Popped outside at dusk
and it was brine time. Dust spinning
around drains and diving down sewers. I
had an umbrella in my bag but I’d forgotten about it. So I trudged along with everyone across the
wet lit plaza of San Li Tun.
Drizzle. Everyone moving
faster. Radiohead sharpening the moist
angles of darkening night-light.
Rendez vous-ed
with a lovely Dutch couple that were in town for a visit. A former colleague and his girl friend who
like a disproportionate number of their country-folk were smart, ironic,
worldly. Most importantly, they were
curious. And the ceremony began
anew. For the how many hundredth time,
you speak with a guest who is mid-epiphany that China is not simply a polluted
prison factory. And it doesn’t matter
how many times you have that discussion, it is always refreshing, it is always like
some elemental vitamin to break off pieces of and share.
I wrote yesterday about China being the most thoroughgoing
and convincing version of civilizational otherness there is. If you consider the global imprint of western
colonialism and imperialism there are few places in the world that were not
thoroughly impregnated. China’s port
cities were ceded, and areas were conquered, briefly, but the vast interior of
China remained under Chinese rule.
Chinese civilizational integrity, wrought over an entire continental
shelf, its own writing, its own language, its own customs and logic prevailing
somehow despite all the efforts of others and the Chinese themselves, to change
or destroy it.
And any curious guest begins to see it. Begins to realize that it has its own logic
that allows for different possibilities.
Some of it vexing, ‘watch out for that car’, some of it ennobling and
all of it foreign. What does living with
so much population density century after century do to a people’s sense of
urban norms? You mentioned that you felt
safe walking around. I’d agree. Why is that?
What does it mean that order is prioritized and maintained during this
phenomenal transition from relative poverty to relative affluence for a fifth
of humanity?
Mid scrape off of the accretions that story after negative
China story from traditional media do to the mind is a fine time to chat with a
China visitor. Because now you are
surrounded with people who are laughing, and brusque, busy and in a million
ways, oblivious to you. And the news
organs had you primed to encounter fear and obedience and crass behavior and
frustration at every turn, and its there if you want to find it, but it is
mixed in with a full range of human expression, just like wherever it is you’re
from. Something human touches you as you
begin to consider the society on its own terms and yet the organizing
principles are all quite different and one begins to consider how it is that a
legitimate and other version of how humanity can coordinate itself, differently. What had been portrayed as simply bad is in
fact, complicated.
They wanted to ask the very understandable question about
Mao’s legacy. What did people think?
Could it be that intelligent people still thought favorably about him, despite
all the devastation he had wrought? If
we were to talk about this topic aloud and criticize the Chairman, right now, would
that be OK? Would there be repercussions
if we were to yell about it, right here, in this restaurant? And I tried to explain that perhaps like in
Amsterdam, if you wanted to find trouble, you could. But most people couldn’t be bothered with the
topic. The gaze is fixed forward. Regardless, the Chairman remains a perennial
mighty topic. What do I think myself,
after all these years? Do you explain as
best you can what he symbolizes for Chinese people why they did or still do
seem to need him like a talisman, or round out the case for precisely why his
rule was a disaster.
And we talked about the security of Europe. What would Europe do if the U.S. were to have
a far more critical shock to the system to make the recent Financial Crisis
seem modest? Assume an even greater depression. Assume that in the aftermath therein, the
U.S. told Western Europe it could no longer provide for their collective
defense. “It’s become too
expensive.” What would the countries of
the E.U. do? Would they fall back to
national defense or would they look to something collective? Would the noble experiment of supra-national
behavior that is the European Union fall apart?
Would nations reassert themselves?
I think I know what would happen in North Asia, where there isn’t even a
supra-national alternative to consider.
Whether there is a rupture or simply an evolution, consider,
I asked them, what a world would be like where suddenly the West and its
civilization was no longer driving the cusp of modernity. If you’ll grant that this civilization really
is different, and large enough to resist assimilation, and if all these people
really do arrive at middle class purchasing power, what would Chinese modernity
look like? How would Western Europe
react to a world where not just another nation, but entirely different worldview,
was defining scientific advance, and where it was heading?
Finally, I told them, as I’ve said to others, that if you
had a good time, and if you were surprised by the reasonableness by the humanity
of what you saw. And if the civilization
was strange but somehow comprehensible, operating on terms of its own, that they
should remember it and store it somewhere.
Because there may well come a time in the not to distant future, when
the world around them, and the stories they read and the leaders who lead them all
speak very stridently about why China and its people have become enemies. To make a people an enemy you have to question
their basic humanity. Differences are
too extreme to be accommodated, and hence it is rational to fight and kill such
people. This has happened before. It may
become expedient for the West to do such a thing again. And if it does, regardless of what this
nation’s leaders do, please, remember, and never forget the essential humanity
of all these Chinese people, and their distinct worldview that is different but
legitimate and is theirs.
We closed down the restaurant and walked out in to the
drizzling evening. A walk near
Chaoyangmenwai, beneath glistening towers, with flashing rows of lights, up
through a hutong night market,
closing down. Late night. 黑天半夜[1] No
cabs. I walked them to the other side of
the main street and eventually flagged one to a stop. A reasonable driver, no yelling, he knew the
address. And with that I got them on
their way back to Dongcheng.
Walking back to the other side of the street with the eastbound
traffic I put on my tunes and the Radiohead mix resumed, with “Paranoid
Android.” And I remembered the first
time I’d heard that song when I’d lived here in 1998, biking around in some
long-gone hutongs of Xuanwu District
when this song was something new from England and the band’s name didn’t have
subsequent inevitability associated with it.
And I could enjoy that jolting break in the song as something new and to
my ears, very modern.
And I stood there beneath it all, beneath the dry, dead
modern night.
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