Today we started off our morning with a visit to the
Forbidden City. After emerging
from the station, there was the iconic picture of Mao looking out onto
Tiananmen Square, idolized since his death in the late 1970s. When I see his
portrait posted in front of the gates, the only thing I can think of is the
Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution. These two periods marked
periods of Chinese history of megalomaniacal totalitarian rule that challenged
all established economic and social theory with simply the will of the people, ultimately leading to famine and great social unrest. Yet, there he stood as the father of
the current generation of the Chinese people in front of the gates of the ancient city. The Giant Gates were very impressive and before we could enter
we had to pass through a quick check point. When we enter the main area to buy
tickets, we noticed food and beverage trucks and people selling ice cream
bars. The heat was unbearable, but in Mao’s envisioned communist society where
everyone would share and live communally, I bet this capitalist hustle would cause him to roll
over in his grave.
When we finally entered the Forbidden City, there were
hordes of tourists walking in gigantic group. Surprisingly, the tourists we saw
were not international, but mostly Chinese and from the rural
provinces. It seemed as if thousands of Chinese were making their way into the Forbidden
City for their once in a lifetime visit. My first impression of the Forbidden
City was its uniformity and its expansive size. All the roofs were gold and the
arches were a bright orange with little figurines hanging off the edges. The
pillars supporting the building were red and led up to an intricate design
space between the roof and supporting pillars that was a combination of green,
blue and gold. The giant plazas could easily accommodate a thousand people and
there were many side streets and off shoots from the main plazas. It was
incredible, but there were way, way. way too many tourists and it felt like I was
visiting the Times Square of China.
The Man, The Legend, The Mao
The Forbidden City
After our morning in the Forbidden City, we arrived at a
Sichuan Restaurant to meet with Charles Hutzler, the Head of Wall Street Journal’s China Bureau.
The Sichuan restaurant was located in an old French postal office in the
foreigner district of the Qing Dynasty. He was a Yale graduate from the class
on 1984 who had lived in China over 25 years and happened to be a classmate of
Professor Armstrong in the same graduation year! What are the chances? He spoke
to us about his experiences and challenges as a journalist in China. All of his
computers have been compromised by hackers and he had been pulled into government offices for
articles that have not even been published on the web. Corporate espionage is
also a huge issue and ex-pats often avoid typing their passwords in while in
China because entire systems are at risk of being compromised.
Sichuan Restaurant
French Postal Office
After being prompted by Fenco, he dived into his experiences
covering the 2008 Tibetan Protests near Lhasa. He was one of the few
journalists allowed into the autonomous region to interview Tibetans. They
arrived in a motorcade at night accommodated by Chinese government officials that had planned it that way in order to make it difficult to interview, but
he and the other journalists scattered across the city looking for possible
interview candidates. As the moved through the city, he noticed that all the
people they had interviewed had also shown on CCTV, the government mouthpiece,
making it clear that the entire tour had been orchestrated. Then when he and a
group of journalists were in one of the main temples, monks forced their way in
and screamed and cried their stories at the cameras. He caught all the footage
and before it could be erased it was sent across seas to the states and aired.
After the story was leaked, his e-mail was also somehow "leaked" on the internet
under the pretense of “Journalists Spreading Lies about Tibet”. He received
death threats, but still stayed in the country. It was incredible to hear his
experience as a journalist diving into the center of the action to get the
story and share the story of those who are silenced.
After he told his story, the conversation moved towards
protests as a whole. China is a society of protests and according to the
journalist there is one large scale protest every 6 minutes in China. Since
China is a one-party rule, there are no alternatives to the governing system
and instead of voting the leader out of power, protests are used to signal to
the government what is wrong. A huge real estate developer that has 2 million
followers on weibo tweeted his discontent with the pollution, causing protests
to erupt. The government then responds with short-term concessions and there
are even policies in place where local factories can get loans from Beijing to
appease their protestors. After the protest is out of the people’s mind, the
government targets ring leaders to stop the protests from happening again.
China is a society in transition and people want more of a
say in the end product. Yet the government pushes the people to the brink with
its rigid authoritarian policies that focus solely on economic growth with the
ultimate goal of creating a modern international metropolis that result in negatives
like pollution. Even when the people push back, the government has set up a
system that plucks out the oppositions leadership, giving Xi Jingping the
ultimate decision making capability.
After speaking with the journalist, we took the subway to
the Academy of Social Sciences for a roundtable discussion with five Chinese
Professors and Charles Armstrong (and his entourage of 8 Global Scholars!!!!).
The discussion was focused on international relations in Northeast Asia. Before
the end of the Cold War, there were defined lines between the
democratic/capitalist alliance of U.S. South Korea and Japan against the
communist China, Russia and North Korea. Since the End of the Cold War, with
economic integration of all parties except North Korea, the relations between
these countries have become more fluid. Professor Armstrong and the expert on
North Korea began the discussion with the importance of Korea in the discussion
of the security and the future of the region as a whole.
Professors of The Academy of Social Sciences
Then, a Professor in a green shirt interjected, bluntly
stating that it was not Korea, but the top three economic players, China, Japan
and U.S. that would play a role in shaping the region. He gave his perspective
on the relation of the U.S. with the two Asia powers. He said that when the U.S. wants to
deal with China, it will work closely with Japan and when the U.S. wants to
deal with the world, it will work with China. It was an interesting perspective
that I had not heard before, but it was very compelling. The perspective that I
did not agree with was his lack of faith in the U.S. - Japan security agreement.
He thought that it did not have that much backbone and the U.S. was not that
invested in Japan. I believe he held this perspective because he equated the
relationship to that of China and North Korea, a burdensome relation for China. The Japan - U.S. relationship may
be a professional relationship where the leaders are not too close with one
another personally, but their security alliance has a strong bilateral economic
component.
Towards the end of the discussion, the Professor in the
green shirt said that a way to characterize Xi’s government was three words: ambitious,
reckless and prudent. Reckless, but at the same time so financially solvent
that mistakes can easily be absorbed and prudent with respect to relations with
Japan and ASEAN and knowing not to trigger a war just because of their new
place as the second largest economy. He then surprised me by saying that Xi
Jingping’s leadership style is very similar to Mao Zedong. In all the
literature that I had read thus far, the comparisons were first made between Xi having similarities to Hu Jintao as a keeper of the status quo and then Deng as a
reformer after their similarities after the Fourth Plenum meeting that outlined
the policies for the next 10 years…but never like Mao. He went on to say that
like Mao, Xi wants to do something special and he will do everything in his
power to cause change and rock the boat. They both place less emphasis on
stability and he shares the same “struggle” philosophy as Mao. This “struggle”
seems to place an emphasis on struggling for a breathe a fresh air while GDP
continues to grow at high rates.
