Commencement Controversy

The Dalai Lama

There is a very small but symbolically interesting controversy at my university over this year’s recently announced commencement speaker, the Dalai Lama. The controversy does not concern religion, but international politics. It seems that some of our Chinese students have expressed concern over the choice, either because they agree with their government’s classification of the Tibetan Buddhist leader as persona non grata or because they are worried about whether their government will recognize degrees granted at a ceremony involving him.

The reason that I say this is symbolically interesting is that I think this little issue reflects the growing entanglement of our country with China in ways that go far beyond trade. Immigrants from China constitute one of our largest sources of population growth. Nearly 600,000 people from that country gained admission to the United States in 2011 alone, according to the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. China also sends more students to our institutions of higher education than any other countries except our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. In 2011, well over a quarter-million individuals from China (277,742) entered on student and exchange visas.

Both the immigrants and the students bring financial benefits to this country. Certainly many universities actively seek to pull in tuition dollars from China. One can safely predict though, that Chinese political and social issues will loom much larger in our future.

Beyond the Post-American World

In this month’s issue of Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria comments on what he calls “A Post-American World in Progress.”  Zakaria observes that none of the world’s rising powers, including the rapidly growing BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have been able to shape international events because of their own domestic struggles.  He also remarks that the United States is no longer able to step in to influence regional or global currents due to its decline in relative world dominance.

Zakaria’s new article is an extension of the argument he made in his 2008 book, The Post-American World. In that book, he asserted that the United States was moving from world political and economic dominance, toward being an important part of a multi-polar world.  He maintained that this post-American future would probably not be a matter of the decline of the U.S., in an absolute sense, but of “the rise of the rest,” a pun  on William McNeill’s classic work of world history, The Rise of the West (1963). Zakaria traced the ascendance of new parts of the world to the spread of market economics, particularly during the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The financial force that has powered the new [post-American] era,” Zakaria writes, “is the free movement of capital” (Zakaria 2008: 3). The movement of capital is intimately linked to the flow of goods and services and, more to the point here, to the movement of people. In order to continue to be a major part of this increasingly multi-polar world, according to Zakaria, the United States needed to “globalize itself,” to become part of an economic and political network of nations.

Both in the book and in the new article, Zakaria may overestimate the extent to which the world was American even in the post-World War II pinnacle of U.S. influence. Plenty of nations did not do what we wanted them to do even in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as countries did align themselves with us or at least give lip service to following an American lead, this was largely due to the great competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the latter dominated a big part of the globe. Indeed, I think one could plausibly argue that the single greatest international achievement of the United States in its period of greatest absolute international sway was spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.

The American effort to dominate world events did contribute to re-shaping our domestic political scene.  Within the United States, political power and activity in the years following World War II became decidedly less “multi-polar” as Washington, D.C. pulled control toward the national center, away from local and state governments.  The “American” role in world events was really a federal government role in both international and domestic affairs.

Perhaps in many ways the United States needs not to “globalize” itself but to “localize” itself, to allow a “rise of the rest” inside the U.S., as communities look to their own affairs. Internationally, rather than seeing the domestic challenges of other nations as impediments to their direction of regional or global events, we should see their concentration on their own internal issues as paying attention to their proper business.  The less China or Russia meddles in the lives of people in other countries, the better.

Reality TV on the Chinese Airwaves

The front page of today’s New York Times carries an article on one of the most popular television shows in China, “If You Are the One” (online version, with video, here). In this Chinese version of “The Dating Game,”  “the men boasted of their bank accounts, houses and fancy cars. The women were svelte and sassy, dousing suitors with acid putdowns.”  If that sounds shallow, this type of entertainment does, according to the paper, contain what we in the United States would call redeeming social value, since “mixed into the banter were trenchant social issues that urban Chinese from their 20s to 40s grapple with, if not always so publicly: living together before marriage, the unabashed pursuit of wealth or the government’s one-child policy. “

We might console ourselves by reflecting that if this kind of cultural junk food doesn’t reach of the heights of the Confucian classics, at least it doesn’t also plummet to the psychotic depths of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.  Still, this kind of vulgarity apparently troubles the Chinese authorities enough that the regulators and censors have tried to rein in “excessive entertainment.” “A conflict has arisen: On the one hand, they’re [the Chinese authorities] pushing for the building of a commercial industry, but on the other hand they wonder if this commercialization has led to an overall decline in cultural quality and moral cultivation,”  said one Chinese professor quoted in the article.

I confess that as much as I oppose censorship and regulation of communication, I have a certain amount of sympathy with the inclinations of the Chinese Communist Party on this issue. After all, “cultural quality and moral cultivation” are now in pretty short supply in our own share of global popular culture. But I don’t think the Chinese state is going to be able to raise the quality of people’s thoughts and lives by command and control.  There, as here,  individuals and small social groups will have to make their own decisions about whether they will be swept along in the polluted stream of popular culture or swim to the shore and walk away.