China has been getting a beating lately. Across the US nearly 30 candidates up for election in two weeks have been running ads pointedly attacking the nation of 1.3 billion people. It seems that many of these aspiring representatives are playing off fears widely held by Americans that China will usurp the United States as the world’s foremost super power in the coming years. These fears are being stoked by the brutal recession our country continues to limp through as well as other xenophobic fears about the nominally communist country’s political and cultural mores.
The Summer Olympics held in China a little over two years ago were supposed to improve global perceptions of the authoritarian country’s political climate. Yet this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, pro-democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo, has shown that the Chinese government still has a long way to go on that front. While it is reasonable to criticize China for its failure to ensure basic political and human rights to its citizens, voters in this country would be remiss to allow politicians running for office this year to demonize China and shroud it in a veil of otherness that historically has only had negative consequences on international cultural and economic relations.
Take a peek at some of the ads from this year’s campaign and you’ll see how xenophobic political propaganda has gotten in the homestretch of the 2010 mid-terms. In one particularly distasteful example, Democratic Congressional candidate Zack Space has run an ad against his Republican opponent Bob Gibbs in which the narrator mockingly thanks Mr. Gibbs for bringing jobs to China as a giant red dragon drops onto the screen: “As they say in China, xie,xie Mr. Gibbs!” Similarly, in its efforts against Senate candidate Baron Hill, the Republican National Congressional Committee is running an ad depicting Hill as a Mao-like figure, accusing him of creating renewable energy jobs (oh no!) in China by voting for the stimulus bill. Besides the obvious logical incongruities in that message, vilifying the Chinese people without any sort of context approaches the height of xenophobia, simultaneously offending and misleading.
To be fair, in his efforts this year against silver-spooned know-nothing Ron Johnson, Russ Feingold has recently brought China into his advertising campaign. However, Feingold’s ad is, predictably, more nuanced and aims not to vilify Johnson as a commie sympathizer but rather as a shameless neo-liberal cheerleader (which he is). Feingold respectfully connects the dots between Johnson’s support for unfair, pro ruling class, trade agreements and the loss of manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin. Criticize Russ for being protectionist if you want, but at least he is targeting concrete policy differences without lowering himself to the use of silly communist propaganda. Unfortunately, other candidates don’t seem capable of the higher minded discourse Feingold is attempting to foment.
Getting back to China and the existential fears that seem to be accruing in the hearts of more and more Americans these days, it’s important to not write the Chinese off as inevitable enemies in some zero-sum realpolitik game of winners and losers. We should all be able to, without hesitation, applaud not only the Chinese people but also their government for the incredible feat they have achieved in recent decades by bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. They even did it the “American Way” by exploiting free enterprise. Add in their endemic abundance of cheap labor, and it’s no surprise they are excelling at a game we’ve been playing with gusto since the 1970s.
Unfortunately, all that success prior to democratization has entrenched single party rule in the country and retarded the advancement of human rights. Liu Xiaobo exemplifies the continuing struggle in China for the rights we’ve long been accustomed to in the West. Most recently in his long career as a pro-democracy advocate and intellectual, Xiaobo co-wrote Charter 08, a pro-democracy petition modeled after Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia denouncing Soviet rule in the late 1970s. Charter 08 received thousands of signatures from mainland Chinese, and demanded, among other things, legislative democracy, freedom of expression and assembly and public control over civil servants. In reprisal, the Chinese government sped him away late last year for a show-trial in Beijing. He has been languishing in prison ever since.
The awarding of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Xiaobo should make Americans re-consider what is most important in our relationship with China in the coming years. Instead of taking an oppositional stance toward the Chinese, as many politicians looking to benefit from the politics of fear would have us do, we should stand firmly in solidarity with the Chinese people in their struggle for the right to free speech and democracy. There will be no other way to avoid conflict and resolve the big problems, such as global warming and resource scarcity, facing the global population in the coming decades. We can start by rejecting the self-serving, xenophobia promoting, ads of politicians hoping to benefit from the lesser angels of our nature.
Sam Stevenson ([email protected]) is a graduate student in public health.
