Reason 2,639,093,126,895,470 that Hong Kong is Not China.

Last weekend was a holiday weekend in Hong Kong. Not in China PRC, but just Hong Kong. It was Buddha’s birthday on the 12th of May and so I had the day off. It was great. I decided to also take a total break from the internet, so, as of Saturday evening I did not touch my laptop. This means that I am totally cut off from my main form of communication and, it turns out, information. The weekend was decent all around, I went to the beach on Sunday though the weather was less than ideal and I had some friends around and made Mexican food on Monday [you have no idea how impossible it is to find margarita ingredients over here... pitiful, no wonder margaritas are always so awful when you get them in a bar.] By the time I returned to work and the rest of the world on Tuesday some big things had happened.

There was a devastating earthquake in Sichuan province in the PRC. I had no idea about this because of my self-imposed cyber-denial and when I logged on finally around midday on Tuesday the 13th I was amazed at what I saw. First, I received a huge number of emails inquiring after my own safety, which was very kind… we felt nothing in Hong Kong, though the 7.9 quake was reported to have been felt in places as far away from the epicenter as Bangkok and Shanghai. Second, the reports of the catastrophe were amazing: the first [state mandated] news report indicated indicated that three people had perished. Within the hour it was over 5,000. Because the PRC does not celebrate/recognize Buddha’s birthday, Monday the 12th of May was a workday. Everyone was at school and work when the quake hit at midday. This has exacerbated the disaster exponentially.

Less than a week later, the death toll is over 22,000 and predicted to surpass 50,000; and the pictures have been some of the most horrific I have ever seen [definitely rivaling the truly tasteless New York Post photo of the jumper on 9/11]. While I have come to expect this from the Chinese papers who post photogs at the hospitals to jump on incoming ambulances, I have been startled to see the images in the major English newspapers.

Less startling has been the Chinese spin on the disaster:

“China will conquer the earthquake catastrophe and reduce the lose to the minimum extent, with the leadership of the central government and the efforts of soldiers” says legislator Wu Bangguo.

Conquer it??

“All should continue to work tirelessly and continuously to combat the disaster and minimize the loss” said Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao at their meeting in Sichuan.

“The rescue work is moving in a capable, orderly, and effective way,” continued Wu. Hu continued here, the rhetoric is familiar.

It all just makes me think about China’s priorities. Image la! It is all about image.

While it appears that there is more transparency than normal in the news regarding this disaster (until three years ago death tolls from natural disasters were considered state secrets) the news still smacks of a state that is so insecure of it’s status and reputation in the world that they inadvertently undermine their attempts to achieve the status they so desire. This article describes a common side-effect of China’s state-run news system… faced with no news, people make up their own. [This of course, is a large part of the problem with external interpretations of Chinese policy (which the Chinese deny) though I doubt Xinhua sees it this way...] Some choice statements from the government include:

“Believe only what we say.”

“Strike hard in accordance with the law at this kind of [rumor-mongering] behavior which seeks only chaos in the world.”

It should be noted that Xinhua reported that seventeen “Malicious rumormongers” have been appropriately punished for spreading “false information, sensational statements and snapping public confidence.”

Well, good.

For a long time I have been keenly interested in “The China Phenomenon.” China has made the cover of Time, Newsweek, The Economist, National Geographic, just to name a few in the recent weeks. Also, of course, there has been unending scrutiny of China regarding the Olympic torch relay and the Tibet crisis, which China assures us is a domestic issue, having nothing to do with anyone outside of China and so we should just all zip it.

There was so much talk about how China was going to be, like, the second coming- a whole new world order.

Then I went to China.

The best way I can describe my opinion of China is through an adolescent metaphor: China is like the kid who is trying so hard to be the ‘cool’ kid that they end up being the epitome of UNcool. If they want to find themselves, as they say, “rightly” in the center of world affairs (see The Economist, May 3) they need to ‘be cool.’ You know, like adopt that attitude that Mike Dimone describes in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: “Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don’t care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin’. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.”

Be cool.

Their control freakery (and I say this as an admitted control freak, though without ambitions of world domination) serves only to make them look like the nut jobs so many portray them as. [Of course, by the pronoun 'they' please understand it is the State to which I am referring...] Believing they are being slighted at every moment only promotes an inferiority complex and this is not the way forward if you want the world to believe you are ‘The Shit.’ Amazingly, the Soviets were able to capitalize on this attitude for much of the Cold War as they put up a facade worthy of the full attention of the entire Western world. And I would say China has got it all over on the Cold War Soviets, (not that that is saying a tremendous amount, but hey, work with it.) In fact China has all kinds of reasons to chill in the comparative eyes of the world… I mean they have got pure crazy to the east in Kim Jong Il, Burma - oh, excuse me, Myanmar - refusing aid to the south, post-communism going wrong all around… But still, they maintain their defensive and paranoid stance.

Regarding Tibet, in the words of Chili Palmer, they are “trying to tell [us] [they] fucked up without sounding stupid, and that’s hard to do.” But actually they are trying to so wit without admitting they fucked up and that is even more difficult.

So desperate to demonstrate that they are The Future, China buries anything that could be construed as dissension. It seems like they have the chance to actually do what they say they want to do/are doing if they just relax a bit and let the pieces of a world desperate to keep China involved commercially and culturally fall where they may.

Like Chili said, “If you’re important, people will wait.”

~ by Amanda on May 17, 2008.