I Want to be in America

As most of you know, I consider myself to be pretty patriotic, and think America is one of the best nations on the planet (if not the best, most of the time). Although this essay will thus be biased in favor of the U.S. and against China, here are three select conclusions about China versus the United States, not covered elsewhere in this blog.

Democracy

China has “democracy” in the sense that voting is held regularly to establish the makeup of China’s lowest level of governance, the municipal and local people’s Congresses. The LPC’s will then vote to determine the makeup of the Municipal People’s Congress, if applicable, and then the MPC will vote to determine the makeup of the Provincial People’s Congress, and this People’s Congress will vote to form the makeup of the National People’s Congress.

For a political science class, I wrote a short paper on the makeup of this voting system. I interviewed several local University students, who, according to China’s voting rules, vote as residents of Beijing’s Haidan district (the largest cities are divided into districts). The following facts emerged: the previous vote was held in late September of 2006. The students could vote for three offices, three deputies to the District People’s Congress. I then asked each student how many people were on the ballot for each office. “Three.” Hmm . . .

Voting turnout was helped by the fact that the government took impressive pains to ensure the people voted. Although I am against mandating voting in the United States, I do think the process could be made easier for citizens, and China goes all out–appointing certain students as “election monitors,” setting up voting precincts in class rooms, and guaranteeing time off from school. Still, a good number of the students I spoke with did not vote. When asked why, the reason was simple enough: “It didn’t matter.”

The Internet

The Internet deserves a special mention. Before heading to China, the most oft-discussed topic was the fact that wikipedia, the “free encyclopedia,” was not accessible in China. Sure enough, it wasn’t, as were things such as the Voice of America, the BBC News, and various other pro-democracy and anti-China web sites. From what I understand, the Chinese government employs literally thousands of computer employees, all tasked with monitoring the internet and reporting or blocking such attempts to find “subversive” web sites.

Now, to the resourceful, this is not ordinarily a problem. One of our professors, a full Chinese citizen, outlined the best way to circumvent the blockers by finding a free proxy address, and accessing whatever site we want.

The Chinese government does get touchier about more damaging things. I never actually tried searching for “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” reasoning that I really didn’t feel like having my internet access revoked halfway through the semester. I did, however, choose to access the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report when it was released in March. To my surprise, I got right to State’s web site, but when looking at the report, I found my internet slowing down. Within five minutes, I could no longer access State Department’s web site.

Of course, this was without a proxy server, signed in using my Peking University ID, so perhaps that facilitated my “capture” at the hands of the censors. My friend Katie related her experience, slightly more disturbing. Using her computer, at a free internet café (Starbucks, actually), her attempts to download the report met with the same pattern–difficulty accessing the report, difficulty accessing the State Department’s web site, all culminating in her complete loss of internet access after a mere 10 minutes. The censors had done their job.

We are allowed to make our own judgements about history and our nation.

I think two anecdotes illustrate this, one from our side, and one from China’s. I recall in High School, when learning about the Civil War, our textbooks presented several reasons for the war’s occurrence, and we held at least one or two discussions in class about which reason may have been better. Some felt that slavery was definitely the reason; others could reasonably attribute it to financial reasons, or clashes between the relative power of the north and the south. Although I have a general conclusion, I’m sure that some of my other friends think differently, and it remains a topic that emerges occasionally in conversation.

In contrast, the Tiananmen square massacre is more neatly presented. Although scholars can argue over why the students gathered in Tiananmen square in 1989, and why the Chinese government ordered the military to suppress the gathering, the average citizen has no such luxury. Informally, most of the students aware of it were certain that the government had a legitimate reason to crack down on the “rioters” and “radicals” meeting in Tiananmen square. This presumes that one knows about what happened in 1989–which, I must also report, was not always the case.

Food.

‘nuff said.