EXPAT FILES:
China: waiting for democracy
CBC News Viewpoint | February 3, 2005 | More from Expat Files
Living overseas is never easy. Getting used to a foreign culture and being away from friends and family can be difficult. Below are the views of Canadian expats as seen from the vantage point of their new locations around the globe.
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Jacob Moeller has been living and traveling in Asia for the past year. Between Chinese language courses in varying Chinese cities, he has recently found time to explore Tibet, Nepal, India and Laos. He has also been seen studying physics/political science at Mount Allison University in the recent past.
How is it possible for an individual living in a vastly over-populated country to feel isolated? This question occurred to me after a friend of mine, Mr. Zhang, who lives in a country of 1.4 billion, told me that he felt this way. Somewhat like myself, Mr. Zhang’s favourite topics of conversation are quite obviously politics and history, yet, unlike myself, the rare occasions he has to speak of his interests occur only when he meets a foreigner who is interested and will listen.
George Orwell said that to see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle. But struggle is bearable, and can even be healthy while in the company of others. For Mr. Zhang and those like him, who fear their political beliefs could lead to a prison cell, and are too busy making a living to risk seeking like-minded people, the struggle for an independent view of the world, irrespective of the government's official line, is a solitary one.
Mr. Zhang's contradictory position, as he himself likes to discuss, is a product of history. The years of the cold war saw the world powers taking part in many competitions: the space race, the arms race, the Olympics, chess tournaments, and so on. But the most important and most lasting was the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – the development of the most effective possible system of propaganda.
While virtually all governments took part and had varying degrees of success, those on the communist side of the world were able to easily dismiss freedom of speech and expression as "bourgeois" and parliamentary democracy as "capitalist," and build propaganda machines that could only have been the envy of the Western leaders.
In China, this policy has been so effective that today, even after property rights have been enshrined in its constitution – making it in a strict sense more capitalist than countries like Canada – the average Chinese person will still claim that theirs is a socialist state.
The propaganda system in China is formidable, with independent media virtually non-existent and the government going so far as to control which websites its citizens have access to.
Knowing I was looking for a place to live, a friend referred me to a Chinese man who was offering a free room in his apartment in exchange for giving English tutorials to high-school students. I jumped at the opportunity to live for free while having unlimited access to a Chinese person who could help me with my own language skills. And once I moved in with Mr. Zhang, it didn't take long for politics to come up.
Being a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., I was preparing to vote in both 2004 elections in absentia and I thought my new roommate might be interested in seeing the ballets. He was ecstatic. "Who are you going to vote for? If I were you I'd vote for Bush."
At first I was reluctant to discuss the subject with him since neither his command of English nor my Chinese would allow us to give an adequate account of our feelings – compounded by the fact that I was most definitely not going to vote for George Bush. But after an evening stroll that ended with him flailing his arms in the air and declaring: "A man living without democracy is no better than an animal," I realized that the subject couldn't be ignored.
That night, Mr. Zhang explained to me his feelings, stopping frequently to write down a few words too difficult to pronounce or to thumb through the dictionary. Sometimes he would form a grammatically correct sentence such as: "For me to live without democracy is like a fish without water," that must have been memorized sometime in the past. Through the night I slowly began to form a coherent picture of his politics and where his ideas had come from.
Mr. Zhang, a 34-year-old private tutor for a dozen overworked high-school students, had grown up in a village in Sichuan province. His parents had been property owners before the 1949 Communist take-over and were subsequently the victims of Communist party-encouraged hatred of the landlord class. According to Mr. Zhang, his parents had both been physically attacked, with his mother being forced to kneel on sharp objects making her bleed from the legs.
To balance the conversation I sometimes try to explain that even in Western democracies, an inequality exists that both reduces the effectiveness of the democracy itself and makes "making what one wishes of one's own life" impossible for most people, especially immigrants.
But such arguments have little impact on a person who witnesses the citizens of other nations actively choosing their own leaders while he is not even able to express to his fellow countrymen his dissatisfaction with China's single party out of fear of prison, or worse.
Such a situation is what led to Mr. Zhang's feeling of isolation; with passionate beliefs that can only be expressed to a foreigner who is neither able to completely empathize, nor effectively speak a common language.
Today, when people in the West think of China they imagine a poor country quickly becoming rich; a potential competitor to the American dominance of the world market; a one-time repressive Communist country that has somehow seen the light. This attitude is a good indication that the systems of propaganda that have taught us to equate free markets with democracy, and democracy with goodness, live on today. China has a free market, but not a democracy.
It has the fastest growing economy in the world, but Mr. Zhang and others like him have no reason to believe that to be true. The party-controlled media have always painted a rosy picture of the economy, even during the worst times. Witnessing the continued poverty of his home-village, of the difficulty of his own life and of his friends', he has no reason to think that the party is telling the truth now.
For Mr. Zhang, freedom doesn't come when he is able to choose amongst a variety of toothpaste brands. It will come when he is simply able to speak his mind without fear. And when he has a say in his country's political destiny.
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