Look Beneath the Surface of "Nambia"

(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The substance of President Trump’s “Nambia” speech was a step in the right direction.

Trump’s mispronunciation of Namibia was not, but it was also unsurprising. It is no secret that most Americans are terrible at geography (which is, however—ahem—not a uniquely American shortcoming), and I don’t think anyone who likes Donald Trump likes him because of his presumed familiarity with the globe. I am sure his supporters feel indignant that we mean old coastal elites should mock him over a matter as piddling as this. But it is not a piddling matter, we anti-Trump folks instinctively feel, because it symbolizes his willful ignorance and privilege. Despite being a buffoon, he has the privilege of leading the world’s most powerful country and thereby obliging other world leaders to deal with his buffoonery. And the problem for America is that although ignorance, clownishness, meanness, and mendacity may play well with Trump’s fans, they are not a good look for the United States. Other countries see what we are now, and they are repulsed.

Or are they? Africans, apparently, took the speech in stride. As explained on the China in Africa Podcast, the response to the speech on African social media was mostly good-humored. Notably, Namibia’s President Hage Geingob said, “That ‘Nambia’ put Namibia on the map, huh? They have to explain, while they are—think they are teasing the president, they had to explain Namibia: where is it and so on, and so we got good publicity from that. So… and I was also very much impressed meeting the president. We had different expectations, but, uh, to tell you the truth he spent two hours with us at luncheon, and he listened.” The podcast’s Kobus Van Staden pointed out that throughout the continent of Africa, President Trump was largely regarded as a joke already, which may account for the lack of anger.

But the substance of Trump’s speech was a more important reason for the willingness of Namibians and other Africans to overlook his ignorance. The speech talked up increased American trade and investment in a variety of Africans countries, and that is good for Americans as much as Africans. The future of Africa matters for the United States because African economies are growing rapidly—more rapidly than most Westerners are aware. 

As for the specific manner in which Trump expressed America's economic interest in Africa, he again received criticism for saying, “Africa has tremendous business potential. I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich. I congratulate you. They’re spending a lot of money. But it does: it has a tremendous business potential—and representing huge amounts of, uh, different markets, and for American firms, it’s really become a place that they have to go, that they want to go.”* The tone is unmistakably paternalistic and classically Trumpian in its narcissism, but beneath that is a positive message: we want to trade with you. That is exactly what African governments want to hear. Earlier in the speech, he said, “In this room, I see partners for promoting prosperity and peace on a range of economic, humanitarian, and security issues. We hope to extend our economic partnerships with countries who are committed to self-reliance and to fostering opportunities for job creation in both Africa and the United States.” Boring and unspecific? Sure, but also respectful, and ritual affirmations of respect and vague commitments to cooperation are the essence of diplomacy.

Prior to the “Nambia” speech, Trump’s views on Africa hadn’t made any headlines during his presidency, except for headlines pointing out that he hadn’t expressed any. The fear among American foreign policy wonks has been that by completely ignoring Africa, Trump is letting the continent fall into China’s sphere of influence or at least—to put it in language less reminiscent of the Cold War—letting China alone take advantage of all the opportunities Africa offers.

In the last decade, China-Africa trade has grown much more rapidly the US-Africa trade, and China surpassed the US as the continent’s largest trading partner in 2009. Africans have long complained that America views Africa as a basket case and a recipient of aid rather than as a potential economic partner. Though the average Zhou also has something of that in his/her view of Africa, the Chinese state most assuredly does not. China’s emphatic official view is that Africa is an economic partner, and it shows in China’s actions. Besides titanic infrastructure investments, China is also building institutions with Africa, the most important being the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, formed in 2000.

On the whole, Africans seem to appreciate this respect. In the 2016 Afrobarometer survey of thirty-six African countries, 63% of Africans reported feeling that China was a positive influence in their countries. To be fair, 30% still reported that America “would be the best model for the future development of our country” versus 24% for the China model. But consider this: the concept of a “China model” didn’t really make its appearance on the world stage until the late 1990s. Since then, it has gained widespread currency and received much debate; the Washington Consensus, the American development model, has meanwhile come in for a great deal of criticism—particularly after 2008. To put it more candidly: since 2000, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. What has America done other than destroy Iraq and tank the global economy?

If mere opinion polling doesn’t interest you, consider that more African university students now choose to study abroad in China than in England or the United States. What relationships are they forging? What values are they imbibing? With whom will this next generation of Africa’s leaders feel comfortable doing business? This is an extraordinarily important development. America’s closeness with global elites in the last few decades has depended enormously on the magnetism of American universities.

Considering that America’s educational and economic appeal has been weakening, why does our image there remain mostly favorable? No doubt we can thank Beyoncé for that. But democracy makes a difference, too. Democracy remains the most widely respected political concept globally (the list of political entities who deny believing in democracy is motley and short—even North Korea is actually the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). But it remains to be seen how long other countries will believe that America embodies democracy or other admirable values. 

Even if America does maintain the mantle of democracy’s champion, democracy itself is not without competition. At the very same time that regressive kleptocracy in a populist mask has been gaining ground in developed countries, the China model or the Beijing Consensus has been generating more and more buzz among economists and policy makers in developing countries. In a nutshell, this refers to a form of authoritarian capitalism, or the prioritization of economic development over human rights. In the next decade, however, if China’s economic growth slows down and the country fails to escape the middle-income trap (as expected), then the China model will doubtless lose some luster, and other developing countries, including those of Africa, will hesitate to follow China's path. But then again, if America falls into complete Trumpism, the authoritarian capitalism of the China model won’t really be an alternative, will it? In essence, we’ll share the same system.

*Addendum: 

A lot of progressive pabulum was tweeted about how money, rich people, Donald Trump’s friends, corporations, and colonialism are bad. Yet money, rich people, Donald Trump’s friends, corporations, and colonialism are all different things and therefore should not be conflated. Do Donald Trump’s purported friends have money? I’m sure. Do many of them run corporations? Seems likely. Do they want to make more money in Africa? It would seem so. Does that mean they want to pillage? No, not necessarily. Does any involvement of Euro-Americans in Africa constitute neo-colonialism? No.

Colonialism is a system wherein a state (the colonizer) seizes control of another state or region (the colony) by means of military force and occupation, and then extracts the raw materials of the colony, ships them back to the colonizer, uses them to manufacture finished goods, and then exports those goods to the colony.

Neo-colonialism is an ill-defined term, but it should refer to a system wherein the economic aspects of colonialism still obtain—that is, an economic relationship wherein a developed country (the neo-colonizer) traps a developing country (the neo-colonized) in a cycle of dependency wherein the developing country remains reliant on the export of raw materials to the developed country and bound in some way to rely on imports of high-value-added products from the developed country.

But this is by no means the essence of trade. It is but one system of trade. Is this what Donald Trump’s alleged friends intend to do? We don’t know. What we do know is that trade is indispensable for developing countries, so let us leave behind the patronizing assumption that Africans will inevitably be victimized.

Chinoptimism

In the 2012 movie Looper, Jeff Daniels imparts some advice to Bruce Willis in his juvenile form (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Upon hearing of his protégé’s study plans, he asks, “Why the fuck French?”

“I’m going to France,” Bruce Willis Gordon-Levitt replies.

“You should go to China.”

“I’m going to France.”

“I’m from the future: you should go to China.”

And so young Bruce-Joe goes and spends three decades doing drugs and dirty deeds in his über-minimalist apartment in an admittedly somewhat hitman-ridden but nevertheless comparatively secure and prosperous China.

This was but one of a number of upbeat Hollywood depictions of China that seem to have kicked off around 2009, when China saved the world in the apocalypse film 2012. China also saved the world that same year as it drove the global economic recovery from the Great Recession.

Admittedly, China receives positive depictions in Hollywood films not because Americans like China, but rather because Hollywood likes Chinese moviegoers. But even if these films aren’t reflecting public sentiment, it is possible that they may be influencing it. There has been a gradual generational shift in American perceptions of China. According to Pew, 55% of Americans ages 18-29 report a positive view of China, while only 41% of those ages 30-49 agree, and those ages 50+ are mighty suspicious at 27%. Perhaps media depictions don’t matter. Perhaps it’s simply that the more distant in one’s memory the Cold War is, the less one regards Communist states as a rival.

“What’s that?” you object, “China isn’t Communist!” Actually, I expect my intelligent and attractive readers are savvier than that, but if the thought did cross your mind, you’re not alone. I have met many people and—sad to say—read the Facebook comments of many more who are under the impression that China is a capitalist country now (sad because I’m reading Facebook comments, not because they’re wrong). This misperception is forgivable, but considerable. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself says, China is a “socialist market economy,” and the more you learn about China’s economy, the more you will find that is an accurate description (I will convince you in a future post).

Regardless of the actual degree to which China is capitalist or socialist, the market is (somewhat) open, and many young Westerners with positive perceptions of it have dived in. More hope to do so, and many people plan for their children to do so (Chinese nannies are in demand). Run across any of these aspiring foreign entrepreneurs in China, and you will find it isn’t just that they regard the Chinese people as one billion customers; in the minds of many, China is the future.

China is also the future in the minds of many Americans and Europeans at home, who may or may not regard this as a good thing. China also looks like the future to many Africans, Central Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Americans, because China is where investment is coming from, China is where you can get a scholarship, and China seems to be led by rational people. The futurism of Chinese cities has been acclaimed by one Paris Hilton who, on a 2007 visit, said, “Shanghai looks like the future!” Shanghai looks much more futuristic now than it did then, and it looks even more futuristic when Bruce Willis Gordon-Levitt arrives in 2044.

Super-Pudong 2044 (Source)

China is also the future in the minds of most Chinese. Optimism is said to be a trait in the Chinese character. Chinese kids, as so many envious American education writers tell us, have grit. They are taught that success comes not from innate talent, but from hard work, and I personally would attest that this truly shows in the attitudes of the Chinese people I know. And it is admirable.

It would be hard not to be optimistic, perhaps, when you experience wealth and security that your parents did not, when your grandparents lived through famine and civil war, and you have an iPhone—or even if you don’t have an iPhone, you are at least able to support your extended family by working in the factory that makes them.

There is another side to the coin, of course. Decades of bullet-fast economic growth produce externalities, as the air, water, earth, expropriated villagers, bewildered elders, and powerless promoters of civil society attest.

Yet money has a way of healing all wounds, and China’s pervasive atmosphere of optimism remains alluring. A few of my Chinese friends make cynical remarks about the government, but very few of them think their country is falling apart, and almost none of them think the world is about to end. It is deeper even than the economic. While America sighs with postmodernism, China enthuses modern: progress, enlightenment, socialism, science, education, improvement, prosperity!

I would wager that this is something inconceivable to American Millennials, unless they should have the opportunity to go a place such as China and experience it for themselves. American popular culture has overflowed with apocalyptic imagery for more than a decade now. This is what Confucius called 亡国之音, the pitiful cries of a doomed country. And why not? To progressives, humanity is a despoiler of the earth, and America is the bandit extraordinaire: climate change is going to destroy everything, and it’s all our fault. Or if not that, automation apocalypse or AI apocalypse or virtual reality apocalypse or colony collapse syndrome. As H. Bruce Franklin said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But regardless of their politics, most young Americans feel the truth of this: Millenials are the first generation in American history to experience less prosperity than their parents. This is entirely the opposite of young Chinese, and God bless them.

Yet here is the rub: today’s young Chinese will soon be crushed by the economic burden of the old. China is rapidly aging just as the economy is slowing down. It will get old before it gets rich. Not only will China not escape the middle income trap, it may not even surpass America as the world’s largest economy (in nominal GDP). Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian once told the New York Times, “People say we can be two to three times the size of America’s economy. I say it’s totally impossible. It will never overtake America’s, because of the decrease in the labor force and the aging of the population.” China’s population is expected to fall below one billion by 2060, at which time the US population will be over 400 million. By 2050, China’s median age will be 48.7, while America’s will be 40. Meanwhile, China’s GDP growth will continue to slow. The recently established pension system remains to be worked out, and lifestyle diseases are expected to spread. Chinese a few decades hence will probably remember the 1990s through the 2010s as a golden age of expanding prosperity in much the same way that Americans remember the 1940s through the 1960s.

Our national salvation (Source)

China is set to suffer the burden of an aging population (as are Europe and Japan), but America is not. America’s fertility rate remains high because of immigration, and as long as it keeps the door open, a continually rejuvenated population will ensure that its prospects for economic growth and national security remain equally high. At the moment, most Americans would agree that the nation seems hell-bent on committing suicide. To the Trump-right, immigration is that suicide; in reality, America's path to suicide would be to succumb to the nostalgic and racist authoritarianism that would lock us into a monochromatic, geriatric destiny. But bad presidents come and go, xenophobia ebbs and flows, and politics sway between left and right. If America can remember its better self, it may find reasons for optimism that most of the world will lack.

Anonymity's End

The Chinese government has sentenced anonymity to death.

On August 25, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued new regulations intended to tighten up real-name registration requirements for online forums. Real-name registration has been in the works for years, with gradually tightening implementation. According to the notice issued by CAC, beginning October 1, the burden will fall upon tech companies themselves to verify the identities of their users. The rules apply to all social media platforms, forums, comments on news websites, and “any other communication platform that features news or with the function to mobilize society.” The form which this registration takes usually consists of signing up for a service using one’s actual phone number, because phone numbers must be registered under one’s real name in China. Chinese service providers themselves will also be required to report any forbidden speech activities which take place, for a list of which see here. It’s a fairly comprehensive roundup (since the final listed activity is “violating any other laws and regulations”). One of the items, “spreading rumors and disrupting social order,” has seen quite wide-ranging and flexible use as a legal charge against presumed speech criminals in recent years.

Anonymity may be marching to the gallows, but it isn’t necessarily going to hang on the appointed date. As with all Chinese laws, we need to wait and see before we can make informed comments, because implementation may be slow and patchy. VPNs, the primary method for circumventing the Great Firewall, have long been illegal, but that hasn’t stopped people from using them. There has been a crackdown on VPNs in recent months, however. Apple has agreed to remove some of them from the Chinese App Store, and China’s three state telecom providers will be required to prevent individuals from accessing any and all VPNs beginning next February (or at least those whose existence they are aware of). Again, we must wait for the implementation, but if there are no more VPNs, make no mistake: the Internet and the Chinanet will become two different networks with, with the very little shared between them turning into less and less.

In The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the Twenty-First Century, Stein Ringen argues that China is a latently totalitarian dictatorship of an entirely new style. What makes the Chinese dictatorship “perfect”—or what will make it so if current trends continue—is the complement of thought control techniques employed by the Chinese Communist Party. The techniques of mental domination being pioneered by the CCP today are far subtler than anything practiced by totalitarian regimes of the past. According to Ringen’s argument, the key to CCP thought control is not censorship but self-censorship: as he sees it, the party aims to establish a society which needs no policing, because people will ultimately choose to comprehensively police themselves. This is a matter of setting up a society in which there are very clear incentives for cooperation. The Chinese state wins legitimacy by offering the Chinese people the chance to participate in economic prosperity. In this bargain, a free and just life is sacrificed in favor of a secure and comfortable one.

The CCP prefers to rely on soft incentives. A recent study of Chinese online censorship by Gary King of Harvard found that the prevalent method in recent years is not to delete criticisms but rather to drown them out with a flood of comments swelling with positive energy. The idea is to distract rather than engage. One advantage of this method is that defenders of the Party-state can point to the many critical comments which do indeed get posted as evidence of China’s freedom of speech. Nor are the posters of critical comments hunted down and jailed. Until now, the only kind of criticism which has been likely to result in a knock on your front door is that kind which moves beyond the mere airing of grievances to the point of actually advocating organized political activities of resistance (such as public protests). This is a noteworthy departure from old-fashioned methods of censorship, which consist of silencing critics.

Real-name registration places responsibility for one’s speech in one’s own hands. The new regulations make clear that there is a comprehensive list of forbidden speech acts for which one can be punished. But one still has a platform, one still has a microphone, one still has a voice. The internet is still there. The choice of what to do as a being with a voice is your own. Should you choose to speak, however, they know who you are. But self-censorship is more ingenious than the threat of consequences. The perfect dictatorship takes self-censorship to a new level. People are not only reminded of the consequences of criticism but are also given an example of what “good” public speech looks like. This good form of speech is referred to as “positive energy.” Positive energy is the quality of any speech act which praises the Communist Party or China (and conflates the two, ideally), and it is the crux of thought control in the perfect dictatorship.  You are not just told to shut up or else; rather, you are told, “This is how you should talk instead. And if you do, you might just go viral.”

In 2014, previously unknown netizens Yu Runze and Xu An released a music video about the love between President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan which, with some nudges from the state media, has racked up several hundred million views. You really must watch this video. Its lyrics, such as “Xi dada loves Peng mama, love like theirs is a fairytale. Peng mama loves Xi dada, a world with love is the most powerful,” are similar in structure to those of “The East Is Red,” a Cultural-Revolution-era song which praised Mao Zedong.

President Xi himself echoed Mao in his October 14, 2014 talk at the Beijing Forum on Art and Literature (whose name recalls Mao’s famous/infamous speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. The bottom line of Xi’s speech was that “The arts must serve the people and serve socialism”—a message essentially the same as that delivered by Mao seventy-two years before. In the speech, Xi showered praise on Zhou Xiaoping and Hua Qianfang, two nationalistic young bloggers whose work he identified as being powered by positive energy. Their commentary typically consists of screeds against Japan and America, which country Zhou has accused, for example, of “opposing humanity,” seeking to “destroy Chinese beliefs,” and being engaged in a Cold War against China. Interestingly, the shout-out to Zhou was scrubbed from later transcriptions of President Xi’s speech after another prominent blogger pointed out factual inaccuracies in one of Zhou’s posts and Zhou subsequently faced widespread online ridicule.

The desire for positive energy also may partly explain why Chinese television is so boring. Satirical comedy does not transmit positive energy, nor do morally ambiguous dramas. Antiheroes who reflect social problems certainly do not embody positive energy. As Xi remarked at the aforementioned Beijing Forum on Art and Literature, “In some of their work, some artists ridicule what is noble, distort the classics. They subvert history and smear the masses and heroes. Some don’t tell right from wrong, don’t distinguish between good and evil, present ugliness as beauty, exaggerate society’s dark side.” Such artists are transmitting negative energy (a.k.a. critical thought). A good recent example of art which does transmit positive energy is the action film “Wolf Warrior 2,” whose poster reads: “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated” (by the way, with Chinese box office earnings of $867 million USD so far, it is the second-highest grossing film of all time in a single market). This line was paraphrased on a sign used by Chinese students at a protest in Sydney against India over the recent China-India border dispute.

In a recent online poll, netizens were asked to choose the news photos which best transmitted positive energy. The winners mostly include pictures of police in action, military parades, and disaster relief efforts.The Chinese media regularly put out Buzzfeed-esque, list-heavy articles about how great it is to live in China as compared to America or "the West," citing such advantages as Chinese cuisine, excellent public transportation, and the wide availability of dirt-cheap next-day delivery services. News stories in general, even when covering tragedies or crimes, tend to end on an upbeat note about how the police, the city government, the local Party secretary, or some other authority figure has taken vigorous measures to rectify the problem. But inasmuch as the media address goings-on abroad, they tend to emphasis the chaos of the outside world in contrast to the safety and orderliness of China. Censors have also urged economists to put out more stories with positive energy. 

Rampant self-censorship and positive energy don't result in the sort of drab, gloomy country which you picture the Soviet Union to be in your head. Chinese cities are full of color and light, hustle and bustle, advertising and entrepreneurialism. Shanghai is full of bikeshares, old streets lined with new cafes, and young people with disposable incomes experimenting with fashion. In other words, it often feels much the same as any other global city. And Chinese people do speak their minds about as much as any other people—at least in a one-on-one setting.

 

Yet I think of the people in my graduate program in Hong Kong, an autonomous region of China which, under the principle of “one country, two systems,” has legally protected freedom of speech and academic freedom. Our course was on Chinese politics, and in a society with freedom of thought, one expects graduate students in a political science course to have something to say. Yet extracting opinions from most of the mainland Chinese students was like pulling teeth. There were some who became more outspoken over time, but not before more than one professor admonished the class that “You can feel free to say anything here. No one is going to report on you.” (Nervous titters.) Those who did grow more outspoken certainly had insightful criticisms to share. So why did it take so long to draw them out? One might say that their reticence reflected fear, and that may be true to some extent, but I am afraid that in the case of many of my Chinese friends, their silence on political matters is not a matter of fear so much as apathy. Time and again have I heard variations of “Why should I worry about politics? I can live my own life.” There are, of course, plenty of people who would say the same in democratic societies. But I think the reticence of many of my classmates reflected something more than fear and apathy. One of those who did eventually speak up more often generally insisted on speaking English because “I want to think in English, not Chinese. I am in Hong Kong, and even though it is part of China, when I am studying here, I should try to think like a foreigner, not like a Chinese.”

Besides the promotion of positive energy and self-censorship, the Chinese state still relies quite heavily on cruder methods of social control. For years, China’s budget allocated more to “stability maintenance” (funds which are spent on state security police, censorship, surveillance, etc.) than to the military. The most recent year in which these figures were published was 2013, when stability maintenance received 769 billion RMB while the military received 741 billion. Since then, the central government has wisely ceased releasing comprehensive figures on stability maintenance. Old fashioned censorship thus chugs on, the recent Cambridge University Press scandal being a prominent example. And the fate of Liu Xiaobo reminds us that the Party-state is willing to straightforwardly crush freethinkers who get too popular. His death also reflects an old-school totalitarian reliance on the memory hole: thanks to pervasive targeted censorship, few Chinese people know who he was. It is therefore quite accurate to say that the Chinese state still relies on brute force and the traditional methods of social control.

But the CCP is also constantly innovating. Real-name registration will not be the last new censorship technique, and such techniques, combined with the incipient social credit system, will soon create an atmosphere so positive that certain people will find it difficult to breathe.