However churlish it might seem to say it, the fact that little Lin Miaoke mimed the solo at the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008 is still the perfect metaphor for contemporary China: all cosmetic, masking deception. China’s self-presentation is a continuous act of deception, which matters because the victims of it include the Chinese people themselves. So well known is this that I cannot imagine anyone was surprised to learn that Lin Miaoke was miming not to her own pre-recording, but to the sweet tones of the even younger Yang Peiyi, who had been deemed insufficiently pretty to take the stage. For this is just par for the Party course.
Other elements of that deceptive moment might not have registered with the watching billions. The Chinese flag was carried to the squadron of goose-stepping soldiers by a large cohort of children, all dressed in the traditional costumes of the so-called ‘minority peoples’ of the Chinese empire – the Zhuang, the Manchu, the Hui, the Miao, the Uighur, the Yi, the Tuja, the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Buyei, the Mosuo, the Naxi, and so on – there are fifty-five such groups recognised officially by the Chinese government, and a number more who claim ethnic difference from the Han Chinese but are not recognised.
Almost all these people live in territories occupied by the Chinese empire. For that is what China is: it is as Europe would be if Napoleon or Hitler had won their respective wars of conquest, and unified Europe under a single rule. Then imagine that the conquering nation had grown in population to be 90 per cent of the continent’s ethnicity, leaving the Czechs and Hungarians to be ‘minority peoples’ obliged to attend national ceremonies in quaint ethnic dress.
Just to give a sense of what is involved here, let me relate an anecdote. While teaching at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing some years back, I was asked by the members of another department of the Academy’s Institute of Philosophy to give a lecture on ‘the nature and origins of consciousness’. Rather bemusedly I said that I’d be happy to talk about the difficulties we face in understanding the nature of consciousness, but was not sure what could be said about its origins. And I asked them whether the origin of consciousness was a subject of research among them. Oh yes, they said; we take our clipboards and visit minority peoples in the outlying areas of China, and we study them, because they have more primitive levels of consciousness than Han Chinese, so from them we can infer something about the evolution of consciousness among humans.
Enough said. At the oasis of Turfan in the Takla Makan desert I once asked a Uighur for his view of Chinese rule over his region. After a significant pause he said, gesturing at the well next to which we stood, ‘A Chinese will take the bucket from the well and put it down on the sand.’ Nothing could be worse for a desert-dweller than to have dirt introduced to well-water; the comment was intended as a sweeping metaphor.
In fact neither of these tales is fair to the Chinese people themselves, but both speak volumes about official or governmental China. Here is a generalisation, to be tempered by remembering that people are much the same everywhere: the Chinese seem to me a good-hearted, hard-working, courageous, sentimental, humorous, vigorous, highly likeable people, and I have the deepest affection for many friends made in years of living and travelling there. Bureaucratic China, government China, is an utterly different matter. Because China is going to be a world superpower in a generation’s time, it matters that China should rectify its human rights record, give up its irredentism, think again about its forcible occupation of Tibet, Xinjiang, and the ‘minority areas’ along the Vietnamese and Burmese borders, stop supporting hideous regimes like Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe, and become a good neighbour to Japan and a good world citizen generally.
Only think: on most of the items just listed, the world’s current sole superpower, the US, has never been wholly perfect, and yet if you put a gun to most people’s heads and forced them to choose between living in the US or almost anywhere outside the ‘first world’, they would choose the US. If China becomes as the US is today in world power terms, yet keeps its current regime and outlook, US history will look like a legend of saints. That is why the pressure has to be kept on China to reform its political institutions and human rights record – systematically one of the worst in the world.
In the interests of the future what we do not want is an apparently sweet-faced Chinese government singing saccharine melodies while behind the scenes all is fraud.