中国的成功打脸“西方剧本”
2023-02-18 08:17阅读：
20世纪90年代，美国改变中国的A计划已确立。中国是非常不同的大国。但根据（美国的）设想，北京仍可被吸引到以美国为中心的“可口可乐轨道”上。这个可被简称为“融合”的计划最终流产，许多西方国家政府特别是华盛顿的暴躁情绪随之而来。按他们的说法，若中国执意拒绝“基于西方历史终结论智慧的发展蓝图”，必然产生不利后果。
可令人吃惊的是，中国坚持自己的蓝图并取得非凡成功。诺姆·乔姆斯基最近引用保罗·基廷的话，强调了这一点：中国大幅减少赤贫人口这个事实本身，就代表了对美国霸主地位的挑战。于是，B计划应运而生——设想北京未来的西方新剧本。
China formulates its own future
By Richard Cullen
Despite countless Western bossy-boots beavering away in the media
and beyond, generating worst-case projections as they strain to
create a collective storyboard for “China: The Disaster Movie”,
China, exasperatingly, keeps successfully pressing on towards its
own clearly considered, affirmative future.
The American Plan A for reforming China was firmly in place by the
1990s. The Middle Kingdom was huge a
nd very different, so these realities would need to be indulged.
But Beijing, it was envisaged, could still be drawn, like so many
before it, into an accommodating Coca Cola orbit pivoting around
the US. The short name for this scheme was: convergence. Plan A
eventually proved, due to China’s extraordinary insubordination, to
be a fizzer. Much Western grumpiness – especially in Washington –
followed. If China was bent on recklessly rebuffing a development
blueprint based on universal Western, end-of-history wisdom,
adverse consequences must surely follow.
Maddeningly, China pressed on, not only purposefully but with
exceptional success, by cleaving to its own Sino-blueprint. Noam
Chomsky recently highlighted what follows from this, quoting Paul
Keating: The fact that China has lifted 20% of humanity from abject
poverty into something approaching a modern state is illegitimate
because its mere presence represents a challenge to US pre-eminence
(see: Even renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky reads Pearls
and Irritations
As a consequence, Plan B, which is explained below, has emerged. An
apt short title for this bleak new Western script envisaging
Beijing’s future is: China: The Disaster Movie.
China, from the beginning of the open-door policy in 1978, was
ready and eager to learn about technical and related modernisation
from the West. However, experience-based wariness, about opening
the doors more widely to Western political and philosophical
marketing (dating back to the 19th century) remained a fixture.
Arguably the single most important recent turning point, confirming
the wisdom of wariness, was the American incubated Global Financial
Crisis (GFC), triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the
US, in 2008. The response in Beijing can be summarised in this way:
You want us to converge with this? No thank you!
In the media world, a storyboard is a set of pre-visualising
written and graphic illustrations, typically prepared for a new
film. As China’s well-grounded dismissal of the West’s convergence
script became increasingly firm, the Plan B development of a
Western collective storyboard, headlining all the misfortunes that
were surely about to beset China – as a consequence of its
disobedience – gained swift purchase. Displaying literally
reactionary zeal, the Mainstream Western Media (MWM) piled-in
offering enthusiastic, haphazard, always alarming storyboard
content, month after month, for, China: The Disaster Movie.
It is worth considering some highlights.
In mid-2020, the Yangtze river was in flood. The Three Gorges Dam
on that river had to deal with more than the usual amount of water
flowing into that massive reservoir. A swift online search reveals
a host of lurid headlines from that time, typified by the Nikkei
news service telling us that, As water crests, Three Gorges Dam
crisis puts 400 million at risk. Further searching reveals much of
this reporting was sourced from startling coverage in Taiwan.
Wilder media outlets almost seemed to be cheering on the
floodwaters. Fortunately, the remarkable dam, in accordance with
its design, held firm. Zero comparable Western headlines appeared
highlighting this. Indeed, once the floodwaters had “lost”, the
story largely disappeared from the MWM.
In early 2022, just as the Beijing Winter Olympics were getting
underway, a Washington Post journalist wrote that, “Nobody likes to
toss a rotten fish into the world’s greatest sporting event”. She
and a school of other fish-tossers, nevertheless set to work doing
just this, eagerly anticipating a measurable breakdown in China’s
dynamic-zero-COVID strategy coupled with some serious commotion and
disruption at the Olympic venues. All this would help prove how the
Chinese model of governance, despite some apparent success, was
deeply flawed compared to political systems based on modern, now
unipolar, universal liberalism. Alas, China, once again failed to
adhere to the Western screenplay. The scornful critics were
outwitted by a safe, exceptionally well-run and thrilling
(according to ABC Australia) Olympics.
Next, it is helpful to consider the more general, intense MWM
scrutiny of China’s COVID management policies. The dynamic-zero
COVID strategy was applied in China from early 2020 until late
2022. During this period, the MWM grew increasingly strident in its
advice that this policy lagged dangerously behind the switch in the
West to the advanced thinking underpinning the Living with COVID
approach. Never mind that, compared to the US, the Chinese approach
likely saved several million lives and prevented several hundred
million infections when COVID mortality and morbidity rates were at
their worst – the West still knew best. Subsequently, as a second
Omicron outbreak took hold in China in late 2022, prompting
significant urban protests, Beijing rapidly decided that it did
need to shift to living with the, now less dangerous, dominant
COVID variant.
Talk about turning on a sixpence: the MWM, like a well-drilled
chorus-line, shifted to a new set of woe-is-China tales and
predictions arising, as it happens, from Beijing acting in parallel
with the previous, insistent MWM advice that the dynamic-zero COVID
policy was past its use-by date. Ghoulish spying on funeral
parlours from above was one innovative reporting technique
pioneered by the Washington Post.
This turn-around brings to mind “Said Hanrahan”, the best-known
work of the Australian poet, John O’Brien. In this remarkable
bush-poem, Hanrahan begins by insisting that “We’ll all be rooned
[ruined]” by the terrible drought then being experienced. By the
poem’s end, however, Hanrahan has worked his way around to
predicting, with equal emphasis, that “We’ll all be rooned” due the
boisterous arrival of heavy rainfall.
Finally, let’s consider some large-scale facts. Since that GFC
turning point in 2008, China, using its own blueprint, has, as Hank
Paulson recently noted writing in Foreign Affairs, seen its economy
grow by 300%. Over the same period the US economy has grown by less
than 70%. The Standard Chartered bank lately predicted that China’s
economy would be more than double the size of the US economy, using
PPP exchange rates, by 2030.
Thus, despite all these Western bossy-boots beavering away in the
media and beyond to generate one worst-case projection after
another, China, exasperatingly, just keeps pressing on: thinking,
planning, creating and building. There is no question that Beijing
faces many problems, but that exceptionally positive track-record
explains why China, unaided, still looks set to create a remarkably
thriving future for itself.
