For some in China, the parade has passed them by – and gladly too

BEIJING – Ten days in China doesn’t make you an old China hand, but for journalists who’ve been around the block, and the world, it was enough to get the lay of the land and a sense of the country just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the 1 October, 1949 of the People’s Republic. A group of 10 European Union journalists canvassed part of the country, starting in Beijing a couple of weeks before the momentous event, and the signs of preparation were evident, as well as those that weren’t, such as the arduous preparation of scores of thousands of soldiers who practiced goose-stepping in precise rhythm to put on a show.
But there were signs too that for every zealot rooted in the Mao Tse-Tung era, which some officials today openly criticize for excesses and murders, many Chinese were more interested in conspicuous consumerism and anything but political ideology, especially the kind Hollywood loves to show, where Red Chinese in military uniforms parade robotically and chant Communist mantra slogans. China, said journalist Wendy Zhou of Beijing Daily, the predominant newspaper in the Chinese capital, “is like a two-person relationship. If you don’t want to know me or understand me, you won’t.” Like most Chinese, she’s eminently likeable, and she’s a cool hand professional reporter who knows her stuff and how to stand her ground too, an asset to any newspaper.
She smiled demurely but had the hard bark of a journalist from any country, with the exception that she, like just about everyone else in China, wouldn’t write or say something critical of its top leaders. Not because they were afraid, but because it just didn’t make any sense to think they had done anything wrong. “I can write something critical but not the president,” she said. “We criticize the legislators if they do wrong. The condition is that I must tell the truth,” she said.
Occasionally, she said, the targets are higher up in the political chain and that leads to the kind of disputes you’d find in any newsroom. Zhou said she’s sometimes upset there isn’t more critical coverage in the country. “Sometimes, it really bothers me. Every journalist would be bothered by this. I argue with my boss and sometimes we go a little bit further,” she said in the nicely-nuanced way Chinese speak to unravel a riddle for you about what they’re really thinking and for every criticism you mention, constructively or not, Chinese point to the bottom line of economic success while Europe and the US teeter on the brink of a recession that almost became a Depression because of the kind of flat-out greed you don’t see in the harmonious Chinese Way.
Chinese officials told us that protesters would be allowed for the 60th anniversary celebration, but only if they could get permission from the police and demonstrate and hold signs – which they couldn’t get – and no one exactly saw the contradiction. For all that, China is eminently freer and more open than you’d expect, but don’t expect anyone to stand in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square again soon because the last time that was tried in 1989 one brave man stood alone for a while but the metaphorical tank of the Communist government rolled over the rest of the protesters, and so Communism in China didn’t end at its 40th anniversary, as the United States and Europe would have preferred, even if since then it has become a mammoth economic power and provided great opportunities for American and European Union companies to sell their wares. It’s a reverse Silk Road now, with those US and EU businessmen coming hat-in-hand, bowing gracefully, if stopping just short  of begging, for sales, the quiet desperation written all over them. For the Chinese themselves, Oct. 1, 2009 was a proud day for most and you had to admire the rigidity of their beliefs and deep-rooted certainty of their philosophy that, they noted, had pulled scores of millions of people out of poverty right about the same time that Capitalism in the US and EU was doing just the opposite, foreclosing on working people’s homes and throwing them on the streets while rewarding the thieving bankers who put them there, huge bonuses paid for failure. In China, the reward for that is more than a metaphorical rolling of the head, and at major companies like Shanghai’s Fosun, the largest privately-owned conglomerate in a state-run country, the executives are well-paid – unless they fail - so they don’t, because the state has a stake in what they do too. Fosun’s businesses cover steel, property, pharmaceutical, retailing, financial services and strategic investments, and last year surpassed $4 billion in revenues.
At Shanghai’s prestigious Tongji University, there was little dissidence in the air and none of the rebelliousness you’d expect on the campuses of American and European universities, certainly not the protest mentality of the Vietnam War era protests in the US or the Paris student riots around the same time. The barricades in China are in people’s minds for the most part, although it’s hard to argue with them that their system is working for them. And Shanghai’s foreign minister, Shao Huiyang, a smooth and savvy professional who spent some college years at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, was enlightened enough to say that “Mao made a lot of mistakes …. a lot of people suffered .. but Mao made great contributions to people. He liberated the whole nation. Our party will make mistakes but we will correct that.” Like other diplomats in China, he noted that the country has free and fair elections too, except that when I said there was only party to vote for so it didn’t matter who was elected, it didn’t register. “If there were only Republicans in the US, there wouldn’t be any Obama,” I noted, but they didn’t see the analogy. “China is securing its way and the path to improve the lives of the people. We also push forward bilateral reforms,” Shao said, adding those included “how to strengthen the party with more transparency, more democracy … we don’t want only economic development … we will correct our ways.”
There’s an admirable work ethic at hand in China, and, indeed, once you’re exposed to the graciousness and decency of the people, it’s hard to be critical, even if there’s plenty of targets for negativity in the government. One young Chinese woman who spoke English but didn’t want to be identified, said that, “The people are, allow me to use a negative word, brainwashed. It’s not only a Communist thing. China is like the US and everyone has to look at the world the way they are in the US. They (Americans) think everyone has to be so democratic,” and that democracy is the only system that works, which most Chinese reject out-of-hand, along with a few Cold War relic leftovers in some former Soviet Republics in eastern and central Europe who apparently long for the days of bread lines, secret police and dingy apartments with a single 30-watt light bulb, a way of life repugnant even to the Chinese, the well-to-do among them who have taken a liking to the kind of big American cars no one else wants, such as Buick and Cadillac. That’s where the real revolution is taking place, not in Tiananmen Square or the bureaucratic palaces of government leaders, who at least have recognized that a reformed Communism, a kind of hyper-Capitalism they call “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is  in place now, not the fear-mongering style of Chairman Mao, whose regime was so repressive and murderous than many young Chinese pay lip service respect to his memory and huge picture plastered in the square where Communism survived a 1989 insurrection.
If you don’t believe it, read Life and Death in Shanghai, the autobiography of Nien Cheng, a former senior partner at Royal Dutch Shell who was imprisoned and tortured and whose daughter was murdered under Mao’s regime in the 1960s, the kind of brutality that critics said continues today, if not nearly as rampant, and where dissenters are squashed. You don’t see that on the streets of Beijing or Shanghai, where glass tower commercial office buildings have replaced pagodas, and fast cars, not stereotypical rickshaws, are on super highways.  Top-level Chinese leaders in back management, diplomats, are clever and smart, and there are quiet young reformers in the government eager to see more transparency and openness and less rigid ideology. They chafe at the notion of four-hour party speeches that are preaching to the choir, and while they’ll watch and cheer the parade past Mao’s picture, behind the scenes they will try to communicate to western journalists frustration there  aren’t greater freedoms.
Chinese film star Jackie Chan, he of the fast feet and slippery tongue, got himself in trouble not long ago when he said he was starting to think that, “We Chinese need to be controlled,” something that obviously doesn’t take place in his chop-socky kung fu comedies. Still, his comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders on the southern island province of Hainan. “I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.” Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”
The young woman with whom I talked, who was educated in China and the United States, seemed to partly agree, even if it was obvious her thoughts weren’t being controlled by anyone. “Chinese people are not as free with self-expression as in the US,” she said. “We are taught in school that freedom has limitations and that there are strings attached,” which is anathema to Americans. “Because of our culture and thousands of years of repression, we are used to this, although once in a while we challenge it … it’s getting better and people are getting freer,” she said. They just can’t yet walk around in Tiananmen Square singing songs and carrying signs saying hooray for our side, because politics is still a one-sided affair in China and that makes for rather dull parades.

Andy Dabilis is New Europe’s Managing Editor and was in China from Sept. 8-20 with a group of European Union journalists on a state-sponsored tour