Wasn’t China just being praised as the laboratory of modernity? And now? Now they stick test sticks in salmon and doom millions to house arrest on fortune cookies and expired yogurt.
I have been to many countries around the world in my life. I belong to a generation that was allowed to fly without a guilty conscience. Actually I liked it everywhere.
I was also in China once. I was there on a state visit as a member of the President’s journalistic entourage.
From a tourist point of view, nothing can be faulted. The country has breathtaking landscapes to offer. The Forbidden City is one of the must-see architectural marvels. Shanghai is a megalopolis that changes its face so quickly that the city map is outdated every six months.
In Beijing we were invited to a state banquet. We sat at tables of 12. My seat neighbor on the right was some big shot in the state apparatus, my neighbor on the left did something with finances.
If you ever receive an invitation to a state dinner, think twice before attending. It’s usually a dead boring event. Of course you don’t let that show. After all, you are not invited as a private person, but as a representative of your country. So you try to make a good impression.
I tried to get a conversation going in English. But then I was obviously in the wrong place. The Chinese man on my right was idly typing on his cell phone the whole time without even looking at me. The neighbor on the left had his back to me and was casually talking on the phone while sipping his soup at the same time. The only consolation was that my fellow travelers weren’t faring any better, as I could tell by looking around at the other tables.
I have to admit that this experience clouded my image of China as a cultured country a little. I’m sure there are very lovely, humble Chinese people who know how to behave towards strangers in such a way that they don’t feel like hospitality is a dirty word. I just haven’t met her.
The crazy thing about the Chinese is that they think they are the crown of creation. I don’t think there is a people as self-absorbed as the Chinese. Anyone who is not like them is considered a second-class person – when it comes up. I would have thought that there was still room for improvement in terms of civilisation, as the saying goes, in a nation that has to be tediously trained not to spit on the ground at every opportunity. But that’s probably that typical European cockiness.
Why this little preamble? Because for weeks I have been finding reports in the newspapers of how they are imposing lockdown after lockdown in Shanghai. In Beijing, too, citizens fear a new curfew.
Nobody is allowed to leave the apartment, not even to walk the dog. Robots patrol the streets admonishing people to stay indoors. you are starving. Ever since residents in Shanghai stepped onto their balconies to cry out their desperation, stepping onto the balcony has also been banned. Anyone caught opening the balcony window will face serious consequences.
Worse off are only those unfortunate enough to end up in one of the quarantine centers. The hygienic conditions in the camps are so catastrophic that you are guaranteed to get infected, if not with Covid then with another terrible disease. There are reports of old people dragging them out of their beds at night to isolate them. Children are separated from their parents, babies from their mothers. Nobody is safe anymore.
I read the reports from Shanghai with a mixture of fascination and horror. Wasn’t China advertised to us as the Mecca of high technology just a moment ago? As the country where everything goes ten times as fast as it does here? As a future laboratory of capitalism and a beacon of modernity? And now they’re sticking test sticks in salmon, alleging the virus was introduced via Norwegian salmon stocks, and condemning millions to house arrest over fortune cookies and expired yogurt. I imagined modernity differently.
Everywhere in the world life is starting to go back to normal, just not in China. Why? Because national pride forbids the Chinese from being vaccinated with a vaccine that works. There is a Chinese vaccine, but it is useless against Omicron. It’s one thing to copy Adidas sneakers or Stihl chainsaws and quite another to copy an mRNA vaccine. There is a contract with Biontech for the delivery of 100 million vaccine doses, but the approval is missing because the state leadership sees the deployment as an admission of weakness. So only the permanent lockdown remains. Zero Covid Forever.
I never understood how to live in China. This mixture of crony capitalism, control addiction and undisguised aggressiveness would drive me insane. But I’ve met many people who raved about China. The speed, they said, the efficiency! Learning from Asia would mean learning to win.
A very big China fan was Angela Merkel. Her eyes lit up when she talked about her visits to Xi Jinping. No chancellor has visited the People’s Republic as often as she has. She was there twelve times during her tenure. I think she secretly admired Xi Jinping for the way he ruled the country. Being able to govern like he did, without stupid chatter from the side, that would have been her dream too. One would like to know how she sees it today. But she’s gone.
Perhaps in the future we should take a closer look at who we make ourselves economically dependent on. I’m not pro-closure or reversing globalization, not at all. But it would be nice if we didn’t repeat the mistake we made with Russia. Anyone who puts 1.5 million people in re-education camps just because they belong to a religious community that they distrust at the head of state can be expected to do anything, even in evil.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said a year ago about the fight against Covid-19: “Judged by how the pandemic has been handled by different governments and political systems, we can clearly see who is better.” it still looks as if China would come through the crisis as a model country.
Xi Jinping wants to be re-elected in the fall. He had the constitution changed for this purpose. He will then be in power longer than Mao. I see no reason to disagree with him. “Judging by the results…”: sure, why not?
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
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