With the Beijing Olympics, China will be in our face for the next two weeks. China has been on my mind ever since I made my first visit there 15 years ago, leading a group of Maryland journalists in a 3-week exchange program.
I got interested in China because of what you might call the ignorance gap. Even in 1993, the Chinese knew far more about the United States than even the most educated Americans knew about the People’s Republic. It is a knowledge imbalance as serious as our trade gap.
Now, three trips later, 16 cities, eight provinces and a master’s degree under my belt, I know a lot more about China, but even my own ignorance gap persists.
English Spoken Here
In China, an estimated 250 to 300 million people have studied English, oftentimes for several years beginning in middle school. Far fewer speak the language well, though it is in the millions. Estimates vary, but in the U.S., 16,000 to 24,000 study Chinese in K-12, more than that in college.
Students from China in the U.S. number about 67,000, most in graduate school and the majority in technical fields. If you include Chinese-speaking students from Taiwan and Hong Kong, the numbers add up to 93,000. Education is one of our biggest exports to China, along with other intellectual property — music, movies and software.
Thousands of Chinese attend colleges and universities in Maryland. Several dozen Chinese professionals attend the University of Maryland’s Executive MBA program in Shanghai, taught in English by Smith School of Business faculty. Towson University has graduated several classes from its master’s program in education in Shanghai. Johns Hopkins University has long had a small campus in the old capital of Nanjing where Chinese and Americans study each other’s culture and history.
Maryland government and businesses have been among the most active in China. The state was one of the first to set up a sister state relationship — with Anhui Province in 1980 — and the Maryland Center China in Shanghai is one of the largest economic development offices run by a state government.
Middle class apathy
For years, the prevailing U.S. policy view held that as trade increased and the Chinese economy grew, the middle class would grow, creating pressure for greater political freedom and democracy and a more open media.
The urban middle class has grown as the economy has boomed, but in a country where political chaos and social disruption reigned through most of the 20th century, the new middle class has clearly traded political freedom for safety and prosperity. This is much like the large chunk of Americans who do not vote or participate in the political process in any way, except to pay their taxes and complain in private about the government.
Cut loose from government subsidies, the Chinese media have been freed to produce new products and content. Many papers look like The Examiner, but minus the political coverage, since it is painfully clear that they will not be cut loose from political control any time soon. The media are an essential instrument of that control.
Making our mistakes
China continues to struggle with many internal problems. The air pollution in every major city has been worsening for decades, as any coughing tourist could attest. The government clearly thought it could bring pollution under control in Beijing for the Olympics by shutting down factories, switching to natural gas and restricting traffic. The measures were not enough. Now they pray for cleansing winds and rain.
The polluted waterways are clearly worse than in 1993, when we saw a hillside of trash being pushed into the river in Chongqing as we boarded boats to take us through the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. Cities and towns we visited that year are now under water as a massive damn project fills miles of canyons with silty water and plastic trash.
Barely touched by the new prosperity, two-thirds of the country still lives in grinding rural poverty that tourists never see. The one-child policy has swelled the population of young males who cannot find wives.
All of these problems should be enough to preoccupy the Chinese autocrats, but as we know, fighting outside enemies can provide a temporary distraction to domestic ills.
China has successfully imported our technology and many aspects of our economy, but in leaping through 200 years of the Industrial Revolution in three decades, it is also making all the same mistakes on the environment that are difficult to reverse.
