The fact is that the Net can only reach people who have imbibed a lot of Western culture already - you can't even enter text unless you know the Roman alphabet. As far as the masses are concerned, the Net might as well not exist - the only important source of Western memes is television. In a sense, this is terrible news, because we all know what bilge television is. At the same time, the peculiar power of Western culture to colonize unlikely places may be the only thing Hong Kong has going for it.
So let's think about the second possibility, which is that Hong
Kong, far from being obliterated, will become the informational capital of mainland China - in other words, that the power of media will overcome, or at least balance, the tanks and guns dispatched from Beijing.
People who think that America has a monopoly on gratuitous TV violence have never watched what the Hong Kong stations radiate across the Pearl Delta every night between 7 and 10.
Their fake blood technology is decades behind ours, but that doesn't seem to bother this audience. The carnage is, ofcourse, frequently interrupted by ads, which also appeal to folks who are fairly new to the idiot box. In my favorite TV ad,
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" was played as front-end loaders fed boulders into a giant crusher and whole segments of mountainside were blasted into rubble. And the Mitsubishi ads looked like what you'd get if you hired Leni Riefenstahl to plug consumer electronics.
It works. The parvenus in Shenzhen watch ultraviolent flicks in their rooms at the Shangri-La with the sound turned all the way up, whooping helplessly with laughter, like the Beverly Hillbillies passing a jug of moonshine during a 24-hour Beavis and
Butt-head marathon. And in the devastated landscape between Shenzhen and Guangzhou - beyond the Second Border - countless bulldozer operators spend their days clawing maniacally at the verdant hillsides, their cockpits lined with posters of their favorite Hong Kong starlets, and the horizon is prickly with television antennas.
Some unimaginative sorts have described this as cultural imperialism. When millions of Chinese spend their scant yuan on putting antennas up to pull in snowy programs from Hong Kong, that's us nasty Westerners being imperialistic, you see.
It's not imperialism. It's what happens when a culture with a sophisticated immune system comes into contact, as it inevitably will, with a culture without one. The Chinese have a completely different relationship to the world of ideas than
Westerners do - it seems that they either take an utterly pragmatic approach, paying no attention to abstract ideals at all, or else they go nuts with it, the way they did in the Taiping
Rebellion (when Chinese Christians went out of control in the 19th Century and sparked a very nasty civil war) and again during the Cultural Revolution (and let's remember that
Communism is, after all, another Western import). I'm not sure what happens to such a country when radical Maoism is replaced by the far more seductive meme of Western consumer culture, as purveyed by the Hong Kong television stations.
I don't imagine we'll see anything as dramatic as the Taiping Rebellion or the Cultural Revolution again; I suppose it will be something like what's happening in the States right now: an abandonment of the value system that has traditionally madethe society work. This probably won't improve matters in China, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a violent backlash.
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.