Whither China?

It seems to me that China has always been a land where communications has been difficult.  There has never really been a common culture from Sichuan to Guangdong, from Mongolia to Xinjiang.  The languages and the people are different, and the miles have historically gone a long way to soften messages, like the "rumor game." 

China has always kept a high context of cultural standards, whether it was the analects or a little red book, something for people to hang unity, harmony, and community on, however illusory those bonds might really have been beyond the Mandarins, or beyond the Han.

From what I see from the outside, China is not one place, one people, today, and she knows it.  She probably knows it better than she ever has, down to the roots, down to the grandmothers sweeping the streets, or the young men everywhere on their bicycles -- now dreaming of cars.

Telecommunications is changing everything.  Video brings a common culture -- and foreign cultures -- everywhere in China.  The Internet contracts the world, making it at the same time one world and a million shattered fragments of some human hologram. 

What is China if she can't maintain the myth of an identity, of Great China, of the Chinese people?

So, the Internet is 10,000 things with a vengeance.  It has no roots, no tradition, no filial piety, no Relationships, no devotion to states.  In that way, perhaps, it is very western, and seems to carry those values.

But I believe it is inevitable that China, that Central Asia, that the Arab states, even some of Africa are at the brink of losing a sort of unity, a tribalism, that is born of protective isolation and xenophobia, and it all is falling in the face of open communication -- whether it's in the form of the Internet, or of satellite TV.  Even al-Jazeera spells the end of tribal authority where a dish is placed.

China is struggling, and in struggle there is always hurt, and bad decisions.  I don't like what they are doing with dissidents, with the Falun Gong, with Tibet. 

But I wonder, when I make those judgements, "How has anyone *ever* governed China?"  It's an impossible task being made possible somehow every day.  I can't imagine living as a dissident in China today, but neither can I imagine what it would be like being in authority there, where things are changing so much faster than the mess in the United States.

Think!  In the US, we complain of the rate of change, the danger to institutions like marriage and the family.  But we have ridden the crest of the wave of those changes.  China is compressing -- what? -- 1930 to today in social changes, into the past couple of decades.  Imagine for a moment what that must be like on the inside.

So, when I was speaking to a reporter today, I told her I think of China as being in the place of the Vatican, speaking to Gallileo.  It is not that his ideas were wrong -- it was that speaking them was too destabilizing, from the point of view of people who believed that in stability was the salvation of the world.

Suppressing Gallileo made so little difference.  I think suppressing Falun Gong, or the Tibetan Buddhists, or the Democracy Movement is also staving off inevitable and possibly catastrophic change.

The Renaissance in Europe is called "the rebirth," but we tend to see it abstractly.  We do not see it as the destruction of an old world, a new arrogant order built on those ashes. 

It might be as hard for a medieval European serf to understand Lorenzo deMedici as it is for a Chinese wheat farmer to understand a Pudong entrepreneur -- but the difference is that the wheat farmer reads and may have access to all kinds of media, including the Internet.  He can learn in one generation what might never have reached to his northern farm in a generation in the past, and he will probably go to the city to learn more, to earn more, and to try to find a piece of this new world for himself.

So the question is, how much of a rate of change can China sustain without falling into chaos, and how much oppression can she take without revolt?  It's a very hard question, a hard balance, and I don't have an answer.

All I know is that we can't take it all back.  We can't turn back the clock, there or here.  So we must learn how best to live in the aftermath of another renaissance, another time of changes, of death, of rebirth, and new ways of thinking about everything.