Simple Things I Learned About China
Simple Things I Learned About China
5 1/2 lessons of experience. I bet most foreigners who have lived in China would give you a similar account.
The world is full of China-policy articles. For instance, here’s a recent good one by Noah Smith, and another by Robert Wright.
This post is not about policy specifics, important as they are. I’ve written about those before and will again.
Instead this is meant as a snapshot of some assumptions and mindsets that shape policy choices. These mental pictures generally matter more than analysis or “facts.”
I’ll give some observations that I think many foreigners who’ve lived in China share.
My hope is that most such people will think, “Oh, that’s obvious.” My guess is that most people without this experience—who haven’t been to China, or have been there as tourists, or in and out on business trips—will not have been through the same process or share the same images.Why bring this up now? I’m prompted by recent talk about “coming war with China,” metaphorical, economic, or real-and-bloody. What I really hope is that points like these will become part of “oh, that’s obvious” conventional wisdom.
1) The more you know, the less you know.
One of my good friends in China was the Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey. He was a leading figure of early-2000s “outsourcing”—connecting Western brands with Chinese suppliers. If you used any Western brand-name electronic device over the past two decades, odds are it passed through one of his facilities.
After I had been in China for a while, Liam, who had been there much longer, told me something that stuck with me: “Each month I’m here, I know half as much as I did the month before.” I quoted that line in my book China Airborne and added:
I thought he was being clever, but a few years later I began to grasp what he was saying.
It’s not that your store of knowledge keeps going down. It’s that your awareness of what you don’t know—and won’t ever know—keeps going up, and faster. It like driving away from the city lights at night and, when lifting your gaze, realizing with shock how many more stars are in the sky than you had previously seen, or imagined.
This is a failure of imagination many outsiders have about China. It’s hard to remain conscious of how much we don’t know, and how misleading it can be to generalize from our own latest experience.
When we were in our last weeks in Beijing and getting ready to move back to America, I wrote in the first part of China Airborne:
The main surprise of living in China, as opposed to reading or hearing about it, is how much it is a loose assemblage of organizations and aspects and subcultures, an infinity of self-enclosed activities, rather than a “country” in the normal sense…
[China] is a success and a failure, an opportunity and a threat, an inspiring model to the world and a nightmarish cautionary example.
It is tightly controlled and it is out of control; it is futuristic and it is backward; its system is both robust and shaky. Its leaders are skillful and clumsy, supple and stubborn, visionary and foolishly short-sighted. Anything said or written about contemporary China and its system is true, somewhere within its great expanse…. [And somewhere else it is false.]
Why does this matter? Because so much U.S. discussion of “China” unthinkingly presents it as some monolithic, homogenous titan.
-Many foreigners discuss “America” in the same caricatured way: It’s a place where everyone has a rifle in one hand, a Bible in the other, and a tub full of fries on the front seat of a giant pickup truck.
-The crucial difference is that so many people around the world have immigrant or extended-family ties to the U.S., or have been here on travels, and have some idea about its contrasts. The spread of American pop culture, from movies and music to the NBA, makes people think they know what LA or DC looks like.
During the time China has had Xi Jinping in command, the United States has had three very different presidents—Obama, Trump, Biden—and four Speakers of the House. (Boehner, Ryan, Pelosi, now McCarthy.) Everyone can generalize about America. But from Nigeria to Pakistan to South Korea, people have some idea of American variety and potential for change.
It’s easy to get a similar sense of Chinese contradictions while living there. It’s harder from a distance.
Is the point that we should be paralyzed, and can’t conclude anything? No. I mean to stress an element too often missing from U.S. talk about China. That is the complication and conditionality, the “what if?”, the unpredictability. We have to make decisions. But we should allow for what we don’t know and might be wrong about.
2) China is a problem. China as an enemy would be worse.
Why is China a “problem”? Where do we begin…
Probably with the name Xi Jinping. Almost everything he’s done in office, seemingly as president-for-life, has made China’s economic, political, and military presence more difficult and threatening for the outside world.
More repression at home. More elbows-out expansion abroad. The folly of the “zero-Covid” policy. The cruelty of anti-Uighur policy in Xinjiang. The relentlessness of anti-democratic crackdowns in Hong Kong. Complicity with Russia in Ukraine. Expansion of military bases throughout the region, and of often-corrupt economic deals in Africa and elsewhere. And so on.
When Deb and I were living in China, the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao seemed colorless at best, shady at worst. (Recall the exposés by David Barboza in the NYT.) Now many of our friends from that era, Chinese and international alike, talk wistfully about “the golden age of Hu Jintao.” We think about how touchingly corny the country’s “Beijing Welcomes You!” tone was during the 2008 Olympics. It was a different time.
No one can know how long Xi will stay in control; who or what might come after him; or whether by brute force he is making the Chinese economy “stronger” or instead revealing its greatest weaknesses. No one can know whether today’s economic and social tensions, like the protests against Covid lockdowns last year, will finally weaken one-party Communist control—or somehow be shunted into nationalist, anti-foreign resentment.
We just know that this China is more trouble to deal with than its predecessors. Here is my longtime friend Clyde Prestowitz with a recent, hard-edged argument.
This all makes China a problem. A challenge. A challenge that, because of its scale, is not going away.
What could be worse? Worse would be a China geared toward thinking of the U.S. not as a rival but as an outright enemy. All you have to do is look at Vladimir Putin’s Russia to see how much more serious that could be. And for perspective, remember that China has nearly ten times as many people as Russia (around 1.4 billion, versus around 140 million), and a vastly stronger economy.
3) Things look different up close.
I’ve written this before, but it can’t be stressed often enough:
—China looks most imposing and unstoppable from a distance. And most complicated and fragile up close. Ten years ago that was the point of my book China Airborne, about China’s still unfulfilled quest for aerospace dominance. I see stories on this theme every day.
—The United States looks most troubled and disaster-bound from a distance. And most resilient, diverse, and creative up close. This was the message of Deb’s and my book Our Towns. And, to oversimplify enormously, I believe it is the message of the past few years’ national and state-level politics.
Does this mean that America will “win,” and China will “lose”? Of course not. And of course it’s possible for both of them to succeed and bring the world up with them, or both to fail and bring everyone else down.
But it’s a reminder to Americans not to panic, when they see the next map of China’s ever-growing High Speed Rail network, or read about its supposed lead in research or patents.
Americans do badly when complacent. They do worse when feeling nervous and threatened.
Better than either of these options would be an America that feels confident, generous, and ambitious. (At least we can dream.)
4) China cares more about China than about the U.S.
I don’t know anything about Russia. But my impression is that Soviet-era and now Russian leaders, especially in the Putin era, have viewed harming the United States as a goal in itself. This or that policy might not be good for Russia. But if it’s bad for America, that’s a start!
China’s leaders could be headed in that direction. But my impression from living there is that the United States ranks, at most, second in their thoughts.
What ranks first is China. Will a new policy help the leaders? Will it keep them and the Party in power? Will it hurt their rivals or critics? Will it make enough people in the country feel better off? After that, they can talk about what it means for the U.S.
Does this distinction matter—between policies meant to hurt the U.S., versus those meant to help China? A lot of them overlap. But in principle what I’m calling the Chinese approach offers at least a chance of compromise. What the negotiators used to call “win-win.”
5) The U.S. should care more about the U.S. than about China.
As a global power and a nation of immigrants, the United States should have a broad view of international well-being.
But when it comes to charting its own economic and social future, the U.S. should do things because they are good for Americans, and not because we need to “keep up with China.” And we should talk about them in those terms.
I generally like the current administration’s “Made in America” programs. I like plans that will increase U.S.-based manufacturing, foster U.S. tech companies, create jobs within the United States. I laid out the general argument in a cover story 30 years ago. In Noēma magazine, Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin have a wonderful new article to similar effect.
But I don’t like the let’s do it to beat China rhetoric. That can only intensify a let’s beat America rationale on the other side.
Maybe we have no alternative. See: John F. Kennedy and beating the Soviets during the space race. Or Dwight Eisenhower and building Interstate Highways to win the Cold War.
But let’s try. Let’s talk about what would be good for most Americans, whether or not China were there at all.
5 1/2) Stop the war talk.
OK, a bonus 5 1/2th point, and the initial reason for this post.
I am a friend of Graham Allison and once was a student of his. But I’ve resisted the implications of his “Thucydides Trap” model for the U.S. and China. This is the idea that a rising power and a declining power are practically doomed to clash.
I’m not sure how history will view the rising-and-declining roles at this moment. China has four times as many people as the U.S., but at least four times as many problems. The U.S. has countless glaring weaknesses, and many under-publicized strengths.
Among those strengths is, perversely, that the U.S. military is vastly more battled-tested than China’s. (Why perversely? This “advantage” comes from the U.S. constantly being at war.) It’s good for the world that the People’s Liberation Army has not been in combat in more than 40 years. But I think its total absence of modern real-world experience should give its commanders pause.
What could make the “Thucydides Trap” come true? Among other things, loose talk about going to war within two years, like that from a U.S. general.
China is a problem. We’ll be worse off with it as an enemy.
My wife, Deb, and our children first traveled through China in the mid-1980s, when we were based in Asia and went to the World Esperanto Congress in Beijing. (It’s a long story.) After our children were grown, Deb and I lived in China for nearly four years between 2006 and 2011. In those years and later we traveled through and reported from nearly every province of China. We’ll never be “China hands,” but we tried our best to see a lot of the country.
Between the Covid lockdowns and overall restrictions, we have not been there in a while.
Thanks for this, Jim. I’m writing from Billings, Montana where the news of the day is the Chinese spy balloon floating overhead. This, unfortunately, is Matt “Baltimore Billy” Rosendale country. Not sure why my people elected such an ignorant loudmouth as their representative. I imagine he’s spouting all kinds of nonsense about the balloon to anyone who will listen. “Thar commin ta tyke yore gons.” That’s a Balimer accent, not a Montana twang. The Chinese are probably “Commin ta tyke yore freeeedom!”
This is great, very important, Jim. I hope you will do more. China has emerged into the center of our consciousness and the world's. We as a country need grounded guidance we can trust on how to think about it