China: Made in the USA

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Tiananmen Square. Photo by Charles Haddad.

By Charles Haddad

"I've seen the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Beijing - What used to impress me most about the Chinese was their ability to eat cold stewed vegetables for breakfast, balance a family of four on the handlebars of a bicycle and dance with sharpened swords at the crack of dawn. Pretty intimidating stuff. No wonder former Defense Chief Donald Rumsfeld was rattling his saber at the Chinese. But I've recently returned from China with a new epiphany: The saber rattlers have it all wrong. We have only to fear from the Chinese what we fear in ourselves. They are becoming more American every day. Consider: Rare is the Chinese child who wouldn't pick McDonald's over stewed ox intestines for lunch these days. Traditional tea houses are empty as students and business people flock to the now ubiquitous Starbucks, (which the Chinese call xingbake) where students happily pay the equivalent of $4 for a regular cup of coffee.

Young people are the most Americanized of all. They are being encouraged to embrace credit and they are doing so gleefully. Said one, quoted in a local newspaper, "I would rather spend tomorrow's cash today." No American could have said it better.

The Chinese are using their new won credit to uphold the American credo of you are what you drive. They're buying cars by the millions, especially big ones. Never mind that a Chinese city such as Beijing has a clean, modern and inexpensive new subway system (a ride costs the equivalent of about 30 cents). Only those who have no choice - sound familiar? - ride it. When the government banned half the traffic in Beijing on any given day during the Olympics, people kvetched bitterly. Give them a gridlock freeway any day of the week, Olympics or not.

And what's a new car without a garage to park it in? Anyone who can afford to is buying a single family home on the outskirts of the big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. To honor the birthplace of modern suburbia, the Chinese have given their new subdivisions names such as "Napa Valley, MOMA, Upper East Side" - and my personal favorite - "Dating Bright California."

China has more printed works than any place in the world but you won't find the IChing, The Dream of Red Mansions or other Chinese classics on the bookshelves of these new homes. Rather, the shelves are filled with the likes of Bill Clinton's autobiography and the Da Vinci Code.

Even in the city center, the Chinese are going American. Inner city Beijing now looks like Houston on steroids. Gargantuan office and residential towers sprawl across the flat landscape. Many stand separate and gated, like monuments to themselves or their developers.

These towers sit along eight-lane boulevards that crisscross the city. These boulevards are like mighty rivers, swollen with angry traffic. Pedestrians cross these boulevards at their own peril. I've yet to see anyone make it across before the light changes. Beijing officials have been forced to span these roads with bridges. Otherwise half the city's population will end up as road kill.

In the name of preservation, the government has sanctioned the tearing down of most of Beijing's distinctive old neighborhoods called hutongs. A hutong is a maze of winding streets lined with one or two story buildings of brick, wood or baked clay. Many of them sported grass growing on their tin roofs and coops of pigeons. In their place have come replicas that would make Disney proud. They're clean, with a spit polish shine, packed with tourists but their storefronts are empty, except for signs pleading for tenants.

Like any modern nation state dedicated to peace and social harmony, the Chinese suspect and despise one another. Beijingers say the Shanghai-ese talk like sissies, with all their shhhing sounds. And their food tastes like candy, it's so sweet. They sniff that Shanghai, with its love of money and pop culture, is the last city of the West.

Au contraire, say the the Shanghai-ese, who feel they represent the "new" China. They scorn the Northerners of Beijing as rubes who don't know better than to eat the dacong, or chinese onion, that Shanghai chefs use only to add aroma to food. It's like eating the carnation off a suit lapel.

All big city dwellers do share one passion. They love to hate migrants. These are the people who pick up after city dwellers, cigarette butt by cigarette butt from bicycle garbage trucks; they brave, without any protection of ropes or nets, heights of 60 stories or more to build the high rises of modern China and they weed the cities' magnificent public gardens on bended knee in the hot sun. Who wouldn't hate such people?

Here the Chinese do differ from Americans. Their hatred is more efficient. Their migrants actually are fellow citizens who have left the impoverished countryside. Not so in America. We have to import our migrants, although the Chinese have nothing on us when it comes to despising those who do our dirty work.

Charles Haddad is a professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism.