piece can takes on a life of its own. I know that one I did for the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year was translated into Chinese and transmitted all over the place via a Chinese language portal. This current piece has gotten excerpted on the China Digital Times portal and reposted on a CBS news site and on the History News Network website, as well as, of course, discussed in this blog.

    It is a challenge to write a short piece for just one imagined audience without feeling you are leaving too much out or oversimplifyng. (Believe me, there are other examples of, for instance, Western over-reliance on the notion of “face-saving” to explain Chnese behavior that I would have liked to have stuck in the Nation piece, but couldn’t due to length constraints. I first started thinking about that issue when in China during the anti-NATO protests of 1999 and seeing how much the American media exoticized Chinese actions then.) But I suppose in future, as I don’t plan to stop writing for newspapers and magazines, I will need to be more attentive to multiple audiences.

    By the way, I’ve directed some friends and colleagues to check out the Granite Studio debate (several have told me how interesting they found it, how the comments draw attention to just how complex some of these issues can be, defying easy answers), and I have also recommended that the students in my “Images of China” class do the same. After all, how often do students get to see their professor criticized in this fashion? And, unlike some other cases when something I have written has started a chain of responses, these have stayed on point, not veered off in strange directions.

    Readers of this site, in turn, might find it interesting to note the overalps but also divergences between postings here and the web letters that have shown up on the Nation’s site concerning my piece. (Go to:
    http://www.thenation.com/bletters/20071022/wasserstrom .) They are running 3 to 1 against me, I guess, but the criticisms aren’t quite the same there as here. The historically minded readers of HNN may have still other perspectives, which would make for an even more well-rounded “teachable” moment.

    By the way, as someone who has long been intrigued as well by the curious career of Hua Guofeng, I enjoyed the recent posting on him.

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