Gotham Diary:
Packing China
6 October 2014

For some reason, I find myself sunk this morning in a meditation on China. Why? Why not. China is almost always in the news, for some reason or other, and the serious lay periodicals, The New Yorker and the two Reviews of Books, pour forth a constant stream of commentary. The story in the foreground right now, at least so far as The New York Times is concerned, is the pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. But when it passes (as it will), there will still be China’s antics in the South China Sea, the government’s attempt to control the Internet, or breakaway movements on the far fringes of a sovereignty that has traditionally sought to incorporate, and then eradicate, its opponents, instead of expelling them. (The banishment of individual members of the elite, also traditional, is quite something else.) The economic relationship between China and the United States, which is almost something new under the sun, has too many moving parts for anyone to understand, but perhaps it only seems that way because no one seems interested in learning from it.

Mostly, I think about how old China is, how continuously long-lived the idea of it. Who else goes back as far? Bear in mind that China is still, fundamentally, a “Confucian” civilization. China misreads the dickens out of Confucius when it suits, and periodically makes a great fuss about rejecting Confucius’s influence root and branch, but it is difficult to read a passage from the Analects and a recent Party pronouncement without discerning a strong authoritarian resemblance.

An argument could be made, I suppose, that “India” carries as much millennial baggage as China does, but India is a patchwork, a subcontinental unit only at the highest levels of organization — where educated people speak English as the common language. India remains culturally fractured by the intrusion of Islam six-odd centuries ago — that recently. I’m willing to concede that Indian civilization is as old as China’s. But it far more pluralistic and nowhere near so conceptually organized.

China has a way of changing with the times that ends up changing the times more than changing China. Periodic upheavals mark the history of China with a planetary regularity in the range of two to three hundred years. China collapses almost as a matter of course. Then it stands up, dusts itself off, and resumes being China — wearing, perhaps, a new kind of hat. Next to China, the nations of Western Europe are yesterday’s kittens, and the United States little more than an unproven and arguably crazy experiment. I don’t know how willing today’s Chinese are to acknowledge that they lost their lead in technology at about the time of the European Renaissance, but I doubt that they much care. As a traditional rather than an historically-minded people, they are happy to appropriate Western inventions and to make them their own. Dazzled by a belief in its own superiority, China has a hard time learning from others. This is where the occasional collapse comes in handy. Instead of a new hat, China might well emerge from one of its breakdowns carrying a new handheld device.

One thing that China is unlikely to learn is how not to be China, and yet this is the fondest dream of Western pundits. Well — the second-fondest dream. The fondest dream, which always makes me giggle, is that China will become a mass market for Western products, made either in the West or in China. This delusion fails to note that China is very, very good at filling its markets with Chinese products. China is not interested in imports. Well, who is? We call countries that are interested in imports “underdeveloped.” Everyone with a brain wants to export. And China, as every American has reason to rue, is a master exporter. The American dreamers who envision expanded markets for American goods are outnumbered by the American realists who are thinking of nothing but keeping costs down. China is there to help them.

Democracy in China is not to be ruled out — eventually, as Manuel says in Fawlty Towers — but without question it will be a Chinese version of democracy, one that probably disregards the Western touchstones of “free elections” and “free speech.” We ought to be taking a closer took at these touchstones ourselves. Our obsession with free elections has withered all other forms of citizen-based democratic action, and, quite astonishingly really, free speech has taken us to Citizens United and Hobby Lobby. If I could have one purely political wish, it would be that the West would stop trying to export democracy until it knows how to make it work at home, instead of dumbing down the standards and whiting a lot of sepulchers.

***

Over the weekend, I forced myself to go through a large tote bag full of old Christmas cards. These had been culled, along with post cards and a few letters, from earlier masses, but they needed culling again. Optimistically, I’d say that I discarded twice as much as I held onto. I spent about an hour at it on Saturday, but much more than that yesterday, and the longer session almost did me in. What’s more churning than a clutch of greetings from people who have entirely dropped out of one’s life?

As I went through what already seemed to be the relics of another life, I sensed two things very deeply. The first is that, since the death of her dear friend and Smith roommate, Julie Reynolds Shaw, nearly ten years ago, Kathleen has been in a kind of mourning for friendship itself. She keeps up with a handful or two of friends who have been determined not to let her slip away, but the initiative is rarely hers. More recently, in the wake of another partial loss, Kathleen expressed a bitter doubt that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Second, I understand more clearly than before that I grew up hoping to make the best of any social situation without expecting any return beyond the absence of grief and shame. Quite often, this meant simply keeping my head down, but even in more congenial situations I seem to have learned how to entertain, not how to befriend. I rarely ask people questions about themselves, for example, not because I’m indifferent, but because, in the world I grew up in, quite simple questions might easily be taken as impertinent, and the appearance of prying was to be assiduously avoided. Having just re-read Norbert Elias’s The Court Society, I’m more aware than ever that I grew up in the modern-day equivalent of old Versailles — the world of corporate executives.

This courtliness, in turn, made it very difficult for me to get to know intellectually-inclined people, and it gave them no interest at all in getting to know me. I thought that they were rude and rather tone-deaf about other people, which they certainly were, and they thought I was a vacuous preppie, which is what I had been brought up to look like. The number of intellectually sympathetic friendships that I have enjoyed in my life can be counted on one hand. An additional but accidental hamper, it is true, was the persistence, throughout the first half of my life, of Marxian leftism as the thinking person’s tic, with its accompanying dismissal of history and its artifacts. My own prejudices, while not at all politically conservative, ran in just the opposite direction. Only recently, and then thanks to Hannah Arendt, have I been willing to admit that Marx might not have been a completely woolly barbarian. And my preoccupation with understanding the history of the human world has become more insistent, as well as, I hope, more articulate.

Many of the cards that went into the discard pile reminded me that I’ve known a lot of bright people who “knew better” than to grow their brains for unremunerated pleasures.