People like author Wang Wen never paint China in a bad light. All the more astonishing is a contribution that he has now written for the “New York Times”. My answer to one of the most famous Chinese authors.
Everyone who reads newspapers in China knows Wang Wen. The author runs the opinion pages of the government newspaper “Global Times”. In this capacity, he defends Xi Jinping’s nationalist course as well as sharing the party’s propaganda on Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.
People like him never paint China in a bad light. In dictatorships, that means not saying anything that can be remotely construed as criticism. Now Wang Wen has written a text for the New York Times that breaks with this taboo.
The article is basically aimed at the USA: Wang describes how he was fascinated by America as a young man and how this enthusiasm gradually died out.
Now save articles for later in “Pocket”.
However, Wang also explicitly says that the policies being pursued in China are not perfect and that the People’s Republic must continue to develop in human rights issues. A party member like Wang can only make this statement in a foreign newspaper, and then even an American one, if he has the backing of the party apparatus.
In October, ruler Xi wants to be proclaimed president for the third time. There has been opposition to this behind the scenes for some time, as not everyone in the KP is enthusiastic about Xi’s course. The post is therefore also to be understood as an affront.
The text below is an answer to Wang’s criticism of America from a German perspective and an attempt to deal with the thoughts of a prominent Chinese author. Especially in times of polarization, it is important to want to know and understand the point of view of the other side.
I read your article in the “New York Times” with great interest. In times of geopolitical tensions between East and West, it is important that we use our opportunities as journalists and authors to talk and learn from each other.
You may be surprised that I would like to say at the beginning of my answer to your text that there are similarities in our perception of the United States of America, even though we look at the “land of opportunity” from different perspectives.
I grew up in the west of what is now reunified Germany. As a kid, I got to know America through Disney movies, Levi’s Jeans, and Coca Cola. The last years of the bloc confrontation between the free world and the USSR also fell in my childhood.
During this time, the United States guaranteed the freedom of West Germany. These formative decades are the basis of the friendship between our two countries to this day.
I first came to America in 1995 as a student. I was visiting a friend’s host family with a friend who had previously completed a year of high school in Minneapolis. In addition to the state of Minnesota, I also got to know Chicago on this trip.
At the beginning of this century, as a young journalist, I was in New York twice, once with a German publisher and the other time in the studio of a public broadcaster. For me, New York was the condensation of the “American Dream”, of “from rags to riches”. Between these two visits lay September 11, a day that would forever change America, Americans, and the country’s politics.
The wars in which an emotionally troubled country was embroiled by a president extremely unpopular in Europe, the establishment of the Guantanamo prison camp came as an incredible shock to many who, like me, loved America until then.
The 2008 financial crisis also showed the world that it had been in cognitive dissonance for some time. Between believing in the American Dream, which would become a reality for all who worked hard, and the reality of a country where there is neither universal health care nor a hint of what is known in Europe as the welfare state.
The financial crisis revealed that a third of US society did not exist economically because they were over-indebted or poor. Another shock. In that sense, the events represented by the years 2001 and 2008 could be tantamount to those that changed the way you think about America.
I can assure you that there are many citizens of the United States who share my stance on the state of their homeland. I’m sure because the USA, despite everything there is to criticize about the country, is a country of freedom where people are allowed to say what they think.
In the same year that the Berlin Wall gave way and burst under the weight of peaceful demonstrators, students were killed at the hands of the communist rulers in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
In Germany, on the other hand, not a single shot was fired at the demonstrators. Perhaps that was also a miracle on an international scale, justifying that a courageous trumpeter stood on the occupied Berlin Wall and blew the old chorale “Nun dankt alle Gott” into his instrument with all his might.
It wasn’t just you and I in the USA in the 1990s, but also another man who was well-known in China: Wang Huning. He described in his book “America Against America”, as well as in your article, advantages and disadvantages of the United States. The great man who has served three Chinese presidents and shaped their tenure was wrong on one point, however.
He attributes the inequalities in the United States to the political system, to put it simply: where there is liberal democracy, there are homeless. He therefore advised Jiang Zeming, Hu Jintao and finally Xi Jinping to prevent any form of political opening of society towards democracy and freedom.
But Wang was wrong: today, inequality in the US and China is almost the same, wealth is equally unequally distributed. This is because both countries have adopted the same economic model, predatory neo-liberal capitalism. Today it shows its ugly face in East and West. The overexploitation of nature is just another, sad proof of this.
Democracy and unhindered capitalism do not go together. The parents of European democracy knew that. In Western Europe today, the model of the social market economy prevails, which subordinates economic performance to the coexistence of people. There are indeed things, of which education and health are the most important, that are not market goods.
You are now in the historical hour in which the leadership of your country must decide whether you will follow the course of the past presidents, who under the current ruler Xi Jinping in many nooks and crannies, the terms Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan must suffice here, has become even harder, more radical and thus more inhuman.
You yourself address the human rights situation in China in your text. There is no point in pointing out inadequate conditions in other countries such as the USA. Their political leaders must do better precisely because the people of China cannot vote them out.
If I have understood it correctly, Confucian teaching speaks of a harmony in which the things of the world must be in relation to each other so that their order is just and good. The ideas of European political philosophy do not differ significantly from this.
Harmony arises here through the constant weighing of free goods, for example in the search for a good relationship between freedom and security. This process is open and is redefined and shaped by each generation.
In the past, America has always been able to develop further and turn back from wrong paths because the power of freedom creates space for change and improvement in the country. That’s why the flow of American soft power has never dried up. With this in mind, I wish your country, the people of China, renewed joy in freedom and the power to change.
With kind regards
Yours, Alexander Görlach
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute at Oxford University and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
