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Bossman Harold Meyerson found himself chilled by the opening ceremonies of the Chinese Olympics. Chilled to the bone:
If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou's opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin's 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit the fascist aesthetics of her film "Olympiad.") The subject of Zhang's ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China's harmonious relations with the rest of the world. Its masterstroke, however, wasn't its brilliant design but the decision, during the parade of the athletes, to have Chinese flag-bearer Yao Ming accompanied by an adorable 9-year-old boy who survived the recent catastrophic earthquake that killed many of his classmates, and who returned, after he had extricated himself from the rubble, to save two of his classmates. When asked why he went back, the NBC broadcaster told us, the boy said that he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates.That answer may tell us more than we want to know. He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy. For all we know, he might well have gone back even if he weren't a hall monitor, but his answer -- whether spontaneously his own or one that some responsible grown-up concocted for him -- works brilliantly as an advertisement for an authoritarian power bent on convincing the world that its social and political model is as benign as any democracy's...[China] poses a genuine economic challenge to the messier, unsynchronized workings of democracies.Come again? The kid's answer is some mix of heroic and adorable. It's hardly the thin edge of an authoritarian wedge. China is one of the world's many checkered countries. It is not one of the world's uniquely malign actors. And the tendency to imply otherwise is incredibly dangerous. As Orville Schell argues in the latest New York Review of Books, China is a continually insecure nation that suffers from not merely an inferiority complex, but a humiliation complex. Nevertheless, their roaring growth over the past few decades is one of the great economic successes of modern time. Progressives rightfully worry about their pressure on American wages, but lifting hundreds of millions out of abject poverty is still a cause for celebration. And doing it quickly is no eager, nor safe, task. China's soft authoritarianism should concern all decent people, but their government should not be reflexively opposed, nor demonized. As Anne-Marie Slaughter and Susan Shirk argue, China is a "fragile" superpower "precisely because its political system is just one layer deep. If the Communist Party were to lose power, there is no back-up in place — only the specter of in-fighting fragmentation, chaos, and even civil war." And it's one layer deep because their modernization has occurred, by any standard, with astonishing speed. That doesn't excuse human rights violations or obviate the need to oppose the gruesome elements of Chinese foreign policy (their protection of Khartoum, say), but it does suggest we'd be well-served not to deliver blunt shocks of global opposition to the delicate compound of insecurity and instability that underlies the country's ascendancy. You don't want to transform a rising superpower into an enemy. And you're not going to open up a standard-issue developing regime by playing into its worst fears about a historically hostile world.
