The Top Ten China Myths of 2010

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The Top Ten China Myths of 2010
Posted by Evan Osnos

Harmony is the mantra of the new Chinese empire. But 2010 was a year in serious need of a tune-up. On trade, diplomacy, the environment, the Internet, and even basketball, China spent the year staking out a muscular new role in the world—with combustible results. The top ten myths left in shards on the floor:

1. Dissidents no longer matter in global diplomacy. Fact: After China joined the World Trade Organization and hosted the Beijing Olympics, the image of the impassioned, ink-stained inmate began to seem as retro as a Cold War spy swap. When the presidents of China and the U.S. convened, they could hardly be expected to have more than a ritual exchange of differing opinions on human rights before moving on to more practical matters of mutual concern. But then the Nobel Prize Committee chose Liu Xiaobo, and, instead of turning a blind eye and ignoring it, China vowed to punish Norway and advised other countries to stay away from the ceremony. Liu Xiaobo, who had been little known beforehand, became famous in China and abroad. China confronted a full-blown diplomatic crisis. (Spy swaps are back, too.)

2. No company can afford to antagonize China. Fact: Google even had a good year doing it.

3. China is parting ways with North Korea. Fact: When a leaked U.S. State Department cable suggested that Chinese diplomats were whispering about the need for change on the Korean peninsula, some in the West saw a glimmer of daylight between the “lips and teeth,” to use the unlovely old metaphor for that special relationship. But the Chinese government contains a large, variegated range of opinion, and for the moment the consensus is far more in favor of protecting Kim as a defense against a refugee crisis and a U.S. troop presence on China’s eastern border.

4. The U.S. has lost the green-technology race. Fact: It can be difficult to tell on any given day whether China is trouncing the U.S. or hobbled by its own top-down instincts to pick winners and losers. But, overall, this is the third inning, and we don’t yet know how it will play out. The one undisputed fact: China is hungrier.

5. Beijing doesn’t care about air quality. Fact: After years of avoiding calls to make more honest measurements of its air quality, China startled environment experts in November by unveiling a new system to provide hourly real-time air-quality information on a hundred and thirteen key cities, with indexes of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter.

6. Beijing has licked its air-quality problem. Fact: No, the Olympics did not solve this. It still gets “crazy bad” some days. That was the wonderfully candid, and quickly revised, term adopted by the U.S. Embassy when it began to report pollution measurements that were literally off the charts.

7. China’s G.D.P. growth speaks for itself. Fact: If you’ve ever wondered whether China’s gross-domestic-product statistics are too perfect, ask the man who is probably the next premier: Li Keqiang told a U.S. ambassador that local G.D.P. numbers are, in the ambassador’s words, “man-made.” Li Keqiang, who was head of the Communist Party in northeastern Liaoning province at the time, earns credibility with this acknowledgement. For measurements that are less prone to meddling by ambitious bureaucrats, he keeps track of 1) electricity consumption; 2) rail-cargo volume; 3) loans. Incidentally, this is not to say that Chinese G.D.P. is lower than reported. It may very well be higher.

8. The “Beijing Model” is a product of Deng Xiaoping’s economic engineering. Fact: It’s fashionable to declare this the age of Chinese state capitalism, but look closely at the record of China’s economic growth over thirty years and the pattern is, in fact, more conventional, erratic, and experimental than Party historians like to present. It’s conventional because, as political economist Huang Yasheng explains, the lives of China’s eight hundred million peasants have improved fastest when they are allowed to pursue plain old entrepreneurship (and, as John Cassidy explains, because the West has also used state resources to boost investment). It’s erratic and experimental because there was no grand plan. Party leaders whom most people have never heard of used trial and error. As the economist Barry Naughton, of the University of California at San Diego, put it, Deng never expressed “any particular insight into the functioning of the economy.”

9. Apparatchiks can get away with anything. Fact: After a twenty-two-year-old drunk driver, Li Qiming, hit two students with his Volkswagen, in October, he told the officers who attempted to arrest him, “Go ahead, sue me if you dare. My dad is Li Gang!” Li Gang, it turned out, was deputy police chief in the Beishi district of Baoding, and the Li pere and fils became the brunt of an Internet campaign infused with contempt for entitled officialdom. Li Qiming was arrested and his father sobbed on national television. “My dad is Li Gang” became of one of the memes of the year (included, oddly, in a list published in a state-backed newspaper). Local abuses of power remain a towering problem for China’s central government—and Li is likely to be treated leniently—but 2010 will be remembered as a turning point in the rising tension over fairness and power in China.

10. China will do everything it can to avoid ruffling foreign powers. Fact: There was a time, not so long ago, when Chinese foreign-policy strategists were guided above all by a powerful interest in “hiding their claws,” as Deng Xiaoping used to say, to avoid encountering unnecessary resistance as they amassed power. But 2010, more than ever, put an end to that principle. China heaped diplomatic pressure on Japan to compel it to concede in a maritime dispute, rankled India by raising claims to territory in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and declared the South China Sea a “core national interest,” marking a new seriousness to claims over a hotly contested swath of ocean.

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