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Happier China, unhappy West

By Brendan O'Neill (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-08 07:52

A recent Pew survey suggests Chinese people are upbeat about the future direction of their nation. In 2002, only 48 percent of Chinese people surveyed were "satisfied" with it; today, 86 percent are.

In 2002, 52 percent rated the Chinese economy as "good"; today, 82 percent do. Although many respondents recognize that China's "traditional way of life is getting lost" as it leaps to gleaming modernity, 71 percent said they like the "pace of modern life". Only 3 percent think China's global economic influence is negative.

Ninety-six per cent of respondents think the Olympics will be successful and 79 percent describe the Games as "important to me personally". Chinese people know their country has problems - rising prices, the rich/poor gap, corrupt officials, pollution and unemployment - but they seem generally, and inspiringly, optimistic about the future. Good for them.

These Pew findings contrast dramatically with Western attitudes to China. Where Chinese people seem happy with the economic progress of recent years, Western observers see only its downsides.

Many in the West regard the Games as an opportunity to berate China, such as some want them relabeled the Olympicsin reference to China's relationship with Sudan. Others call on Gordon Brown and George W. Bush to use the Olympics to pressurize China to reform. But what earthly right do Brown or Bush has to lecture anyone about authoritarianism? People in the moral gutter cannot take the high ground.

No doubt some will argue that Western observers can take a more sophisticated, critical and objective view of China. This is self-deceiving pomposity. In truth, the difference between Chinese attitudes and those of Western commentators reveals what really lies behind the China debate today: a tussle over modernity itself.

Much of this fear-mongering is driven by Western distaste for progress. Many see in China the "mistakes" that we in the West have already made: industrialization, the expansion of cities, skyscraper-building, mass migration, the rise of a consumer society. Our own doubt about these historic gains for humanity means we look at China and see its awe-inspiring development as something dirty, dangerous or duplicitous.

Slowly but surely, the Western elite's self-loathing of recent years is transforming into a loathing of China, which is seen to represent everything that is rotten about "Western-style" modernity.

Anyone with an ounce of humanism should challenge the demonization of the Chinese and instead share in their optimism about the future. Whatever the killjoys in Islington and DC might say, it is an unalloyed good that Chinese people's lives are improving.

The Guardian

(China Daily 08/08/2008 page11)