It can be argued that the same consumer culture is in the process of dragging American civilization down the toilet, making us more nihilistic, less educated, less respectful of our own civilization in general. It's the smallpox of our time - it's hurting us badly, but we survive because we've got some immunities. Nobody over the age of three believes most of what they see on the tube. When we export it, though, cultures get flattened.
The influence of Western culture has a long way to go before it reaches its peak in China, but the early signs of a backlash are already developing. After I left, the government announced it was cracking down on private ownership of satellite dishes and intensified its regulation of the pager and cellphone business.
The excuse was that these things were letting in too much Western culture (thanks in part to Star TV's Rupert Murdoch, who runs five channels out of Hong Kong). As the Economic
Daily, an official publication of the People's Republic of China, put it: "If China's information system is spread about and not grasped firmly in hand, how can people feel safe?" Of course, one of the major players in these industries is the People's
Liberation Army, so it's also largely a turf war; but at some point they'll have to put a stop to the spread of Western culture, in the way that Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and even France have recently tried to do.
The provinces have a lot of power in China. They negotiate with the central government over how much of their tax revenues will be sent off to Beijing. As a result, China's central treasury came within a hair's breadth of running empty in mid-1993, scaring the bejesus out of the government. In order to get the provinces under control they will have to reform their tax system and radically reinforce the power of the central government, which the provinces won't like.
Say what you will about the power of media and of information technology; the fact is that when a few million ravenous peasants come swarming into the cities with AK-47s, all the cellphones and fax machines in the world aren't going to help the people who've been enjoying the good times in thedouble-bordered free-enterprise wonderland of Guandong Province. The Han Chinese didn't get to be the all-time world champion ethnic group by being nice guys or by docilely soaking up every foreign idea that came along.
The Network is spreading across China, getting denser and more sophisticated with every kilometer of fiber that goes into the ground. We'd like to think of it as the grass roots of democracy, but the Chinese are just as apt to think of it as a finely engineered snare for tying the whole country together even more firmly than its predecessor, the human Net of the Red Guards. Looking at all the little enterprises that have sprung up in Shenzhen to write software and entertain visiting spacemen, it's easy to think that it's all the beginning of something permanent. But a longer historical perspective suggests that it's only a matter of time before the northerners come pouring down through the mountain passes to whip their troublesome southern cousins back into line.
I'm no China expert. But everything I saw there tells me that, in
China, culture wins over technology every time. Sometime within the next couple of decades, I'm expecting to turn on CNN (or BBC if I can get it) and see a jittery home videotape smuggled out of South China, showing a heap of smashed and burning cellphones, satellite dishes, and television sets piled up in a public square in Shenzhen, and, as backdrop, a giant mural portraying a vigorous new leader in Beijing.