Ape Rifle

On occasion, the anglo Western media breaks out of its narrow, celebrity-obsessed confines to bring us some valuable insight into the machinations of this little planet of ours. Personally, I’m always delighted to see this great media machine turn its attention towards that lost backwater no one ever talks about these days: China. To enlighten those of us who can’t find this mysterious land on a map, we have the China Special. And there must be many of us who can’t find this mysterious land on a map, because special reporting on China has become a booming industry in its own right. The most recent of its products include China Rises, a massive collaboration of major media organizations, and Eye on China, brought to us by the minds at CNN (not to be confused with last year’s effort). Not unlike the country it purports to constantly rediscover, the China Special industry is experiencing somewhat of a growth frenzy, the last few years having seen nearly every self-respecting major English-language media organization dump its profoundly original contribution on the pile.

Before you decide to cash in on this trend and put together your own China Special, however, be aware that not just any old hack or expat has the analytical skills to produce one of these masterpieces. You see, the China Special world is one of strict guidelines and firm ground rules. To qualify for inclusion in the elite club, you must without fail do the following:

1) Demonstrate the originality of your report from the outset:the title should be a combination of the words China, Rise, Change, New or any of their variants. Possibilities include: Rise of China, China Rises, Changing China, New China, China Changes while it Rises, The Rise of Changing China, New Change in Rising China or China’s New Rise Changes. CNN obviously ignored this rule, but we’ll let it slide- this time.

2) Use a sparkling image of Shanghai Pudong’s skyline as your centerpiece to demonstrate the depth of your analysis and photographic resourcefulness.

3) Operate on the assumption that Shanghai is the only city worth exploring in China- and talk about how futuristic all the bright lights are. If you are to talk about another urban area, make sure it is Beijing and that you somehow relate everything back to the 2008 Olympics.

4) Shock your captive audience by revealing that the Chinese are people just like everyone else. Describe their hopes and dreams, along with their revolutionary daily lives of eating, sleeping, working and taking care of their children.

5) It is essential to regularly contrast imagery of capitalist consumer excess with socialist relics. For example, follow a typical middle-class urban resident to a Wal-Mart in their new car and make some comment relating to the large Mao statue you drive by. Perhaps something about the Great Helmsman rolling over in his mausoleum encasement is appropriate. You can never mention Mao enough.

6) Visit a factory in southern China and describe how a lot of people make a lot of things. Nothing says insight as much as “industrial revolution” or “world’s factory”. A reference to Britain’s condition several hundred years ago is highly recommended.

7) Astound your audience by revealing that China has some rather wealthy people living there. Make sure to single out the nouveau riche magnate with the gaudiest faux-European palace and talk about him/her. Preferably, this person should also have been a dirt poor farmer ten years ago. Talk about their growing widget export empire, and how they’ve “given back” to their native village by building the province’s largest KTV entertainment complex on top of it.

8) Amaze your audience by discovering that despite the economic boom, China still has hundreds of millions of people living in poverty. Photographic evidence should be provided to confirm the usual “elderly people push carts full of fruits in the third world” stereotypes.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a basic idea of the ground-breaking analysis to expect from your typical China Special. As should be obvious by now, not just anyone can meet these strict standards of investigative journalism; this sort of expertise is best left to those who venture little beyond a 50km radius surrounding Pudong International Airport.

Actually, I guess that means anyone who has spent no more than a few hours in Shangha…uhh, I mean China, can be a China Special correspondent. So go East, intrepid reporter, and regale us with tales of that mysterious land that is strangely also sort of like the rest of the world.

Ok, time to get a little more serious. I often get carried away with the sarcasm, and I’m admittedly guilty of some exaggeration in the mockery above. China Rises, I admit, is actually a rather well-balanced and realistic portrayal of the country (although even they couldn’t resist a tired name and a little glittering skyline sensationalism). There is certainly some good stuff coming out of anglophone Western journalists in China, particularly those working for the Guardian, the Washington Post and the New York Times- in fact, a series of articles on the Chinese justice system in the latter just snagged a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

In general, however, I would say these quality reports are certainly in the minority. The mocking tone of this post stems from a more sober and serious realization that on the whole, reports on ‘new’ or ‘changing’ China are, in fact, getting rather old and stagnant. There are only so many times one can stomach awe-struck descriptions of a beautiful neon skyline, or rediscover that China has skyscrapers, shopping malls, cars and restaurants that don’t serve Chinese food. This sort of stuff may have been news to someone back in 1999 or 2000, but even that’s pushing it a bit. Here in 2006, awe at China’s transformation is certainly becoming a bit tired. Perhaps the media believes there is someone out there who still thinks all the Chinese are tinkling their bicycles bells in Mao suits, and that is justification enough to regale us all with yet another amazing tale of someone sipping a Starbucks latte while leaning against their BMW. We get it, China has changed enormously in the past few decades (well, at least in urban areas). Enough already. And I’m certainly not the only one who feels this way.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to argue that China hasn’t undergone an immense transformation since the late 1970s. Compared to the 1980s or even the early 1990s, I’m quite certain the place is nearly unrecognizable. My problem, rather, lies in more recent times: how much has China really transformed itself in the past few years? My answer would be not nearly enough to justify a constant onslaught by the China Special. Of course, the country certainly changes every year as the strict definition of the term goes. Economic growth is steaming ahead, and the built environment is razed and reordered every two years or so, with skylines thickening and expressways growing ever larger. Every sort of Chinese export statistic known to man is reaching new heights, whole new instant cities are announced and they even, just recently, opened Asia’s largest IKEA in Beijing to a throng of giddy consumers.

I often ask myself, however: how deeply qualitative is the change taking place in 2006? The quantity and scale of things might certainly be growing, but the deep transformations that underpin this movement took place quite some time ago. For example, I first went to Shanghai in very early 2003 and already found it to be immense, clogged with highrises and bustling with an intense activity at street level. And every second block was giving way to a highrise construction project. Upon my last visit a little more than two years after that, in April 2005, I found the city to be equally immense, clogged with highrises and full of intense activity at street level. And every second block was giving way to a highrise construction project. And my guess is that the situation is pretty similar as I type this. Sure, things constantly get torn down and replaced with shiny new glass structures- but does this make things fundamentally different? Does a city that already has thousands of highrises change that much if it adds another few hundred?

At a certain point, it stops making much of a difference. And there lies my beef with the China Special craze: above and beyond the penchant for sensationalism, they are rehashing stories of fundamental transformation that should have been (and at some level were) told years ago. Is it really ground-breaking news in 2006 that Chinese cities are undergoing a construction frenzy? When I first showed up in China in 2002 that process was already full-blown and showed no signs of being any recent phenomenon. Is it really ground-breaking news in 2006 that there is a growing wealth in the country feeding a giddy consumerism? Geopolitical implications of China’s quantitative growth aside (now that’s still an interesting story), I think the book should be closed on stories of ‘fundamental transformation’. I think it’s finally time the world just accept that the Chinese can buy cars and live in a highrise and get on with it.

In the end, I believe this Western media stagnation unwittingly mirrors a larger and more looming problem: the stagnation of the Chinese developmental model. The state’s mega-modernization project has built itself into a corner with the promise that by constantly making everything bigger, more numerous and gloriously grandiose, somehow everything will turn out all right. But the limitations of this are rapidly approaching as China creeps up on the reality of diminishing returns. The more infrastructural mega-projects are planned and announced, the less each one has the intended power to impress- especially when considered amongst the thousands already in existence or under construction. A first upscale shopping mall in a city is certain to be impressive; the 25th less so. After a while, a numbing effect kicks in. You mean that whole neighbourhood just got demolished to make way for the world’s largest condo project? Yawn, what’s for lunch.

Of course the country’s top leadership realizes they’ve hit the point where China can no longer blindly build itself out of serious qualitative problems. Beijing has sucked out all the political capital of the shock and awe development spectacle that it possibly can, and it knows it. Although the Western media may never grow tired of fawning over Pudong’s latest financial superstructure, the national Chinese government is instead trying to throw around concepts such as social harmony and environmental sustainability. The guys at the top are certainly not stupid, but there is only so much they can do. After nearly three decades of emphatic central support for growth at all costs, more local levels of government are so gorged and fundamentally reliant on the proceeds of never-ending construction projects that a few sweet words about sustainability aren’t going to do much. It’s kind of like letting a rabid animal out of a cage to go wild, and then complaining when it turns around and attacks you.

But the basic fact of the matter is that due to basic political constraints (and I’m pretty sure you can guess what those are), the leadership is currently unwilling to let loose forces which would begin to address the qualitative deficiencies in the great Chinese experiment. Working within the narrow confine of what is politically possible, this development model can do little more that beat the increasingly dead horse of infrastructure mega-projects and ad infinitum urban construction. I would dare to say that China is a place where the constancy of change is itself becoming a tired idea. In this fascinating environment, ‘new towns’ are increasingly passé.

And so the great quantitative growth machine barrels on as factories continue to rise and real estate developers continue to speculate. The world’s biggest port is announced in one city, while the world’s biggest airport terminal is announced in another. All of this is celebrated with fanfare in the hopes that someone, somewhere, is paying attention. And, of course, someone still is: the in-your-face sensibilities of current Chinese development are perfect for the superficial sensationalism of the less intrepid portions of Western media. I fear, however, that with the Beijing Olympics rapidly approaching, there is little sign of respite in sight. Correspondents will continue to pour into the place raving about the office towers and the freeways, and how they are surprised to find all the “modern amenities” one could desire. They will rave about transformative changes that will have taken place almost a decade before, and make the usual confusion between quantity and quality.

It will all reach a furious and unbearable climax in the summer of 2008, when Chinese developmental propaganda is put into astounding overdrive and Western media reaches the highest peaks of its Middle Kingdom fever. Every newspaper, screen, cell phone and PDA will scream “CHINA, CHINA, CHINA”. That’s right folks, it certainly won’t be pretty. You’ll find me lying on a hammock with a good book away far away from any news source.

But when the confetti is swept up and the news crews go home, maybe then someone will finally venture to ask “Well, what’s next?”. Truth be told, only the Chinese can answer that question even if they seem to be increasingly unsure of the answer themselves. But for my own sanity as a consumer of media, I hope the China Special of the West find its proper resting place: the trashbin of sensationalist history. I’m praying that I only have a few more years to bear before everyone finally gets over the fact that some people in China drive cars, go shopping and live in highrises. Quite apart from how China turns out, that in itself would be a major feat.

And, of course, that would be when I open my newspaper only to find India Resurgent. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 11:39 am and is filed under China, Globalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.