Absurdity, Allegory and China

“This is not a book that should be set aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.”
– Dorothy Parker

(What follows is not a book review, but rather a response to a promotional book tour interview by the co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society (Harper Collins), John and Doris Naisbitt.)

Last week I received an email from a good friend in Texas who wrote to let me know that he was listening to the Diane Rehm Show, a popular Washington, DC-based radio interview program “distributed by National Public Radio, NPR Worldwide, and SIRIUS satellite radio.” The show claims to reach 2.2 million listeners a week. When I lived in the States I often listened to Ms. Rehm’s program. Later in the day I downloaded and listened to the segment with the “two China experts.” It took about three minutes for my blood pressure to start rising.

Mr. Naisbitt was introduced as having been a former Asst. Secretary of Education under JFK – a position he would have held nearly a half century ago – a specialist assistant to Lyndon Johnson, and a former visiting fellow at Harvard. His wife, Doris, is the current director of the Naisbitt China Institute and a professor at Yunnan University. What followed was 50+ minutes littered with painfully shameful pontifications on the current state of China with whole pages torn straight from the Central Propaganda Department’s playbook. Mr. Naisbitt claims that “We wrote the book inside out. Most of the books about China are outside in, and we tried to get inside China and I’ve been going to China for forty-two years. And Doris and I have been going there … ahh … the last ten years. And we tried to write this story from the Chinese point of view.” Unfortunately Mr. Naisbitt’s “inside out” point of view seems to be one from inside a CITS (China International Travel Service) tour bus.

Here are a few highlights:

John: “The social and personal freedoms in China are as open as they are in the western world.” [11:00]

Doris: “Here comes an advantage of the Chinese political system. There is a constancy in the government, so they’re thinking is not election driven, but long-term driven, and they are able to set long term goals in which … and with the long term goals create the frames in which then the people can act and the Chinese government gives the people all the freedom they need to grow.” [15:00]

On Liu Xiaobo [35:50] (John): “Let me say about Liu …. He was sentenced not for speaking his opinion, because that’s done all over China all the time.  He was sentenced because he was organizing an alternative government. He was getting petitions, he had 10,000 signatures to have another … although there are other parties in China, this was a party to install multiple elections and so forth. He crossed the line that all Chinese know. If you cross the line then you take the consequences. He’s well known, because he’s one of the few dissidents who remains in China.  He’s very courageous to do that. He remains in China, so he’s taking his medicine.”

This is a fundamental misrepresentation of Charter 08, the petition that Mr. Naisbitt refers to. Liu was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison on “suspicion of inciting the subversion of state power” for calling for democratic reforms, not as Mr. Naisbitt claims for “organizing an alternative government.” (For Vaclav Havel’s letter to the Hu Jintao concerning the Liu Xiaobo case see here. The letter was delivered by Mr. Havel to the Chinese Embassy in Prague, but “officials would not open the door.”)

On Tibet [44:50](John): “We’ve been there [Tibet] and it is not an oppressed area. In fact it … Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, is a very modern city, a very thriving city, and the Tibetans, the monks and so on are subsidized actually by the Chinese government.” (Doris) “You know, what is not very much known in the west is how the Tibetan society was before 1949, before the Chinese came. It was a feudal society. Ninety-five percent of the population were serfs, and the rest were the aristocrats … aristocratic class and the monks, and they were in power. So life was not a paradise in Tibet, only for 5% of the population.”

This is the same fire-eyed harangue that one can read or hear from any of the official government-controlled media mouthpieces. And this means what? That prior to 1949 China was much different? During both the Ming and Qing dynasties the percentage of imperial officials/bureaucrats numbered about 5% of the population. In the interim between the collapse of the Qing dynasty and 1949, it is hard to imagine a society in any more chaos than China was. If one were to look closely at the number of current CCP members as a percentage of the current population, the golden rule of 5% shows up once again. The finger pointing at feudalism and 5% aristocracy argument is used time and time again to thwart any substantive dialogue on the Tibetan issue. An analogous argument would be that there is no reason to include China at any global negotiating tables, given that sixty/seventy years ago they were involved in civil war, and chaos was the order of the day. The Naisbitts either purposely ignore or just flat-out miss the fact that this red herring has nothing to do with any present possibility of resolution of the ethnic issues at hand. This is CCP boilerplate used ad infinitum as they vigorously displace the nomadic population from the Tibetan Qinghai Plateau grasslands. (See the People’s Daily here, here, and here for a quantification of the numbers being “settled” (read relocated or, better yet, displaced) into permanent housing far from their native lands.)

Regarding Mr. Naisbitt’s take on Tibet as “not an oppressed area,” have a look here (h/t to Danwei) to see an excerpt from the documentary Leaving Fear Behind, which earned the young Tibetan filmmaker, Dhongdup Wangchen, a six-year prison sentence earlier this week. If you are trying to reach this site from inside China, you will need a VPN, since you can’t get there from here without one.

On the ‘Falungong as cult’ question John claims that he and his wife have no idea why the government sees it as a cult. This bespeaks a fundamental lack of knowledge of Chinese history. The mid-19^th C. Taiping rebellion – where a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus led an uprising that over the course of 14 years led to the slaughter and starvation of at least 25 million Chinese – is a lesson in why cult classification is part of a much wider strategy in maintaining the mandate. The arrival of 10,000 peaceful Falungong protesters at the main gate of Zhongnanhai on the sunny Sunday afternoon of April 25, 1999 trumpeted a failure of domestic intelligence in a country that prides itself on knowing what the people are doing. Chinese history is littered with ‘cults’ that have led to localized failures of government. It is something all Chinese know. In a word, the CCP got spooked, and so a cult was launched. The ensuing, relentless barrage from all state media outlets (and in China, there are no others) classifying the group as a cult is not something many who were here at the time can forget. The tirades were deafening. If the Naisbitts are unaware of this rigid Chinese ruling mindset, then they have no business talking about China at all.

I cannot even bring myself to address Mr. Naisbitt’s response to China’s internet blocking. When asked why China is blocking social sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Naisbitt launched into the standard party line about stopping the spread of pornography. Leaving Fear Behind is not pornography, nor are any of the social networking sites mentioned above. This week the Chinese blocked the IMDB (Internet Movie Database), a great resource for all things film, though not pornographic films/videos.

To repeat, this is not a book review since I wouldn’t buy this book if someone held a Taser to my head. The Diane Rehm Show should be ashamed to have given ‘air’ to such blatant obfuscation without doing a far better job of vetting the Naisbitts, then holding their toes to the fire. There is much truth to Mr. Naisbitt’s claims at the beginning of the interview when he says, “We tried to write this book from the Chinese point of view.” And one can hardly disagree, though that point of view is one straight from Party Central.

For more on the Naisbitts from the China Digital Times have a look at It’s Time To Stop the Absurd Promotion of John Naisbitt’s ‘China’s Megatrends.’ The Naisbitts are shameless self-promoters, which they are free to be in the west, though if they’d taken a more substantive stand that looked at China with a more critical and responsible eye, they would not now have access to the lucrative Chinese marketplace, which they are so shabbily kowtowing to. It is quite apparent that the view from inside the official bus is much more profitable than getting off and having a real look around. This is clearly a book that will get a lot of exposure in the state-controlled book market. Even the subtitle, The 8 Pillars of a New Society, panders to that market.