China: Lay off!

Seems the surest way these days to get a headline or your 15 seconds of fame is to:

1)be a journalist covering a critic of China;

2)be any kind of critic of China.

The runup in press coverage of the Beijing Olympics has made me sick and tired and mad. To most of the American mainstream media, China remains behind a Bamboo Curtain, mired in Mao, a culture that's revolting, an oppressor of free thought, etc., etc., etc.

Is China perfect? Nope. But who is, especially the U.S., last time I checked? Has it come a long way from the Bad Old Days? More and further than it's almost ever given credit for in the Western press, especially by American news organizations.

When you hear, see and read criticism of, say, China's supposed suppression of Tibetan freedom (hard to avoid when the Richard Geres of the world mount it as a hobby horse), have you ever looked into what lies beneath? That the central Chinese government doesn't tax Tibetans and gives Tibet 90 percent of its government spending? That it spent billions to build a railway to Tibet from China's central provinces in 2006, opening up that province to more development and tourism?

Has the central government acted crudely--and sometimes violently--against Tibetan protestors? Of course it has. But if you were trying to govern a country with more than 1.3 billion people, and your main fear was domestic unrest--not U.S. or Russian missiles or even Islamic terrorists--wouldn't you take measures to ensure the most stability you could manage?

Even at the temporary cost of a small part of your population's civil rights?

And when the human rights activists of the world lump China in with North Korea, the Sudan, Somalia and other repressive dictatorships/failed states, they couldn't have their heads deeper in the sand.

Is China politically unfettered? No.

Is China increasingly prosperous and are its citizens' livelihoods rising every year? Yes.

Can Chinese travel in and out of the country at will, take whatever job they want, live where they wish and protest government policies within certain broad circumscribed limits? Yes.

Can Chinese practice any religion they want, as long as members of that religion don't threaten the political status quo? Yes.

Are 90 percent of Chinese literate? Yes.

Do minorities--including Tibetans--make up less than 9 percent of China's population? Yes. (Han Chinese account for 92 percent.)

I visited China for several days in 1979, going in and out of North Korea. That wasn't long after the U.S. established diplomatic relations with Beijing, and it was before the economic reforms of Deng Xiaopeng and his successors that have led to China's 11 percent-plus annual economic growth rates and its role as one of the world's main economic engines today.

The present U.S. ambassador to China is a longtime friend of mine. Another longtime friend is running security for one of the Olympic Games main American corporate sponsors. One of my former Cal State Fullerton students has been living and teaching in China for the past four years. From them and others I hear the good and the bad about China.

And the good far outweighs the bad.

Here's one reporter's insightful take on how much China has changed since he was one of eight Western journalists allowed into the country in '79, the year I visited:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0808mcnultyaug08,0...

While American has wasted more than a trillion dollars, over 4,000 American lives and tens of thousands of American wounded, as well as maybe 100,000 dead and several million displaced Iraqis in the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place...while America was doing that, China just kept on coming.

The reliable Financial Times provides one example: China will probably take over from the U.S. next year as the world's top manufacturer of goods--four years before it was projected to do so:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2aa7a12e-6709-11dd-808f-0000779fd18c.html

While U.S. policy makers focused on forcing democracy into a country and region with no history, tradition or desire for democracy, China kept getting bigger and more free. Is it a Jeffersonian democracy? Nope. Is it far more open than it ever has been to outside influence? Yup. Does it have a ways to go before it could ever claim to be a tolerant, pluralistic state? Yup. Will it get there? I dunno.

But I do know that one way to promote more freedom and indepedent thinking and action is economic development. I witnessed South Korea move from authoritarian rule in 1976, my first visit, to the thriving economic powerhouse and rambunctious democracy it is today--mainly because people's livelihoods got better and better, allowing them to question some of the restrictions on them. And, through popular pressure, for those restrictions to be lifted.

I don't know for sure if that same process will recur in China; I think the sheer scale of the place probably means the restrictions on a few personal freedoms will last a lot longer than they did in South Korea.

But will China dominate the rest of the 21st century? Yes.

Will that be good or bad for America? Probably some of both.

But it will be great for the Chinese people--and that, in the last analysis--is all their government cares about. Nations don't have allies, they have interests. And it is in China's interest to clamp down on some political expression in exchange for raising the living standards of all its people.

Increasingly, younger Chinese--who make up the bulk of the burgeoning population--have begun to resent and resist demands from the West to become more like them. This article provides an excellent overview of the phenomenon:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_osnos

Americans don't like hearing that their day in the sun has come and gone. For awhile it looked as if Japan might assume that mantle. But the Rising Sun also set.

Now it's China. We've got to learn to deal with China based on facts, not wishes. And to see China's wrongdoings in the context of all it has done right for its own people.

So lay off.