Dialogue with Chinese characteristics

Ningxia, the Muslim Autonomous Region in northern China, is home to nearly twice the population of Wales

The authorities in Beijing were well prepared for the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Their tactics for dealing with the renewed interest from the international media and any heightening of domestic political tensions ranged from the predictable – cutting access to Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail, keeping their hands hovering above the big, red ‘CENSOR’ button and slamming it down whenever CNN or BBC mentioned the story – to the unintentionally hilarious strategic deployment of camera-blocking umbrellas around the square itself on June 4^th. Given the exhaustive planning that clearly went in to making sure that the ‘harmonious society’ remained harmonious in June, it must be pretty galling for President Hu and the Politburo that July has been one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most difficult months since it crushed the nascent pro-democracy movement in 1989.

Some of the recent challenges have been natural: an earthquake in the south-west of the country destroyed or damaged 40,000 houses and displaced almost half a million people; the government has also felt compelled to maintain its hyper-vigilant anti-swine flu programme.

However, most of the government’s other problems have ‘Made in China’ stamped all over them. President Hu has found himself uncomfortably close to a business scandal after his son’s industrial scanner company was charged with corruption by a Namibian Government that is apparently uninterested in the billions of dollars that the Chinese are currently throwing at Africa. Meanwhile, in the southern Guangdong province, the dark side of the country’s manufacturing boom was again exposed when a man suspected of stealing a prototype for a new iPhone from his employers committed suicide after being threatened and beaten by the company’s security staff.  Apple has said that it is ‘saddened’ by the death, while Foxconn, the Taiwenese electronics giant that builds the iPods and does all the worker intimidation on Apple’s behalf, has given a new MacBook to the man’s family in an attempt to ease their pain.

The most significant China story of the past month has been the outbreak of ethnic violence between the Uighur and Han populations in the sparsely populated far-western province of Xinjiang. The clashes there, motivated by racial and religious discrimination against the Muslim Uighur people, resulted in 156 deaths and the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of Uighur activists – Rebiya Kadeer, the Washington-based Uighur leader, has claimed that up to 10,000 protesters have ‘disappeared’. The violence was the most intense since 1989 and was considered so serious that the President cut short his attendance at the G8 summit in Italy.

In light of these events, it was an extraordinary time for us to be travelling to China with the British Council as part of the ‘China-UK 400’ exchange programme. The programme represents an attempt to get young people from the two countries to exchange ideas about politics, business and the arts, and to generally develop greater cross-cultural understanding.

Our host organisation for the exchange in China was the All China Youth Federation (ACYF). The ACYF is the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and pretty much anyone who wants to ‘get on’ in China joins. Hu Jintao was a member of the ACYF, as was his predecessor Jiang Zemin, and as will have been all the future presidents of the country as long as the CCP remains in power. The consequences of being hosted by the ACYF were that, on one hand, we got access to a level of Chinese society that would otherwise have been completely unobtainable, and we got treated like visiting dignitaries. On the other hand, the ACYF is packed full of ambitious, loyal young members of the CCP who are primarily trying to advance their prospects within the gigantic, Kafkaesque Chinese political system. It quickly became clear that the ‘exchanging ideas’ thing wasn’t really going to happen.

A majority of the meetings followed a set pattern: a limited number of senior representatives would give us a presentation about their particular regional administration/business/government department, and a tightly-controlled question and answer session would follow. Any sensitive topics raised in these sessions were usually dealt with politely, unsatisfactorily and in a manner that suggested that a follow-up question was not welcome. For example, when questioned about the state-owned and state-run China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group’s activities in Burma, Iran and North Korea, the representative from the company assured us that, “these are economic transactions between businesses and have nothing to do with politics”. In the provinces this situation could be even more delicate: a scheduled and much-anticipated meeting with CCP leaders in Liaoning was cancelled after an earlier session with some non-CCP young people had threatened to become interesting. We ended-up spending the morning of the cancelled meeting picking raspberries in a field alongside a motorway.

The trouble in Urumqi had begun a couple of days before we left the UK, and the knowledge that there was major civil unrest going on in the country – albeit hundreds of miles away – coloured our experiences and made any discussion of China’s approach to its ethnic minority groups particularly interesting. Ningxia Province has a significant Hui minority population, who, like the Uighurs of Xinjiang, are predominantly Muslim. Given the on-going situation, it came as no surprise that regional officials in Ningxia made a point of demonstrating that the Hui minority occupied a representative number of senior posts within the local administration, and they also sought to emphasise the seemingly trouble-free integration of Hui and Han in the local universities. Yet, like in Xinjiang, the government’s efforts to accommodate Hui culture and religious practice could look clumsy at best and tokenistic at worst. For instance, the Government built mosque and museum celebrating Hui culture had been constructed in an area outside of Yinchuan that was hardly easily accessible to passing traffic. No one in the group managed to get an answer as to why racial tension seemed so much less in Ningxia than Urumqi.

The real highlights of the exchange came from the all-too-rare occasions when we got to talk to normal students and school kids, and learnt just how remarkably similar a 17 year-old living in Shenyang or Yinchuan is to a 17 year-old living in Newport or Wrexham. Through meeting the students we also discovered priceless nuggets of information like the fact that Ken Loach’s northern-boy-meets-bird classic Kes is used as a teaching tool in English language classes across China. The further you got from the invasive hand of the CCP in Beijing the closer you felt you were to getting to see the real China.

Beyond those personal connections, the trip showed how China wants to portray itself to the West: it was the fruits of their economic success that they wanted us to acknowledge above all else. The luxury of the hotels, the scope and ambition of the city development plans, the no-expense-spared banquets all hammered home the same message: wealth, wealth, wealth. That is not to say that the Chinese delegation that visits the UK will be given the warts ‘n’ all tour of the country and all of its social ills, but the disciplined pounding of the same core message about rising prosperity was reminiscent of Mandelson or Coulson on their finest form. There was also barely any mention of ideology: whenever discussions touched on Chinese political history it was Deng Xiaoping and his economic miracle that people wanted to talk about, not Mao.

It is important when trying to evaluate a programme like this that you can separate the personal experiences – the warmth of the Chinese people, the beauty of the country, the nightlife in Beijing etc – from the political and professional successes. There is a fundamental problem with the concept of an ‘exchange of ideas’ with China: they’re not particularly keen on talking about political ideas, at least at an official level. While the respective leaders of China and the UK can discuss shared strategic goals and practical policies, and businessmen from each country can talk shop and cut deals, it is always going to be difficult to discuss ideas with young politicians from a political culture so radically different from our own – especially with a government that is so insecure and frightened of political ideas that it is prepared to silence its own citizens rather than allow free debate.

Our experiences in China would suggest that this kind of formal, low-level political engagement is frustrating and ultimately hollow. But the obvious mutual curiosity and the connections made at the margins of these meetings would suggest that there is something more valuable to be gained from putting young people from China and the UK together and just letting them talk.

Joe Allen and Alison Goldsworthy are both members of the British Council’s UK China 400 programme.