What Time Is It in China?

Posted October 6, 2008

Foreign travelers often find it disorienting that every part of China is on the same time zone, that of the capital, meaning the sun can set at 6:00 p.m. on one day of their tour, 10:00 p.m. on another. Journalists and academics primarily interested in China take the uniform use of Beijing time in stride, but we’re sometimes affected these days by a different sort of temporal confusion. Namely, figuring out whether China should be seen as futuristic (it has the world’s fastest train) or at least keeping pace with the most modern countries (one of its astronauts recently took a walk in space)—or a reflection of its own, or some other country’s past.

Adding to the confusion, a case can be made for all sorts of different domestic and international historical analogies. Contemporary China can seem stuck in old Maoist grooves (the lead-up to the Olympics was sometimes like an old-style political campaign) or returning to the days of Chiang Kai-shek (when Confucius was celebrated, as he certainly wasn’t under Mao, but is again under Hu Jintao). Some commentators see parallels to South Korea and Taiwan circa 1988 in an East Asian authoritarian state going through economic boom times. Others see similarities to the U.S. circa 1900 in a rapidly industrializing nation with an energy that many admire but rough ways that draw criticism from more established powers.

Have the whirlwind developments of China’s all too eventful 2008 clarified the situation? Hardly. If the latest scandal involving tainted milk, for example, has shown us anything it is that several of the different temporal approaches to China just limned has something to offer. And it has also shown that each will mislead us if we go too far in embracing it. This is especially true if we fall into the trap of thinking that China is either impervious to change (as the stuck in its own past analogies suggest) or destined to follow in the evolutionary footsteps of another country, such as our own, with the coming of open elections being just a matter of time (as the “P.R.C. is now like the U.S. once was” parallels, if treated too simplistically, can lead us to fantasize).

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao appeared on CNN on Sunday, Sept. 28, in an open-ended interview with Fareed Zakaria that only confuses the matter further. From his comfort of grieving parents in Sichuan after the May earthquake to his recent call for greater regulation of the food system, Mr. Wen has been unusually engaged this year in public discourse for a national-level CCP politician. So engaged that it seems fair to see 2008 as marking a turning point of sorts for the public relations efforts of the Communist Party. China’s leaders still do not need to stand for re-election, but some of them, most notably Mr. Wen, increasingly look and act like they feel the need to seek the support of ordinary citizens and want to advocate for and, incredibly, explain his country’s policies to the international community. The Premier’s nickname may be “Grandpa Wen,” but there’s more that’s au courant than old fashioned about his style, right down to the fact that he has his own official Facebook page.

Yet during his interview with Mr. Zakaria, Prime Minister Wen followed an old playbook in issuing denials and prevarications about topics that have been sticking points with the international community—such as insisting, ridiculously, that the government monitors the Internet “for the overall safety of the country and for the overall freedom of the majority of the people.” That kind of talk sounds very much like the double-speak of earlier Communist leaders.

Similarly, the recent scandal over melamine in milk products resurrects competing notions of China as an anachronistic land of throwbacks. Worries over tainted baby formula have led, for example, to a surge of women offering their services as wet nurses to worried professionals with infants—though, bizarrely, this distinctively “pre-modern” seeming breast-feeding for hire is being advertised through the decidedly “post-modern” medium of the Internet. But above all, the scandal, which has taken a heart-wrenching toll on infants in China (several of whom have died, large numbers of whom are developing kidney stones), makes China seem like belle époque America on steroids. The combination of stories of tainted food coming a year after tales of factories using lead paint to coat toys calls up images of a dangerous land where workers and consumers need to both beware—reminiscent of the America that muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair exposed and criticized. We are seeing, it seems, the world of “The Jungle” transposed from Chicago to Shenzhen.

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Again and again, this theme has emerged in 2008. China watchers—ourselves included—have made the point, when confronted by claims that the P.R.C. is uniquely unregulated (as in the ongoing melamine scandal), uniquely cruel to ethnic minorities (as during the Tibetan riots earlier this spring), or uniquely polluted (as when discussing Beijing’s efforts to clear the air before the Olympics), that we have seen these situations before … in the U.S.

The rough familiarity of these situations to U.S. history, though, shouldn’t lull us into thinking that China will address those issues in the way that Americans chose to. We’d do well to remember how often in recent decades, there have been efforts to paint China as heading along a familiar course. And each time, these haven’t proved accurate, sometimes leading to an equally important analytical mistake: thinking that China, despite all appearances, just isn’t changing at all.

One of the best examples of a presumed trajectory that didn’t pan out concerns the notion, which gained popularity in the 1990s, that China was so much like South Korea in the 1980s that a move from authoritarian to democratic governance must be on the horizon. All that was needed for political reform to follow economic growth, as it had not just in South Korea but in other East Asian countries such as Taiwan, was for the middle class to grow and become increasingly assertive politically. This “East Asian Development” line got a new lease on life during the lead-up to the Olympics, as some commentators optimistically asserted that the 2008 Beijing Games would have the same sort of democratizing impact on China that the 1988 Seoul ones are sometimes said to have had for their host country.

The reality in this Olympic year is that we’ve seen middle-class activists push for change at the local level, in Not-in-My-Back-Yard or Nimby-style protests against health threats to specific neighborhoods. But there’s been no indication at the national level that the Olympics have undermined the overall system of Communist Party rule. The post-1989 pattern of entrepreneurs making common cause with the regime and officials and official agencies becoming increasingly entrepreneurial (even the People’s Liberation Army runs businesses) has not been altered.

Almost four weeks on, the baby formula scandal illustrates why the notion that China is heading along a path that U.S. once followed is likely to be of as limited predictive power as the notion that it would retrace the steps of its East Asian neighbors. This is partly because the latest food scare draws attention—or at least should—to why all analogies with historical instances from less globalized eras will have significant limits, due partly to how much more tightly enmeshed in far-flung international flows China’s factories are than were the Chicago meat-packing plants of “The Jungle.”

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One of the underlying tenets of engagement with China has long been the notion that increased economic exchange would also lead to a transfer of Western business practices and regulations to their Chinese partners, a tenet underlain by the notion that capitalism was linked to personal freedom and that economic engagement would spread democracy. However, the producer of the original tainted baby formula, Sanlu-Fonterra, is 43% owned by Fonterra, a New Zealand dairy company that is among the top dairy producers in the world. It has been reported that Sanlu’s foreign board members were aware of the contamination in early August, but sat on their hands for weeks.

As parents have feared for their children’s safety, media has reported steps that seem unlikely responses had the crisis occurred in the U.S., from nursing mothers sharing their breast milk with friends who have stopped nursing, to hiring wet nurses, to buying stakes in (or outright buying) local cows. These may strike us as resonating with social phenomena of the past, but in context they are clearly situations only necessary and possible in the China of today. Many mothers are not breastfeeding because they work outside the home. The wet nurses are advertising their services on the Internet. And the crisis is so widespread—tainted products have now been found in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Taiwan as well and products by major corporations like Cadbury, Nestle, Heinz, Unilever (Lipton), Nabisco and Glico—only because we have a globalized food system and a closely integrated international market that rapidly distributes a product to multiple regions at once.

One value of historical analogies, even with all of their limits, is that they help break down the misleading sense that China is thoroughly unique, that everything about it can be celebrated or blamed with reference to unusual cultural traditions. We need to do more than this, though, to make sense of China’s troubles and challenges. Yes, we should take into account that some Chinese phenomena call to mind different eras of the past, while others seem futuristic. But we also need to remember we are living in an era when financial crises, environmental crises, and food crises, like the ongoing milk products one, sometimes pay as little attention to borders as Beijing does when determining how clocks should be set.
 
Kate Merkel-Hess, a doctoral candidate in History at UC Irvine, is the editor of “The China Beat,” and the co-editor (with Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey Wasserstrom) of “China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance” (forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield early next year).

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a professor of History at UC Irvine, is the author of “China's Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times” (2007) and “Global Shanghai, 1850-2010” (forthcoming later this year from Routledge).