Damjan and Adam Daniel Mezei Talk China, Part I

Over the past few weeks, Adam Daniel-Mezei and I have been engaged in an email dialogue of epic proportions. We were inspired by a series (2006 series, 2009 series) of very entertaining exchanges between popular sports writer Bill Simmons and world-class idea author, Malcolm Gladwell. Their conversations mainly focused on sports, but often strayed to completely unrelated topics of interest to both authors.

While Adam and I cannot claim to be nearly as popular as those two, there are some interesting parallels between our respective couplets. Like Bill, I consider myself a blogger first and a writer second, and I write about healthcare from the perspective of a fan as opposed to an expert. Adam, like Malcolm, is a professional writer – having written for the Toronto Star, the Globe, the New Statesmen, and others, and having published, by my count, two anthologies, and two works of fiction - and makes it his business to be in the loop of, seemingly, everything that’s interesting about the world today.

Whereas Bill and Malcolm share a common love of sports, Adam and I share a common love of China. So, please enjoy what we think is an entertaining conversation about the country, that is sometimes tinged with matters of complete unimportance to anyone besides those of you at work looking to waste some time on a fun read.

Damjan DeNoble:

Adam,

Lets talk about, Panda Huggers and Dragon Slayers. I am neither a panda hugger nor a dragon slayer. Instead, I believe that most developed nations are fairly similar in their approaches to acquiring resources and financial might. Eventually, the growth of all developed/quickly developing economies flattens out along an average trajectory. The relevant question to me is how a country reacts to crises – does it show itself to be a fire breathing dragon, or a slothful panda? What kind of transformation is easier for its communal mindset, its people, its military might, and its political ideology to handle?

In Africa, China is doing nothing different from what European powers have been doing for centuries. Trillions of dollars of American, and European foreign aid to Africa are sitting in the Swiss bank vaults of three generations of African dictators and corporate swindlers. We can choose to attribute this sort of waist to the inefficiencies of NGO’s, or we can choose to take the more realistic view that bribing the wheels of justice and power under the cover of foreign aid has long been par for the African course. I might get slammed for that, but like Frank Rich of the New York Times points out, once upon a time Enron was Forbes’ most innovative company six years running, and Tiger Woods was the face of wholesome America.

Yet, despite these similarities, no one ever talks about a three headed dragon of America, the EU, and China working in tandem to gut the African continent. This is interesting. But, why is it so.

I tend to believe that it is a dragon duel. The EU dragon has, to some extent, already had its time of free reign in Africa. One just need to Google the words “Berlin Conference,” “Belgium,” “rubber,” and “genocide,’ or to read a history of the Rwandan genocide to see how. What’s left is really Dragon China and Dragon America, and from either perspective, China’s or America’s, it is a logical media spin to show the foreign dragon and hide one’s own tail.

At the end of the day, America still holds a gigantic advantage on the African continent in terms of influence and China still has a lot of catching up to do. This holds true for oil commitments, minerals, as well as hearts and minds.

Adam Daniel Mezei:

I’m going out on a limb here and say that it might very be the Chinese national propaganda machine — a well-oiled beast of a thing that’s been intently boning up on the high- and low-lights of the East-West Grand Game — that came up with such terms as “panda hugger” and “dragon slayer” if only because it suits their purposes well. While the G20 is busy analyzing the merits and demerits of the two terminologies and all sorts of other political punditry and game theory (things the Chinese grudgingly acknowledge as a necessary evil, though which they heartily laugh off at the karaoke bars with their pliant xiojies over shots of baijiu), the Chinese are rolling across Africa, geolocating and extracting what they need or as John Ghazvinian says in , “…making mistakes today so that when tomorrow comes they don’t.”

Having said that, if we absolutely must — pshaw! — parse out such differences once again, I think the Chinese somehow intuitively know that we’ll eventually cotton onto what they’re doing (if we haven’t already) in Africa. It’s just that they thought by going about it with grand slogans and free handouts (not kissing the African babies in the process, mind you) we, and by we I mean the collective non-Asian world, wouldn’t instantly compare them to the brutal Belgians, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italians, or Germans of their day. I note that America has an bittersweet African past, but Liberia came into being through the willpower of returned American slaves.

But that’s not where I wanted to go with this…

I think the panda/dragon nomenclature is essentially meaningless. What is important, rather, is that China’s activities in Africa and in other “rogue” nations (by whose definiton?) is a symptom of the US’ aggressive dash across the planet to secure its needed vital resource stocks — oil, natural gas, diamonds, precious and rare metals, minerals, and the like — and that jolts the Chinese Politburo into emulating this behaviour by utterly crushing markets that are either wholly untapped or located in places where few Westerners dare tread. Case in point — American workers wouldn’t be mindless enough to bulldoze a field that is knowingly infested with hundreds — if not thousands — of land mines, but the majority of Chinese workers would. Why? Because the Chinese company which employs them, or imported them overseas, will shell out handsomely, with payouts often reaching a hefty $45k in compensation to their rural family members back home. No small potatoes in a fifth- or sixth-tier one-horse Han town. Landmines! Can you believe it?

But I like where you’re going with this three-headed hydra of the EU, the US, and China thing, with the trio jointly tackling Africa’s pernicious societal and leadership problems. In this respect — and I hardly count myself as one of the doe-eyed Panda Huggers — I think China’s got the rudiments of a better mousetrap on that continent, simply because they’re giving the Africans what amounts to a physical leg-up by building roads, bridges, dams, and laying railway and other sorts of mission-critical infrastructure for them. Sure, we all know the Chinese are not purely magnanimous. Angola’s revamped Benguela railway which connects it to Zambia and the DRC and beyond is a fine example of this. The Chinese needed a reliable route to the Atlantic to ship their Zambian copper finds back home, though Angolans of all social strata benefit from this arrangement by gaining access to more efficient mass transportation which criss-crossed their otherwise war-ravaged nation.

I somehow don’t see the safari hat-clad, gimlet drinking, fly-swatting plantation bosses having done that in their era. Had the PRC gone the way of the corrupt Chiangs and not rallied under Mao’s Reds, maybe the Chinese might have acted similarly?

Coulda’, shoulda’, just don’t crucify me!

Damjan:

How the hell do you not have a column in a major newspaper? If this is supposed to emulate the Bill Simmons/Malcolm Gladwell chat sessions, you are definitely, without a doubt, Malcolm Gladwell. I guess that would make me the Sportsguy by default, but I don’t know if I’m enough of a degenerate to pull it off. (I say this in the kindest possible way since I click my way over to his column multiple times a day, as do millions of other people, in the United States).

But then again, I look at what John Ghazvinian says about China, and what you echo, and I think that I might be more of a degenerate than I have the will to fess up to. Boiled down to a one sentence, philosophical statement, China’s tactics in Africa appear to mirror my own throughout life. I currently live a pretty straight laced life style – I don’t gamble, I gave up smoking, and I rarely drink. Find me on a random summer’s day five years ago, and I was probably doing some or all those things, frequently; and, these are all just minor, surface examples. I like to think that I have become a much better person. In the same vein, I like to believe that China is only going to become a better country with time.

I have always had this strange feeling that, in the United States, the whole country suffers from post traumatic stress disorder brought on by centuries of frontier violence, gun culture, and, more recently, a thoroughly complete saturation of media by various forms of violence and terror. I feel it myself – rare is the moment that I feel completely at ease in a crowded theater. I am always looking for the nearest escape route in case there is a fire, or some sort of terror attack like the one in Moscow. This may simply mean I have issues that need to be worked out, but i see the signs of something bigger when I get too close to American males. They instinctively move away as if anticipating a knife strike. You were born here, and moved to Europe. Have you noticed this, or am I really just crazy?

In China, I don’t see that. People have different fears and worries, sure. But, mentally, as individuals, they appear, on the whole, much healthier. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps I was sensing more of a calm, a peace of mind. I believe that a countries politics reflect the mindset of its peoples, and vice versa. So, based on this thought, I would think that going forward China’s foreign policy could provide other countries with a lot more peace of mind than that of the United States. If, on the other hand, one chooses to attribute this sense of peace to society-wide ignorance, then one would conclude that China’s foreign policy could be much more dangerous going forward then we give it credit for.

That’s still a half-baked thought, but I think I have something there.

If the Chiangs stayed on, then American policy would have been Chinese policy, but with more heroin.

Adam:

Oh no, you wouldn’t want to be reading yet another columnist, would you D? Isn’t your Google Reader already bucking beneath the strain of too many feeds? I’d only be cluttering your paradigm…

In response to your question, I indeed feel that heightened sense of security and unexpressed need for drastically expanded personal space when I travel anywhere throughout North America, Canada included. One of the first realizations that shocked me when I moved to the Czech Republic was how wantonly Prague Czechs — as garden-variety pedestrians — would hammer across each other’s path with unrepentant flippancy. For instance, a walker would have no qualms about slicing my gait within centimeters (I kid you not!) of my body, only to walk off as if nothing were amiss and it were the most normal aspect of one’s day. At first it would irk me because it’s hardly how we do things in North America. A move like that in Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, or Miami would normally be accompanied by an “excuse me” or “I’m sorry,” as a bare minimum, more elaborate if a collision occurred. Get that close to someone back home without the expected exclupatory kowtows and there might hell to pay; not so in Prague, nor anywhere in China’s big cities — as per my experience. I don’t know if it’s any different in the States than it was a mere ten years ago — you might only perceive it to be so because it’s been extant for as long as you’ve been closely observing the phenomenon, but as I remember things — not that I’m considerably longer in the tooth than you, esteemed counsellor-in-waiting — it was always this way. Think about that iconic Dustin Hoffman scene from Midnight Cowboy.

Having said that, I don’t like how on eggshells everyone seems to be when I’m in Toronto, for instance. On the other hand, I don’t like the liberties certain Europeans take with respect to personal space issues, but I suppose we take the good and the bad when we live somewhere and somehow blend in. There have been occasions that I’ve given people a piece of my mind, mindless as this “closing of the gap” activity can sometimes be, and I have people staring back at me in Prague like I’ve recently emerged from beneath Nurse Ratched’s protective wing. “I’m walkin’ here!”

China under the Chiang cabal? Like Iran under the Shah, plus-minus a few minor differences. Both were fated to end someday, to be replaced by something even more extreme. I liken the PRC regime to the way Uncle Joe described it back in the ’30s, “a bunch of radishes” — red on the outside, white on the inside.

Damjan:

I had started a post on fruits/vegetables and political regimes. The idea was to do it for every regime in Asia, and a few other notable regimes from around the world.

For some reason, I could not settle on a fruit/vegetable for China because I knew I had completely blanked on an obvious one. I was thinking along the same lines about the Chinese party – red on the outside, white on the inside – but the closest I came was the dragon fruit. That just didn’t sound right. Could you imagine someone trying to seriously convince that the PRC was just like a dragon fruit? No, of course not. It would sound forced. So would lychee fruit. And calling them apples would be too pedestrian. But, radish. Damn it all. That was the little fella I was trying to remember but couldn’t.

One other one I came up with for the PRC is this;

“Chinese Communists are Kroger Tomatoes because the red color is purely artificial.”

It should be mentioned that I came to that red/white conclusion by myself, and then mentioned again that it’s not too difficult a conclusion to come up with if you think about the PRC a lot…and I know you do. My inspiration was drawn from the fact that non-Muslim Yugoslavians used to call Muslims working in Yugoslavia’s communist party watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside.

I also came up with one for Republicans.

“Today’s Republicans are Red Bananas because they are red on the outside and white on the inside.”

Maybe an easier way to get that across though is to simply call Republicans ‘The Reverse Radish’.

What would the North Korean regime be? I’m thinking some sort of food that’s hard on the outside and empty on the inside. Alternatively, if we called up Pyongyan, they would probably be willing to go along with anything as long as we weren’t allowed to call them anything other than fillet Mignon. With this arrangement in place we could call them something new everyday. It would sound something like this,

“North Korea is like a Papaya, because they call themselves fillet Mignon.”

Adam:

Well, if we’re being technical — and you know how much I dig technical, Double D — a tomato is an imported exotic fruit, and so I therefore christen the denizens of the Kim kolkhoz a bushel of “rotten tumaytas.” Now if that doesn’t work for ya we can always go with “coconut” (empty enough for ya?) or perhaps “dessicated date” because I’ll occasionally pick one from the Turkish, Egyptian, or Iraqi fruity supermarket bunch that’s a bit on the hollow side of plump. And given the paisan-esque relationship between the North Koreans, the Iranians, and rest of the League of Extraordinary Rogues I’d reckon that’s pretty apt.

You know how much I’ve got my finger tapping to the China Beat. A recent knee-slapper of a conversation I shared with a colleague this afternoon went something like this:

Him: “Well, that recent statement of Zhou’s about Chinese internet being the most open in the world?”

“Our country’s Internet situation is unique. Compared to all kinds of restrictions in foreign countries, China has the most open Internet in the world.”

«我国互联网形态有特殊性。相对于国外的各种限制，中国的互联网是全世界最开放的。»
- Zhou Xisheng (周锡生) Deputy Chief of Xinhua News Agency, Director-General of Xinhua News Net.

Me: “Yeah? It somehow had a bit of an Orwellian aspect to it, didn’t it?”

At which point my friend chortled up his afternoon snack.

Him: “A bit of an Orwellian aspect, eh?! That’s like saying Hitler was just being emotionally insensitive during the War.”

At which point my crunchy afternoon snack projectiled towards the adjacent wall in a fit of carpet-rolling laughter.

…But wait, can China really be this funny?