China, Friend or Foe?
November 29th, 2007 — -With the arrival of the shopping season (and what season isn’t for shopping these days), we welcome, with open arms and purses, and wide eyes, the million tons of plastic, electronic paraphernalia from China and East Asia.
Earlier this year, I spent a month in China, home of American goods and products. The experience left me a little wide-eyed. Or, more than a little.
I wrote about it a little bit, Here and Here, but haven’t quite had the heart to get back to it in full. Somewhere inside, there is a voice that says, “If you don’t have anything nice to say….”
But, nice or not, I can’t sit on these thoughts anymore.
You see, having been to China, I am now afraid of China. Or, more to the point, I am afraid of our massive intertwining with China.
I see the PBS specials on the wonders of the place, with gongs and pentatonic scales sounding over images of the rose and gold-lensed landscapes. I hear about the growth and opportunity, but mostly, what I hear, having been there, is a denial of what it is actually like to be in China. Or, to be poor in China. (And poor is the way most people in China are, have been, and will remain).
There is a tendency for reporters to shy away from the difficulty, the tragedy, the deep unpleasantness of the lives of most Chinese people. The often mortal burden placed on individual Chinese by their government, which does not seem to worry much about individual human or civil rights…After all, they’re building the new regime, to compete, not with the old, but with us.
This year I witnessed what I came to call “the building of the pyramids,” 2007 style. When the Pharaohs built the Pyramids, they didn’t build them. Their workers, and slaves did. Every day, blocks of stone rolled up gangways, pushed and pulled by rope and lever and wheel. Every day the stones were piled higher. And every day handfuls of slaves met their end under those stones.
And so, in China, every night, you go to bed with the sound of steel against steel, hammers pounding rivets on the thirty second floor of a scaffold. Every morning the buildings are a little higher, and the air and water, a little more polluted. And you can bet a number get caught in the gears and steel of the new pyramids dotting the emerging, brown and dusty skyline.