Revisiting 'One World, One Dream'

James Fallows comes back. In a more thorough way, the latest piece in the Atlantic about the post-Olympics China points out some paradoxes that are typical in contemporary China. 

The general public opinion in China seems to be very different from the one outside of China that 'according to a report last year by Joshua Cooper Ramo of Kissinger Associates, most people in China considered their country very “trustworthy.” Most people outside China thought the country was not trustworthy at all'. 

Knowing this fact would make the slogan 'one world, one dream' sound naive.  The problem is whether Chinese leaders know this situation. Fallows thinks that 'the closer Chinese officials are to centers of political power, the less they know what they don’t know about the world.' 

Is that so? Look at Premier Wen's interview with the Newsweek, issues such as Tibet and the Dalai Lama, human rights and democracy can be talked frankly. The matter is how such an openness to the West can be represented in a broader way and synchronized in China, say, by officialdom in China to the ordinary people.   

Here is another paradox, or the mismatch between the image that Chinese top leaders want to project to the outside world as a progressive and harmonious society, and the reality of what China really is in the eyes of some outside observers. The gap between what China wants to be and what China really is has become particularly prominent. While the government desperately tried to do all sorts of PRs and take preemptive measures to achieve an ideal and positive image of China, it has encountered the most dramatic antithetical event - the milk scandal.  

Truth about what China really is lies somewhere beyond such a paradoxy. Sometimes we need another big event that involves both sides to provide a proper lens to see it clearly. It would be amazing in historical eyes that within just two months the world has witnessed three big events, namely the Beijing Olympics, the Russian-Georgian conflicts and the global financial crisis, that probably would mark the dawn of the new era of global governance. 

If the dichotomy thinking of the West and the Other was fashionable for what's happened in Beijing and Moscow, the latest financial crisis looks like an antithesis to such a mindset, for it's been generally agreed that the world needs to work together to tackle down the problem. 

Are the national interventions across the board of the West not historical necessity? Isn't such a kind of socialization in the post-industrialized countries of the West realized naturally in the discourse of history? Such a development certainly is at the vanguard of the historical movement that no historical lessons so far can one refer to, which means, the socialized policies that the West have adopted are not the historical regression but completely new. 

It is in vain to use any adjective to define capitalism being caught in this financial turmoil and remedial measures thus taken to save it from collapsing as 'true capitalism' or 'honest capitalism' like what Judy Shelton tries to define in a reactionary 'A Capitalist Manifesto'  , or Simon Jenkins' unsolicited defense against 'the End of Capitalism'. Those ideological tainted words all fail to capture the essence of this new trend as it's still too early to make a judgement. 

Probably, this financial crisis will be like a catharsis to enable either the left and the right, or the West and the Non-west to become more inwardly reflective and to concentrate more firmly on its internal self problems. Finally, China adopts a new rural policy to unleash its potential, and to some extent, empower peasants to achieve equal social status as those city dwellers. What kind of changes it will bring is still too early to say, but it will certainly be one of the keys to win the trust from the outside world.