Young Chinese are not only angry about US foreign policy - they are increasingly expressing disdain for the social and political ideas of the West.
Corona and anti-Asian racism are increasingly alienating young Chinese from the West.
The fight against the corona pandemic in western countries convinced them of the superiority of the Chinese system.
Liberal democratic governments must take decisive action against the epidemic of anti-Asian hate crime and harassment.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on March 22, 2021
.
Beijing - Since the fall of the Qing Dynasty more than a hundred years ago, young Chinese have pushed their country's leaders to learn from the West.
In 1919, the student-led May 4th Movement called for a departure from the old Confucian order and a move towards women's rights and individualistic societal values.
Protesting students erected a paper mache Statue of Liberty in Tian'anmen Square in 1989 and urged the Chinese Communist Party to implement democratic political reforms.
Recently, there was a generation of Chinese alumni from overseas universities who returned home and used virtual private networks to read overseas news, access Facebook, and stay connected with the outside world.
Today, however, many young Chinese are not only angry about US foreign policy - they are also increasingly expressing disdain for the most fundamental social and political ideas of the West.
This is an epochal change that will have profound effects on China's future and on US-Chinese relations.
The Chinese youth made two main criticisms of the Western model.
First, that the recent spate of hate crimes against ethnic Chinese in the United States, which has attracted widespread attention in China, reveals the white supremacy ideology at the center of Anglo-Saxon culture, out of fear of ethnically Chinese people and contempt for Chinese values reflects.
Second, the miserable failure of Western countries to contain the COVID-19 pandemic proves that liberal democracy is inferior to Chinese one-party performance-driven rule.
This is a strong combination.
China and USA: Anti-Asian racism in the United States is causing tension
"[Anglo-Saxons] have an unspeakable cultural racism in their bones," writes blogger Chairman Rabbit, a Harvard graduate and grandson of Ren Zhongyi, a famous Chinese statesman who advocated in the era of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping political reforms began.
"They believe that Western civilization is better and more advanced and that Chinese civilization is backward." Last month, NBA star Jeremy Lin wrote on Facebook that another player called him "coronavirus" on the field.
The news received little attention in the US, but it became a hot topic on Chinese social media.
“Systemic racial discrimination is ubiquitous in the United States,” read a headline.
In China, the terms “Western Imperialism” and “White Supremacy” are used to describe historical episodes such as the “Century of Humiliation” or the United Eight States that occupied Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion.
Young Chinese now use the term “white supremacy” to explain current events, particularly reports of attacks on ethnic Chinese abroad and the crackdown by the US government against professors and doctoral students at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other institutions that had not disclosed their ties to China.
A news item reported: “54 American scientists were forced to leave their jobs, and most of them were Asian and Chinese.
"These investigations are deliberately aimed at the Chinese and their persecution."
For more than a hundred years, many of China's foremost intellectuals have gone abroad to study, teach, and work.
Headlines like this could see that change.
It could herald an ominous decoupling in Sino-US relations and the end of an era in which Western education meant prestige and professional opportunities in China.
Corona pandemic in western countries: Conviction of the superiority of the Chinese system
Meanwhile, Western countries' botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic convinced many Chinese citizens that liberal democratic political institutions cannot solve big problems.
Zhang Weiwei, dean of the China Research Institute at Fudan University and a prominent public intellectual, summed up the zeitgeist on television last month.
Initially, Zhang mocked the United States for its hypocrisy of teaching China about human rights, while around 3,000 US citizens die from COVID-19 every day.
"If the right not to die from a deadly virus isn't a human rights issue, then what?" He asked.
He alleged that the Chinese government completely eradicated the virus in spring 2020 and urged the American people to take to the streets and demand that their government do the same.
"American lives matter!" He gasped.
Zhang claimed the United States was attacking China's model of government in order to divert attention from its own shortcomings.
Societies and political institutions in the West would elevate selfish and often incompetent leaders to high positions, he argued, and these would motivate citizens to act selfishly and to divide themselves into antagonistic partisan camps.
He goes on to argue that the “Chinese model” developed as a theory by the Beijing-friendly Canadian scientist Daniel Bell, in contrast, puts the most capable people in positions of responsibility and enables them to act decisively in the interests of the general public.
The global pandemic proves the superiority of the Chinese model, Zhang said.
Liberal democratic governments could not induce their peoples to make the small individual sacrifice of adhering to a strict but temporary lockdown, even if the result were a massive collective benefit.
(Zhang ignored Taiwan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia, all of which are multi-party democracies and addressed the virus at least as quickly as China.)
The pandemic is also used to justify restrictions on freedom of expression.
"The United States is entering a 'post-factual era,'" said Zhang.
“About half of the population does not believe in government, and a large proportion of the people do not believe in science or the relevant scientific institutions.
As a result, "he said," everything is politicized and controversial. "He characterized China's internet censorship as positive, noting that since the first outbreak in Wuhan more than a year ago, Chinese internet censors have been promoting public opinion about the pandemic on social media have strictly controlled.
Removing "misleading or incorrect information," he argued, would help maintain social stability and harmony.
Of course, rumors abound that Western countries would similarly censor public debate, albeit without the social benefits.
"When it comes to China and the COVID-19 pandemic, 'freedom of expression' in the United States is being scaled back more and more," wrote a journalist in China.
"The voices of normal users are weak in the face of the giants" - namely Amazon and Twitter.
China's Fight against the Corona Pandemic: Nationalist Direction in Political Discourse
In short, after the painful early experience in Wuhan, Beijing's relative success in fighting the pandemic has convinced many young, overseas-educated Chinese that China's political and social values outperform those of the West.
Whether you agree with Zhang's views or not, they tell you something about the direction in which Chinese foreign policy and public opinion are headed.
Of course, these examples only cover a small selection of the debates on Chinese social media.
In addition, the Chinese Internet is a tightly controlled environment: citizens who disagree cannot respond and defend the West.
However, several polls confirm that the nationalist direction in political discourse in China does indeed reflect a shift in attitudes, and not just an escalation of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda.
In a survey of nearly 20,000 Chinese citizens conducted in April 2020, almost half of those surveyed said that their trust in the national government had increased.
Only 3.3 percent of those surveyed said they had less confidence in executives after the epidemic.
The approval ratings of the Chinese leadership were more than 90 percent during the outbreak.
These trends have long-term implications for Chinese domestic politics and US-China relations.
US-China Relationship: Young, well-educated Chinese return to China
Fears of COVID-19, hate crimes and racial discrimination have already led many gifted and cosmopolitan Chinese students at foreign universities to return home rather than settle in the West.
The annual growth in the number of Chinese students enrolled in the United States fell to less than 1 percent, a marked low in the past decade.
Mainly for this reason, today's generation of Chinese youth could be the first since the Cultural Revolution to be more patriotic and ideologically committed than their parents.
This will inevitably steer Chinese politics in a more nationalistic and cultural direction.
As Peter Hays Gries noted more than a decade ago, the Chinese Communist Party can fuel nationalist sentiment anytime it wants, but shutting it down is less easy.
Liberal democratic governments have no magic formula for convincing Chinese youth that their political values are better than autocratic values.
But they can and must do more to counter the epidemic of anti-Asian hate crime and harassment.
The Stop AAPI Hate advocacy group received more than 2,800 reports of hate crime incidents against Asian Americans in the United States in the past year.
Countless more were never reported.
Addressing this issue is not only a moral duty for any open society, it is also a foreign policy issue with long-term implications for national security.
A Chinese observer, in his comment on the situation in the United States today, drew a parallel with the early days of the Cold War.
In the 1930s, according to the author, a Chinese student named Qian Xuesen went to the United States to study.
He graduated from MIT and the California Institute of Technology and worked as an aerospace engineer in the United States.
However, in the 1950s, Qian Xuesen was accused of communism by the McCarthy mob and returned to China.
By the mid-1960s, he had established China's missile program.
by Eyck Freymann, Brian YS Wong
Eyck Freymann
is the author of
One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World
(Harvard University Press 2020) and Director for the Indo-Pacific at Greenmantle, a macroeconomic consultancy.
Brian YS Wong
is a Rhodes Fellow from Hong Kong and a founding editor of the
Oxford Political Review
.
This article was first published in English on March 22, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available to
Merkur.de
readers in translation
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In China and the West, there is growing aversion to the other. Cultural admiration for the West in China is also declining. That has consequences for politics.
