China a fantasyland for American pundits

Whenever I want to be cheered up about the future of my adopted country, I turn to American pundits. The air here [in Beijing] might be deadly, the water undrinkable, the internet patchy and the culture strangled, but I can always be reassured that China is beating America at something, whether it’s clean energy, high-speed rail, education or even the military.

Over the past decade, American audiences have become accustomed to lectures about China, like a schoolboy whose mother compares him with an overachieving classmate. “That used to be us,” journalist Thomas Friedman tells his countrymen, citing the “impressive” Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Centre (thrown up in a few months) as an example of China’s greatness and glacial United States construction projects as an example of America’s decline. China is “kicking our butts” because the US is “a nation of wusses”, according to then-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who, in 2010, lamented his state’s inability to handle snow.

Rendell ignored the time snow paralysed southern China in 2008, stranding millions of people, cutting off water supplies to major cities and killing dozens. Friedman ignored the buildings that collapsed like a soft pile of tofu across Sichuan in an earthquake that same year because they were rapidly erected by crooked contractors. I’m not talking here about arguments over China itself, like the dueling predictions of magical reform or sudden collapse so brilliantly dissected in James Mann’s The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism will not Bring Democracy to China, or about the delusional fears of Chinese plots from analysts such as Michael Pillsbury. The people telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman.

For Chinese residents, daily life is a constant reminder of both how far the country has come and how far it has to go. One morning recently I went to the coffee shop at the end of my central Beijing alley for a superb latte, where the owner teasingly chastised me, as he has before, for paying with cash like some peasant rather than with my mobile phone through the WeChat Wallet service. That evening, I came home to one of our small compound’s regular power failures, and I wrote this in the dark on a laptop battery and a neighbouring building’s thankfully unshielded Wi-fi signal. In heavy rain, our alley becomes a swimming pool, and even newly built Beijing streets disappear under a foot of water because the drainage is so bad; in storms in 2012, people drowned in cars stuck under bridges.

China’s mega-projects are often awesome, but they’re also often costly and corrupt. The more than 10,000 miles of recently built high-speed rail came in well over the original US$300 billion budget, and all but a few lines run at a loss. The process of creating them was so crooked that the Ministry of Railways ended up broken into three parts and most of the top officials ended up in jail. It’s understandable why visitors, especially those who don’t stray beyond the metropolises, might be overwhelmed. What’s not forgivable is how rarely pundits try to look further, content with an initial vision of glittering skyscrapers and swish airports that can be conveniently shoehorned into whatever case they’re trying to make.

And because China is so vast, its successes can be attributed to whatever your pet cause is. Do you oppose free markets and privatisation, like John Ross, former economic policy adviser for the city of London? Then China’s success is because of the role of the state. Do you favour free markets, like the libertarian Cato Institute? Then China’s success is because of its opening up. Are you an environmentalist? China is working on huge green-energy projects. Are you an energy lobbyist? China’s building gigantic pipeline projects. Are you an enthusiast for the Protestant work ethic, like historian Niall Ferguson, who describes it as one of his “killer apps” for civilizations? Then credit China’s manufacturing boom to its 40 million Protestants – even though they’re less than 5 percent of its 1.3 billion people.