With crisis in Texas making U.S. look like a Third World country to China’s netizens, Steve Harrell helps answer the question, ‘Is America declining?’
With prolonged power outages, water and food shortages, and deaths in Texas under extreme cold weather, especially with videos and photos showing icicles hanging inside homes, roofs caving in, and shivering Texans lining up for help, etc., micro-bloggers in China flocked to Sina Weibo expressing their disbelief and sarcasm.
Under #U.S. Texas storm led to large areas of power outage#, Mr. Hu Xijin, 胡锡进, editor of China’s Global Times, wrote a long post during the last week, including these two paragraphs:
按说,这实在不该是世界最发达国家美国的场景。不过,什么是不应该的?美国新冠疫情死亡快50万人了,应该吗?但它在真实地发生着。
Normally, this really should not be a scenario in the United States, the world’s most developed country. However, what is ‘shouldn’t’? The pandemic death toll in the U.S. is nearing 500,000. Should that be? But it is happening.
美国一再跌下神坛,之所以中国人关心它,是因为我们过去把那个国家看成了现代治理的标准。上世纪80年代开始,很多中国知识分子把美国理想化了,想当然地认为那里的制度能够有效消除中国人在我们国内看不惯的各种弊端。然而随着中国发展到不用再仰视美国的时候,也随着互联网带来了更多信息,去美国的中国人越来越多,我们似乎 “重新发现” 了美国:那个国家原来在很多方面 “挺差劲的” ,做得不如中国,比如一些时候的赈灾,比如抗击新冠疫情,等等。
The United States keeps falling from the pedestal. We Chinese are paying attention because we used to regard that country as the standard in modern governance. From the early 1980s on, many Chinese intellectuals have idealized the U.S., taking for granted that the system there would effectively eliminate many of the problems we did not like to see in our own country. However, with the development of China, we no longer look up to the United States. With the Internet bringing more information and more Chinese going to the U.S., we seem to have “rediscovered” the United States: That is that in many aspects, that country is actually “pretty bad,” not as good as China, for instance, in disaster relief, fighting the pandemic, etc.
Under #U.S. Texas with over 14.6 million without water#, three Weibo users had these comments:
Supersized dancing spirit: Rise, the cold and hungry people. Rise, all the suffering Texans.
Dreams like quiet water: When I was little, my mother told me that the United States had been in deep water and hot fire. Now almost twenty years later. Hope the U.S. can finally get out of hunger and poverty and build a well-off life.
Scholar traveling rivers and lakes with sword: How is this possible? It must be fake news. It should be Dezhou in China. Ha ha ha! Power off, water off, shouldn’t this be happening in Third World?
To respond to these comments out of China on the still unfolding crisis in Texas and to better understand the United States, we have here Steve Harrell, retired UW Professor of Anthropology, Environmental and Forestry Studies, to meet and talk to us, who provided part of the answers directly in Chinese.
Q1: Over the past week, with millions of Texans shivering in freezing cold without power and water, Weibo users had a field day. One user was Hu Xijin, editor of China’s Global Times, whose long post included the two paragraphs shown above earlier in this column. If you were to have a conversation with Mr. Hu, what would you say to him about what has happened in Texas?
Harrell:
尊敬的胡编辑,
有机会与您讨论这些问题是个荣誉。说实话我个人的意见在某些方面跟您一样,美国的治理对不少现代的问题是非常差的。您所提到的两个案例—新冠疫情和德州供电制度崩溃—确实是我发商榷的。然而我和您不同意的是您于此抽出来的结论—这是基本制度的问题。我能指出中国的一些事情,处理的也不理想,其中最为突出的可能是武汉市最初不公开承认新冠疫情的爆发,没通知人民这件事的重要性,也让疫情传播到全球。当然,承认了以后,在其他省市也控制的很好,但是初步的治理大家承认是很差。这是基本制度的问题吗?中国的制度偏于保密,官员怕上级,不敢动手。这可以辩论,但是无疑的是中国在管治疫情方面由怀转好,我们也可以问,如果开端好,能否避免很多国内外的困难与伤害?
Dear Editor Hu,
It’s an honor to have the opportunity to discuss these issues. Honestly, my personal
views in some ways are the same as yours. America has indeed been rather bad in managing many modern problems. The two cases you raised – coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of Texas electric grid – are really things I have been thinking. But what is different between us is your conclusion – that it is an issue of the system. I can point out some of things that have not been managed so well in China. Most prominent is probably how Wuhan City did not initially acknowledge the outbreak of the coronavirus, did not inform the people of the seriousness of the matter, and allowed the virus to spread to the whole world. Of course, after it was acknowledged, other provinces and cities did control it well. But it was the initial managing that is considered by many as poor. Was that a problem of the system? China’s system tends to be secretive. Officials are too scared of their superiors to take actions. This can be debated. No doubt, China’s managing and controlling of the pandemic has turned from bad to good. Still, we can ask, how much difficulty and harm both inside and outside of China could have been avoided if the initial work had been done well?
谈到德州的电力问题,我们国内专家的批评特别激烈,所有专家同意,有罪的主要是那个州管制电网者不肯投资保障供电。北方的州,如明尼索达州,气候比德州寒冷多,上周没遇到任何供电的问题。所以您能确定德州的治理是代表全国制度的基本缺点吗?
As for the electricity of Texas, our own experts have criticized it vigorously. They all agree that the main problem is the state’s grid regulators who refused to invest to guarantee the power supply. Northern states, such as Minnesota, which is much colder than Texas, didn’t have any issue with power supply. So how could you be so sure that the governance of Texas represented the shortcomings of the system of the whole country?
此外,我们国内能激烈批评错误的管理,您作为新闻界的领导应该很清楚。很可能您自己最近也看了不少美国主流和非主流媒体对于这事情的分析,批评,辩论。这种辩论自由在我们的心里是很宝贵的,有缺点,有错误,通过媒体自由也能开始改正的过程。
Besides, we can engage in heated criticisms of bad management in our country. You as a leading member of the media should know that well. You yourself have probably seen many analyses, criticisms, and debates of this issue in both mainstream and non-mainstream media in America. This freedom of debate is of great value in our thinking. When there are shortcomings and mistakes, free media can help begin the process of correction.
最终,如果我们俩都能承认自己国家的制度有它的缺点,您有空间用您报刊的权利推动这些缺点的改正吗? 我有我的怀疑。但是, 如胡适先生早就提到的,可能我们应该少谈主义,多解决问题。两国有很多主义的方面短期不能同意,但是同时有很多问题需要合作才能解决。把所有的事情变成两国的竞争不利于解决这些问题。
Finally, if both of us can acknowledge the shortcomings of the system of our own country, would you use the power and space of your publication to promote correcting these shortcomings? I have my doubts. However, just as the Mr. Hu Shi pointed out long ago, “Maybe we should talk less about isms, and solve more problems.” In the short term and in many areas, our two countries cannot reach an agreement regarding isms. But at the same time, there are many problems that can only be solved through cooperation. Turning everything into a competition between the two will not help solve them.
Q2: When responding to questions regarding Xinjiang Uyghurs on Feb. 19, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, “… some in the West like to talk about human rights with other countries condescendingly, acting as a judgmental ‘lecturer.’” “At the same time, a cold spell gripped the southern U.S. state of Texas, causing power outages affecting millions of households. Without electricity to heat their homes, people are in dire straits. Dozens of lives have been claimed. All this has given us a deeper understanding of what human rights truly mean and how to better protect them. We are more convinced that we are on the right path and have every confidence in the future.” What do you think of the logic of Ms. Hua comparing the Uyghurs in “re-education” camps and Texans under blankets, and what would you say if you had a chance to respond to her comments?
Harrell:
Dear Ms. Hua,
I fear you are trying to distract your audience from the real issues it is asking about. In the first place, the atrocities that your government is perpetrating against Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang have absolutely nothing to do with anything that did or did not happen because of the recent cold spell in the southern United States, specifically Texas. A million and more Uyghurs and Kazakhs have been interned, punished, brainwashed, convicted without evidence of non-existent crimes, and sent to forced labor for such “crimes” as having a passport, reading a religious text, or covering one’s face—certainly the irony of this last during a pandemic when people are required to cover their faces would be evident even to people like you who don’t deal in subtleties. Aside from the fact that China also has had instances in recent times when human failures turned natural events into disasters—from the Wenchuan earthquake killing children in shoddily built schools to snowstorms (sound familiar?) at the Lunar New Year in 2015 to devastating floods in Hunan and Hubei in 2020, caused by overbuilding cities and urban infrastructure—giving you little basis for invidious comparison, there is the fundamental issue of detaining over a million people for no justifiable reason at all. You know and I know that Texas failed to protect its citizens against foreseeable climate events. This is short-sighted and wrong. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ethnic and religious repression in Xinjiang (and, by the way, in Tibet). You are a hypocrite and you know it, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Q3: As you know, I got really upset about the riot at the U.S. Capitol in early January. But I am also upset about the 500,000 Covid deaths of Americans. And now Texas. With your experience of many years working with the Chinese in your research, do you agree with China’s narrative that the U.S. is in decline, and China model is better, at least in disaster management?
Harrell: I fear that yes, the US is declining, or at least there has been a long-term trend since Ronald Reagan told us that governance itself was bad, and since then our system of government has become deadlocked and unable to address a lot of pressing problems, including rotting infrastructure, increasing social and economic inequality, and persistent and growing racism. But as Jill Lepore and many others have pointed out, the US is an experiment, a tension between the ideals of equality and justice on the one hand, and the ideals of racial nationalism on the other. Right now, I fear the latter is winning out, and it is up to Uncle Joe Biden and his capable team to start turning the situation around.
China better? No. If it were, no Chinese would be trying to get green cards. Without going into any details, this is all we need to know.
Q4: Now back to this column about Sina Weibo. There are two views. One, Americans should know what the Chinese are saying. Two, Sina Weibo, like all media in China, is censored. Posts we can read, or I can translate, are those allowed. You said it was fun. But what do you really think about what we can read and learn from Sina Weibo?
Harrell: I fully believe that most of what we find on Weibo or other Chinese social media represents what the posters believe. I don’t know how many postings actually come from bots, but certainly not all of them. That there are dissident voices that are suppressed is clear from the fact that posts get taken down, and also from the recent Clubhouse events. But no regime rules by terror alone, and in the case of China outside Xinjiang and Tibet, terror is only a minor tool in the kit of governance. So, let’s hear what nationalists and pro-government citizens have to say; let’s just realize that they don’t represent the whole spectrum of opinion.