A tale of two tyrants: was it abusive fathers?

Orville Schell is a grand old man of American sinology, the study of China, as well as a long serving dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

He sees some resemblances between the dispositions of two highly disruptive despots. 

Trump’s Cultural Revolution

When US President Donald Trump’s factotum, J.D. Vance, held forth on Europe’s “threat from within” at the recent Munich Security Conference, his audience was left struggling to make sense of America’s confounding new approach to foreign policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, has been relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House – but that doesn’t mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question last October about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”

... there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.

Mao’s penchant for disorder was deeply rooted in his troubled relationship with his father, whom he described to writer Edgar Snow as “a severe task master” and a “hot-tempered man” who beat his son so brutally, he often ran away from home. But Mao learned from this “war” how to stand up for himself: “When I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive he only cursed and beat me more.”

This formative childhood experience shaped Mao as a person and drew him to the oppositional politics that helped catalyze the chaos and disorder that engulfed China for decades. ... his most epic political upheaval was the 1966 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in response to what he saw as his fellow leaders’ bureaucratic resistance to his absolutism. He wrote the first “big-character poster” (大字报), calling on China’s youth to rise up and “bombard the headquarters” (炮打司令部) of the very party he had helped found. ...

Certain of the righteousness of his crusade against what Trump supporters would call the “deep state,” Mao published a column in the People’s Daily newspaper counseling that there is “no need to be afraid of tidal waves. Human society has been evolved out of tidal waves.”

Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. “Without destruction, there can be no construction” (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: “World in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命) and building a “New China.”

... Given that Xi came of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and was himself shipped off to the countryside to “eat bitterness” (吃苦) for seven years as a youth, he undoubtedly learned a thing or two about coping with such chaos. Still, Xi may have a hard time fully comprehending that the US – a country many Chinese have long admired, even using the expression “the moon is rounder in America than in China” (美国的月亮比中国的月亮圆) – has now produced its own grand progenitor of top-down turmoil. 

Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.

I don't actually think dwelling on what's wrong in the psyches of these monsters is very important at present. Mao's dead and largely dishonored. What matters is how to stop our madman and his henchmen from inflicting the kind of death and destruction that Mao inflicted on China. 

Addendum: Apparently many Chinese people see the similarities between the two monsters. Gift article.

If warming stalls, thank China

 

If David Wallace-Wells is right, in the increasingly possible world in which climate change is halted by a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, we'll all have to thank China. 

In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate. ...

He goes on to survey similar progress in China in wind, batteries and other technologies. 

While American politicians argue about tariffs to try to protect an anemic manufacturing capacity for the green energy transition, Xi Jinping saw Chinese green tech as an economic driver replacing China's collapsing real estate bubble -- and the rest is history.

The full article is at a gift link and well worth reading.

A sweet story of election day in a newish democracy

I don't know anything substantive about Taiwan. This island, populated by 23.5 million inhabitants, exists in a kind of sovereign limbo, claimed by China and inhabited primarily by people of Chinese ethnicity, but outside the domain of Beijing. How this anomalous situation came to be is a tangled story. 

Since China's current ruler, Xi Jinping, presses China's claim to rule the island, it's not crazy to fear the big country might try to absorb the little one. And U.S. foreign policy (non-Trumpified) pushes back, though cagily. The situation seems appropriately scary, given what China has done to democratic aspirations in Hong Kong and U.S. anxiety over our overstretched global power. Poor Taiwanese, balanced between monsters!

Taiwanese historian Albert Wu offers a presents a succinct pre-primer on how the island became what it is and some sense of its people's current opinions in an interview with political scientist Yascha Mounk. But what warmed my heart was his account of participating in the recent presidential election. Democracy is new and valued in Wu's Taiwan.

"What I've been really moved by the past couple of days is how democratic culture really has come to take root here. On Saturday, we went to the polls with my wife and her parents and, like many families, there are generational divides in Taiwan but also political disagreements. We've long had political disagreements, and we’ve talked about them. But on Saturday, we all went to the polls together. And the polling station was a five minute walk from us. We took our little daughter with us.

"In this election, 70% of people turned out, which is actually considered low for Taiwan. Normally it's between 75 and 80 to 85%. But 70% turned out. And when we got to the polls, there were multigenerational families, people pushing their elderly parents or grandparents. I'm sure many of them disagreed. But they just went to the polls. And many of those people had lived for forty years without ever having the chance to vote for their own president.

"There are always local elections, but people really take this privilege of being able to choose their elected leader seriously, and it was orderly: people were just lining up. When I was growing up, election day was really just a chaotic mess, people were still campaigning outside. I sort of missed that personally.

"But everybody got the day off. And afterwards, in Taiwan, eating is very important. So we strolled to this hotel and had a really delicious and wonderful meal. And even though we disagreed politically, we sat down and ate and talked about the future of our country and our hopes and dreams and desires for the country. And even though we know we've had some disagreements, we cherished that moment of voting together and being together.

"Coming out of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when there was a lot of ballot stuffing during the authoritarian era, vote counting is now completely transparent. And what they do is they open up the voting booths, and everybody can go and observe. And people will just open up the ballots and count them out, and so we went and watched the count.

"The polls closed at 4, and, by 7:30, all the votes were counted. By 9:30, we had a new president, and there was just this wonderful victory rally and all this confetti. And what really moved me is that by the end of the victory rally, everybody stayed behind and picked up confetti: they wanted to keep the streets clean, they picked up confetti, they stacked all the chairs. And the next day, it was as if nothing happened. It was just part of the normalcy of everyday life.

"My grandfather never in his life was able to vote for his own president. My grandmother died before the transition to a fully democratic country. And I think everybody, at least in my parents' generation, and in my generation, knows that. And I think that love for democracy is sort of baked into the current landscape."

As we strive to ensure our own aspiring dictator goes down to defeat in November, the experience of people newly able to make choices about their lives through voting can be inspiring.

A "beautiful and terrible" story

Noah Smith captures gracefully how industrialization is spreading around the globe. His economic techno-optimism can feel cloying -- but he's onto something here.

In my last post, I predicted how manufacturing would spread to India and other developing countries in South and Southeast Asia. Basically, India will start out doing low-value assembly work using imported tools and components, and then gradually work its way up the value chain. Right now, in terms of its position in the supply chain, India is about where China was in the early 2000s.

Viola Zhou and Nilesh Christopher have a wonderful article about what Indian industrialization looks like on the ground. They traveled to a Foxconn factory in southern India, where Apple has shifted some iPhone production in order to diversify out of China. They found that many of the engineers that have been brought over to train and supervise the Indian factory workers are themselves Chinese. Much of their reporting focuses on the interaction and culture clash between the factory’s Chinese and Indian workers.

The story that emerges is a very familiar one. The Chinese supervisors think the Indian workers are slow, lazy and undisciplined — just as the British once thought of German and Japanese workers, when those countries were first industrializing. Industriousness is learned; it proceeds from industrialization. The people who first come to work in the labor-intensive factories are mostly women, looking for independence and an escape from rural life (and probably advantaged by having small fingers). The Indian factory girls are recognizably similar to their Chinese predecessors, or their British forebears centuries ago.

The Mill Girls of Lowell, Mass. via the National Park Service

This is the universal tale of industrialization, and it’s a beautiful and terrible one at the same time. It’s a story of ruthless labor exploitation, urban ennui, and harsh working conditions. But it’s also the story of workers escaping what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life”, finding their own way in the world, making money and winning their independence. And it’s the story of a country that is primed to become much richer in the near future. 

We know how this story typically ends, too. Indian factories will become more automated; salaries will rise and assembly line jobs will become fewer and more technical. Indians will move into higher-paying service jobs with better conditions. Indian companies will move up the value chain, learning how to make tools and components, eventually creating their own brands and competing with China and the rest of the industrialized world. And then Indian engineers will be off to the next poor country — Bangladesh? Ethiopia? Nigeria? — to start the whole process over again.

So far, across the globe, most humans have welcomed abundance and forgotten the miseries along the way. That seems to be who we are.

Dueling demonstrations

I knew this would be a good week to be out of San Francisco. APEC (the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) seems to have brought out the expected raft of protest contingents. One might have expected that the Gaza war, Ukraine, and climate to be main themes, but that wasn't all.

Mission Local covers what seems to me the most interesting aspect of the San Francisco response to the arrival of Chinese President Xi and his meeting with US Prez Joe Biden: dueling Chinese demonstrators.

Flying in from New York and Philadelphia, supporters of Chinese President Xi Jinping waved red Chinese flags and greeted the president’s motorcade on Tuesday, part of a hundreds-strong rally outside the St. Regis Hotel in downtown San Francisco, where Xi is reportedly staying.

“I just want to see him, even if it’s probably just seeing his car going by with a tiny Chinese flag on it,” said Lily Tan, a Chinese national who lives in San Francisco to attend language school.

But Xi's admirers had competitors.

On Wednesday morning, hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Chinese consulate to the security gates near APEC downtown, lambasting what they called human rights abuses by the Chinese government. 

“Shame!” bellowed Jigme Ugen from the Tibetan National Congress outside the consulate, eliciting boos from an internationally-diverse crowd.

... Speakers — from China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and more — advocated against a host of issues: China’s forced education schools and lack of media in Tibet, its political prisoners, its influence in Taiwan, violence against Uyghurs, and its crackdown against Hong Kong.

Alex Chow, who was imprisoned in 2017 for organizing the Umbrella Protest as a student in 2014 and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, described the experience as torturous, especially of seeing his mom behind the glass. One of his co-organizers still is not free, he said, and another is in exile. ...

San Francisco has long been a place where intra-Chinese conflicts manifest visibly. Walking down Chinatown's Grant Avenue, if you look, you can see flags of both the People's Republic and of Taiwan on different buildings and shops. Mostly tourists are oblivious, but China is close by for many San Franciscans.

Hoping for a good outcome for China's COVID test

Just about every source through which most of us consume international news keeps reminding us that contemporary China is a pretty awful place for human rights (think what seems a genocide of Muslim Uyghurs) and freedoms (think the destruction of democratic elements in Hong Kong and mainland China's nationalist threat to democratic Taiwan).

As Xi Jinping’s Zero COVID strategy appears to be failing, Americans and Europeans might think we have license to gloat. We suffered -- the Chinese can too.

I'm grateful to Adam Tooze for pointing out the conundrums and costs any Chinese government would face as Omicron breaks through and millions of Chinese people have had enough of ongoing tight restrictions.

A dictator’s embarrassment is generally a cause for celebration. But what if it also threatens a national tragedy and a bona fide global problem? ... now, only weeks after Xi’s triumphant party Congress, the zero covid policy is in crisis. The disease is spreading and China’s population is no longer willing to put up with it. ... One must profoundly admire the courage of the protestors and sympathize with the outrage and desperation triggered by successive waves of capricious lockdowns. ...

... [But] what is the policy alternative? The fact that abandoning zero COVID would be a blow to Xi does not make that the right policy. The dilemma facing Beijing goes beyond the question of Xi’s legitimacy. As ludicrous as zero COVID has come to seem, as oppressive and capricious as its intrusions are in the everyday lives of Chinese people, it has saved huge numbers of lives. And if Beijing were to follow the demand to abandon the policy, this would likely result in a public health disaster not just for the CCP but for China.

Omicron is less dangerous than Delta but its infectiousness is extremely high. If the pandemic is allowed to run unchecked, hundreds of millions of people will become infected. Even with a low rate of severe cases, China’s medical system will be placed under impossible strain, not just in a handful of cities as in 2020, but across the country. Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people, if not more, will likely die.

It bears repeating that though China may be a remarkable economic success story, it is still a middle-income country and its welfare net and health care provision are fragile, especially in the countryside, where hundreds of millions of people still live. ... the figure of between 500,000 and 1.5 million deaths are predicted by most studies would ... be a shattering disaster.

... There are no simple answers. Xi’s regime is weighing huge risks. Anyone who imagines that that can be a matter of indifference to the rest of the world or is tempted to indulge in Schadenfreude has not learned the first lesson taught in February 2020 - what happens in Wuhan does not stay in Wuhan. ...

We adopt obliviousness to the human cost of China's peril at this moment at our own peril -- moral and material. Much as we loathe the Chinese government's abuse of its people, we should be hoping it can find a relatively gentle path forward as the coronavirus escapes the temporary fence the zero covid policy built for the last couple of years.

A sometimes wise, often strange, book

The book excerpts that follow, written in 2020 as far as I can tell, seem perhaps even more on point about what we are trying to comprehend today than when they were written:

Whereas Hungary represents how capitalism without meaning or restraint open the door for a return to an older nationalism, Russia represents the disruptive force that nationalism can be in the world when hitched to a belligerent approach to national security, the worldview that domestic and international laws are always to be subjugated to the raw will to power. The corruption that seeped into Hungarian political life is but a drop in the ocean of graft upon which Russia runs. ... The nostalgia for the past and ceaseless Us versus Them politics was ... a reflection of Putin's political project, one in which greatness is defined by what you can destroy, not what you can build. And what Putin set out to destroy, above all, was the idea that was so prevalent when the Berlin Wall came down: that a new world order of democratic values and agreed-upon rules and norms was here to stay. 

For much of the twentieth-first century, Russia has led the counter-revolution to American domination -- not by seeking to upend the local order that America constructed, but rather by disrupting it from within, turning it (and ultimately America itself) into the ugliest version of itself. I think of how Russians must have seen us Americans as I was growing up: capitalist stooges, driven entirely by a lust for profit; a militarized empire, unconcerned with the lives of distant people harmed by our foreign policies; racist hypocrites, preaching human rights abroad and practicing systematic oppression at home. That's the America Putin wants all the world to see, and that's the America that Putin wants us to be. 

Think about it. Isn't that what you would want for someone who humiliated you? For them to be revealed, before the world, as the worst version of themselves? By doing so, Putin leveled the playing field -- the world is what it is, a hard place in which might makes right, capitalism is as fungible as Communism, and a ruthless Russia will always have to be treated with the respect it was denied after the wall came down.

• • •

Ben Rhodes, from whose After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made these thoughts derive, was a national security aide and speech writer to President Barack Obama. He's all of 44  now and served 8 years back then on the White House staff. The more senior figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, then and now, seem to regard him as an irritating twerp.

Nonetheless, it has leaked out that Obama used Rhodes extensively when he wanted to open up to normalizing relations with Cuba -- perhaps some youthful thinking helped break that fossilized morass open. Today Rhodes can be found as cohost of Pod Save the World.

In response to the shock of the United States electing an authoritarian moron to succeed Obama, Rhodes wandered the world, trying to understand illiberalism on the ascendant. This book is the story of the places (Hungary, Russia, Hong Kong) and people (mostly members of a young, modern, educated class like his own) who he met and commiserated with.

It's not a bad book -- as the excerpts above indicate, it is often insightful.

But to this reader, it's also just plain weird. 

Rhodes seems genuinely to know a lot about the places he describes. (With his background, one would hope so.) But he shows not the least brush with any leftish narrative of "western" history. I'm not talking hard core Marxism or Lenin on imperialism. He uses all the conventional critical words -- corruption, capitalism, nationalism, American exceptionalism. He understands that women matter, but perhaps has never had to understand how we're different. He describes being in his own country during the "racial reckoning" of 2020 and he is sharp about how white supremacy constrained Obama. But above all, his mindframe is "rules-based-order," "international law," "human rights." He doesn't seem to have a frame for society-wide, systemic oppression and subjugation.

Don't get me wrong: I love that some of the horrors and heartbreaks in our past have taught the U.S. and Europe to care about liberal values. But I can't understand the implications of what we affirm on our better days without also considering fascism, communism, imperialism, colonialism. And patriarchy. And somehow Rhodes seems untouched by these concepts; they are not his frame.

Rhodes is aware of US hypocrisy. He knows unequivocally that the "War on Terror" was both a practical and ethical disaster for the country. He knows U.S. global hegemony is over. He's perhaps like his old boss without the cosmopolitan sophistication, preferring to point his readers to visions of better possibilities rather than chew over the breakage of the past. He's likable. But this is an odd book, just a notch off-center for this reader.

The world's longest recorded history

This discussion of Michael Shuman's Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World has to start with an apology: I read the audio book version without having a print copy on hand until afterward. If you are not familiar with the English renditions of Chinese names and dynasties (and I'm definitely not), much of what you hear is hard to hold on to. If my blurb convinces you look into this volume, get a print copy -- it's in libraries.

Shuman's premise is simple and very intellectually healthy:

There is no such thing as world history, at least one that holds the same meaning for everyone. Which world history is important to you depends on who you are, where you live and where you come from. ... Just as we in the West are products of our world history, the Chinese are a creation of theirs.

Just as we are steeped in vague notions of coming from a continuous civilization arising from Greece and Rome, adopting and adapting Christianity in Europe through the so-called Middle Ages, and extending Europe's known world by trade, imperialism, slavery, and the force of "civilized" arms, Chinese people live and breathe a confidence in a multi-millennial, uniquely civilized Chinese past.

... China is different from other empires [that have come and gone.] To a great degree it still exists. China, as a nation-state, is a version of previous, independent Chinese entities that formed in the same general geographic location. The Chinese political system, at its core, has proven remarkably resilient. ... At some periods, often long ones, China was broken into competing states or ruled by invading foreigners. ...Yet the most incredible aspect of China's political history is how often the empire was reassembled. ... If China wasn't unified, its political elite, again and again and again, wished it to be.

Rulers and invaders came and went, but a certain characteristics of a Confucian-inflected polity remained:

 ... the Chinese imperial order was an autocracy. There were no formal constraints on the authority of the emperor. ... Today... top leaders can do as they please, and party cadres, court justices, and civil servants will do as they are so ordered. ... Unlike those of us in the West, the Chinese cannot look back fondly on ancient republics. The political ideal throughout the millennia-long course of Chinese political development has been authoritarian monarchy. ... And as China rises on the world stage, it is bringing with it the baggage it has carried through its long historical journey -- both the honorable and the dishonorable.

Western barbarians (that's us) with their temporarily superior technology and efficiency breached the kingdom in the mid-19th century and Chinese found themselves calling their history into question. Elites wondered, what if these invaders were onto something? What if ...

Chinese civilization was, in fact, not superior. For thousands of years, confidence in their own culture had remained unshaken. The rise and fall of countless dynasties, the invasions of Turks, Jurchens, and Mongols, green-eyed beauties, Buddhist monks -- nothing shook the conviction that Chinese civilization was civilization. ... Now however, the Chinese ran smack into an alternative civilization, that owed nothing to China's own, believed itself to be superior, and had the guns, money and power to back its claims. The experience rattled the Chinese elite to its very bones ... at the beginning of the twentieth century, with China helplessly prostrate before the world's imperialists, [their] enduring confidence in this ancient system had been badly shaken. ...

Twentieth century China endured the collapse of the dynastic imperial authority, an aborted attempt at constitutionalism, the vicious Japanese invasion and occupation at mid-century, and the triumph another Western-inflected force, the Chinese Communist Party. The transitions were bloody and crazy making.

Many Chinese retreated into racial tribalism:

The Chinese had always believed themselves a superior civilization; now they began to perceive themselves as a superior race. The white race may have gotten the upper hand for the moment, the thinking went, but the Han Chinese with their thousands of years of civilization, were surely more advanced that those black, red, and brown peoples -- and of course the steppe Manchus. ... China's long distrust of foreigners was being brewed with hatred of the Manchus [who had imposed the last, failed imperial dynasty], bitterness toward the humiliations inflicted by Western powers, and emerging Western theories about natural selection into a potent stew of Han nationalism ... the [old] empire was seething with ideas, movements, and political and economic forces it had never confronted before.

Shuman sees China's present as a new and likely enduring recreation of the old Chinese civilization that thought itself the greatest and most significant in the world -- now on a global stage.

Deng Xiaoping's reopening of China was among the most momentous events of modern times. It was one of those pivotal hinges in human history, when the future course of our lives is altered forever. The stage was set for China to resurrect its traditional, central role in the world, along the way reestablishing the ancient trade connections of the Middle Kingdom and the other great civilizations, this time on a grander and more global scale than ever before. And through it all, the Chinese history of the world became ever more entangled with the West's. The world would never be the same. 

... Xi [Jinping] himself appears a reincarnation of the empire-building emperors of old. ... Like Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, he is confronting global challenges by strengthening his state and his own position at home and abroad. Similar to Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, he is capitalizing on the successes of his predecessors to stress the more expansive and universalistic aspects of China's worldview. But perhaps most of all, Xi is spiritual kin of the Ming Dynasty founder, the Hongwu emperor. Both introduced personalized rule to the collegial model that had prevailed before them. ... Xi characterizes himself as the champion of the Chinese nation after a century of humiliations by the Western Ocean barbarians and their allies. ... As we've seen, the Chinese have experienced periods of both great openness to foreigners and foreign ways, and eras of tremendous arrogance and distrust of outsiders. ... Now, under Xi, the pendulum is swinging once again ...

I wouldn't exactly call this book hostile to China -- but I would say that in trying to convey an unvarnished China-centric perspective on the country's relationship to the rest of the world and especially to the Western barbarians, Shuman doesn't smooth out any rough edges. 

There are plenty of other perspectives to read on the civilization of modern China which are much more nuanced. One I've appreciated is Ian Johnson's The Souls of China. I'm no judge of overall accuracy -- China too big and too old be easily reduced to any one historical perspective.

Beijing Winter Olympics in the 'hood

Somebody's got it in for China and the upcoming extravaganza. Here an ice hockey enforcer takes down a barefoot monk.

Ubiquitous surveillance cameras make a kind of mogul.

How about some coronavirus curling? 

These posters have turned up on random Mission District phone polls. Don't disagree with the sentiments behind the first two here, but mostly I'm just reminded that Olympics equate with noxious nationalisms. 

UPDATE: the posters were created by Australia-based Chinese artist Badiucao. An oft-censored critic of the Chinese government, Badiucao’s series satirized the Beijing Olympics and China’s human rights record.

A terrible courage, craven greed and women's solidarity

Here's a headline I wish I'd written, but didn't quote when I excerpted from the article's content: Overthrowing Democracy Requires Overthrowing Feminism? This came back to me watching the fate of #MeToo-proclaiming Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai -- isn't her brave declaration and the subsequent behavior of the people and institutions around her a succinct demonstration of where much boldness for freedom can be found?

Look at the scenario and cast of characters:

• Peng tells the world she was sexually imposed upon by a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party leader.

• Within 30 minutes, Peng's social media post is disappeared by the government censorship apparatus.

• Next Peng herself is disappeared.

• The international Women's Tennis Association (WTA), the governing body of her sport, demands Peng's freedom and expresses willingness to forgo playing in China, a huge market for their sport, if Peng is not freed. That would be 10 tournaments down the drain next year.

• The Chinese government issues a transparently false email and some images claiming that Peng is A-Okay.

• Prominent international women tennis stars like Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams speak out about Peng. The current world No. 1 male tennis star Novak Djokovic chimes in as well.

• Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, participates in a strained video call with Peng. He reports "she prefers to spend her time with friends and family right now." He comes away assuring the world that nothing will get in the way of his organization's lucrative Winter Olympics in China in February. All's well as far the IOC is concerned.

• All is not well as far as the WTA is concerned. The WTA said the recent videos "don't alleviate or address the WTA's concern about her wellbeing and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion," per the BBC.

• Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics, chimes in to support the IOC's brush off of Peng. Male sports moguls stick together.

Sadly, it's unlikely any of this ends well for Peng.  But it's sure a clear cut demonstration of who in sport is all about money and who cares about justice for women. The Chinese government and male sports bosses appear very much in sync with each other. As usual, the athletes, most especially the women, are just products to merchandise and stoke bureaucratic egos on the way to the bank.

A little Cassandra-ing of my own: war with China?

Every obituary for recently deceased General Colin Powell leads with his recognition that, at the pinnacle of a stellar career, he lent his prestige to the catastrophe which was the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  He called his war advocacy "a blot" which "will always be part of my record." Indeed.

A whole lot of U.S. foreign policy sages (and old guys who play them on TV) seem to be seeking resurrection after the War on Terror's collapse by once again looking abroad for "monsters to destroy."

And this time, if they don't manage to conduct some deft diplomacy, they could very well lead us into mass casualties and even a nuclear exchange -- as well as losing the war.

Journalist Peter Beinart was a sucker for the Iraq war, but he's not going there again. He warns against a developing bipartisan call for the U.S. to declare our willingness to fight to preserve the independence of Taiwan from China as crazy dangerous.

Since the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve often wondered how much US foreign policymakers have learned from the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. This week offered fresh evidence that, when it comes to US policy toward China, the answer is: not nearly enough. 

In the months before America overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government, America’s leaders recklessly downplayed the war’s potential costs. ... Prominent figures, including prominent Democrats, are doing the same thing today. They’re downplaying the potential costs of an even more dangerous war, this time over Taiwan. ... 

Representative Elaine Luria ... wants to proactively give Biden, and all future presidents ... [authority for] war with China over Taiwan.  

What might such a war entail? For one thing, the US would likely lose. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, “The Pentagon has reportedly enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan, and China has prevailed in every one.” ... The US could lose as many troops in the first few days of a war over Taiwan as it lost in the entirety of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. There’s also a genuine risk of nuclear war. ...

As was true after 9/11, the U.S. is profoundly ignorant of the passions that our big-footing about in someone else's complex historical context could (and does) evoke. China is an emerging military and economic superpower, the equal to anything we've got, in the grip of intense nationalism. To the great advantage of its current authoritarian leader, masses of Chinese appear to be very ready to subsume any domestic grievances to repudiate the "century of humiliation," the exploitative encounter with the West -- that means us. Chinese genuinely consider Taiwan merely a secessionist province, a relic of the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s, which should rightly be reabsorbed by the mainland.

Here's the best I can do for an analogy: Think how we'd react if a bunch of right wingers forcibly took over the state of Hawaii, repressed the present Hawaiian population, and then thumbed their noses at the U.S. mainland. And if, from across the Pacific Ocean, China backed up the wingers now ruling Hawaii. I suspect we'd have feelings.

A significant difference is that Taiwan is only 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, not 2500 miles.

And another difference is that the Taiwanese managed to claw their way to building their own vibrant economy and an enviable liberal democratic state since breaking off from the mainland. Modern Taiwan is a success for that rule-of-law idea we claim to aspire to. This seems to be a desirable outcome to most Taiwanese. China, on the other hand, seems to be getting more oppressive by the day. If mainland China gets its way, Taiwan would go the way of Hong Kong, its freedoms eviscerated and its distinctiveness erased.

Former U.S. foreign service officer Chas Freeman, who happened to be serving as an interpreter on President Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China, offers his nuanced account of the tangled U.S. commitments and interests in Taiwan and China in the linked article. We have not been sure-footed and if we are to avoid war, we will need to be. And Taiwan looks to be in very rough seas.

Beinart begs for more U.S. sophistication before we let our leaders take us into another "dumb war, a rash war."

... through many Afghan or Chinese eyes, the US doesn’t look like a champion of freedom at all. It looks like the most recent foreign power seeking to violently subjugate their nation.

In official Washington, in fact, the legacy of Western imperialism is even more absent from discussions of China than from discussions of Afghanistan, where people at least occasionally trot out cliches about the Hindu Kush being a “graveyard of empire.”  

... But without discussing China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Britain, France, Japan and yes, the US—which dated from roughly the First Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s—it’s hard to understand why the CCP can convince many of its constituents that America’s rhetoric about democracy, economic fairness, and the “rules-based order” is a smokescreen for its efforts to keep China subservient and divided. “Every schoolchild in China and every educated Chinese person knows about the ‘century of humiliation,’” the historian Stephen R. Platt told The New York Times a couple of years ago. Has a top Biden administration official ever publicly used the phrase?

So here we are again. Are the people of the U.S. ready to be led into a war on the other side of the Pacific in circumstances about which most of us know exactly nothing?

We have built up some resistance. By 2008, most of us knew Iraq and probably Afghanistan were futile adventures, more crimes than mistakes. So we elected Obama and discovered how little power politicians have to overcome the inertia of wars once they get underway. (Kudos to Joe Biden for cutting the cord on Afghanistan.)

But as was true after a similar popular evolution from jingoism to revulsion about the Vietnam war, enough time has passed so we're looking inward, not outward. Once again, our leaders threaten to get us embroiled in a context about which we are ignorant. Once again, as in 2001, there's no popular organized mass peace movement. Maybe we could start early this time -- inform ourselves as best we can -- and let the powers-that-be know we want them to navigate these shoals without war!

We have to pay attention to U.S. policy toward China

Well before the atrocity in Atlanta, I began collecting material about the apparent bi-partisan agreement among U.S. elites that China was our Big Bad Enemy, a worthy opponent for a new Cold War. A declining empire needs a hate-object -- here we go again ...

In the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria pointed out that the fear of an Enemy props up the military budget:

Having spent two decades fighting wars in the Middle East without much success, the Pentagon will now revert to its favorite kind of conflict, a cold war with a nuclear power. It can raise endless amounts of money to “outpace” China, even if nuclear deterrence makes it unlikely there will be an actual fighting war in Asia. Of course, there might be budget wars in Washington — but those are the battles that the Pentagon knows how to win!

My most trusted Pentagon reporter observes too many generals wallowing in warlike glee:

... there is a difference between being clear-eyed and objective about China as a national security threat and treating China as if it were Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

It does not appear that anyone in the Pentagon realizes that a conflict with China would be a total war – which the United States has not waged since 1945. The last time the U.S. military fought a war of that scale in the Pacific, it ended with the world’s first nuclear strikes. 

There are far more nuclear weapons in the world today.

The pattern is familiar. Mark Hannah was writing about Afghanistan, but everything he says could apply to U.S. policy toward China. 

Despite promises to make foreign policy serve the interests of everyday Americans, many of Washington’s decisions are circumscribed by a professional culture among policymakers that normalizes war and idealizes military might.

... The people who make foreign policy tend to be walled off from public opinion and all too eager to conform to a bipartisan consensus that favors intervention over restraint. Washington isn’t solely to blame. American voters don’t often prioritize foreign policy during election season and so don’t exert the political influence they might. ...

If we don't start paying attention,  we could find our militarized imperial state in direct conflict with a rising China. 

Ian Johnson, whose The Souls of China took us past the posturing of leaders into Chinese daily life, offers some concrete prescriptions for U.S. polices that would leave the Trump anti-Chinese offensive behind.

What’s needed are immediate low-rent measures to reverse the downward spiral in the two countries’ relations. 

One, the Biden administration should offer to restart the Peace Corps and Fulbright scholarship programs in China, two key ways that Americans have learned about the country over the past decades. The Trump administration canceled both as part of an effort to isolate China. All that accomplished instead was to hurt America’s ability to train a new generation of scholars and analysts. 

Two, in exchange for this, the U.S. government should stop vilifying China’s Confucius Institutes as sinister propaganda machines. These are largely cultural centers and much like educational outposts from other countries trying to push a good image of themselves. ... 

Three, the Biden administration should allow back into the United States some of the scores of Chinese journalists expelled by the Trump administration last year — provided that Beijing also agrees to welcome again accredited journalists from American news organizations and commits to not harassing them. 

Four, the U.S. government should lift restrictions on visas for Chinese Communist Party members wanting to travel to the United States. The policy was crafted to protect Americans from the C.C.P.’s supposedly malign influence. But the party counts some 90 million members, the majority of whom are civil servants doing normal jobs, not followers of some evil cult that needs to be kept at bay. 

Finally, China should be invited to reopen its consulate in Houston, which the Trump team closed last year in retaliation for alleged espionage. In return, the Chinese government would allow the United States to reopen its consulate in Chengdu, which Beijing had closed in retaliation.

Yes -- China's violent attempt to eradicate the Uighur ethic group's culture and religion is probably properly called genocidal. Yes -- China's destruction of Hong Kong's democratic freedoms violates treaty obligations. Yes -- China's threats against Taiwan's chosen autonomy are insupportable. This is not a nice regime.

But when our elites make China the Big Bad Enemy, they are not serving the interests of most of us. They are certainly further endangering Americans of all Asian origins -- our know-nothings will consider all Asian Americans spawn of the Enemy. 

This is a bad game. During the Trump era, progressives of necessity took our gaze off U.S. foreign policy. But the creation of a new designated Enemy isn't good for any of us.

There will be an "after COVID-19" ...

When last month Donald Trump blurted, "It’s something that nobody expected," I almost blew a fuse. Journalist Laurie Garrett knew. She spelled out the threat of a global pandemic in 1994 in her best-selling THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. She'd seen AIDS/HIV spread across our country and the globe. Earlier, she'd seen Legionnaires Disease erupt -- and fortunately be pushed out of sight. She's heard of bizarre illnesses in remote places like the blood curdling Ebola in inaccessible parts of Africa. She understood that new sorts of biological threats to humans, amplified by the speed and scope of world travel and by our complacent confidence that modern medicine had a remedy for illness, was going to break through one day. And here we are. I remember reading the book and wishing I could shove what I'd learned into some dark corner where I never had to think about it again.

Today Garrett is reporting in real time on a plague that is engulfing humans everywhere. She has constructed a clear timeline of COVID-19's emergence in China, the criminal denial from both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, and scientists' efforts to work around these self-centered political leaders. It turns out it's neither our flawed democracy or Chinese authoritarianism that determines responses; it's powerful men's fixation on their self-interests.

Both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping instinctively sought to repress news of the true danger of their countries’ outbreaks, and the reach of their infection zones, so as to minimize potential political damage to their regimes.

Okay. We know that and it is important to keep in mind their record of murderous malfeasance. But I'm almost more interested when Garrrett looks ahead toward a time when, after millions of deaths across the world, scientists invent a vaccine that could immunize us against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And once again, she's drawing on what can be learned from the past.

Going forward, there is one hope for humanity, and for the Sino-American relationship: the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine. Several nations, including China and the United States, are racing to create a vaccine, and to push prototypes of one into large clinical trials. With luck, one of those products can stop Covid-19’s spread, without difficult side effects.

But that may well lay the groundwork for additional high-stakes battles. In past global epidemics, such discoveries have led to two terrible outcomes: patent disputes, and a fully unjust distribution of lifesaving innovations worldwide. In 2009, for example, the H1N1 swine flu spread globally in less than six months, but viable vaccines weren’t available for most countries until the epidemic had passed. Poor countries never did receive supplies of the vaccine that were sufficient to put a dent in their outbreaks. ...

International agencies are now poised to counter such profit-motive failures in the vaccines markets, drawing their funding mostly from the Gates Foundation and the foreign aid budgets of a handful of wealthy countries. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which grew out of the World Economic Forum, offers financial support for vaccine invention. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, makes bulk purchases of childhood vaccines and helps ensure their distribution in poor countries. The Global Fund underwrites some health system costs for poor countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, they represent a fledgling international infrastructure for global immunization

But Covid-19 won’t simply disappear if the wealthy world is left to its own devices, manufacturing costly vaccines that are only affordable to fully insured residents of the 30 richest nations on Earth. What we collectively face is the need to execute the largest mass immunization program in world history, deploying teams of vaccinators to every nook and cranny of the planet, rich or poor.

... If an effective Covid-19 vaccine is developed, its targets will include almost eight billion human beings, with nearly three-quarters of a billion living in conditions of extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. Eliminating the coronavirus scourge will require mobilization of tens of thousands of immunization teams, armed with affordably priced vaccines. It is likely that both China and the United States, based on their initial human tests of candidate vaccines, will lead global manufacturing—and that both countries will face the moral and economic pressures of balancing global needs against company profits.

Whether we like it or not, we are all citizens of the world. Xenophobia and panic separate us. That's not going to serve.

Can the US let go its global dominance without war?

I've thought since the end of the Cold War that navigating an inevitable stormy downsizing of US ambition would be the urgent responsibility for any political leader who aspired to memorable accomplishment. (It's turned out it will be just as burdensome to mitigate climate chaos and to reduce domestic terror about demographic change. Trump's the proof.) Obama seemed to understand our need to give up on being the world's economic hegemon and biggest bully. He got damn little respect or support for his necessarily weak moves, well out ahead of elite consensus.

Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School explores whether a US war with China-on-the-rise is inevitable. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? looks at the question through a somewhat tortured historical framework. The thesis:

Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he turned the spotlight on "the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta," he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history's most catastrophic and puzzling wars. Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress make a violent clash the rule, not the exception. ...As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides's Trap.

People who write within the discipline of international relations seem to feel free treat history as a handy bucket of threatening analogies, more or less applicable to whatever dynamics they want to write about. I get it; I sometimes succumb to the same temptation when trying to apply what I know of history to the present. But Allison's list of 15 analogous examples of hegemonic transitions strikes me as once-over-lightly cherry picking rather than bumpy, granular history, so I won't explore them here.

What I found more interesting was Allison's description of "what Xi's China wants." Like Trump, China's present ruler wants to make China great again; he's "driven by an indomitable determination to reclaim past greatness." After a couple of centuries of Western domination, Xi and most Chinese believe their huge, productive, inventive country is ready to resume its proper destiny leading the civilized world.

"Making China Great Again" means:

• Returning China to the predominance in Asia that it enjoyed before the West intruded.

• Reestablishing control over the territories of "greater China," including not just Xinjiang and Tibet on the mainland, but also Hong Kong and Taiwan.

• Recovering its historic sphere of influence along its borders and in the adjacent seas so that others give it the deference great nations have always demanded.

• Commanding the respect of other powers in the councils of the world.

Those ambitions hardly seem surprising for the country with the most people and the largest economy in the world. Real conflict is more likely to arise from their source:

At the core of these national goals is a civilizational creed that sees China as the center of the universe.

Allison takes his cues about Chinese ambitions from Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime, successful modernizing authoritarian ruler of Singapore, who of necessity knew a thing or two about co-existing with China. Lee helped him grasp Xi's vision of a revitalized (less corrupt) ruling Chinese Communist Party, reawakened Chinese patriotism, further exponential economic growth, and rebuilding a "fight and win" military. Though all this at once might seem like an unsustainable project, Allison concludes that Xi is well on the way to being able to tell the US to "butt out" of Asia.

So how will we react? Will we be governed by fear of China's rise? Allison sketches several terrifying scenarios that might lead -- mostly without malicious intention -- to a shooting war. He also suggests that China and a wise US might be able to redefine our relationship and achieve another long era of peace. Both parties know that war, especially with nukes, would mean Mutual Assured Destruction.

But a happy outcome is going to take wisdom -- currently lacking badly on our end. And China needs good fortune as well as ambition on theirs. It's worth remembering that China faces plenty of domestic challenges as has lately been very visible among the intelligentsia as well as in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and Taiwan.

China's Great Awakening

One afternoon while sitting in our living room shooting the breeze, a Chinese-American friend -- an aggressively atheistic friend -- assured us that Chinese are the most atheistic people on the planet. Really?

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by journalist Ian Johnson asserts that this is a Western misunderstanding. (Our friend can be forgiven; he's something like a fifth generation American who speaks little or no Chinese.) According to Johnson:

Until the past few decades, scholars thought Chinese religions were somewhat analogous to the Abrahamic faiths. Instead of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, China had Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. That was wrong. ... religion was "diffused" in Chinese society. It wasn't one pillar next to secular society and could not be defined as one particular thing you did once or twice a week, at a certain place, under the guidance of a certain holy book ... Chinese religion had little theology, almost no clergy, and few fixed places of worship. But this didn't mean that Chinese religion was weak. Instead, it spread over every aspect of life like a fine membrane that held society together.

... pollsters have a hard time figuring out if Chinese people are religious. ... They expect a clear cut answer like "I am a Buddhist" or "I am a Daoist." But for most of Chinese history, this sort of question would have been strange. Religion was part of belonging to your community. A village had its temples, its gods, and they honored certain holy days. Choice was not a factor. ...

The turmoil of the past century and a half has ... made people uncomfortable about expressing their religiosity. ... studies are absurdly flawed. Almost all try to get people to define their behavior based on the loaded Western vocabulary. ... Put this way, almost all Chinese will say no. [But] a 2005 survey by East China Normal University in Shanghai found that 31 percent of the country's population, or about 300 million people are religious: two-thirds are worshippers of Buddhism, Daoism, or folk practices in addition to 40 million Christians, with the rest divided among other faiths. The key reason for the high response rate was that the survey used the word xinyang, or faith, instead of zongjiao, or religion.

What Johnson calls "Chinese Religion" is simply how people live in their society. During long stays in China beginning in 1984, Johnson set out to understand through what I'd call respectful "participant research." (He'd never refer to his process in such ungainly pseudo-social science jargon, but I do.) The result is one of the most graceful, most fascinating, most mind-bending volumes I've read in many years.

As in everything in that ancient civilization, layer lies upon layer of history and consciousness. Johnson contends that, first, Western imperialism and Japanese invasion inflicted national humiliation. A long civil war was finally won by the Communist Party in 1949, definitively ending the moribund dynastic system. The subsequent famines and political upheaval which were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution has left a people eager for the material plenty of Chinese capitalism -- but also often feeling something is missing.

Faith and values are returning to the center of a national discussion over how to organize Chinese life. ... hundreds of millions of Chinese are consumed with doubt about their society and turning to religion and faith for answers that they do not find in the radically secular world constructed around them. They wonder what more there is to life than materialism and what makes a good life. ... We have long known that China's ethnic minorities -- especially the Tibetans and Uighurs -- have valued religion, sometimes as a form of resistance against an oppressive state. But now we find a similar or even greater spiritual thirst among ethnic [Han] Chinese, who make up 91 percent of the country's population.

... For millennia, Chinese society was held together by the idea that laws alone cannot keep people together. Instead, philosophers like Confucius argued that society also needed shared values. Most Chinese still hold this view. For many, the answer is to engage in some form of spiritual practice: a religion, a way of life, a form of moral cultivation -- things what will make their lives more meaningful and help change society. All told, it is hardly an exaggeration to say China is undergoing a spiritual revival similar to the Great Awakening in the United States in the nineteenth century.

The fiercely atheist Chinese Communist Party has been intermittently actively hostile to religion, sometimes destroying ancient shrines and temples. But the CCP also is often warily tolerant of undercurrents in this enormous, unwieldy country.

Traditional values and practices are encouraged as a source of stability and morality. But faith is also feared as an uncontrollable force -- an alternative ideology to the government's vision of how society should be run. In the past, state and religion were united, forming a spiritual center of gravity for China. That old system is now gone, but nothing new has taken its place.

Johnson took part in, studied, and describes daily life in folk, Buddhist, Daoist, and Protestant Christian settings. For these rich descriptions, people who are interested should read for themselves; I will not dilute their granular descriptive power. But here's just one sample from Johnson's stint with a Daoist master:

One evening he stated that China was the last ancient culture still alive. How many Greeks or Egyptians, he said, could read their classical texts or draw on their ancient practices? In China, though, the language was still roughly the same. Learning classical Chinese is not easy, but it is still taught to all students in school and is much easier, say, than a Westerner learning Latin.

... "In the West, most of this kind of knowledge was lost or suppressed, " he said. "But in China, through Daoism, this prehistorical knowledge was transmitted."

... No one reads ancient Greek texts to re-create religious life in modern-day Athens, but in China precisely this is happening.

The book delves into Chinese speculations about what the ascent of the country's current authoritarian leader Xi Jinping may mean for Han Chinese religiosity. (Muslims are another matter.) He made a name for himself after the Cultural Revolution by reviving a provincial Buddhist center as a tourist attraction; whatever his personal sympathies, he knew what was good for a community he had power over -- and what was good for his Party prospects. Johnson interviewed an old woman who had known Xi Jinping in that period:

"He believed in Buddhist law," [she said.]

This probably was not literally true; as a Communist party official, and a savvy one at that, Xi would not have actively worshipped at the temple. I mentioned this to the woman.

"Well, of course he would not have lit incense," she said, "But when you look at what happened during his term, how this temple was rebuilt and how he kept coming back to see the old master, how else can I express it? Actions speak louder than words."

Folk superstition or perhaps insight? Johnson leaves this to his readers.

China's millions of evangelical Protestant Christians are under more state suspicion than other religiously inclined groups but even they find cracks in an edifice which claims absolute control. Beijing had send orders to provincial Chengdu to curb unauthorized congregations. But their leader, Peng Qiang, wasn't worried.

Yes, he agreed that that Xi Jinping's administration was making a concerted effort to strengthen state control over society by arresting dissidents and lawyers. It was also promoting Chinese traditional values and religions at the expense of Christianity. But Peng stayed positive, not out of naivete but because he saw the longer-term problems in the government's hard-line approach. One is the cost of "stability maintenance"...

Talking to Peng reminded me why it was so important to get out of the capital. There, the government's power seemed limitless; here it was tamed by distance. It would be naive to downplay the hard political power of an authoritarian leader like Xi but equally glib to ignore long-term trends beyond the government's control.

This is one many instances in this book which expose a Western reader from a hurried civilization to the very different sense of time Chinese society retains from its long history. The book is organized around religious practices as dictated by the older moon calendar. In 1929, modernizing rulers transitioned China to the western calendar, but underneath ancient sense of time and season remains.

Few practices are as important to a society as how it measures time.

At least one geneticist, much criticized by other scientists, has proposed we humans come with a "god gene," an inherited predisposition to spiritual experience. Now there's something I'm agnostic about. But Ian Johnson's account of the persistence of religious belief and practice in contemporary China makes me wonder ...

Remembering the dead 30 years after Tiananmen

From the delightful volume China A to Z: Everything You Need to Know to Understand Chinese Customs and Culture, I have learned that the most important activity of Tomb Sweeping Day (Qing Ming) that Chinese celebrate on April 5 is "to care for the graves of one's ancestors. Traditionally this meant sweeping the dirt away and weeding the cemetery plot." Interestingly, that's almost exactly the sort of activity my very WASP mother engaged in around Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) when she visited her family's plot, sometimes planted flowers or clipped grass, and complained to cemetery authorities if any head stones were leaning tipsily.

In The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, journalist and China scholar Ian Johnson provides a vignette describing of the personal Qing Ming ritual performed by Xu Jue, the mother of a young worker killed in the Tiananmen massacre. She not only lost her son when the ruling Communist Party crushed the peaceful democracy protest in 1989; soon after her husband, who had raised the boy, contracted leukemia and "died of anger."

The Party has done everything it can to erase memories of the terrible slaughter in Beijing, but Johnson finds that this is not so easy when there are survivors who know what happened in their country. Xu Jue showed Johnson how she remembers.

As she spoke, she began unpacking a box, assembling what was left of her son. She laid on the sofa a stained blue work shirt that he wore that night. ... She placed a black and white photograph of her son where his head would have been. He is young, with Xu Jue's small mouth and intense eyes. His name, Wu Xiangdong, had been taped over the bottom of the photograph.

Then she laid out two thin white strips of cotton. They framed the shirt at angles and met at the top, over the photograph, spreading out like protective halberds. The left one read,

The spirit of the June Four martyrs will never decay;
It resides below in the mountains and rivers, above the sun and stars,
and on the right side,

Blood shed in a just cause may not be rewarded for a thousand autumns;
Its fame lies at the gates found at the gates of the capital, its merit found in the whole world.

The government has her under surveillance and won't permit any commemoration of the Tiananmen dead on the Qing Ming day itself. But when Johnson visited her in 2012, it did allow Xu Jue to sweep her husband's and son's grave the preceding week. Johnson is able to follow Xu Jue to the gravesite and reports her ritual tribute.

In memory of the Tiananmen massacre, Johnson retold Xu Jue's story in Thirty Years After Tiananmen: Someone Always Remembers in the Monday New York Times....I hope to write much more about The Souls of China in a future post, but it seemed wrong to let the 30th anniversary pass without notice....Photo by Catherine Henriette, AFP

Exodus, exile, and yearning for a ground to rest in

The ascendancy of Donald Trump is fraught for Christian evangelicals of color; after all, most of their white co-religionists embraced an unapologetic racist. New York Times reporter Campbell Robertson became aware that many black evangelicals seemed to be drifting away from largely white evangelical churches since the 2016 election. He reported sensitively on the trend, passing along this poignant quote:

“It said, to me, that something is profoundly wrong at the heart of the white church,” said Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta. Early last year, Professor Walker-Barnes left the white-majority church where she had been on staff. Like an untold number of black Christians around the country, many of whom had left behind black-majority churches, she is not sure where she belongs anymore.

“We were willing to give up our preferred worship style for the chance to really try to live this vision of beloved community with a diverse group of people,” she said. “That didn’t work.”

Some U.S. evangelicals of color have long been striving to live their faith without feeling they had to take on a white Christianity that erased their roots, their families, their cultures. In January, Religion Dispatches published an interview with sociologist Russell Jeung under the pugnacious headline “I Think the White Evangelical Church is Dead”: on ‘Guilt’ vs. ‘Shame’ and Decolonizing Asian-American Christianity. The professor told correspondent Deborah Jian Lee how he sees Asian evangelicals adapting:

The American sense of doing justice is that things are unfair and so, you’d have to make things more fair. It’s a very individualistic, process-oriented sense of justice. I argue that the Asian’s sense of justice isn’t about fairness. It’s about right relationships and corporate responsibility.

It’s not about you individually losing your rights; it’s about people not being responsible for other people. Injustice occurs when people aren’t taking care of others. It’s when the government isn’t being responsible for the people. It’s when families don’t take care of each other. Justice is when people take corporate responsibility for each other. It shifts the sense of justice from being an individualized thing to a corporate thing and from a thing that’s rights-oriented to something that’s responsibility-oriented.

... Since the racial reconciliation movement, people of color have been going to these justice conferences and spoken to young white audiences about these issues. The white vote just disheartened me… all this effort, all these conversations and conferences… they haven’t made a dent. ...

Dr. Jeung, a long time resident of a tough Oakland Asian-immigrant neighborhood, has elaborated in a memoir on how his own life led him to a Christian faith inflected by his Chinese ancestral culture. At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors is about Jeung learning who he is, and who his neighbors are. After graduating from San Francisco's Lowell High School and Stanford, he moved by choice and in faith into a decaying rental building populated by very poor Cambodian refugees, in a neighborhood of Mexican and Guatemalan undocumented laborers. What did he do there? Live and learn among his neighbors.

As I read the Bible at Oak Park, I realized that many of God's words, though offered to all, were directed to the poor and for the poor. .. When I was a stranger and new to Oakland, children and grandmothers invited me in. When I was hungry, they fed me bagel dogs. When I was thirsty, they offer me drink. For twenty years, this community of refugees took this privileged, wandering guy into their family and embraced me.

In Oakland, he reflected on what he had learned from his Chinese roots. His people who immigrated to California were Hakkas, an underclass minority in China who were landless, "guest people." His great grandmother was a tough character, fishing abalone in Monterey Bay until white merchants burned out the little Chinese settlement and the family ended up in San Francisco Chinatown. His father served in World War II, took advantage of the G.I. bill to complete college, and by the time Russell was growing up, had joined the Chinese middle class. Living in Oakland, Jeung came to name his identity:

I am a Hakka, a guest person. My identity derives from a simple, agrarian people who lived on the hillsides that no one wanted, dressed in black, and wore hats with curtains. And ate food that looked like crap.

My family in the United States were working class, people of color. They were victims of institutional discrimination, forcible removal, segregation, stereotyping, and underemployment.

I am grateful that God redeems this history. Yet, along with this redemption, I am reclaiming this history and my identity as a Chinese Hakka.

After many years, Jeung eventually helped his neighbors win a legal fight to have their building restored to habitability. In that context he discovered that, though living standards were improved, other qualities of his community that he valued were lost. Many of his neighbors

adopted American suburban lifestyles: privatized and nuclear family centered. ... Today, a decade later, I feel like I've lost the community that gave me so much joy, meaning, and friendship. I once again feel like a Hakka, in exile from home and community, Was justice won? This question haunts me. As an American Christian, I expect -- and even feel entitled to justice and happy endings. Some of us are optimistic and hopeful that we can effect social change ...

... Settling down, building family ties, and taking on mutual responsibility for one another is the first step in doing God's justice. Righteousness, and then peace, emerge when we are rooted and invested in each other's lives and take responsibility for each other. In the United States, we tend to believe that justice is an individual right that we need to defend. For [his Cambodian elder neighbor] Bech Chuom, justice required assuming one's corporate responsibility: we are obligated to take care of one another, and reciprocate the care we have received. In this sense, injustice occurs when we do not take care of one another, whether on an individual or systemic level.

Dr. Jeung's faith culture is not mine, but I can easily join with Dr. Jeung in affirming that all healthy cultures hold in high esteem both service to others from individuals and collective social responsibility, truths undervalued by our polity and society.