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Robert Delaney

Call it cultural, ideological or civilisational. The great debate about who’s superior continues.
To try to make a point in this pointless exercise, I’m going to indulge in the self-centred custom that most corporate executives and policymakers engage in when trying to establish their China credentials.
I’m going to talk about the country I discovered when I first landed there.
You won’t be surprised that this is a story of beguiling economic transformation with a turn away from the freedoms that Americans hold dear. But don’t worry.




There’s room here to examine the way US political culture has crippled the high horse American leaders sit on when they criticise Beijing.
I arrived in China in December 1992, and proceeded to Wuhu, in Anhui province, to start studying Mandarin at Anhui Normal University.
For a young American, China during those years was a strange place. The dorms were freezing. The cityscape was hellish. Most dismaying of all, the chocolate sold in Department Store No 7 tasted like wax.
By 2006, it was difficult to access any non-Chinese news portals … Dissent has all but disappeared
One encounter stood out in the way it taught me about the difference between the culture of my host country and the one I had left.
I received a stern lecture from the director of my school’s foreign office, or waiban, for agreeing with a local medical college to teach English for 10 kuai (yuan) an hour.
I learned that being a foreign student at Anhui Normal University meant that I didn’t have the right to take on such a side job without its permission. I tried to argue that, at such a low wage, it wasn’t a real job. That argument didn’t land well.
When I moved to Beijing in 1994 to attend Princeton University’s language programme there, I would ride my bike to the Friendship Store every weekend. This was one of the few places in China where one could buy Time and Newsweek magazines.

The store’s mark-up was substantial, but these purchases were as essential to me as food because they were my only connection to what was going on outside China.
In 1995, I became a journalist, covering the very gradual reforms that were turning China from the kind of stifling and dreary world that I experienced in Wuhu three years earlier into something more like America.
Foreign retailers, auto manufacturers and financial-sector firms were selectively given approval to access this burgeoning market that so enticed the American business community. So far, so good.
How talk of a clash of civilisations with China suits the US
By about 2005, my life in China wasn’t very different from the experience I would have had in any other major metropolis. I could eat at Indian, Italian or Brazilian restaurants. I could buy wine from California, Australia, South Africa or France.
I could keep up with world events online through the BBC, The New York Times and any other global news outlet. I opened Facebook and Gmail accounts and immediately got reconnected with scores of old friends and classmates.




And the waiban at universities across the country no longer cared what foreign students got up to outside the classroom as long as they were paying tuition fees and steered clear of politics.
This was as close as China would get to the kind of culture American policymakers had in mind when Robert Zoellick famously argued that full engagement with Beijing would make the country “a responsible stakeholder”.
By 2006, it was difficult to access any non-Chinese news portals. The BBC and CNN news feeds began going dark more frequently.
What Trump really wants from his big, fat tariff snake oil
Since then, we’ve seen Beijing’s gradual roll-out of a surveillance state, increasingly walled off from the rest of the world. Dissent has all but disappeared.
This is a shame for Chinese innovators – in industry, the arts or elsewhere – who would need to draw on all the world’s ideas for inspiration.




But America has done a U-turn of its own in recent years. Even before US President Donald Trump took office, far-right ideologues began questioning scientists, limiting women’s reproductive rights and disenfranchising minorities.
Trump’s administration has accelerated all of these violations of America’s political culture.
But the ultimate expression of Washington’s departure from the country’s ideals was Trump’s assertion that arms sales to Saudi Arabia were more important than a response to the apparent political killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
China may have squelched the political rights that had started to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, but the Chinese Communist Party never staked its legitimacy on them.
In a world where access to information is key, America would appear to have a lead, but the US can’t win this debate as long as it’s at war with its own cultural values.
Robert Delaney is the Post's US bureau chief


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The US flag flies over the White House in Washington, DC. Donald Trump’s administration has accelerated the violations of America’s political culture. Photo: AFP

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The grave threat to US civilisation is not China, but climate change

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epa07602973 Local crew on hand to survey damage after a large tornado hit the town of El Reno, Oklahoma, 26 May 2019. Days of storms and rain have left flooding and tornado destruction across the country. EPA-EFE/TORREY PURVEY

To counter China, the US must rise above talk of race and a clash of civilisations

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Opinion

News

World

The Chinese state may have turned its back on political liberalisation, but the US, too, has subverted its own proud traditions. The debate on whose culture is superior is one Trump’s America can’t win


The Chinese state may have turned its back on political liberalisation, but the US, too, has subverted its own proud traditions. The debate on whose culture is superior is one Trump’s America can’t win.


US-China trade war

Donald Trump

China’s Communist Party

United States

China economy

US-China trade war: All stories

Human rights in China

Censorship in China

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

On Balance

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}On Balance | US criticism of China rings hollow when America itself has betrayed its own ideals

On Balance | US criticism of China rings hollow when America itself has betrayed its own ideals