Chinese and American 'netizens' clash in cyberspace
Kaiser Kuo will present “Shouting Across the Chasm: Chinese and American Netizens Clash in Cyberspace” as the Lewis E. Harris Lecture in Public Policy and the second lecture in this year’s E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.
Sino-American relations in the Obama Administration are off to an encouraging start—at least at one level. Despite Beijing’s apprehensions over an Obama victory, the first seven months of the new presidency have seen a rare, nearly friction-free transition. Secretary of State Clinton and House Speaker Pelosi, both veteran critics of Beijing’s human rights record, were conspicuously quiet during visits to China earlier this year. For its part, Beijing has focused on common ground with Washington in dealing with the economic crisis, and even offered praise, after a fashion, for the Obama Administration’s “balanced” response to July’s ethnic violence in Urumqi.
But beneath the calm surface of the official relationship, people-to-people relations have deteriorated badly in recent years. This relationship, which I hold to be as important as the more visible diplomatic one, continues to slide. Unchecked, this decline will both strain and constrain the political relationship. And there’s no easy fix: There is no reset button.
For most of the 30 years since China’s reforms began, Chinese and American civilians rarely met face-to-face in any numbers. When encounters did take place, they were typically stage-managed events involving curious, civil and painfully polite participants. In the last decade, however, two changes have set the stage for an altogether different kind of encounter. One has been the tremendous growth of the Chinese Internet. At the end of 1999, China counted only eight million of its citizens online; it now boasts 338 million. In that same period, the number of Chinese capable of communicating in written English exploded, as compulsory English education spread through China’s school system. The language and the medium for conversation at scale were now there. Only the incentive was lacking, and the approach of the Olympic Games provided that.
In 2008, as China stepped into the international media spotlight in the run-up to the Games, ordinary Chinese came in for a shock. Proud of China’s accomplishments and confident of its essential benevolence, many were blindsided by the negative English-language reporting they read online. Americans, for their part, were surprised to find a high level of popular support for a regime they believed to be repressive, corrupt and authoritarian.
Indignant citizens joined battle online. When rioting broke out in Tibet in March, and as controversy dogged the Olympic torch along its route from Athens to Beijing, they went at it in the comments sections of news stories, blog posts and YouTube videos. What had been low-intensity skirmishes fought by a politically minded few escalated into a bruising, frenzied people-to-people brawl that continues today. They fight over a long litany of issues: Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen and trade; Internet censorship, religious freedom, Xinjiang, Darfur, carbon emissions and much more. This first real people-to-people encounter between the world’s reigning and rising superpowers has not boded well at all.
Many Chinese come away from these encounters more certain than ever that America—its government, its media, even its people—simply has it in for China, fearful of its rising power and stuck fast in a Cold War mentality. Americans, meanwhile, see confirmation that Chinese are locked into a dogmatically nationalistic worldview, the result of brainwashing by a state-run media and a Party leadership that has deliberately fanned the flames of jingoism. Each side seems eager to believe the worst of the other.
It’s a tremendous irony that the Internet, that marvel of communications technology so many believed would bring down barriers, has instead made us ever more fractured and tribal. Anyone who’s spent any time online knows that polite discourse is the exception, even when the topic at hand isn’t particularly charged. No surprise, then, that a discourse so freighted with emotionally intense issues should draw its share of extremists on all sides. Yet even when we strip away the most strident voices on both sides, the chasm that separates Chinese and Americans hardly seems to narrow. As people, we now stand nose to virtual nose, but we’re a far cry from seeing eye to eye.
Why does this matter? First, because in both the U.S. and China, popular sentiment very often percolates up to policy. In America, this happens of course at the ballot box. But in an increasingly deliberative China, where leaders look more and more to online sentiment as a gauge of public opinion, it’s happening, too. Beijing is already coming under popular pressure to take a harder line with the U.S.
Secondly, it matters because some of the most important challenges we face today are transnational in their impact, and demand bottom-up, not just top-down, solutions. They require the Americans and Chinese to be on the same page. Climate change is just such a challenge. Popular environmental consciousness and individual behavioral change are essential if we hope to avert disaster—especially for people of the two countries now contributing most to the problem. What I see happening now, though, alarms me. Even as environmental consciousness begins to take hold among young Chinese, a countervailing, defensive sentiment is on the rise. A growing number of young Chinese now see “western” environmentalism as just the latest stick to bludgeon China with and keep her down. Browbeaten by incessant American media reports about China’s polluted cities and coal addiction, they’re becoming galvanized, resentful of a hypocritical U.S. that has gorged itself at the trough of fossil fuels for a hundred years. And they won’t be begrudged their turn at the trough.
For Americans who would seek to improve the relationship, there are no simple solutions. Papering over what are profound, perhaps irreducible differences is no answer. Empathy, however, can go a long way. Get behind Chinese eyes, and understand how they see the world and how we Americans must often sound to them.
Remember that what you read on the Web—all that anti-American invective from China’s infamous “angry youth” often reported by the American media—is by no means representative, any more than the hate-filled, racist rants posted by some Americans are. In China, online conversations take on a very different tone when participants believe they’re taking place out earshot of foreigners. In the real, face-to-face conversations—out from behind the shield of anonymity, out in the open where people are accountable for their words—civility, thankfully, remains the rule.
Kuo’s lecture will take place Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009, at 7:00 p.m. at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, 12th and R Streets, Lincoln, Neb. All lectures in the E. N. Thompson Forum on World Issues are ticketed events. Tickets are free and guarantee you a reserved seat. You may reserve your Thompson Forum tickets for the fall 2009 lectures by contacting the Lied Center at (402) 472-4747 or (800) 432-3231. You may also pick up tickets in person or download a ticket order form from the Thompson Forum Web site, http://enthompson.unl.edu, and order by mail or fax. The lecture will also be streamed live on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Web site, http://www. unl.edu.
The opinions in this essay are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Thompson Forum or other sponsoring organizations.
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