The American Dream Is Alive in China

https://palladiummag.com/2019/10/11/the-american-dream-is-alive-in-china/

by undefined1 • 7 years ago

22 42 7 years ago

I know I have always dreamed of being thrown in prison for criticizing the government:0

The 50s are quite often described as the time that America had achieved the 'American Dream'. And during that time thousands of people were imprisoned and/or lost their jobs due to Kafkaesque trails performed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

990528825145694• 7 years ago

The scale, intensity and length are just not comparable. It's like comparing the Gulag to modern American prison labour.

senorjazz3• 7 years ago

The 50s are quite often described as the time that America had achieved the 'American Dream'.

white middle class America maybe, but certainly not "America"

TremendousJudge• 7 years ago

Coverage I’ve read in American discourse focuses on the dystopian side of the Chinese government. Examples abound: from its oppression of Uyghurs, to its outright ban of many religious groups, to its increasingly aggressive influence in American political and social life—like the Blizzard and NBA cases over the last week. But over the last five years, this discourse, though often correct, has felt increasingly disconnected from my personal experiences in China and the more fundamental problems at hand. In particular, it fails to comment on the larger, more important context: how much better life has become for many Chinese people, China’s new self-confidence, and America’s struggle with development, optimism, and sovereignty.

What the hell is this guy saying? "Oh sure, China has literal concentration camps, but as long as you're not there then it's just great!"

In many ways, China in the 2010s reminds me of what I’ve read of America in the 1950s: the country is powerful, economic development is booming, and people are optimistic about the future.

"People" meaning "the ruling class". It was great living in America in the fifties, as long as you were a white dude with a job.

ThinkBeat2• 7 years ago

I agree that there are many negative things that has done and still do. Including the things you name.

As an American, though I think my country might be even more shameful, We have Gitmo. We have a country that lied into a war that killed at least 100.000s of people.

Our treatment of asylum seekers now is certainly worth a dystopian movie or two.

As far as the 1950s you are defining the ruling class as the ruling class and the middle class? I dont disagree with you about diversity but the middle class was much better off than it is today.

Our ever-shrinking middle class and our ever getting richer oligarchs and the political class is contrasted to China's increasing middle class.

But you go from zero it is easy to improve, and in the US we used to have a large middle class so it is easier to lose.

ng12• 7 years ago

This is the opposite of the American dream. Immigrants fled to the US for it's unprecedented social mobility and opportunity. Things being nice for the upper echelons of society has little to do with it.

bassman90002• 7 years ago

Yeah no, thanks.

Sure, everything is nice for many people if you don't dare speak against the authority. Tomorrow you're on the wrong side of the fence. Good luck coming back.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-ap...

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/09/chinas-new-cybersecurit...

990528825145694• 7 years ago

Not to mention that, once in a while, even people who don't dare speak against the authority get caught up and obliterated by the system. It's the nature of oppressive authoritarian systems where the rule of law is absent. You don't necessarily need to do anything for it to single you out.

On the topic of the 'American Dream': the more successful you are, the more likely it is in such a system that you don't pay off the right guy in time, or don't surrender enough of your wealth to a well-connected guy who wants a piece of it. And off to the Gulags you go, sharing a cell with the 'political prisoner' who pointed to as a cautionary tale of why you must not speak out and criticize the government. Wait, does that mean you're also a 'political prisoner' now too?

ThinkBeat2• 7 years ago

Assange, Snowden, Manning.. Speaking truth to power is not without its risks in the US.

The list can be made much larger, but then it needs to explain each case, whereas the ones above most people know about.

You can say this is not speaking truth to power, it was leaks that are different but not really.

Concentration camps in China, might be a secret. I dont think they are but what goes on in side of them is meant to be, breaking the government's repression of information is a good thing.

Just like telling the world what the US really does is good for our country.

dbspin6• 7 years ago

This is a bizarrely rose tinted view of China, which not only completely ignores mistreatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities - from imprisonment and 'reeducation to literal organ legging; but also the everyday horrors of life under an authoritarian dictatorship.

For example the frequent adulteration of food (including baby food) with poisons. The panopticon surveillance and control of movement which prevents the poor and those living in rural areas from travelling within their own country. Restrictions on free speech, not only political in nature but critical of any aspects of civil society - and the inevitable lack of reforms to public health and safety.

Increasing nationalism, police observation and 'patriotic' violent attacks on foreigners. Violence against medical professionals when patients feel (rightly or wrongly) that they haven't received the treatment they should have.

The rise of an unelected dictator forming a cult of personality and the subsequent reinvigoration of anti-foreign, nativist han Chinese sentiment, and the increased suppression of minorities and dissent that has resulted.

The thousands of 'incidents' of protests (attempted rebellions) that are ruthlessly crushed each year, while being actively hidden by Chinese media and social media.

The incredibly successful censorship of both China's own history and any discourse about political reform.

On and on.

China is a spectacular case of all the ills that can befall a centralised authoritarian regime when people cannot directly criticise their government. This article seems to advocate 'learning from China' in a way that implies replicating their authoritarian control. It reminds me of a bizarre TED talk a few years ago that celebrated the supposedly effective meritocracy of the CCP - just before it became one man dictatorship - while ignoring the fact that the CCP leadership is almost exclusively composed of the children and grandchildren of the communist party leaders that supported Mao. It is in short, thinly veiled propaganda.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

I've seen this website pop up here a few times and the amount of pro-Chinese content together with apocalyptic stories about North America and Europe on it together with the self-proclaimed talk about a "post-liberal" future is pretty off. Is there information available on who funds this?

dbspin6• 7 years ago

Hard to say. The mission statement seems to be an attempt to create a 'post liberal synthesis', which sounds like Tony Gidden's neoliberal 'third way', but is so no specific it could mean just about anything. https://palladiummag.com/2018/09/29/towards-the-post-liberal...

baal80spam• 7 years ago

What you wrote is very true indeed. Some time ago I saw a recommendation of this book on HN:

https://www.amazon.com/have-been-harmonised-Kai-Strittmatter...

It made me read it and even though I try to be up to date with world news - it's a true eye opener.

Reedx• 7 years ago

Yes, those are serious problems, but you're not painting a full picture either. Notably ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions of people in China have been pulled out of poverty in recent years.

They're able to get big things done. Elon Musk recently commented that he was amazed how fast they're able to build things and said he's never seen anything like it. We are regressing in this aspect. We can't even get decent public transit built in the Bay Area or improve the homeless situation despite being one of the richest places in the world.

dbspin6• 7 years ago

Not sure what your point is?

India too has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, while remaining federated and to some extent democratic. The elevation of China's billions out of poverty has come through it's involvement with the marketplace of global capitalist democracies - not the other way around.

senorjazz3• 7 years ago

which not only completely ignores mistreatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities - from imprisonment

but the US statistics on imprisonment of minorities is no better.

For example the frequent adulteration of food (including baby food) with poisons

all major countries have scares and recalls due to contamination

The panopticon surveillance

really? After all the details come out in the last 5 years, surveillance cannot be thrown at the Chinese alone. UK leads CCTV per population (or some metric). NSA data slurping revelations...

and the inevitable lack of reforms to public health and safety.

why do you think the Chinese do not make improvements to public health and safety? Of course they do.

Increasing nationalism, police observation and 'patriotic' violent attacks on foreigners

errr are you blind to the rise of this in the US since Trump and UK since brexit?

Violence against medical professionals when patients feel

Bombing abortion clinics comes to mind

The rise of an unelected dictator forming a cult of personality and the subsequent reinvigoration of anti-foreign, nativist han Chinese sentiment, and the increased suppression of minorities and dissent that has resulted.

Change unelected to "unelected by the majority" in higly disputed elections countrywide with many cases of fraud and vote tampering and I can think of another country this applies to

Anyway, why does the above mean there is no "American Dream" in China, when most the accusations you make can be levelled (in some form) to the US as well

JoeAltmaier• 7 years ago

Cherry-picking? Some of the objections are reasonably reflected back at the Western world, but most are nowhere to the degree perfected in China. War on Muslims (systematic destruction of Mosques etc); military conflict with Tibet (their own people?); the astonishing 'social credit score' system.

Sure there may be an American Dream in China, if you line up with the acceptable profile of citizen. But the Dream is supposed to be for everybody; that's foundational to the idea.

hnbroseph• 7 years ago

Anyway, why does the above mean there is no "American Dream" in China, when most the accusations you make can be levelled (in some form) to the US as well

this seems fallacious. it's not clear how the various whataboutisms you're engaging in establishes or relates to "the american dream in china" actually existing or not.

dbspin6• 7 years ago

This is the definition of whataboutery. 'America is bad to', is not an argument against any critique of China.

Any US or European citizen can travel freely throughout their country or to most countries in the world.

While the US carceral state is indeed abominable and a continuation of the suppression of African Americans, America does not have prison camps holding a million members of an ethnic minority.

The NSA surveillance programme revealed by Snowdon and Manning is awful, as are the continuing attempts to prosecute and silence whistle blowers. Fortunately the US does not regularly send police officers to harass citizens based on their expressed political beliefs. Nor does it scrub political communication and expression from the internet or censor it from public media.

Electoral fraud and gerrymandering are awful. They are in no sense comparable to actual dictatorship however.

Critiques of murderous dictatorships like those in Russia, China and North Korea are always side tracked like this. No one is disputing the many and varied faults of liberal democracies. But to hold them up as equivalent to the imprisonment of Uyghurs, the harvesting of prisoner organs and so on is disingenuous to say the least. Not least because we in the west have the privilege of making these critiques, which Chinese do not.

hybrids• 7 years ago

I am no apologist for China, but the course of the American Dream itself was similarly colored by a "rose-tinted" view juxtaposed with less-than-ideal circumstances. One could look at for instance its original emergence in the 19th century after being primarily brought on by the 1848 revolutions in Europe, legalized chattel slavery still existed and manifest destiny would turn out spill a lot of blood in its wake, both that of natives, settlers, and soldiers. This, of course, ignores the emancipatory possibility of the American Dream then - for instance, the massive emigration to America and throughout its frontier that occurred in the 19th century provided much of the pretext for the actual dismantling of chattel slavery.

The more modern, post-WWII imago of the American Dream of a booming economy and cute little suburbs was overlaid over antiquated Jim Crow laws and early Cold War saber-rattling that would accelerate into the greater turmoil of the '60s, which would turn out a tragedy more than anything. Many of the criticisms you put on China now have mirrors in a historical America.

China and America are really both flip sides of the same coin. It is true that looking at China as a safe haven when America's economy and culture has become so anxiety-riden is silly and ignorant. China is able to rationalize itself with a liquefied idea "socialism" it never truly was able to understand in the first place, and has grown to content to treat the task of governing its people in similar kind to herding animals.

I would not pin China's blame singularly on the CCP or Xi for that matter, but I would rather describe the CCP a symptom of modern capitalism. If one were to hypothetically "clean the CCP's house" with a new stock of younger legislators that weren't "beneficiaries of the Mao era" as you claim, than you would likely find them repeating the same regressions as their predecessors; never mind that Xi himself was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, considering that his sister was killed by student protesters and his father was jailed for 10 years. China's problems (more problems of contemporary society in general) extend beyond the Mao legacy, similar to how Leon Trotsky did not regard Stalinism in the Soviet Union as purely beginning and ending with the one man.

dang4• 7 years ago

Please do not use HN for nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

helen___keller2• 7 years ago

While I disagree pretty heavily with the author's central thesis (and this thesis relies on an ill-defined "american dream" that the author roughly describes as the period of postwar growth & prosperity for middle/upper class americans in the 1950s), I do have to agree with this part of the author's conclusion:

China’s success scares me. There is something deeply disconcerting about watching China surpass America in the ways it is. China is transforming fishing villages into major industrial cities, while we fail to build high-speed rail or new housing. How are we going to catch up?

Right now China is still high off a period of heavy growth and industrialization. How China can handle easing out of heavy growth in the next 2-6 decades will show how real the Chinese dream is, but my personal fear (as a person who believes strongly in western liberalism) is that a rich authoritarian country can unlock a world of efficiency that the western world can only dream of, leaving our standard of living in the dust by comparison

I fear that this will lead to an era of global authoritarianism as countries around the world seek to emulate the success.

As a rail enthusiast, watching China build huge subway networks and a massive web of HSR almost overnight while my very rich western city struggles to extend a century old trolley by a few miles in the same timeframe, it really feels bad.

dbspin6• 7 years ago

I wonder about this. By all accounts construction of homes in China is so haphazard buildings frequently become uninhabitable, and occasionally literally collapse within a few years. Clearly China has a lot of money and has exhibited the capacity for some large scale construction projects. But to what extent it is merely attempting to outrun a construction bubble, and ensnare developing world countries in debt; versus building a sustainable economic model, is questionable.

At the bottom end, manufacturing is moving out of China to countries like Vietnam. While high tech manufacturing is still China's forte, this is largely confined to special economic zones like Shenzien, and reliant on lack of enforcement of patent and copyright, as well as government subsidies for import and exports of components and manufactured goods. We're all familiar with the impossibly cheap components and electronic devices available through services like Ali.

I'm not sure any of this is sustainable - whether in an environmental sense, or economically. There is much that is illusory about the Chinese economy, and the recent clamp down of state control may well be an effort for the CCP to maintain control during the inevitable economic collapse they see coming.

helen___keller2• 7 years ago

By all accounts construction of homes in China is so haphazard buildings frequently become uninhabitable, and occasionally literally collapse within a few years.

Well, I'm not convinced that this effect is necessarily widespread. Certainly more common than in the west where we have strict building regulations and such, but this is the flip side of getting a lot of housing built cheaply, which is necessary for China. An analogue might be construction in the states during our industrial revolution - we had all sorts of horrid issues, from barely-livable tenements with no ventilation to massive fires that killed tons of poor workers. Most of the stuff we built back then doesn't come close to conforming with modern building code.

In any case, it's not a big problem I saw personally in China, but I'm n=1 here. I stayed in a relatives' apartment building from the 90s that was holding up fine, as well as perfectly nice newer apartments that relatives enjoyed in tier3 cities and older houses and townhouses that aged well.

I imagine this is the kind of thing that western media likes to play up, but isn't as visible for people on the ground (another example is the social credit system - I couldn't find any evidence the social credit system even exists yet during my time in China, much less the horrifying things we see reported regularly.)

But to what extent it is merely attempting to outrun a construction bubble, and ensnare developing world countries in debt; versus building a sustainable economic model, is questionable.

Strongly agreed, hence my comments that the next 2-6 decades of slowing growth will be very telling on the "Chinese dream".

I don't think Chinese success is guaranteed - I think the CCP has made a lot of frightful financial gambles. My big fear is that it does, somehow, pay off, and the world turns to China as a model of how to run a country as a result.

hos2342• 7 years ago

False dichotomy. Large Infra projects need huge land parcels. What do you think your options are in China if the govt decides it wants your land?

They get away with all kinds of abnormal activity because most of their citizens are still poor. Once people have resources they won't bend over as they once did. I doubt their rate of progress will continue as it did over the last 2 decades. Things are going to get more complex for them not less.

whoevercares2• 7 years ago

Actually everyone I know of become super rich after their land/home is taken by the government, at least in some Suburban areas of tier 2 cities. Nowadays it’s a big deal for the local officials if something went wrong (eg someone injures) during the development process so they normally will negotiate

pixelperfect• 7 years ago

The author of this article seems to anticipate that the growth China has experienced during the past few decades will continue for the foreseeable future. I am doubtful. International corporations continue moving manufacturing to other countries. China's total debt / GDP ratio keeps rising and will eventually be unsustainable. Population is aging. Automation will displace many manufacturing jobs. I don't think China's future is totally bleak, but it isn't rosy either.

The American Dream Is Alive in China

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