Weston - China beyond the Headlines

Geremie R. Barm

T heres a school of thought that argues that China is a story just waiting to happen. The headlines have been written, the outcome preordained. The only thing thats missing is copy from the frontlines of the breaking media event, information that will fill in the fine detail, add a touch of local color here, a dab of poignancy there. For any marketable description of the endgame requires a dimension of personal tragedy and a measure of bathos that makes any good story just that.

All too often in the West, particularly in the United States, China doesnt seem to have much of a chance; it barely even has a present. But it does have a future. If you restrict your media consumption to glib sound bites and headline one-liners, its a future that is the past of the Soviet Union or could just as well be the past of a swath of Eastern European nations. Its supposed to be the future of all the defunct autocratic one-party police states that held sway during the twentieth century.

Chinas tomorrow is, as they say, its yesterday. Or, as the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein put it when considering the denouement of the Soviet empire: The communist future had become a thing of the past, while the feudal and bourgeois past approaches us from the direction where we had expected to meet the future.

Caught between the dire historical fate of European totalitarianisms and the seemingly impossible future of Chinese socialism and communism, the present itself disappears, or at best becomes a stopgap diversion that keeps the progress of history on hold. The headlines from that frontline are about a story waiting to be told. Epstein calls this particular condition postfuturism, insofar as it is not the present that turns out to be behind us, but the future itself.

In the 1980s and 1990s popular characterizations of mainland China readily invoked a grand narrative that told a story about that last bastion of recalcitrant one-party rule being undermined by economic reforms and the liberating pressures of technology, social change, and global markets. It was a view that presented us with an inexorable logic: market diversity will result in increased commercialization; the growth and strengthening of new social forces as well as of a general liberalization will in turn engender political, social, and cultural pluralism. While it is all too common to encounter Chinese thinkers and writers who gloat to Western analysts and observers that China and its politics are simply too complex ( tai fuza ) and beyond the ken of outsiders to truly understand, Western masters of whither China scenarios are equally confident in their privileged knowledge about the globalized future of the world. For their part they argue that everything is really very simple ( hen jiandan ). They reason that the mainland will inevitably go the way of Taiwan and sooner or later become a pluralistic market democracy. Their confidence is based on a linear view of historical change; they believe theyve seen the future, and they claim it works, at least for them.