China: The New America?

WWH – Last week I wrote why I would not pledge my allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Not surprisingly, I received a number of emails, some all in caps, yelling at me the familiar phrase so fraught with redneck intelligence and wit (or is that an oxymoron?) “America, Love it or Leave it!” Talk about polarizing the continuum? No wonder we are in such deep shit!

I do confess that in moments of weakness, I consider leaving this country. To which one, I can’t say. The ones that seem to suit me best would be even more attractive if they were located in a more southerly clime. Perhaps somewhere between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, with wide, white beaches, perfect surf, and coconut palms growing thick as grass. Why so many progressive countries end up being in such cold climates is beyond me? What were they thinking?

There is one country to which I do NOT wish to emigrate, but which nevertheless fascinates me only because it has always had the reputation of being completely antithetical to the principles of the United States. That country is China. I find what they have accomplished in a relatively short span of time to be simply amazing. Perhaps these accomplishments have come at a high cost to human life, a cost we would never consider paying. (Or would we?) I am fascinated by China, because it seems to adopt the best practices of other countries, while we seem to pay no heed at all to what we can learn from others.

Most of what I know about contemporary China I learn from my brother who lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife and their teenage son. When he left the States years ago, I thought he was crazy. Now I think maybe he knew something I didn’t.

We often argue about China’s poor record of human rights. I remind him of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution under Mao, the Totalitarianism of the Communist Party, the unforgiveable and still unacceptable conquest of Tibet, the sad and brief protest at Tiananmen Square, and the gross abuse of “eminent domain,” displacing hundreds of thousands of people for the world’s largest dam and other public projects the country deems absolutely necessary. To say nothing of their very poor environmental record.

My brother speaks more kindly of China than I. And he reminds me of things I myself have said… things that scare me. Things such as knowing people rewrite history to suit their own needs, whatever they may be. I think of Rumsfeld’s new book and the Texas Board of Education and the generations that come along right behind us who are taught this revisionist history and may not even have a clue they are being deceived.

It only takes a couple of generations, for the youngest generation to think their world was always the way it appears to them in the present. Young Chinese people have little understanding of the torture that went on during the Cultural Revolution. Soon the generations who suffered under Communist tyranny will be gone, and if you mention Tiananmen Square to my nephew, you may as well ask him if he knows the music of Joni Mitchell! When my teenage nephew’s Chinese grandparents try to explain the horrors of the past to him, he finds it boring and disappears into his bedroom to play video games. If they try to describe what daily life was like for them when they were kids, he rolls his eyes and scans very tall and very modern skyscrapers.

This isn’t so very different from when my parents or grandparents would talk about the Great Depression and how they worked their fingers to the bone to put enough food on the table while my brother and I competed to see who could make the other snicker first.

My brother tells me the Chinese have an incredible sense of working for the common good. In the United States, we have been taught that Individualism is the key to success; watch out for number one. Fuck everyone else. After all, it’s a dog eat dog world!

I was raised to think Socialism was just a notch below the dreaded Red menace, Communism, which was the same thing as a dictatorship except the dictator was a group of people called the Party. No one told me we had our own “Party” in the United States and it was called The Obnoxiously Wealthy Party. (Do not misread me. Wealth alone is not obnoxious nor connotes any disparagement upon those with wealth. It is wealth accompanied by insatiable greed that is obnoxious, and wealth whose byproduct is the suffering of others, which is immoral.) As Dennis Kucinich says, “Economic democracy is a precondition for political democracy.” Based on that statement alone, we are quickly losing our democratic footing.

Say it’s not so, but could it be that I, that you, that we, have also been taught revisionist history along the way? I mean all the way… back to what we were taught about the Great Empires. Whose history were we taught? Was it revisionist or just plain slanted? Did we get the truth? When all is said and done, perception is the reality.

The perception is that our economic “recovery” has begun. But my brother reminds me that while the United States had an unemployment rate of nearly 9%. China’s was less than three. President Obama said we would create jobs by becoming the world’s leader in renewable energy sources and become once again the innovators and inventors of the world. He said the United States would produce the most advanced photo-voltaic cells. Yet while the words were spilling from his lips, China was becoming the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels with a global market clamoring for its technology.

Obama said he would create jobs by rebuilding our broken infrastructure and creating high speed rail and mass transit. But what he calls “investing,” his opponents call “spending,” and that is verboten in a nation whose right wing cuts taxes for the wealthy while cutting programs for the poor and middle class. In the meantime, the Chinese are building new roads and highways continually. Their high speed bullet trains crisscross the country. And there are more new model cars on Chinese highways than there are in the United States. Yet only 3% of the people in China even own a car! Think about it.

Obama said there would be a major investment made in education; that excellent schools will have excellent teachers who produce exceptional students and that these young people with their great minds would return us to our rightful place as the world’s economic powerhouse. There are no signs that any of this has even begun. In China, a new university is dedicated almost every day of the year!

You have probably heard these statistics before, but they are breathtaking. I wouldn’t be surprised, should I live a couple of more decades, to find that the average Chinese citizen has a higher standard of living than an American; that they have universal health care and free education; that they have a healthier environment than ours and use cleaner technologies. And that all this transpired due to Socialism and an appreciation for the common good.

I’ve said in the past that Socialism is the economic system that is most fair to all, at least to the extent that it provides for the basic needs and welfare of its citizens. But to embrace Socialism one must have attained a certain degree of consciousness, understand how it works, and, in this country, embrace it voluntarily and willingly in those areas of life where the welfare of all people is at stake.

There was a time when a small island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida embraced Socialism. Yes, there were other factors, but our first instinct was to fear and hate this little island. We placed an embargo around it, attacked it unsuccessfully, and in general acted like a spoiled, rotten, little kid. Cuba was no threat to us. We could have chosen to regard it as a socio-economic experiment from which to learn… to discover what worked and what didn’t. We could have chosen to befriend it. Instead, we vilified it, regarded it as a threat, did what we could do to stop the little experiment, and thereby escalated what could have been an education into a near nuclear war.

In the same way, we have been taught to hate and fear the ideology of the Chinese. But as my brother points out, the Chinese know our history all too well and much better than we know theirs. They are taught our record of human rights abuses both in this country and around the world. They are taught the truth of Vietnam. They are taught about the exploitation and genocide of indigenous peoples under the hands of Central and South American dictators we supported. They are taught that the number of people whose deaths for which we have been responsible around the world far outnumbers those killed in the Twin Towers. They are taught their own brand of history as we have been taught ours. And they are taught how ineffective our system must be if we could allow ourselves to get into the position where we owe them enormous sums of money!

We know relatively little about the power players in the Communist Party itself who tell China’s President what to do and who control all the other politicians in the public eye.

Is it possible there were some enlightened leaders at the very top who said decades ago that they couldn’t wait for their citizens to attain the required level of consciousness which makes it possible for a billion people to live together in harmony? Did they decide that for the survival of the race, they had to drag many of their citizens into the 21st Century for their own good, whether they liked it or not? Did they know that by mandating certain behaviors of them, they would create a lot of enemies in the process? Did they somehow know that with the passage of time, and when the people were finally reaping the rewards of such a system, they would be glad they were forced to go along with it? And did they realize the youngest people would never have known another way?

Please do not think I would like to have any system of government or economics shoved down my throat without my consent. And I must admit that the very homogeneity of Chinese culture makes it easier for people to think of themselves as connected and more willing to work for the common good. We see that same sense of being “one body” in China’s neighbor, as the Japanese put their lives back together. It is true. It is much easier to come to consensus the more a group shares the same culture and values and often religion. From Scandinavia to Asia, the more homogeneous a nation, the more likely the citizen will be concerned about the common good.

In contrast, it makes the United States appear not so much as the proverbial melting pot, but rather a colloidal suspension…globules of oil and water and other substances that do not mix well. We have never quite learned how to live with each other. It seems there has always been a top dog putting down an underdog who is more than willing to step on an under-underdog.

For years we have tried to persuade people and politicians, within this “democratic” milieu, to elevate their consciousnesses to a place where they will realize that only until this nation and the entire world think in terms of the “Common,” will there be an end to war, starvation, social and economic injustice, and an immediate and heightened respect for the earth.

The Chinese express their patriotism and nationalism by working for the common good, whereas in the United States, the concept of individualism is paramount and in too many cases, what is deemed good for the individual takes precedence over what is good for the people as a nation. In a country where the corporation is considered an individual, the problems caused by corporatism are multiplied thousands of times over.

China is certainly not a paragon of virtue, but it may be evolving in that direction. Capitalism is creeping into their system, but highly regulated and carefully observed. We, on the other hand, seem to have left the path that leads to the betterment of all. We are so afraid of anything that smacks of socialism, despite so many successful examples of it already in our nation. Yet there are many in power today that will do anything to continue the undermining of all and any programs which satisfy the common good.

We seem to be devolving into a corporate oligarchy at best, fascism at worst. Only making yourself privy to the truth will help turn this behemoth idiocy into a government run by rational thought and a compassionate heart; a government that is run of, for, and by the people. If we do not stand strong now, our children and their children may grow up to think that it is absolutely normal to play stick ball in the dirty pot-hole ridden streets. Seeing grandma sitting on the steps in arthritic pain, begging for food or alms, is commonplace. They will be taught to fear and obey whatever the “government” tells them without ever asking questions.

And they will look across the pacific to China, where they will think the streets are paved with gold, all the kids have plenty to eat, nice homes, and fancy toys. There are no homeless. The elderly and sickly are well cared for. Intentional sharing lifts their society higher and higher in one enormous boat… and freedom reigns!

Is this how the pendulum finishes its swing? That China becomes the new America?

To contact Phil or find out more: check out his website and blog For a copy of HUNGA DUNGA
Phil Polizatto is a graduate of The School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was a feature writer for the overseas division of UPI, a copywriter for CBS, and an award-winning corporate film producer. Mr. Polizatto is a published poet and a regular contributor to Worldwide Hippies as well as a variety of other arts and literary journals. Hunga Dunga is his first published novel. He resides in the Pacific Northwest.