“Breaking down the costs of Trump’s trade war with China …”; “US reverses China ‘currency manipulator’ label …”; “China may be using sea to hide its submarines!”
Why does this ‘news’ sound so strangely familiar?
According to our guest lecturer, Andrew Peaple, such reporting was common during the 1980s and 90s, but was in fact directed towards the archipelago of Japan rather than China.
It is quite fascinating to consider that, before the birth of the present millennium, Japan’s rise in gross domestic product had made it the ‘second-largest economy’ in the world. Japan had the seemed the major threat to the West because of its strong growth and was thought to someday overtake the States.
However, in 2010, China overtook Japan as ‘second-largest economy’ and, probably, as the brand-new menace to US hegemony. Having worked in China and Japan (and having picked up both Mandarin and Japanese), Andrew Peaple voiced to us last week his opinion on the validity of comparing the economic and social practices of these two ancient civilizations.
Despite having only 1300 miles between them, Beijing and Tokyo’s paths towards prosperity contrast remarkably. China’s GDP per capita is extremely low in relation to developed nations; Peaple explained with thoughtful judgement that there stands the risk that a slowing economy and wealth inequality could cause resentment in a nation. There is the possibility that a country’s people disagree with how the country is run. In China, he explained, the risk is high. But on the other hand, he argued, perhaps this would not be the case. Perhaps we overestimate the bitterness foreign countries have to their own governments. After all, as much as one may dislike their current government, it could arguably be stronger, more stable and better-liked than its predecessors.
In the UK, we forget the issue of transferability. Although a system may work in one part of the world, this does not mean that we can simply apply it elsewhere in a completely different environment. Peaple clarified that China is phenomenally large; “running the UK is probably like running a town on the grand scale of things in China.”
China is the country where 1.4 billion people of various ethnicities, traditions, and even languages, will call the land home. How can a simple journalist understand the wide array of voices and opinions and then present an entire country in neat black type back at home? As a journalist himself, Peaple joked that his job was to “pretend that he knew stuff,” of which I would partially agree.
It becomes quite regular that we read of China in the press, whether as ‘Communist danger’, an ‘oppressor of human rights’, or even a ‘security threat’ to our privacy. Amongst this endless stream of negativity, it is rare to hear of something positive regarding the East. We hear about the issues so often that it can become quite difficult to pinpoint precisely an optimistic event.
Peaple argues that the problem with writing positives is that, in most cases, nobody wants to hear it. It is nigh impossible to wade through the sensationalist headlines to find a small kernel of truth. This is why, for resilience term, I pass on his suggestion that if you really would like to know the truth for yourself, then it is not a bad idea to travel there and find out.
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