Читать книгу What Does China Think? - Mark Leonard - Страница 7

A growing body of Chinese thinkers believe that since their country crawled out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, it has simply replaced the shadow of Maoism with another fundamentalist philosophy: the cult of the United States of America. They complain that when Deng Xiaoping opened China’s doors to the world, it was the USA that burst in. Its market philosophy set the rules for economic development. Its demands for democracy set the standards for political reform. And its foreign policy defined what was acceptable and unacceptable on the world stage. The USA has taken on the role of an all-powerful god whose moods define the weather. In the same way that Chinese peasants of old lived in constant fear of divine retribution, China’s most pressing goal has been to avoid the wrath of the hegemon, crafting a foreign policy that hides China’s ‘brightness’ with humble behaviour, while making ritual sacrifices on issues ranging from North Korea to Sudan in order to satisfy US demands.

For good and for ill, modernization became synonymous with Americanization in the 1980s and 1990s. At a superficial level, Communist China shed its red skin, and grew a new one branded with the symbols of mass consumerism – Starbucks penetrated the walls of the Forbidden City, McDonald’s and KFC signs lit up the high streets and malls of urban China, and kids learnt to cuss each other with Hollywood-inspired jibes: ‘get real!’ As the political scientist Yu Keping argues, ‘The American dream is the highest ideal for the young generation that grew up since the reforms. Everything in the USA, including American people, institutions, economy, culture and country, is so perfect that the American moon has become more round than the one in China!’

At a deeper level, China was forced to accommodate itself to the rules of a globalized world shaped by American capital and American military power. In this era – christened the ‘flat world’ by the journalist Thomas Friedman – all nation states are losing control of their fates: pushed out of the economic sphere by privatization, out of the political sphere by a ‘Third Wave’ of democratization, and out of the foreign policy realm by the stateless forces of capital, terrorism and trade. Many Chinese thinkers worry that by embracing the economic benefits of globalization, China risks being ‘flattened’ by an accompanying American political ideology.

Wang Xiaodong, one of a new breed of Chinese nationalists, argues that the embrace of American ideas springs from a kind of self-hatred. According to him, many Beijing intellectuals in the 1980s saw the Chinese people as an inferior nation with an inferior history: ‘In my opinion, this is not very different from Hitler’s racism,’ he claims, ‘the only difference between them [i.e. Chinese intellectuals] and Hitler was that they [i.e. the Chinese] directed this [hatred] against their own race. This is why I coined the term “reverse racism”.’ Although Wang Xiaodong’s analogy seems extreme and misplaced to many Chinese as well as Western ears, his arguments are symptomatic of a pervasive sense of intellectual insecurity that has driven China’s swings from one extreme ideology to the next.