China in the Year of the Games A Chinese-born Australian Academic Explains what is Real and What is Just Appearance

An Interview with Dr. Yu Haiqing who was then (26th November 2008) Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Tasmania Haiqing Yu joined the School of Asian Languages and Studies, Universtiy of Tasmania in January 2008. She received her PhD in culture and communication from the University of Melbourne in March 2007. Prior to coming to Hobart, she taught at the University of Melbourne, RMIT and Shandong Normal University, and worked as a television journalist at Jiangsu Satellite TV (Nanjing). Haiqing is also an honorary research fellow of School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. She has been teaching at UNSW since January 2009. Research Interests: Haiqing's research interests include Chinese media and popular culture, journalism and communication studies, Asian media systems, AIDS in the media, and new religious movements in the media. She is the author of several journal articles on contemporary Chinese media culture. She has reviewed several articles for academic journals on subjects related to media, art and politics in Asia Pacific. She is also the author of Media and Cultural Transformation in China (Routledge, 2008). Haiqing is currently researching Internet and new media technologies and their impact on lifestyles in contemporary China.

Dr Yu Haiqing

I have prepared a few questions but mainly I wanted to talk about the impact of the Olympic Games on China. I went to China in September and I was having a conversation with a friend of mine from previous trips (a young woman in her late twenties) and I was talking about the Three Gorges Dam and how I thought it was a disaster like the Cultural Revolution. To my surprise she agreed and then she said that when all that controversy was going on, she and her friends were accessing overseas websites because they had decided that the official government sites weren't telling the truth. But as a consequence of the Olympic Torch relay, the attacks on it and of course the riots in Lhasa in March, and the way all that was reported in the Western media, she has decided that now it is the Western media that lies.

I gave a presentation on the Olympics just two days before the Opening Ceremony. I touched upon international journalism, but you talk about truth. What is Truth? According to the Postmodernist, Constructionist theory there is no single regime of truth. There are several regimes of truth. So if you are asking is the Chinese Government telling the truth or is the Western Media telling the truth, I think "the truth" is a very fluid concept.

I find the Chinese ultimately pragmatic. Talking about propaganda, while I was in China this time there was a mining disaster. An illegal mine flooded, caused a mudslide and buried over 300 people. The relevant government minister was being interviewed on CCTV and he was shaking with rage. He was going to get the people who did this. Then there was the melamine contamination scandal, and in that context Hu Jin Tao gave a speech – I think to the Central Committee of the Communist Party – about the danger of putting profit before people. Whether this is all true or not, it now represents the Chinese Government line.

But that has always been the Chinese Communist Party's official line. There is a difference between rhetoric and practice. The rhetoric has always been the Party line but you have to look at what's happening at the bottom, at the grassroots rather than what the leadership in Beijing says. Of course I wouldn't doubt their good intentions. Like Hu Jin Tao and Wen Jiabao have enjoyed high prestige, a very good reputation among Chinese people. My parents are in China and they have very high praise for them. They say this is the best government that we have ever had. That is a quote from my father.

The two incidents you mention, the mining incident and the contaminated milk incident actually occurred before and during the Olympics but both of them were covered up.

Until after the Olympics. I actually arrived in Beijing in the week between the Olympics and the Paralympics and both incidents were being reported on CCTV

Until after the Olympics because nothing negative could be reported while China was staging the biggest ever spectacle to the world. So it was all covered up. It was only after the Olympics were over that the media were allowed to report those two incidents that impacted so hugely on Chinese society and the Western World. Under this new regime we see more openness. More willingness to acknowledge China's problems but it is still very highly controlled.

I have formed the impression that there is a kind of panic in the West about China, starting with the preparations for the Games and becoming particularly hysterical since the Games – because China is successful while western economies are faltering. especially in the US. A lot of the rhetoric that is currently being directed towards China is, I think, a result of the perception that this COMMUNIST economy is working comparatively well while the West is failing. So THAT system is being seen to have worked even though we were always told it couldn't. People in the West are even becoming cynical about Western parliamentary democracy. Is it really the best system? Is a choice between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum every three or four years the best we can do?

You raise a number of topics. One is the persistence of Cold War attitudes in the West: Socialism versus Capitalism. You were saying that Communism seems to be successful while Capitalism is failing. But I disagree with you. China is not a Communist Country any more. It is only Communism in name. In media studies we talk about Chinese media as a kind of monster with a Capitalist body but a Socialist head. Is it either Capitalism or Socialism? Don't worry about whether it is a black cat or a white cat, as long as the cat catches mice it is a good cat. That stops the debate about which is better for China; this is where we talk about pragmatism. Since Dung Xiao Ping initiated the open door reform policy China has departed from Maoist Socialism for more than two decades, and under Jiang Ze Min's regime he literally transformed the nature of the CCP, allowing capitalists and the bourgeoisie to join the Communist Party. It is no longer the party that represents the best interests of the working class.

So I don't agree that the current financial crisis demonstrates that the Chinese communist economy is successful while the West is not. I think commentators should get away from Cold War rhetoric, from the divide between this world and that one or between the capitalist world and the socialist world. It is this Cold War mentality that prevents people in the West from seeing what is really happening in China, to see the real dynamic there. If you always have that particularly negative view towards Communism whenever it is mentioned, you automatically have that picture – that Maoist image. But the real China is not what people used to envision in the past, in the 1970's and 1960's – the Maoist High Socialism.

What else did you want to talk about? Oh yes, more media savy. I agree. The Chinese Government was really bad at playing PR tricks. It was too stuck in a Maoist propagandist 'mass campaign movement' mentality. As China is gaining this power, economic power and military power, it is now trying to improve its image internationally. It now has "hard" power which is economic power and military power, but the government is now looking to deal with "soft" power, like the setting up of Confucian institutes worldwide to encourage people to study Chinese, to come to China for a visit and sending people overseas to study and work.

That's a point that struck me – referring to the Torch Relay again. When the overseas Chinese students joined in the counter demonstrations, the "Free Tibet" people said to them, by implication, "We are not demonstrating against you, we are demonstrating against your government" and I think that is a category mistake; in the West we consider ourselves entirely separate from our governments. Chinese don't.

Oh yes, this has been a problem for generations, for the whole of the 20^th Century Chinese people always identified themselves with the Nation State and after the Communist Party took over in 1949 the concept of "Chinese Nation" was further mashed up with the party state. Since 1949 until now, about 60 years, I think it will take a long time for people to be able to detach the politics of self from the politics of nation. Mao has been very successful in mashing all those concepts together. Just like when you talk about Chinese culture, you talk about Chinese history, you always talk about six or five thousand years of Chinese civilization. So civilization, culture, tradition, and nation – all mashed up and those Chinese students growing up in China, educated in China but now overseas, their mentality has been shaped by all the education they got in China, so this is what they understand about "nation" and "state" and the party. So of course they won't understand when people say "we are not criticising you as individuals, we are criticising your government". To them the nation, the state and the party are the same.

I have had the experience when I first came to Australia of feeling very alone and very cross when people talked about how bad China is. I felt people were criticising me as a person. But I am now able to detach myself from my 'Chineseness', from the Chinese nation state and party. But for undergraduate students who are mostly doing science, computer science and commerce, they don't have the chance and they are not interested in critical thinking about themselves.

I think that is a real shame that they are NOT doing a wider range of subjects.

I have heard that even the most brilliant Chinese student tends to lack critical thinking.

Well they are used to being like that, they are used to being told and they grew up in an environment where they had to obey their parents, their teachers, their village leaders, the police… because this is an authoritarian society it leads to serious consequences if you don't obey the rules.

I was talking to two Chinese girls at the Helpdesk. They were getting quite interested in the conversation and possibly, for the Library, getting slightly but not excessively noisy. Without any reference to me a colleague at an adjoining desk, a woman, suddenly told them to be quiet. They were thunderstruck and instantly stood up and moved away as though they had done something very bad. It was as though they had been slapped. I tried to coax them back, reassure them they had done nothing wrong and criticised my colleague for her insensitivity. It seemed any show of authority (however petty) gets an instant reaction.

(LAUGHING) Yes, Chinese, I have to say; some of us can be quite noisy. Not just Chinese - some other Asian societies as well. China has only been open to the Western world for three decades and look at the great changes it has made materially, but in terms of growing up I think don't expect that to happen too quickly. I think the reaction of the two students to your colleague shows a certain immaturity. Maturity is not just a personal thing; it is also about the nation as a whole. If you are more confident in yourself, you know who you are, you don't react so dramatically to different views. I think what China needs urgently is support and confidence because of the lack of self-confidence due to the 100 years of humiliation. The victim mentality is so deeply rooted it is hard to get over it – even with the economic take off. They say we are no longer the sick man of East Asia; You should respect me more but when the Chinese does not get that respect he feels hurt. So it is easy to see what is happening there. I think it is natural for the latecomer lacking confidence, and this lack of self-confidence can manifest itself as extreme arrogance sometimes.

About the Concept of Face; could censorship be seen as a way of saving face? To what extent has China gained face through the Olympic Games?

Again this relates to "Soft Power". Face in Chinese culture is very pervasive in it's effects; stealing face, keeping face, losing face – at the level of personal relationships or international relationships it is all the same. You give me face, I'll give you face – if you don't give me face, I don't give you face... (LAUGHS), this is what we talk about. For the Olympic Games the Chinese cooked up such an extravaganza performance, particularly in the opening and closing ceremonies, and the whole event was such a tremendous success that the whole Chinese nation really feels very proud of itself. Look at the infrastructure – you saw it, people are smiling, we were happy that China is finally accepted as a superpower amongst fellow nations. So finally we can say goodbye to the 100 years of humiliation. We are now able to embark on the road towards China becoming the greatest nation in the world again in the new millennium.

How do you view Western support for the Dalai Lama and the cause of 'Free Tibet'?

I have no comment on that. There is one fundamental principle on which I agree with most Chinese; Tibet is and will always be part of China. There is no doubt about it. This is the basic line on which the Chinese Government will never compromise. This Dalai Lama is quite a charismatic figure, I have to say. I quite like him as an old man.

One blogger, who is my favourite, says there is no point in debating because most Chinese agree with the Chinese Government – Tibet is part of China, this is a matter of sovereignty. There is no negotiating on that. Whether it is the Communist Party in power or the Nationalists, whoever is in power, I believe that the State, the Chinese Government, will never relinquish its control over Tibet. Strategically Tibet is too important to China.

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