For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Young spotlights the foods of Shanghai that she finds most memorable. “They stem from my own experiences of living there for a few years during my childhood, as well as the summers and winters that I have subsequently spent there,” she tells Zócalo. But her illustrations go beyond food illustration. Keep an eye out for the architectural and scenic elements of Shanghai that she incorporates into each piece.

The post Bite-Size Shanghai appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Russian war in Ukraine is a calamity—for the people suffering through it, for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe (which has lost its strategic compass), for China (which needs stability to develop faster than its competitors), and for most of the world (due to the energy and food crises it is triggering).

But it is by no means a calamity for the United States.

Please forgive the complexity of the argument that follows. But geopolitics, which I study, addresses complexity. And this war has taken geopolitics backwards.

When a war breaks out, we rediscover how, as human beings, “we have not yet crept on all fours from the barbaric period of our history,” as Leon Trotsky wrote at the outbreak of the Balkan wars 110 years ago. We also fall back, in a Pavlovian way, into a sort of blind herding together, developed in the age of caves. The will to understand, when it exists, is overwhelmed by the need to take sides, to uncritically merge behind the dominant opinion.

Recently, an erudite Italian newspaper cast blame on “demagogues of complexity”—those who, instead of cheering for one side or the other, take the trouble to delve into complexity to try to understand reality. The thesis would be that, in this war, the thing does not need to be excavated: There is an aggressor and there is the victim, and therefore we must take sides.

Simple, linear, incontrovertibly human. It is a pity that the same newspaper, in 2003, sided with American (and British, and Italian, and Spanish, etc.) aggressors against the attacked Iraqis. It is a pity that the world is full of assailed peoples that we forget to defend and support. It is a pity that, in Russia, the overwhelming majority of the population believes that the Ukrainians are the aggressors and the Russians the victim, and that this “special military operation” is an act of self-defense.

If one does not face complexity, one is a victim of propaganda: a willing victim—because one wants to shelter in the herd when danger approaches—but still a victim.

Russians have never wondered why they “lost” Ukraine and are now told they must have a “military operation” to reclaim it. They’ve never examined why Ukrainian ruling circles felt the need to slide towards Europe and NATO protection. If the Kremlin had tried to answer these questions, perhaps all the miscalculations that led to a war that is a strategic catastrophe for Russia would never have been made.

In recent decades, the Russians have tried to keep Ukraine in their sphere of influence by dangling carrots: reciprocal supply chains established in the Soviet era, common historical-cultural roots, and the project of the Eurasian Union, “an essential component of Great Europe … from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” as Putin wrote in October 2011. Had it joined, Ukraine “could have integrated into Europe more quickly and from a stronger position.” In other words: Alone, Ukraine would have been treated poorly, but together with Russia, it would be received with the honors due a great power.

Except—and this is the crux of the matter—Russia is not a great power. By 2014, its GDP had collapsed, dragged by a steep fall in gas and oil prices, only to return to the level of ten years earlier in 2020. For Ukrainians, choosing a modest Russian loan over an association agreement with the European Union no longer made sense (if it ever had); when pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych chose the Russian loan, it triggered the Maidan revolt.

Moscow responded by pulling out the stick: annexing the Crimea and creating two puppet republics carved into the old Soviet Rust Belt, the Donbass. It does not take great skills of psychological penetration to understand that Russia had lost whatever sympathy it still enjoyed in Ukraine, and why the new regime in Kyiv would seek economic, political, and military protection elsewhere. It does not take great psychological penetration skills to understand why Ukraine preferred to forge an agreement with an economic bloc (the U.S., the EU, and the U.K.)) with a combined GDP of almost $40 trillion (in 2020) over doing so with Russia, with its GDP of just $1.5 trillion (a little less than South Korea, a little more than Spain).

From a geopolitical point of view, Russia is stuck in a vicious circle: In order to develop economically, it must recover its imperial dimension; but, in order to succeed in that, it has to spend resources that it does not have.

To play in a bigger league, Russia generally bluffs, giving the rest of the world an impression of power. When it succeeds, it is not only thanks to disproportionate military strength and elusive diplomacy, but also because its rivals almost never ask to see what cards it’s holding.

In the days preceding the invasion of Ukraine, massive military mobilization and deliberately misleading communication seemed to portend success: Russia was again, overwhelmingly, at the center of the world—feared and flattered. The control of Crimea and of the two puppet republics seemed likely to be recognized (de facto, even if not de jure). Finally, NATO, strongly divided, would most likely have accepted (more likely without saying it) the outcome to lighten its presence at the borders of the former USSR.

All analysts then skeptical about the possibility of a Russian attack (including the present author) were led by this simple observation: If Russia invades, it risks not only losing what it has, in actuality, already obtained, but much more. But obviously, Moscow wanted more: to regain control of all of Ukraine. It goes without saying that the unconditional surrender of Ukraine could not be obtained at the negotiating table; not even the two NATO countries (France and Germany) most open to Moscow’s needs would have allowed it. Military action thus became the only possible recourse.

But this time, as happens at the poker table, when you have very little or nothing in your hand, you lose your entire stake.

With the invasion, Moscow achieved a long series of results opposite to what it had, at least in words, set for itself: It created a stronger national cohesion in Ukraine, losing most of its residual support among the Russian-speaking population. It reunified and reinvigorated NATO, labelled as “brain dead” by Emmanuel Macron a couple of years ago, increasing the alliance’s popularity throughout Europe, and prompting Finland and Sweden to want to join. The Russian war caused a surge in NATO’s military presence on the borders of the former USSR; allowed Germany to accelerate its rearmament; stimulated the opening of a debate on nuclear weapons in Japan; alienated many in China, Iran, and India (even if the Chinese, Iranians, and Indians cannot say it openly); alarmed Turkey; and was heavily condemned by the U.N. General Assembly (141 in favor, 4 against, and 35 abstentions).

Last but not least, Russia showed the world its embarrassing military paucity. It devalued all the bluff of armaments, the alleged backbone of the illusory Russian power.

All these consequences make the United States the real, and only, winner of this war, at least at the current stage of the conflict in early May.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine,  the United States suddenly regained international influence that had been fading for decades: forcing France to put its dreams of “European independence” back in the icebox; obtaining increased military commitment from allies that Americans have sought for years; acquiring valuable new allies on the Baltic front; improving relations with Turkey after two decades of coldness; increasing the importance of the U.S. on the Pacific front and East Asia in general; and being able to exploit new frictions between rivals, including the Chinese, Iranians, and Russians.

China’s leaders are unhappy not only because the Russians proved unreliable (they have always known this), but because of the soaring prices of raw materials and because, as good investors, they need stability and order. And if it is true that Putin, in his visit to Xi Jinping for the Winter Olympics, really failed to warn him of what was to come, then China’s resentment of Russia is multiplying.  Moreover, if the common tactical objective of Moscow and Beijing is the weakening of the United States, this war is instead strengthening it.

And, in Tehran, Iran’s leaders are unhappy because the war has blocked the signing of a new nuclear deal, which Iran desperately needs.

The United States has a vested interest in the continuation of this war, possibly at low intensity. But the Russian war on Ukraine will not solve America’s problems. The war cannot suddenly or definitively reverse the erosion of American influence, after decades of relative decline.

China will not give up its strategic goals, nor will Europe: The unity of the anti-Russian front on the Continent strictly depends what happens in Ukraine, and therefore is provisional. Electoral victories of Russia’s friends Victor Orbán in Hungary and Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia indicate that their populations were not upset by the invasion of Ukraine.

In France, lines of communication with Russia have never been interrupted, and if Paris found a pretext to reactivate its traditional strategy of attention toward Moscow, Italy and Greece would fall into line, and Germany would be forced to choose between the U.S. on one hand and Europe (and gas) on the other.

And in the wake of success, the U.S. runs the risk that it, too, may overplay its hand. By continuing  to bully China and India, it can only reconsolidate the now loosened ties between these two countries and Russia.

Worse still: Many in Washington, blinded by ideology, fail to understand how strategically precious Russia is for American foreign policy. A weak but intact Russia can divide Europe in useful ways, as during the Cold War, and serve as a counterweight to China. But many in Washington still think of Russia as the “evil empire,” deserving to be wiped once and for all from the geopolitical map of the world. If such ideological and emotional considerations prevail over geopolitical calculations, the consequences for international relations will be disastrous for everyone. But it would be much worse for the United States, which has more power to lose than any other country.

In an ideal world, geopolitics would be useless. In the real world, it is indispensable. In a theater of incessant and multiple conflicts between interests, it is geopolitics that delves into complexity and identifies the limits of action: what is possible and what is impossible to do—or, better still, what is impossible to do without hurting oneself unnecessarily.

For Russia or the United States or any other country, any attempt to make ideological and emotional aspirations prevail over the geopolitical calculation of constraints is a sure recipe for disaster.

The post Is the U.S. Winning Russia’s War in Ukraine? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And heeding the advice of former California governors now seems like the best path for humanity.

It’s improbable that these two ex-governors—one known for head-scratching aphorisms, the other for silly one-liners—are now global voices of reason and champions of peace. It’s also logical, in a perverse kind of way. As the world goes mad and sets itself on fire, where better to turn for wisdom and experience than crazy and combustible California?

Brown’s and Schwarzenegger’s ascents to sage status reflect the extent to which California, the world’s fifth largest economy, functions as its own country, with its governor serving as a second American president. California governors now sign international treaties, contribute to global climate policy, and constitute a fourth branch of the U.S. government—employing regulations, litigation, and our markets to check the president, Congress, and the courts.

When California governors leave office, they maintain high profiles but carry less political baggage than presidents, whose foibles our polarized and partisan media cover obsessively. The world and the U.S. lack statesmen, and Brown and Schwarzenegger have used their position and notoriety to fill the diplomatic void.

They’re doing so in a very California way, combining big visions and hard realism in statements with global reach. At a time of war, they mix nostalgic appeals to their own personal histories with dreams of a more peaceful future. But they do this with a blunt style that challenges the knee-jerk good-and-evil moralism that plagues America’s national politics. They argue for making common cause with rivals and enemies—the sort of hard-headed inclusion that represents the California idea at its best.

Schwarzenegger’s most recent message was for Russia in a short video he posted online that went viral in a matter of minutes. In the clip, Schwarzenegger pointedly told President Putin, whose Twitter account follows Schwarzenegger’s, to stop the war in Ukraine.

But the former governor also rejected the increasingly commonplace American condemnation of all things Russian. Instead, his message also embraced the country and its people. He employed his incredibly rich and varied life story—Arnold may have met more people than anyone alive, with the possible exception of the Dalai Lama—to talk about his visits to the country and relationships with friends there.

That approach, along with Russian subtitles and distribution over Telegram, the messaging app popular with Russians, gave Schwarzenegger an opening to try to penetrate misinformation and propaganda. He spoke bluntly about what is actually happening in Ukraine, directly addressing Russian soldiers there and noting that they themselves were victims of their government’s lies. The video’s most powerful, heartbreaking moment came when Schwarzenegger spoke to those soldiers about a subject he used to avoid: the war history of his father, an Austrian policeman who fought with the Nazis during World War II.

“The Russian government has lied not only to its citizens but to its soldiers,” he said. “When my father arrived in Leningrad, he was all pumped up on the lies of his government. When he left Leningrad, he was broken—physically and mentally. He lived the rest of his life in pain—pain from a broken back, pain from the shrapnel that always reminded him of those terrible years and pain from the guilt that he felt.

“To the Russian soldiers listening to this broadcast: You already know much of the truth that I’m speaking. You’ve seen it in your own eyes. I don’t want you to be broken like my father.”

As Schwarzenegger tugs at the heart, Brown—concerned about growing conflict between China and the West—hammers on heads.

In a remarkable essay published this month in The New York Review of Books, Brown took dead aim at calls in the American government—from both parties—promoting greater conflict with China.

He did so by framing the last 20 years as a period of war and human suffering, triggered by American actions after 9/11. America’s actions abroad, he wrote, “have killed more than 900,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the United States an estimated $8 trillion.” The country could have spent those dollars, he noted, on education, research, infrastructure, and other services.

But do our country and leadership even realize what we have done? “One might assume that such disastrous results, and the ignominious end of the war in Afghanistan last year, would lead to a period of reflection and soul-searching,” Brown wrote. “Yet no such inquiry has occurred—at least not one that fully grapples with the shocking self-deception, pervasive misreading of events, and powerful groupthink that drove the longest war in American history.”

Brown points to books and articles by “think tank specialists and defense department insiders,” like The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby, for continuing to promote that groupthink. These policymakers now advocate provocative actions that increase the chances of a catastrophic war. These include more military competition, “selective nuclear proliferation” (in Colby’s formulation) to friendly countries, and alliances that might turn a Chinese invasion of Taiwan into a wider conflict with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines.

The ex-governor, who leads the California-China Climate Institute, a think tank at UC Berkeley, is clear-eyed about the Chinese government’s dangerous and provocative behavior, from its treatment of Uyghurs to its repression of Chinese immigrants overseas. But Brown argues powerfully that war and conflict will only make things worse.

“Framing the China threat as irredeemably antagonistic, as many ‘political realists’ are currently doing, misses the reality that both countries—to prosper and even to survive—must cooperate as well as compete,” he wrote. In the piece, and in a recent interview with Politico, he warned against a “Manichean mood” in America, “a philosophy of ‘The world is sharply divided between good and bad, and we’re good, and they’re bad.’”

Brown argued instead for vigorous U.S. engagement with China, with a focus on avoiding catastrophes. He calls this strategy “planetary realism.” It is “an informed realism that faces up to the unprecedented global dangers caused by carbon emissions, nuclear weapons, viruses, and new disruptive technologies, all of which cannot be addressed by one country alone.”

That’s a powerful and convincing argument. And it should carry extra weight coming from someone who spent four terms governing California, a state that produces more than its share of disasters and catastrophes.

The world needs Brown and Schwarzenegger to keep counseling all of us. It’s a role that ex-presidents used to fill. But that was before Bill Clinton got effectively sidelined by his foundation’s lack of transparency, before George W. Bush became a painter, before Barack Obama went on a weird narcissistic bender with Bruce Springsteen, and before Donald Trump attempted a coup.

So, maybe it’s time for our last two governors to team up. They complement each other, the Philosopher-Nerd and the Muscleman-Movie Star. And their logos, pathos, and wise interventions might just save the world from itself.

The post Can Two Ex-California Governors Stop World War III? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can we decipher the nuances of today’s form of extreme nationalism? And what is new about it when compared to, for instance, the ultra-nationalism that led to fascism and dictatorships in the 20th century?

To answer that question, consider today’s nationalist political movements like you do the vegetable section in your grocery store. There are a variety of neo-national movements and leaders, but they are all metaphorically vegetables.

Varieties of neo-nationalism range from political movements and parties (think Brexit or the National Front, rebranded the National Rally, in France under Marine Le Pen), to neo-nationalist leaning governments (with wannabe autocrats like Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the evolving story of Modi’s India), to illiberal democracies (Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Andrzej Duda’s Poland and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey), to authoritarian states (think China, Russia, and North Korea at the extreme end).

Hybrids abound. But most neo-national movements, parties, and governments are characterized by some combination of right-wing anti-immigrant, nativist, anti-science, anti-globalist (sometimes couched as anti-Western), and protectionist sentiments. When in power, they seek to squelch or even eradicate criticism.

And neo-nationalist leaders often have a core constituency that includes conservative religious groups—a marriage one finds in India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and here in the U.S., but not in secular China where the Communist Party is the state religion.

Some of this is familiar. Like right-wing populist movements in the past, neo-nationalist supporters and parties are often reacting to their own sense of waning political power, and perceived declines in social status and economic opportunity. Demagogues, then, step in to feed off a desire to preserve or reclaim a seemingly lost national cultural and political identity.

In Russia, you can find such backward-looking neo-nationalism. Vladimir Putin is infatuated with asserting Russia’s power and place in the world in order to revive nationalism and reclaim in some modern form both Russia’s tsarist and Soviet empire.

But if you really want to go back to the future, go to China.

Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is a rewind to hero-worship politics. He demands increased loyalty to the party, and has built a personal cult around himself reminiscent of the founding leader of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Xi’s goals are to preserve the existing domestic political order, to restore territory seen as lost (namely Taiwan), and to pursue a new global economic dominance and increasingly military presence in Asia, and beyond. Xi’s autocratic China is also portrayed as a superior model to established democracies that seem incapable of governing.

One of Xi Jinping’s earliest nativist edicts—in 2013, just a year after assuming power—was for the Chinese people to avoid Western values and what he called the “seven unmentionables.” These included “Western constitutional democracy,” human rights, media independence, promoting “universal values” in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership, judicial independence, pro-market liberalism, and “nihilist” criticism of the party’s past.

For all the attention on autocratic regimes like Russia or China, it is the illiberal democracies that are growing the fastest in number. These are nations that often in the aftermath of dictatorships elect their leaders but have no history or culture of participatory democracy and civil liberties. Elected right-wing nationalists then establish a political environment that employs a mixture of corruption, demagoguery, and a lighter version of repressive regimes of the past, often with wide popular support.

Some illiberal democracies border on being authoritarian regimes. These are characterized by indefinite presidential terms, the repression or control of media outlets, erosion of judicial independence, the transfer of state resources to an oligarchy, and the persecution of opponents—along with the maintenance of some semblance of open elections.

Perpetually staying in power is often one major objective of neo-nationalist leaders. An example is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In a call to arms, in 2014, Orbán infamously declared the end of liberal democracy in Hungary and his intention to build “an illiberal new state based on national values.” He cited China, Russia, and Turkey as his inspiration and encouraged others to follow. Indeed, autocratic leaning states and their leaders are supporting each other, sometimes to mitigate international sanctions, other times militarily—Putin’s support of Belarus’s autocratic government being one example.

What fuels the popular support for neo-nationalism? Orbán and other protagonists leverage the politics of fear to attack and blame perceived enemies, domestic and foreign, wrapping themselves in a mantle of patriotism. Such tactics were prevalent in previous forms of extreme nationalism.

But the causes and practices of today’s breed of nationalism (and hence the prefix neo) are newer and modern, and have three accelerants.

The first is the rapid pace of globalization and the economic uncertainty and fear it produces. While globalization, and specifically the growth of transnational trade, promised cheaper goods and a rise in living standards, it also led to economic stagnation and oftentimes an actual decline in living standards among lower- and middle-income populations in regions of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and elsewhere.

The second accelerant is the pace of immigration and demographic changes among and within many countries. Today’s shifts in demography are historic, and are marked by mass immigration, mostly to Western economies, caused in part by the search for jobs as well as displacement caused by war, poverty, climate, and dysfunctional societies.

Open borders, open markets on an unprecedented scale, and the shock of the Great Recession, are all widely recognized causes for a populist reaction characterized by anti-globalism, nativism, protectionism, and opposition to immigration.

The third accelerant is the ability of a new generation of populists and demagogues to use technology and social networks to promote themselves, find allies for their movements, both at home and abroad, and attack enemies. The ease at which social media and its algorithms can distribute false narratives has added considerably to the power of political movements. Right-wing populists in many nations now bypass conventional media and build followings—like President Trump using Twitter for significant policy directives sandwiched between aspersions on political opponents.

Technology in the service of neo-nationalist leaders does not end there. In China, Russia, and in many illiberal democracies, new technologies offer paths for monitoring and punishing dissent, for spreading disinformation, and concerted efforts to subvert established democracies—what is termed sharp power.

Xi’s China, for all its backward-looking cult-making, has led both technologically and tactically. The state has imposed firewalls controlling access to websites and strict rules on what can be discussed. The 1989 events in Tiananmen Square are off limits to the web and discussion in China. So is the mass incarceration of ethnic Muslim Uighurs, again part of a nationalist drive for conformity.

Such suppression is blatantly overt, but other tools are more subtle and decidedly novel. Beijing has developed a Social Credit System using data sources, such as artificial intelligence and face recognition technologies, to give each citizen a score on their social and political conformist behavior—with the threat of penalties and even jail for those that stray. Putin’s Russia is experimenting with this in Moscow.

Combining new and more conventional forms of surveillance, like encouraging citizens to report on each other’s broadly-defined seditious activity, sometimes leads to arrests, or the loss of a job. It is not so much the number of academics, civil rights lawyers, or other pro-democracy advocates put in jail, but the message it sends to induce fear and encourage political conformity—whether in China, increasingly in Hong Kong, or elsewhere. One objective is self-censorship. And it works, particularly if practiced over a long period.

It’s crucial to note that nationalism—whether in new forms, or in revivals with new characteristics—is not solely the domain of right-wing politics. Modern nationalism also has a variant on the left side of the political divide. The left shares anti-globalist views espoused by nationalists of the right—for example that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), multilateral trade agreements, and even the EU, are conspiracies to increase inequality and erode national sovereignty. And there is intolerance for civil debate on both sides of the political spectrum.

One might also consider the nuances of nationalism that led to the Arab Spring. Nationalist movements that started with calls for participatory democracy and economic opportunity eventually resulted in religious conservative governments or new autocratic regimes—think Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and, perhaps, Tunisia since Kais Saied’s presidential coup earlier this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic should have eroded the attraction of neo-nationalists’ messaging. Think about the remarkably short period—just one year—from discovery of the virus to the creation of multiple effective vaccines. This governance and scientific success was built on decades of publicly funded biomedical research and it should have elevated the value of global collaboration and scientific inquiry.

Instead, the virus provided an opportunity to reinforce extremist views, spread fantastical conspiracy theories, and thus solidify and expand the power of savvy neo-nationalist leaders in much of the world. China used the pandemic as partial cover to crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong. In other corners of the globe, extreme nationalists used the pandemic to argue that international organizations are ineffective and pose a threat to national sovereignty.

Where is the world headed? Numerous non-profits monitor and provide data on this march of autocrats and right-wing nationalist movements. Freedom House, an NGO that monitors global freedom, has chronicled a long-term decline in democratic governments “broad enough to be felt by those living under the cruelest dictatorships, as well as by citizens of long-standing democracies.”

Varieties of Democracy or V-Dem, which uses an extensive dataset relying on local country experts, estimates that some 68 percent of the world’s population live under autocrats and autocrat-leaning governments—up from 48 percent in 2010.

Optimists might see a few signs of slowdown in the march of neo-nationalist political leaders and autocratic-leaning governments. The desire of young people in Hungary and Poland to stay in the European Union poses a political obstacle for nativist policies. The neo-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party just lost seats in the Bundestag. Trump lost to Biden. In France, Le Pen’s party is not making major gains, at the moment.

Societies with strong democratic traditions and civil discourse may appear to be partially immune to the worst scenarios of nationalism gone haywire.  But danger lurks for both established and new democracies. Donald Trump, despite his near-coup, remains a viable political candidate and has created a playbook for Brazil’s Bolsonaro, who has insisted that he can only lose the pending presidential election if it is stolen.

Perhaps democracy is more fragile than many of us would like to think.

Writing in the midst of the Great Depression and reflecting on nationalist movements in Europe and America, Sinclair Lewis warned in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here of a dystopian American future in which a charismatic and power-hungry demagogue leverages fear and nationalism to become president. The first American writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, Lewis gave voice to a worry that fascism could emerge in arguably the world’s first modern republic as an outgrowth of economic disruption and populist anger.

The United States has an antiquated electoral process, a justice system seemingly incapable of swiftly prosecuting a treasonous political leader, and a Republican Party cheering on a possible autocrat. Only a year ago the U.S. was close to a complete constitutional meltdown instigated by a morally bankrupt neo-nationalist.

It can happen here.

The post What’s New About Neo-Nationalism, Anyway? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, titled “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” and part of a series on global challenges called “The World We Want,” offered a fast-paced look at dozens of aspects of the Chinese-American relationship, from their economic interdependence to their 5G networks, and from their military competition to the mutual hostility between countries that shows up in public opinion surveys.

The conversation also turned repeatedly to the possibility of military conflict of Taiwan, with two panelists suggesting China could move to reunite the island by force with the mainland in the next few years.

The event’s moderator, New York Times associate managing editor Philip P. Pan, who spent much of his career reporting in China, started the conversation by asking to what extent the features of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union can be seen in conflict between the U.S. and China today.

Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished University of Toronto historian and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us, said that the two conflicts both involved two large powers with global ambitions and reach. “The United States and the Soviet Union claimed to be speaking for a better part of the world,” she said. “We have elements of that in the current tension between China and the United States.”

But, she suggested, it is the differences that matter more. The U.S.-China relationship, MacMillan said, is not as ideological as the old Cold War, and the U.S. has a much closer relationship with China, especially as a leading trading partner, than it did with the economically isolated USSR. Another crucial difference: The U.S. and the Soviet Union were such dominant superpowers that they were able to pressure other countries in the world to take their side, while today’s world is more multipolar, with other major powers having enough autonomy and weight not to be drawn in.

Still, MacMillan cautioned, the fact that the U.S. and China are inherently closer to each other might actually produce more friction.

She recalled that before World War I, Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners; four members of the British cabinet had been educated in Germany, and the British royal family’s lineage was quite German. Despite these elite connections, MacMillan said, public opinion turned hostile in each country against the other as war broke out.

“That is what concerns me today,” said MacMillan, nodding to the increasingly negative public sentiment in China and the U.S. toward the other at present. “The historical record isn’t that reassuring.”

Another panelist, Oriana Mastro, an FSI Center Fellow at Stanford University, warned that popular comparisons of the U.S.-China conflict to the Cold War could produce flawed strategies for dealing with today’s problems.

China, she said, is a profoundly different rival than the Soviet Union in that it is not trying to turn democracies into autocracies, and is not perceived as a military or security threat to other countries. Because China is in Asia, the most dynamic and populous part of the world, “China doesn’t have to be a power elsewhere to be a superpower; dominating Asia is enough, and that’s where it is focusing its energies and its military.”

But that focus on Asia might make this conflict more dangerous in some ways than the Cold War. “The military confrontation between China and the United States is going to happen in Asia,” said Mastro. “This competition is much more likely to turn hot than it ever was with the Soviet Union.”

After Pan asked whether countries would be pressed to choose sides between two superpowers, as in the Cold War, Mastro, who is also a Defense and Foreign Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that China is not going to form its own bloc because it does not want a coalition forming against it. She referred to writing from Chinese strategists noting that the U.S. already has locked up the best partners—the world’s democracies, and richest nations.

Instead, she said, China is turning its lack of coalition into an advantage in its contest with the U.S. While the American government makes heavy demands of partner countries (such as economic or democratic reform, or providing military bases), China typically asks other nations merely to choose neutrality in the U.S.-China conflict, and to avoid talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

“When countries choose neutrality, when they choose not to take a side at all, in effect, they are choosing China,” Mastro said. “It’s very hard for the United States to build coalitions against China … because we ask so much more.”

Meanwhile, while China is more focused on economic issues than military ones, Mastro warned that the country is using its extensive economic and technological expertise to enhance the lethality of its military. And China’s ability to gather a lot of data through its technological expansion could allow it to target elites in other countries.

For instance, she said, “They could use targeted cyberattacks to disrupt someone’s life who says something bad about Taiwan.”

Striking a much more optimistic tone than the other two panelists, the third panelist, UCLA Anderson distinguished professor Christopher S. Tang, argued that China’s new trade agreement with the European Union—in which China expressed new willingness to cooperate on technology transfer and meeting international labor standards—might provide an opening for less conflict, and more peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and China.

Tang said the U.S. and other countries should say to China, “We embrace you, we recognize your success, but if you want to win respect in the world, you need to become a leader” in protecting the environment, workers, and intellectual property.

More broadly, Tang argued that the rest of the world needs the U.S. and China to set a strong example of peaceful cooperation. He cited four major global problems that threaten both countries that would be easier to solve if the U.S. and China worked together: COVID recovery and global public health, combating climate change, reducing poverty, and caring for the rapidly aging population

“I think there is a window,” said Tang, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s stated commitment, at last month’s World Economic Forum, to solve global problems. “Why not leverage this moment?”

He described the U.S-China rivalry as primarily economic, and compared it to a 50-year-long chess match. He described President Trump’s trade war as a middle game of this chess contest, which had failed to advance American economic interests, and suggested that President Biden could work to “keep it to a draw … so there will be no winners and no losers.”

The Zócalo/University of Toronto virtual event drew a global audience, and it concluded with questions from the YouTube chat room about whether the Cold War strategy of containment applies to China (not really, panelists said), how Canada should deal with China (carefully and in partnership with other countries, MacMillan answered), about technology’s role in the rivalry, and about how the U.S. should respond to any Chinese military aggression, especially against Taiwan.

On that last subject, both MacMillan and Mastro were emphatic that the threat of conflict over Taiwan is more serious and urgent than generally understood, in part because Chinese leadership is losing patience. Mastro pointed to opinion polls showing that a majority of Chinese citizens support armed reunification with Taiwan—and expect it within three to five years.

That could mean we’re heading toward a very hot U.S.-China war.

The post The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Ching-Ching Ni

The post A Letter From Beijing, Where There Is No Normal to Go Back to appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My family has been navigating the shifting geography of COVID-19 for months, as the virus first emerged in China, our country of residence, and then moved onto our native home, the United States. We’re Americans with a home in Virginia, but a couple of years ago I took a job in Shanghai, and we moved there, with my husband commuting back and forth to his job in D.C. When the coronavirus began to shut down China over the Lunar New Year holidays in January, we were on vacation in Japan. Once Shanghai schools began announcing closures, we decided the girls should fly back to the U.S. unaccompanied to stay with my husband, while I returned to work in Shanghai. The subsequent Chinese lockdown would separate us for two months.

By mid-March, we had reached a pivot point. The girls had just enrolled in their old Virginia public schools when those schools announced a shutdown. Meanwhile, their Shanghai school was sending out upbeat notices about reopening in the near future. And with U.S. cases on the rise and China tightening its borders to prevent re-infection, I figured it was now or never.

I was on the ground in the U.S. for less than 36 hours, but saw enough to be alarmed. If I hadn’t volunteered quite forcefully that I had just come from living in China, I don’t think I would have gotten anyone to check me for fever before entering the U.S. Once I declared myself, I was escorted to a “CDC line” for a cursory temp check (with a large group of returned Mormon missionaries from Europe), given a CDC flier about COVID-19 symptoms, and asked to stay home and minimize my trips outside for 14 days. While on the ground, I did not leave my house except to ride with my husband to pick up some takeout; I was stunned at how full my hometown restaurants were.

The girls and I landed back in China on March 19, and our arrival there was the opposite of my entry to the U.S. Our flight from Tokyo landed at 11:45 am, but we sat on Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport tarmac for two hours before immigration officials let us disembark. During those hours we filled out health forms that asked, among other questions, whether we had sore throats, runny noses, or fevers, and whether we took any medication to reduce fevers. I debated whether to report a stuffy nose that I was sure was caused by allergies and not any other illness.

After they let us off the plane, we were put into a line that did not move for another two hours. When we finally reached the front of that line, we sat down with a man in full PPE—a white hazmat suit, face-shield, and glasses. He reviewed our health forms. I did say I had experienced the occasional stuffy nose, but insisted it was because of allergies. I held my breath. 

He paused, but decided to let us through to the next stop—a line for a Xerox machine run by police officers in hazmat suits, where we had to make two copies of our health forms. The senior official in a hazmat suit also put yellow stickers on our passports—meaning that we would be required to take the COVID-19 tests and undergo mandatory 14-day quarantine either at home or a hotel.

The next line was for passport control, and then another line for a body temperature scanner, and then another interview with another set of hazmat-suited individuals who would decide whether we were “high-risk” and needed to go to the hospital to get our COVID-19 tests or whether we could go to our home district to have the tests performed there. Luckily, we got waved into the home district channel. That meant we would be allowed to pick up our luggage and move to a line for a bus to our home district in Shanghai. 

In that line, we were required to download an app and provide our passport information. Then another hazmat-suited person asked if we wished to do our quarantine at home or at a hotel (they offered two levels of hotel, one that was about $30 per person per night and another that was $60 per person per night). We opted for the home quarantine—which would be allowed only if our neighborhood committee and building management agreed. Since we live in a building of foreigners like ourselves, we were pretty sure the building management would agree. The official asked for our passports and informed us that they would be returned to us only after our COVID tests. 

After a 45-minute wait, we were asked to form a line. Police officers stood at the front of our line and at the back. We were led to a large tour bus, and got onboard. We pulled out of the airport parking lot around 6:30 pm. We had been in Shanghai for almost seven hours at this point. The girls were amazingly patient with this process—it helped that the 13-year-old had her phone and could watch TikToks; the 10-year-old alternately read and napped on the luggage cart.

The bus arrived in front of a large gymnasium around 8 p.m. I turned on my phone mapping app to find out where we were—it was the Xuhui District Sports Middle School. After a temp check, the hazmat-suited workers took our names, assigned us ID numbers (I was I7), and led us all to a cordoned-off section of the gym. 

Our bus was dubbed “Group I,” so we were led to Section I. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer and a flat-screen TV at the front of the section, and what appeared to be a selection of videos on demand. We were each assigned a reclining lawn chair where we would wait to be called for our COVID tests. Volunteers in hazmat suits passed out new blankets, bags full of bakery breads, imported German milk, masks, and water. I was impressed by their foreigner-friendly care package—they knew their audience. Around 8:30 p.m., another hazmat-suited individual called us up and led us to an outdoor alley behind the middle school. There, seated at a table under an awning, were two nurses, who swabbed each of our nostrils and our throats as well. I double-checked the vial to make sure it had my name. Once we were done, we were escorted back to our lawn chairs to wait. 

I spent a sleepless night in my lawn chair, worried that after two months of staying virus-free in China, I might have managed to pick it up in the U.S. during my 36 hours on the ground. What if the girls were asymptomatic carriers: Would they really separate me from my children? (The answer is yes—all infected children are separated from their parents and sent to the children’s hospital.) And if I were a carrier, where would my kids go? I watched the volunteers spray down the chairs of travelers who had finished their waits and were off to their homes. Even now, I feel outrage that the U.S. still does not have enough tests for the symptomatic, while China had enough to test asymptomatic foreigners. 
 
No one ever told us we were negative. But at 2:30 a.m., we were informed that it was time to go home, and we boarded a bus. More paperwork awaited us in front of our apartment building, where the security guards for our complex and the doctor who would be supervising our case (also in full hazmat gear) met us. Finally, after we promised not to leave our apartment, our passports were returned to us, and at exactly 4:03 a.m., some 16 hours after landing, we were finally home.  
 
That morning, a young woman in a hazmat suit knocked on our door and took our temperatures at 10 a.m. She returned at 3 p.m. to take our temps again. This routine was repeated for 14 days before we’d be permitted to circulate in the general Shanghai population. We chatted occasionally with our temperature takers (they were a rotating cast of twentysomething women). Initially, a man would accompany them to film the temperature reading, but by the final few days, the women came alone.

A few days after our return, we discovered that authorities had placed a sensor on our door. And more than a week after the start of our quarantine, we received a note informing us we were not to open our door more than five times a day. Because we were trapped in the apartment, we had to have everything—groceries, toilet paper, takeout meals—delivered. There were a couple of days where we were inefficient with our ordering and had more than five deliveries—and more than five door openings. Oops.

Entering China was a long, tedious, and dystopian process, but extremely orderly and well-organized. All the foreigners waiting in the long lines with us at the airport and testing center were polite and patient as well. We understood why the Chinese were doing it. On the day we landed, five people right away were found to have the virus: a Chinese husband and wife returning from New York, a French citizen and a Chinese student traveling from France, and a Chinese student returning from Switzerland. Nine days after we returned to Shanghai, the Chinese shut down the border to all foreigners in an effort to prevent the further re-importation of COVID cases. I am so glad I made that mad dash back to pick up the kids when I did.

After 14 days of being locked away with my family, where we miraculously got along much better than expected (a combination of online school and work kept us pretty busy), we were cleared to exit quarantine. We bid goodbye to our cheerful temperature-taker lady, who informed us that this was her last day as well—and that she would be going back to her real job, at the dental clinic. The doctor on our case texted me our health freedom papers.

We can now walk the streets again, but we have been cautious about re-entering Shanghai society. Markets are bustling and the subway is nearly full; though the manicure shop, a women’s clothing boutique, the draft beer bar, a branch of a popular bubble tea chain, and the quirky hipster gift shop didn’t survive, most of the businesses in our neighborhood have re-opened. But I find the crowds a little unnerving. We’d gotten maybe a bit too used to keeping our distance and keeping to ourselves.

Still, Shanghai is almost back, and so are we. 

The post A Letter From Shanghai, Where a Powerful System of Control Prevails Over COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A soldier stops him. “You can’t see Mao,” he says. “He’s dead.”

The worker returns the next day, and again asks for Mao. The same soldier turns him away: “You can’t see him. He’s dead.”

The third day, the worker returns, and insists: “I must see Chairman Mao.”

The soldier loses his temper. “I told you yesterday, and the day before that. Chairman Mao is dead. Dead! Dead! Dead!”

“I know,” says the worker, with a smile. “I just love hearing you say it.”
 

The author, seen here at age 5 in Hong Kong, where he and his family lived until abruptly moving to Beijing, after the normalization of U.S.-China relations. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

That is the first joke I remember learning. I was 6 years old when I committed it to memory and started retelling it.

You may say that a small child telling a joke like that is “not normal.” Then again, we’re seeing and hearing a lot these days that is “not normal.” It’s what we say when we see slippage in our democracies, when authoritarian leaders violate norms.

But that joke was more than normal for Joe Mathews, age 6. In fact, it was normalization.

From ages 5 to 7, I was a pint-sized participant in the creation of the modern relationship between the two most important nations on earth.

At the end of 1978, Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping announced what was called normalization—the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, after three decades of estrangement following the 1949 Communist revolution.

Normalization immediately opened up China to Americans.

So early in 1979, not long after Deng mounted a tour of the U.S. to introduce himself, I moved to Beijing, arriving on a plane with many American diplomats and their families. I had no official status. But I was the son of American journalists, Jay Mathews of The Washington Post and Linda Mathews of the Los Angeles Times, who were two of the first four U.S. newspaper reporters given visas to live and report in China.

It has been 40 years now since that fateful spring that put China, the U.S., and the world on a different path. The experience has never left me. Beijing is the first city I knew intimately, at least as well as a child can. The Chinese capital, during the years of 1979 and 1980, is where I first became aware of the outside world. And my time there left lasting and powerful impressions—about history, about hotels, about childhood, and especially about the real meanings of democracy, tyranny, and resistance.
 

The author’s parents, competing newspaper journalists, took him on assignments around China. This photo is from one such trip in 1979. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

Mine is a California family, tracing our heritage to Scotland and Ireland, but for nearly a century the joke has been that we are secretly Chinese. In the 1920s, my great-grandfather, the Naval Commander Raymond Corcoran, moved his wife and children, including my paternal grandmother, to the small Shandong Peninsula seaport of Chefoo (now Yantai), where he was posted. It was another delicate moment of transition in the history of colonization and foreign influence in China; the Germans were moving out, and the Japanese were moving in. So the Americans decided to step up their naval presence.

The Corcorans loved the place, in no small part because the Chinese treated them so well. As Americans, they were seen as a better class of barbarians—much nicer than the British and Japanese imperialists who had humiliated China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And so my grandmother and her siblings would eventually fill their California homes with Chinese antiques and stories of the Chinese people they had known, whom they often praised for their ingenuity at surviving poverty and China’s unenlightened rulers.

These family stories deeply influenced my father, who studied Mandarin and Chinese history in college, and then lobbied his editors at The Washington Post to send him to East Asia. In 1976, when I was 3, we moved to Hong Kong, where my mother worked first at the Asian Wall Street Journal and then at the L.A. Times (Yes, my parents competed against each other on the same beat—and yes, they are still married to each other, though that is another story).

In Hong Kong, I went to an American-run Montessori school, dodged the wild dogs in my neighborhood of Repulse Bay, and welcomed a baby brother, Peter.

But mostly we waited for normalization, which would open China to us. Nixon had gone to China in 1972, but turmoil in Chinese politics (including Mao’s death in 1976) and American politics (including Watergate) meant that the effort to normalize relations stalled. It wasn’t until the second half of 1978, when Deng rose to power, that the final talks necessary to reestablish diplomatic relations began. In a matter of months the U.S. agreed to Chinese demands that it abandon diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and the talks concluded quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that when we got permission to move, we left for Beijing before we’d found a place to live or work. So, in 1979, my parents made a highly consequential decision: to move our young family of four into a 15th floor suite in the Beijing Hotel.

There is no hotel quite like it. The Beijing Hotel was the city’s leading spot for international visitors. First opened in 1915, it was really two buildings—a modern tower with 17 floors of rooms, connected to an older wing, used mostly for events, with traditional Chinese lobbies and decorations.

The hotel was in the very center of the political universe, on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, next to the Forbidden City, and a short walk from Beijing’s world-famous monuments. From the window of our room, I could peer into Tiananmen Square and see the Great Hall of the People, from which the Communists ruled China.

My parents sought other housing in Beijing, but never found it. So the hotel—specifically Room 1532—became our home for the next two years. My parents also worked in the hotel, renting other rooms as their offices. They sometimes complained about raising two young children in a hotel, but my brother and I learned to appreciate the place—and rule it.
 

Lau Lin (right), a Chinese amah, or little mother, took care of the author (center) and his little brother in Hong Kong and then moved with the family to Beijing. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

In Kay Thompson’s classic children’s story, Eloise, a 6-year-old girl lives in The Plaza, the famed hotel on New York’s Central Park, and has the run of the place. She writes on the walls, wanders into strangers’ weddings, and tussles with the housekeeping staff, all while being chased by her English nanny.

My life in the Beijing Hotel was not so different than that.

The hotel had a very professional staff, and rules of comportment that they often recited to me. But I had just turned 6, and didn’t have time for rules.

So I rode my bicycle through the hotel halls, into the lobby, and all over the hotel’s older wing, despite many warnings to stop. My little brother sometimes joined me on his tricycle. We explored every stairwell and closet, raced on the elevators, attended events to which we were not invited, and commandeered empty meeting rooms and the hotel’s small pool hall for our games. We had too much energy to be controlled or confined for long, so the hotel staff—our uncles and aunties, as we called them—sought to pacify us, teaching us Chinese songs, playing with our Matchbox cars, and giving us 6-ounce cans of Coca-Cola (the tiny size was the only one available) or bottles of orange Chinese soda pop. Of course, the sugar only made us more energetic.

We may have been rowdy, but we were not a total nuisance. The hotel was full of important Americans traveling to China to check out new avenues of business. And I served a vital role as unofficial greeter, helping guests find their rooms and pointing the way to local attractions. Many of these early visitors to the Beijing Hotel were U.S. scientists, since Deng’s new Chinese administration had prioritized scientific and academic exchanges. I remember getting lessons in the lobby about black holes and supernovas from visiting American astronomers.

Our policing of the hotel also led to entanglements with American politicians, who raced to Beijing to build connections and help their donors pursue business opportunities. One day, my brother and I were racing our bikes down a hotel corridor when we sped into a large conference room. Peter collided with the leg of a man, who let out a loud “ouch” and fell onto the floor in pain. Our father was called to the scene, and we were made to apologize to the man, who introduced himself as Ed Koch, the mayor of Eloise’s hometown.

Technically, we were not unsupervised. In Hong Kong, my parents had hired Lau Lin, a local amah (the term means little mother), to cook, clean our apartment, and take care of us, and she bravely agreed to accompany us to Beijing. But Ah-Lin, as we called her, wasn’t always able to keep up with our hotel adventures.

She did focus on making sure we got fed—she felt I was too skinny (“Joe has no bottom,” she would complain, in English and her native Cantonese). When she wasn’t able to prepare food in the room (since it was a violation of hotel rules), she made sure we made frequent visits to the hotel dining room. The dining room was split—with Western-style meals served on one side, and Chinese food on another. We patronized both, and soon grew sick of the limited menus at each. I decided not to suffer in silence.

Then, as now, China was a country that suppressed free speech and dissent. But the authorities had foolishly left an opening: the guest book at the Beijing Hotel dining room. For most guests, it was a place to sign your name and let people know where you were from, but I seized it as a platform. Writing in block letters, I tore into the taste and warmth of the food, and the speed of the service, with a direct and undiplomatic American style. I critiqued nearly every meal in English, and a hotel staffer translated my comments into Chinese.

I got noticed. “Who is Joe Mathews?” asked one fellow diner and commenter. “This is rude,” commented another. Hotel management questioned my parents, who tried to stop me. But they had stories to file, and so I persisted. And I got results. Staffers started making dishes for me that were off the menu. They asked my opinion on changes. Not that it stopped me from criticizing. Eventually, the book was removed, and a 6-year-old future journalist learned his first lesson about democratic expression right there, in the heart of a communist dictatorship.

It would not be the last lesson.
 

The blond author and his redheaded brother were celebrities in central Beijing, where they used every kind of transportation to go where they pleased. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

The hotel was only one piece of my education. The streets of Beijing were quite another.

With Ah-Lin or my parents giving chase, I rode my bike all around our neighborhood, joining the thousands of Chinese on bikes (there were still relatively few cars). Before long, the capital’s center, both ancient and modern, felt utterly familiar.

I flew my kite in Tiananmen Square. My brother and I explored every inch of the nearby hutongs—the traditional alley-centered neighborhoods—and threw balls and toys against the walls of the Forbidden City. We joined the crowds lining up to visit the mausoleum that displayed Mao’s body. (“Peasant under glass,” was one expat joke I soon adopted.)

And our local playground was at the Temple of Heaven, constructed by the Yongle Emperor between 1406 and 1420. There I couldn’t help but notice the young and amorous local couples, who spent long afternoons displaying their affections publicly. What I came to understand at that playground has allowed me to brag ever since that I first learned about sex at the Temple of Heaven.

My brother and I were constantly approached by regular Chinese people. Some asked to touch our hair—I was very blonde at that age, and my brother had hair so red that it nearly matched the flag of the People’s Republic. And while Americans remember the “ping-pong” diplomacy that paved the way for Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, I practiced Wiffle ball diplomacy. My dad and I held endless games with a plastic ball and plastic bat, sometimes out at the Ming Tombs, the mausoleums that house Chinese emperors from the 15th and 16th centuries. When we played Wiffle ball in the hotel parking lot along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, hundreds of onlookers would watch, sometimes retrieving foul balls and even taking turns at bat.

Beijingers were nice to small American children, and I identified closely enough with the Chinese worldview that I made drawings of Soviet planes and rockets attacking the Great Wall, and being heroically fought off by Chinese on horseback. Deng’s anti-Soviet propaganda had thoroughly penetrated my consciousness; China fought a brief war with the Soviet-backed regime in Vietnam for less than a month in 1979.

But it wasn’t hard to find anger and conflict in the streets of the city. Fights were common. And arguments were frequent, especially in Beijing’s black markets, where Ah-Lin took me on shopping excursions. So many conversations ended in conflict, with one person declaring “I won’t stand for it” or “Wǒ bù huì zhīchí de,” that I started using the phrase myself.

Even a 6-year-old could see the link between people’s anger and their fear of authorities. So while my parents navigated China diplomatically, and my brother learned the language and customs at his Chinese government preschool, I fought back.

I refused to obey the commands of the omnipresent Chinese soldiers and police when they told me I couldn’t go here or there. I once got into trouble for banging my bicycle into the shin of a soldier who refused to let me back into the hotel. Soon, I was an unwavering opponent of tyranny, in all forms.

At my school, a converted garage at the U.S. Embassy, which I attended with 14 kids of American diplomats, I argued bitterly with the authoritarian principal. “Joe is the most insolent child I have ever known,” she wrote in a note to my parents. When they showed it to me, I replied that she too was pretty insolent—“whatever that means.”

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person in Beijing willing to challenge dictators.
 

The author, age 6, in Nanjing at the Yangtze River Bridge. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

As they traveled the country reporting stories, my parents often took me along. I loved the lake in Hangzhou, a historical center of Chinese art and poetry, and the Yangtze River in Nanjing, perhaps best known to Westerners for Japanese atrocities in the 1930s. We vacationed in Beidaihe, the seaside resort favored by China’s leaders. And my dad even took me by train to Yantai, where we looked for the places where my grandmother had lived as a small child.

Sometimes, my parents used me as a decoy, hoping to avoid the Chinese government surveillance that was a fact of life. Drivers and translators who nominally worked for my parents were expected to report back to the government about their activities. So, Mom and Dad would announce they were taking me for a family outing, and instead we would visit a dissident.

I remember in particular a man named Xu Wenli, a light-fixture repairman who was publishing a pro-democracy magazine called the April 5th Forum. He had a 7-year-old daughter, Xingxing, who I liked to play with. Xu was a patriot who wanted his country to succeed. He was also cautious, and he never attacked the party’s leaders by name. But none of that saved him from being harassed and arrested by the authorities during those years.

Some of my clearest memories of Beijing involve accompanying my parents on their many visits to Democracy Wall. In 1978, at a street corner not far from the Beijing Hotel, citizens had commandeered a long wall to post messages about what had happened to themselves or their loved ones during the Cultural Revolution.

By 1979, these messages had grown more pointed, so that they included aspirations for China and democracy. I remember spending time standing there while my parents copied down the postings on the wall in their notebooks. I didn’t understand much, but I remember thinking that democracy must be something very important if people were willing to stand out in the cold to read about it, especially when wind storms flooded the air with dust from the Gobi Desert.

One man would go even further, using the wall to take on the regime directly.

Deng Xiaoping, as he ramped up his massive campaign to modernize China, had given a speech listing “four modernizations”: science, industry, agriculture, and defense. An electrician named Wei Jingsheng took to the wall to say that Deng had made a major omission: democracy, the “fifth modernization.”

“The leaders of our nation must be informed that we want to take our destiny into our own hands. We want no more gods or emperors. No more saviors of any kind,” Wei wrote. “Democracy, freedom and happiness are the only goals of modernization. Without this fifth modernization, the four others are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”

I remember learning about Wei from my parents, and appreciating his love of challenging authority. “Dissent may not always be pleasant to listen to, and it is inevitable that it will sometimes be misguided,” he famously said. “But it is everyone’s sovereign right. Indeed when government is seen as defective or unreasonable, criticizing it is an unshirkable duty.”

To this day, I often find myself returning to the words of the essay he posted on the Democracy Wall, the “Fifth Modernization”:

What is true democracy? Only when the people themselves choose representatives to manage affairs in accordance with their own will and interests can we speak of democracy. Furthermore, the people must have the power to replace these representatives at any time in order to prevent them from abusing their powers to suppress the people. Is this possible? The citizens of Europe and the United States enjoy just this kind of democracy and could run people like Nixon, de Gaulle … out of office when they wished … In China, however, if a person so much as comments on the now‐deceased “Great Helmsman,” or “Great Man peerless in history,” Mao Zedong, the mighty prison gates and all kinds of unimaginable misfortunes await him.

There are even “certain people” who try to tell us that the Chinese people need a dictator and if he is more dictatorial than the emperors of old, it only proves his greatness. The Chinese people don’t need democracy, they say, for unless it is a “democracy under centralized leadership,” it isn’t worth a cent. Whether you believe this or not is up to you, but there are plenty of recently vacated prison cells waiting for you if you don’t.

Wei was right. In October 1979, he was convicted of publishing counter-revolutionary statements and leaking secret information. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison (and eventually released to the United States, where he still lives).

On January 16, 1980, Deng Xiaoping demanded cancelation of the constitutional right to hang wall posters and stated that the “four great” freedoms of “speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates, and writing big character posters … have never played a positive role in China.”
 

Trips to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs were routine in 1979 and 1980. The author played Wiffle ball at those locations, and along Chang’an Avenue, literally the Avenue of Eternal Peace, in central Beijing. Courtesy of the Mathews family.

A place so hostile to freedom is a tough place for journalists to work. Eventually, China—and hotel living—wore on my parents and their kids. By 1981, we were back in California. Since then, we have mostly watched China from afar, though my dad did go to Beijing in 1989 to report firsthand on the massacre in the very same neighborhood where I once rode my bike and played Wiffle ball.

As an adult, I’ve visited China as a tourist, even staying in the room that was our home at the Beijing Hotel. But I’m not sure I would want to work there. The place is awesome and maddening, paradoxically demonstrating both the infinite potential and the definite limits of human imagination. How could anyone who was there at the time of normalization have imagined exactly how good and how bad things would now get?

Massive advances in economic and technological growth have pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty. Today’s Beijing is literally unrecognizable. And Yantai, which had 65,000 people when my grandmother lived there and 225,000 when I visited in 1980, is now home to more than 6.5 million.

Even less conceivable is the unprecedented technological breadth of today’s Chinese police state, and the rise of another dictatorial figure, Xi Jinping, who engages in mass purges and violates norms while fashioning himself as the new Mao.

Of course, China isn’t the only place experiencing changes that once seemed unimaginable. My own country’s wealth, and power, and technology also have grown beyond expectations. And our democratic norms have withered with a mind-boggling speed and force. American government and American businesses have fashioned a surveillance state far more intrusive than the flesh-and-blood one that spied on my parents back in 1979.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that China and the United States are competitors, two very different powers fighting over control of the world. But from where I live, in California, the two countries and their leaders seem all too much alike. Xi and Trump both embrace nationalism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories in service of extending their power. Both offer slogans and relentless propaganda. Both bully their neighbors.

And while both men talk about dreams, both wallow in false nostalgia. Trump wants to take us back to a whiter America and build his own Great Wall, while Xi suggests reviving the Zhou dynasty, which lasted 800 years, concluding two centuries before the birth of Christ.

I can’t shake the past, either. With everything going on in America now, I find myself thinking about the China I knew as a kid. The anger and bitterness in American life today feels familiar to this onetime Beijing boy. So do the plaintive pleas for democracy, scrawled on every available surface.

And so does the citizen’s conviction that challenging tyranny is an unshirkable duty that you can’t abandon until you’re absolutely sure that the tyrant is dead, dead, dead.

The post What Communist China Taught a 6-Year-Old American Boy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The result is that approximately one million Muslims, most of them Uyghurs—an ethnic group of around 11 million who are concentrated in Xinjiang, a vast western region of China—are currently held in what many sober, cautious people, with little inclination to hyperbole, are calling concentration camps. Though authorities denied the existence of these camps throughout 2017 and most of 2018, this became unsustainable in the face of testimony from former detainees and evidence from satellite imagery and official documents authorizing the camps’ construction.

One can only conclude, as a United Nations human rights panel did in August 2018, that Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”

From interviews with people who’ve been released, it’s become clear that detainees in these camps (who also include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities from the region) have been charged with no crime and are from no particular age, class, or professional demographic. The young and the elderly, farmers and teachers, the secular and the devout: All are being held in newly built or repurposed structures surrounded by barbed wire, reinforced walls, and watchtowers. Every moment of their day is controlled by the authorities. Former detainees have spoken of cramped conditions, sleep deprivation, interrogation, torture, and a sustained campaign of political indoctrination that requires them to denigrate religion, recite political slogans, and sing patriotic songs like “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Though some detainees have been released after a few months, many have been held for a year or more.

The Chinese state has justified the camps by claiming that they are not what they seem. In October 2018, Shohrat Zakir, the Xinjiang governor, described the camps as vocational training centers whose purpose is “to get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and religious extremism.”

The government says that the camps are the latest installment in what the Chinese authorities have called a “People’s War on Terror.” Since September 11, 2001, China has claimed to be fighting a domestic Islamist terrorist threat in Xinjiang, which it has tried to link with al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. In the name of combating this threat, it has built up an extensive security network that combines surveillance technology, digital censorship, and an intrusive police and military presence across the region.

Throughout my 10 years of reporting on Xinjiang, I have attempted to pick apart this tangled claim. While the details certainly matter, my overall conclusion is that the threat has been grossly exaggerated. Sporadic outbursts of violence against the state have taken place over the last three decades, but the overwhelming majority of these incidents are better understood as local, desperate responses to cultural and economic inequalities produced by government policy rather than “terrorist” acts. Even the most violent events in which Uyghurs were involved—the riots in Urumqi in 2009 that left at least 200 dead, the killings at a train station in Kunming in 2014, and the attack on a market in Urumqi the same year—had disparate causes and motivations. Both the West’s war on terror and the consequent rise in Islamophobia have facilitated the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang.

In fact, these repressive policies are an attempt to find a long-term solution to a “problem” that has nothing to do with terrorism or religious extremism, but stems from the history of the region and its peoples. The geographic boundaries of the area now called “Xinjiang,” or “New Territory,” only took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Qing dynasty conquered the area—albeit partially at first. (It had been only loosely part of earlier dynasties.)

Even after the Qing took control, the area remained culturally and economically oriented toward the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Only with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 did Xinjiang become fully incorporated into China. Officially sanctioned Chinese histories today deny this by stating that, “Xinjiang has since ancient times been an inseparable part of the motherland,” a position that few Chinese historians held before the early 20th century.

Though the term “Uyghur” has a long history dating back to the sixth century, it’s been used to designate different groups of people whose attributes and fortunes have shifted with the flux of kingdoms and empires. In its current sense, “Uyghur” is generally agreed to be the result of political and intellectual debates within the region in the late 19th and early 20th century—what historian David Brophy calls a “palimpsest of Islamic, Turkic, and Soviet notions of national history and identity.” The term found purchase with the people in Xinjiang a century ago because it reflected a sense of shared identity based on common religious beliefs, social traditions, language and culture, and some degree of physical resemblance.

Uyghurs’ awareness of their deep roots in the region drives a strong sense of identification that takes precedence over contemporary notions of the “Chinese nation,” or “Zhonghua minzu.” Uyghur culture, traditions, and identity are the manifestation of this separate history.

It is this history which has now become problematic for the Chinese Communist Party. Even Uyghurs’ long attachment to the region, which the full name of the region acknowledges—the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—has come under attack. Yasheng Sidike, the mayor of the regional capital Urumqi, wrote in a newspaper article that Xinjiang wasn’t the home of Uyghurs, but of all ethnicities, and opined that “the Uyghur people are members of the Chinese family, not descendants of the Turks, let alone anything to do with Turkish people.”

Across Xinjiang, particularly in the south, a sense of distinctness from the rest of China used to be both palpable and immediate. The blend of Uzbek and Turkish-influenced pop songs playing in shops, the smoke from lamb kebabs, and the painted adobe walls and ornate shutters of the older houses all evoked Central Asia.

It has thus been unsurprising that in recent years, as Uyghurs themselves have been subjected to more intrusive forms of monitoring and control by the state, their old residential and commercial districts have been demolished. The destruction of the tangible history of the region, coupled with the continuing influx of Han migrants from other regions of China, has been yet another way in which the state has sought to weaken Uyghur identity. As one Uyghur in Kashgar put it, “[j]ust look all around you. You’ve seen it yourself. We’re a people destroyed.”

Before the current campaign, the Chinese state paid lip service to the idea that some aspects of Uyghur culture were worth appreciating and preserving, though they remained suspicious of anything they perceived to have nationalistic or religious elements.

The Chinese Communist Party’s need for total control has grown far worse since Xi Jinping took control in late 2012. The official rationale behind the camps and other repressive policies in Xinjiang is that ethnic minority identity itself represents a threat to national unity and stability. Their aim is to “break lineage, break roots, break connections, and break origins,” so as to “strengthen interethnic contact, exchange, and mingling.” The ultimate goal is thus the assimilation of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minorities into one “Chinese nation.” This concept has a long history in Chinese Communist Party discourse. The camps are arguably only the most drastic part of a long process of marginalizing Uyghur culture and identity, perhaps the most explicit of which has been the removal of Uyghur language instruction from the education system.

One of the most revealing aspects of the latest detentions is the large number of prominent Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and athletes who have been targeted, many of whom had previously been endorsed and supported by the state. The Chinese Communist Party is now so determined to eradicate Uyghur identity that promoting Uyghur literature or folklore is politically suspect. One impetus for this is certainly Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a program of infrastructure development and investment in Europe, Asia, and Africa, of which Xinjiang is “a core region.” Stability, or at least the appearance of it, is thus vital in Xinjiang.

Though there have been many waves of repression against the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang since the Communists took power, the pervasiveness and expense of the current campaign suggests it is intended to prevent the return of even the precarious (and often terrible) normality that existed before. While many of the current detainees are likely to be released at some point, the detentions won’t stop. The climate of fear, trauma, and suspicion created in Xinjiang isn’t going to dissipate.

Yet there’s also something naïvely ahistorical about the campaign. Previous targeting of minority culture during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) arguably only strengthened people’s sense of identity in the region, as did the banning of some Uyghur cultural practices in the 1990s. Beyond China, such colonial-scale oppression has often promoted cohesion and acts of resistance among the colonized.

The government’s approach does not seem like a blueprint for stability and national unity because the vast scale of this government persecution only underlines the differences between the Uyghurs and the state as a whole. The more likely outcome is that it will lead to the kind of violent opposition the government claims the camps combat, to which the authorities will respond in even more draconian fashion. They may well end up creating the monster they claim to be fighting already. And if they are willing to take such extreme measures now, the world should wonder how much worse their tactics may become when faced with the real thing.

The post One Out of Eleven Chinese Uyghurs Is in a Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

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