Driving down the
airport expressway into the city on a remarkably clear autumn day. 秋风过耳[1] The
wind is blowing leaves around playfully in perfect accompaniment to the Randy
Weston Trio’s live version of “Just a Riff.”
Everything feels light. The sun is
confident in a way it might be ashamed of a few weeks later when the arc of fall
recedes at last into winter. Could this
really be the same city that is so pilloried with stories of pollution? On a day like this you might even wonder if all
those stories were true.
It is important to maintain a healthy skepticism on all the news
you read or see. We all lived through
Colin Powell’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ speech. Students of American history can remember the
bombing of Cambodia, “remember the Maine” and cite countless examples of the
government or the press willfully lying to the American people. And the press in the United States, for
example, is largely free and it largely self corrects, and there is room, if
not funding, for others to expose bias, or outright mendacity.
And I suppose it is this process that I have some faith
in. Like most people I need to consume
the news. I need to have a few trusted
sources for efficiency sake through which I discern what is happening in the
world. I am an atheist, someone who
does not subscribe faith to any particular religious explanation for
being. But I concede that I operate with
a strong sense of faith however, in things that I do not know, for sure. Our medieval
ancestors without the benefits of science had faith in many things that would
seem simplistic today. They needed faith
in something to organize and explain their world and get them through the
day. I, and I suspect most of you; have
a religious-like faith in certain things as well, if only to organize a path
through this world of uncertainty.
In the United States, I have an unspoken faith in the rule
of law. This may or may not be poorly placed. But that it operates as such, is interesting. If I’m sitting at a traffic light and someone
cuts across two lanes and slams into my car, I have a certain faith that
justice will prevail and the offending party will be deemed guilty. I have faith that we’ll file a report and the
other person’s insurance company will settle and all will be righted in the
end. This reasonable assessment may well
find itself buffeted by the actual experience.
We can find countless tales where justice did not prevail. But again, initially at least, I have faith
in my assessment of how this encounter will play out. Struck by the other car, my instinct upon
impact is not to call my powerful friend, who knows someone at the Department
of Motor Vehicles to make sure things go my way. I would only turn to the “rule of man” as a
last resort in the United States. In
China, of course, traffic disputes, for example, are often a much more complicated
interplay between the rule of law and the rule of man.
I also have faith, that I am reasonably educated as to “what
is going on in the world.” Why? Because I read the paper. Which paper?
I read the New York Times every day and assume that I have done a reasonable
check in with matters. I read an article
in said paper every day with my older daughter because I want her to “know what
is going on in the world.” I do make
time to go deeper into the news that most concerns me. During the presidential election cycle I
scour the web for more and more information sources. And in general, I cast the net wide for China
news.
Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about a drone
strike, which killed the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/world/asia/drone-strike-hits-compound-used-by-pakistani-taliban-leader.html
The Times’ suggested that Mehsud had a $5M bounty on his
head for his role in attacks on CIA agents in Afghanistan and the attempted
Times Square bombing in New York. Like
many Americans I suppose, I have confused feelings about drone attacks in
general and certainly in countries where we are not at war; about the bystanders
who were also killed, about the tit-for-tat repercussions that may never be
bombed into cessation. And, of course, I
acknowledge that terrorist attacks in the United States are a very real
threat. And as I move on to the next
story on the front page, I have a subtle, underlying faith that what I read was
a factual and reasonably exhaustive accounting.
Reading news about China, where one has more content
knowledge, and more reason and wherewithal to question, can be jarring. I have far less faith about the accuracy of
what I’m reading and more wherewithal to be critical of the assumptions. Take for example this reasonably balanced AP article
in USA Today about a Los Angeles businessman Vincent Wu, who was recently
arrested in Guangdong: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/18/businessman-mob-boss-china/3006981/
The Chinese authorities have cast him as a ruthless mob boss
with nickname’s like “Ferocious Mouth”.
He is charged with paying an associate to throw acid in the face of a
judge who ruled against him. Conversely
his family and business associates maintain that he is an upstanding individual
and a successful businessman whose wealth attracted attention. He exposed corruption and paid for it, by
having is property seized and by being subjected to torture. What really happened? I have no idea. It is easy enough to imagine that the Mr. Wu
was rapacious gent who was finally caught and it is just as easy to imagine
that his business success earned him enemies who wrongfully brought him
down. No one is clean, you could say and
so it’s probably a mixture of both. This
filter of relativism applied to every business transaction, every personal
assessment. This default to ambiguity at
every turn is jarring, enervating. It
makes it harder to just get on with your day.
Here is another series of articles from a New York Times
blog about the arrest of a journalist, again in Guangdong. The initial story shows the bold full page
message from the local paper “New Express” calling for the release of one of
their journalists, who, they claimed, was wrongly arrested for exposing
corruption:
Then this same reporter publically confessed to having taken
bribes to write unflattering stories about a particular business by a
rival. Seemingly crestfallen, the paper
then asked publically for an apology, insisting they’d been wrong to assert
that the reporter was innocent in the first place. They were guilty, they claimed, of lax
self-censorship.
What are we to make of this?
Was the reporter simply on the take?
Was he tortured to confess a crime that he actually did not commit? Did the police, in fact, bravely rout out a
perfidious form of corruption, just like they are supposed to? I have little to no faith that I will ever
know what it is that really happened.
Faith is reinforced or jarred in the United States by a
million events just as it is here. I
choose to believe and have selective empirical evidence that regularly
reinforces subconscious faith that “the
truth will come out in the end” or that “justice will prevail” in the United
States. Maybe that is part of being a
citizen. And though these bromides are sorely
tried at times, they are part of what allow you to function as something other
than a full time skeptic and thereby get on with your day.
In China, I apply faith differently. I am more fundamentally suspicious of these
sort of platitudes as I look into the dusty intersection between the rule of law
and the rule of man in this country. I
still operate with a faith that within this broad momentum, it is a continuum
and that things are on the balance “getting better.” Experience teaches me that guanxi can nearly always ban shi and at the same time it seems
clear to me that the cumbersome, intimate rule of man is on the wane. And I believe, in the high probability of
some difficult speed bumps for China up ahead.
And what informs and anchors all
these assumptions in another land, exists inchoate, through a veil of otherness.
To remain in Beijing, one must be a member of the
faithful. Apostates should probably pack
it in. And certainly it’s best to shake
out these assumptions of belief and have a look at them, and the inchoate void
where they’re anchored, regularly. What are we counting on to get us through
our days? How is it distinct from the way faith is applied, back in wherever it
is we come from to whatever it is we believe in there. This process ought to be ritualized, perhaps
a weekly mass of one, as things are changing too fast to have much of any faith
in consistency.
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