Chinese Television

My apartment at the university where I am living came with a brand new television on which I can receive approximately 50 channels. Forty-eight of them are Chinese language and the other two are BBC World News and one Australian channel. The Aussie station seems to show mainly travel documentaries about young, blond people having fun in forests, on beaches and in pubs. Australian news reports focus much more on Asian countries and markets than on those in Europe and North America and the financial news ahs lately been depressingly similar throughout the region.

The financial emphasis is much the same on Chinese television news shows, to judge from the plummeting graphics and the occasional camera view of people carrying cardboard boxes on Wall Street. There is certainly no pleasure being taken here in the problems of the West, as would certainly have been the case in years past. It is well understood here that we are all now firmly, happily or not, in the same leaking boat. The effect of collapsing consumer markets in the United States and Europe is already being felt here. Exports are, inevitably, beginning to fall and the economic prosperity the export industries created must as inevitably come under pressure in the years ahead. How far, one wonders, might China and the West “decouple” if we now lose our mutual interest in Wal-Mart, as suppliers or buyers? My bet is, not much. Too much has changed here in the past generation for any imaginary clock to be turned to a different time. “Turning the clock” would in any case be the wrong image to employ. It implies that some sort of “westernization”, or non-evolutionary process, has been occurring here and that reversion is an option, as if the China that exists now has been cobbled together from advertising slogans than will be abandoned when sales begin to flag.

I think we need different terms to describe how China, in particular, has changed. You can pick up indications about that change from television. A few weeks ago, I watched a show, which I think was a comedy, about a schoolteacher who gets reassigned from the city to a rural village. His duties include leading a troop of local Young Pioneers, the Communist Party equivalent of Boy Scouts. The plot revolves around his relationship with the Beetle Bailey of the troop, an overweight twelve year old who is constantly late for drill, marches out of step, and evidently doesn’t like regimentation. The comedy is partly in the physical reluctance of the boy to conform to Young Pioneer norms but mainly in the practical jokes he and his Young Pioneer mates play on the teacher. In the concluding scene, the teacher gets his own back – and restores the proper generational balance - by playing his own joke. The youngster catches a supposedly conciliatory Coke tossed to him by the adult, which promptly drenches him once he opens it.

Noticeable was that, in addition to the Young Pioneer red bandana around his neck, the boy wears a (red) Harry Potter T-shirt throughout. Harry Potter and Karl Marx don’t normally go together so this show was evidently not about ideology. Nor was it about coca cola, communism or traditional China. There is a separate channel for dramas about traditional Ching (Manchu) China. There is also one that shows a continuous loop of People’s Liberation Army soap operas. Also one for 24 hour a day sports, another for financial news, one for international travel documentaries, and another that features classical, Beijing opera. There is even an MTV-type channel that shows Chinese pop stars and variety shows including, on one occasion, lightly clad pole dancers. That was a special surprise for anyone who remembers when the standard dress in this country was the blue boiler suit. Between then and now is a huge distance but “modernization” does not adequately describe the change. China was always different but its cities were never “not modern”. Nor is “Americanization” or “westernization” a useful description. Peoples to whom these processes happen have weak or debilitated cultures and lack self-confidence. Elements of Western technology have been borrowed or adapted, just as we borrowed and adapted Chinese inventions such as gunpowder and toilet paper in the past, but the culture is still very much Chinese. I have seen no western TV shows here, dubbed or subtitled for local consumption, though there are Chinese versions of what we see on our own sets. If I had to pick an English word to describe how China has changed in the last generation, I think the word would be “internationalization”. I would define it as representing the next stage of development of China’s traditional perception of itself as the Middle Kingdom.

The corresponding evolution of the Chinese perception of their fellow global citizens (i.e. us) slightly puzzles me. We have complete freedom to walk around, shop and meet people in Shenyang. This is also a “nation of shopkeepers” and it would be easy to overcharge us but I have found the overwhelming majority of those I have dealt with to be scrupulously honest. The younger generation is usually eager to communicate with us. They appreciate that the English language is presently the global language and that it is necessary to learn it for that reason. They also seem genuinely warm and friendly. Older people are not unfriendly but are also quite reserved. How they may see us was hinted at, at least for me, in a comedic cooking show I occasionally watch called “East and West” (on the food channel). The show’s title refers not to cookery but to its stars: an expatriate American, Max, who is fluent in Chinese, and his Chinese wife, who is fluent in English. It also provides vocabulary lessons through the use of English subtitles, plus an occasional explanatory voice-over, as the pair prepares Chinese meals with local ingredients. The most recent show demonstrated the creation of some sort of chicken dish, starting with Max and his wife actually catching the chicken in their back yard. “Max and his wife demonstrate team work,” explains the narrator, as they emerge from the house with a large butterfly net. The chicken has guessed Max’s intentions but is chased down and eventually caught. The butchering process is thankfully omitted and Max is next shown readying a traditional wood-fed oven. As he stacks the firewood and prepares the cooking surface, the narrator intones: “Max, though a foreigner, is well-organized and methodical”.

I think there’s a clue there.

China's Year

When corporate managers first learned that the Chinese word for “change” combines two characters meaning “danger” and “opportunity”, their enthusiasm for this new thought was endless. Not since the old Army concept of “zero defects” had an aphorism so captured the limited imagination of the business world. As if from an assembly line, the observation that the Chinese word for change combines characters meaning both danger and opportunity reproduced itself at conferences, pep talks, meetings, training sessions and even in corporations’ annual reports. I remember hearing it several times. There is a complementary Chinese curse, almost equally well known: “May you live in interesting times”. Those times are upon us again and China seems well situated to make something of the opportunities they present.

This has so far been an exceptional year for China’s image and reputation. They “won” their own Beijing Games, depending on whether gold or total medals are counted. But however you count them, who knew that China was so competitive in so many sports? Gymnastics, judo and ping pong for sure but how about gold medals in sailing, weightlifting and kayaking? And Chinese women took the silver and bronze medals in beach volleyball. If they have television wherever Mao is now he must have been stunned at that one.

Last week, on September 27th, a Chinese astronaut took the country’s first “space walk”, in a Chinese-made space suit, five years after China put its first man in orbit. Interestingly, though the Chinese space program might seem recent the base from which they launched in the Gobi desert began construction in 1958, fifty years ago and only 8 years after the Peoples Liberation Army first took power. China was at the time an impoverished, third world, rural economy with a fifty-year history of civil war, invasion and famine. So they evidently think long-term here.

The debt-ridden economies of the West are now contracting and would probably be collapsing but for unprecedented government interventions in North America and Europe. You can sense the panic building as formerly blue chips like AIG dwindle to penny stock status. Will it be a recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth) or a severe recession (ten point reduction in GDP) or a depression (30 point reduction in GDP)? The choice at the moment seems to be between the last two. All that’s certain is that Western governments are going to incur tremendous debt as they attempt to stall the momentum toward panic. The US national debt – from which the excesses of the past and the emergency of the present are funded – is now $10.1 trillion, heading toward $11.3 trillion, about 70% of GDP. Twenty-five percent of that amount is owed to foreign countries and of those foreign debtors China is the second largest, owning $519 billion of US treasury bonds.

China also has a current surplus of $1.8 trillion, no sub prime problem in its banking system, and no credit problem in its economy. As far as I can tell, there is no credit. This is a cash economy. I haven’t used a credit card since I arrived in China because I can’t find anywhere that takes one. I am told that there are domestic credit cards but I haven’t seen anyone using them. So, if there are really no hidden problems in the Chinese economy and banking system – apart from the fact that the country’s biggest customers are now basket cases - how might they emerge from this global turmoil?

China’s Premier, Wen Binjiao, was quoted yesterday as saying that “what China can do for the world is keep growing”. China’s economy has grown at an average rate of 10% in each of the last 30 years and this year and next the rate is projected at between 8% and 9%. That projection may be wishful thinking since it comes from the CEO of Rio Tinto, a very large mining and metals conglomerate, who admits that his own company’s prospects depend on that growth rate. The panelists at the discussion where this prediction was cited, however, agreed that the role of China in the world economy is about to become substantially more prominent.