Samizdata

What the hell is going on in Japan?

This story in the Daily Telegraph today about Burmese officials allegedly pilfering foreign aid and selling it just reinforces any prejudice one might have about the efficacy of sending aid to a country governed by thugs. It is not obvious to me what, if anything, the major powers could or should do about this. Outright military intervention seems unlikely and given the stretched resources of western powers, unwise. However, given its rapid economic ascent, one might hope that India could exert some influence for good, which is preferable to that of China.

Right at this moment, though, the main emotion one might feel about Burma and its plight is one of dark despair.

There is a deeply revealing article in the Telegraph written by the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, Fu Ying, called ‘Western media has demonised China‘. It is fascinating because it reveals the same psychopathology on display that I wrote about on Samizdata when many Chinese people reacted badly to a ‘disrespectful’ image of Mao (debatably the most prolific mass murderer in human history) which was used in a Spanish car advertisement. The ambassador pains a picture of wounded feelings over the protests launched against Olympic torch carriers…

My daughter, who loves Western culture, must have used the word “why” dozens of times in our long online chat. Her frustration could be felt between the lines. Many who had romantic views about the West are very disappointed at the media’s attempt to demonise China. We all know demonisation feeds a counter-reaction. I do pray from the bottom of my heart that the younger generation of Chinese will not be totally disillusioned about the West, which remains an important partner in our ongoing reform.

And to Fu Ying, the Chinese state and the Chinese people are simply the same thing (a profoundly fascist attitude I might add), so to her, protesting the Chinese government’s policy of maintaining the colonial occupation of Tibet is the same as protesting against the Chinese people itself. She, and a great many other people alas, cannot truly conceive of the notion that hostility to the Chinese state because of its actions does not imply any insult to or hostility to Chinese people simply because they are Chinese, because to any non-collectivist, the Chinese state is a political construct, not some expression of the Chinese soul, or some such metaphysical drivel.

The western media are not demonising China because China’s demons are generally home grown. The Chinese state has moved from full blown communism to a less mundanely repressive nationalistic fascism, but it is still a state which brooks no rival power centres of any sort, be they the Falan Gong, Dalai Lama or Roman Catholic Church let alone any real political movements. Moreover it demands, with considerable success, an atavistic loyalty based on ethnicity that Chinese people see themselves as extensions of the state. As a result Fu Ying’s claims of widespread insult and incomprehension by Chinese people is almost certainly true enough, but the issue here is not ‘us’ understanding China, it is China understanding the rest of the world. Until a critical mass of Chinese people can think their way past mental collectivisation and realise they are not the Chinese state, the genuine modernisation the Ambassador craves will remain an illusion no matter how many skyscrapers they build.