The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  If Washington really wanted to “flip” Burma to its side against China, it would fail, if for no other reason than geography. The U.S. is thousands of miles away, but China is right next door—a consumer market of 1.3 billion that is still growing fast. Burma’s leaders do not want the Chinese breathing down their necks, but they also realize that China’s economy is one of the main keys to Burma’s own future prosperity. The controversial Myitsone Dam is only one of a string of major investments that China is conducting in the north of the country, including the twenty-eight-hundred-kilometer rail-and-pipeline project to Burma’s Bay of Bengal coast. The government has been eager to gain the good graces of Washington to help dismantle the sanctions that have strangled parts of its economy, but Burma cannot and will not close the door on China. As Aung San Suu Kyi put it: “You must not forget that China is next door and the U.S. is some way away.”

  The real irony is that the foreign government with the biggest stake in seeing improved human rights in Burma is China. Even though the political opening in Burma has allowed an outburst of anti-Chinese sentiment, there are actually good reasons why China would want a more representative and liberal government in Burma. China’s investments in the country have given it a direct stake in several of the uprisings and conflicts between the government and ethnic minorities that have scarred Burma for decades, including the pipeline that runs right across several areas of unrest. Geography also makes China a party to some of these disputes, given both its long, loosely policed border with Burma and the fact that some of its own ethnic minorities in southwestern China are related to groups within Burma. In early 2012, tens of thousands of refugees from Burma fled across the border into China after fighting escalated between the military and the Kachin Independence Army. If a civilian and more representative government can bring some stability to these regions and begin to draw the poison out of long-standing ethnic conflicts, China would stand to gain enormously.

  More than any other issue, the promotion of human rights and democracy has to be done with a light touch. Preachy rhetoric does little to change minds, in China or anywhere else. But in the long run, the promotion of more transparent and open government is a central U.S. interest. The more well-governed states there are in Asia, the more resilient and stable the region will be.

  Section II

  POLITICS AND NATIONALISM

  5

  China’s Brittle Nationalism

  AS MIDNIGHT STRUCK to usher in the Chinese New Year, the firecrackers were almost deafening, but Li Yang continued to teach his English class as if nothing were going on. Outside the school gymnasium, the local residents were celebrating the most important holiday of the year, the one day when Chinese families make a special effort to be together. As many as 150 million people return to their hometowns, making the Chinese New Year the biggest annual human migration on the planet. It is also the largest spontaneous fireworks display; the next morning’s streets are lined with ash and debris. The roar did not prevent Li Yang from holding his three hundred students in thrall. Standing below a basketball net on an impromptu stage, he shouted out English words in his raspy voice, which they then repeated. “Success!” he called. “Success!” they called back. “Sux—sess,” he boomed, pausing between the two syllables. “Sux-sess,” the enthusiastic audience replied. Li uses a method of language teaching that involves shouting the words—“exercising the tongue muscle,” as he calls it—which he believes is essential to overcoming the awkwardness of learning a foreign language.

  “Opportunity!” Li shouted. “OPPORTUNITY!”

  “All right, bu cuo da jia. Well done, everybody.” He joined them in a loud round of group applause.

  Li is at the forefront of the “English fever” that has been sweeping China for the last decade. Learning English has become one of the main paths to social mobility—the key to getting a good job, getting married, and getting on. Researchers estimate that there are between two and three hundred million people studying English throughout China, not far short of the population of the entire U.S. The British Council has calculated that there may be more English speakers in China than there are in India, even though English is the secondary official language of India. English has become the touchstone for the ambitions of China’s aspiring middle class. Li Yang, who speaks with an almost pitch-perfect American accent, is the best-known popular English teacher in the country, a cult figure who is treated like a film star, stopping to give autographs to young fans in airport lounges.

  The class was taking place in a suburb of Guangzhou, the main city in the south of the country, where the students were attending a week-long “boot camp” that Li runs over the Chinese New Year. Some had traveled from as far away as Xinjiang in the west and Inner Mongolia in the north, a four- or five-hour flight. Throughout the year, Li tours schools across the country to give seminars, visiting as many as two hundred cities each year. His blog was the most popular education-related Web site in the country before he lost interest in daily postings. In the past he has filled entire sports stadiums with his classes, an improvised performance of jokes, advice, and interactive shouting—part teasing and part scolding his students. Beside the stage, one of the teachers wrote a series of inspirational slogans that were projected onto a screen, and Li then used these as the basis for his classes. “Education is the secret to success!” the teacher wrote.

  Li has won a broader fame in China for two reasons. His unorthodox teaching methods have attracted a good deal of attention, especially during China’s pre-Olympics burst of learning English. More recently, he gained a different kind of notoriety when his estranged American wife won damages in a Chinese court for assault, a 2012 case that broke new ground in the prosecution and discussion of domestic violence in China. Kim Lee, originally from Florida, had helped Li build up his teaching business. She posted pictures on the Internet of her damaged face and ear and described in detail how he “beat me” and then “slammed my head into the floor ten more times.” But when I met Li, he had yet to be accused of wife beating, and I was curious about a different aspect of his teaching style. Along the wall in the main classroom were a series of large photographs of soldiers in uniform with slogans such as “Integrity!” and “Duty—It is our Duty to give something back to our great country.” The schools are called “boot camps” for a reason. The group of three hundred students is divided into classes of around twenty, each of which is assigned a monitor dressed in army fatigues. The monitor wakes the kids at 6:30 a.m. and brings them downstairs for their first, pre-breakfast shouting exercise. For the large sessions in the main hall with Li Yang, the monitors march the different classes of students in at precise times, with a military anthem blaring, and each monitor carrying a red flag. The cosmopolitanism of “Crazy English” is laced with a harder-edged nationalism.

  Li peppers his talks with casual put-downs of America and the English-speaking world. “We Chinese are victims of English—so difficult, but we have to learn it,” he tells the audience. He is obsessed with what he sees as the growing softness of young Chinese. Over the New Year holiday his company ran two boot camps—a cheaper version in downtown Guangzhou, and a more expensive, “platinum” camp at a private school in a distant suburb. While driving between the two campuses, he told me that he much prefers the students at the cheaper program, because they work harder. “Chinese kids are becoming spoiled,” he says. “We cannot become like the West.” Li exhorts his classes to improve their English not just as a means to self-improvement but as a form of patriotic duty. He wants to use language training to stiffen the national backbone. Every one of the students in his courses wears a red windbreaker with Li Yang’s signature motto on the back: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”

  The literary quote most often repeated to me by Chinese friends and acquaintances is not from Mao or Confucius, but from the novelist Lu Xun. “Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners,” Lu wrote in the 1930s. “We either look
up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.” One of the most interesting, perplexing, and important aspects of the rivalry between Washington and Beijing is modern China’s simultaneous admiration for and resentment of America. The three decades of economic reforms have created a tidal wave of Western influences in Chinese cities, from the cars that people drive, to the supermarkets they shop in and the suburbs they now flock to, with their wide roads and neatly spaced uniform houses. The “English fervor” is one part of that mindset. There is no prouder parent in China today than one whose child is studying at a brand-name American university. But there is a parallel instinct that is equally powerful, a desire to stand up to the West, to make up for past injustices, and to restore China to its natural position of superiority.

  Every nation’s nationalism has a blind spot, a raw nerve that is all too easily tweaked, which reveals a deeper angst. Post-colonial societies have an obvious and natural sense of injustice that colors their view of the West. And rising powers are often particularly touchy, hypersensitive about condescension from the established players. But none of this really captures the potentially toxic quality of modern Chinese nationalism, the nervous energy that is constantly just beneath the surface. China’s worldview is being nurtured by an often abrasive brand of nationalism that is informed by deep historical wounds, and which is infused with a desire for payback. “A weak country will be bullied and humiliated,” warns one popular Chinese history textbook. China’s sense of itself as a great power is closely wound up in this parallel feeling of victimhood. This brittle nationalism provides the emotional underpinning for the emerging contest with the U.S., a constant psychological tension which is shaping many of China’s interactions with the world. As Peter Hays Gries, author of a book on modern Chinese nationalism, puts it: “The West is central to the construction of China’s identity today: it has become China’s alter ego.”

  Li Yang has positioned himself exactly at the sweet point of this identity crisis, the on-off romance with American-style modernity. The first day I visited the school, Li was wearing a brown suede jacket over a mauve turtleneck sweater, smart jeans, and brown lace-up boots. Along with the designer glasses he was sporting, it was the sort of moneyed, smart casual you see more often in Santa Monica than in mainland China. His classes can sometimes feel like an American civics lesson. Before one of Li’s teaching sessions, the screen on the stage was filled by a large video of Barack Obama giving his first election victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible …” Obama pronounced. Li provided the simultaneous translation when Tony Robbins, the American “life coach,” came to China, and there is a strong element of self-help philosophy in his teaching. The students carry around marker pens and ask teachers to write a comment on their “Crazy English” windbreakers. On the shoulder of one of the students, a teacher had written: “Don’t forget me when you become President!”

  Yet Li delights his students by taking potshots at the foreign teachers in his school, who sat in a circle behind him onstage when he was giving his lectures. He called on one of the teachers to stand up, an American named Shawn who was considerably overweight. “America is a ridiculous country,” he boomed. “Why do you people get so fat? Why do you eat so much?” The audience roared with laughter. “Are you offended, Shawn?” he asked. Shawn smiled gamely—a slice of humiliation is clearly part of the contract for teaching at Li’s schools. “I hate going to America,” Li later told me in his car, a black Buick sedan. “I mostly stay at home and watch TV. What is there to do apart from going to Sam’s Club? I find America boring.” As the car pulled up to the second school, the driver nearly knocked over one of the teachers by accident. “These foreign teachers, they are so lazy,” Li muttered. “They become language teachers because they are too lazy to do anything else. I always tell them this.”

  NEVER FORGET OUR NATIONAL HUMILIATION

  Blame it all, if you like, on Lord Elgin.

  China and Greece have one powerful thing in common—a deeply held grievance over the cultural vandalism of the British Empire. In both cases, their resentment is focused on the Bruce family from Fife in Scotland, inheritors of the earldoms of Elgin and Kincardine, and colonial adventurers of the most notorious brand. For Greece, it is the seventh earl, Thomas Bruce, who dominates the family’s share of historical infamy. It was he who in 1801 removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon that are still housed in the British Museum. For the last few decades, Greece has viewed Britain’s refusal to return the marbles as an acute form of post-colonial condescension. For modern China, it is his son, the eighth earl, James Bruce, who has a central place in the gallery of foreign villains. It was this Lord Elgin who gave the order in 1860 to set fire to the Yuanming Yuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, a vast complex of Qing dynasty gardens and buildings to the northwest of Beijing which were known in English as the Summer Palace.

  James Bruce has received much less attention than his father in the U.K. over the years. When Britons reflect on the history of empire, we focus heavily on India and to a lesser extent on East Africa, but we rarely discuss the episodes in China. At my school, we only learned about the Second Opium War, 1856–60, in which Elgin was a central figure, because of the way Lord Palmerston used it for domestic political gain in a general election. When Elgin sailed in 1856 on board the Furious, he almost did not make it to China: when they stopped on the way in India, the Sepoy Mutiny, one of the biggest uprisings against colonial rule, broke out, and the governor of Calcutta pleaded with him to use his seventeen hundred troops to help put down the uprising. They were delayed for several months. But their voyage to China culminated in an incident of imperial arrogance that still reverberates a century and a half later, even if it is largely forgotten at home.

  Uncomfortable in the claustrophobic confines of the Forbidden City, which had been the focus of power under the Ming dynasty, the Qing dynasty rulers constructed a new compound to the northwest of Beijing on an area of eight hundred acres. Amid the palaces and pavilions, there were opera houses, fountains, waterways, and intricate gardens. The complex also boasted extensive hunting grounds and riding trails, which were among the favorite haunts of Xianfeng, who became the seventh Qing emperor in 1850. He was born at the Summer Palace, by which time it had already become the main seat of power.

  Elgin had been dispatched to China after a dispute over a ship called the Arrow, which had been impounded by the Chinese authorities. The British used the incident as a pretext to push for greater opening of China to European trade. By September 1860, a British and French force was on the outskirts of Beijing and threatening to invade if Xianfeng did not grant their demands. Elgin sent a small team to conclude an agreement with Xianfeng’s envoys, which included a senior British official, Harry Parkes; Elgin’s secretary, Henry Loch; a group of Sikh cavalry; and a journalist from The Times called Thomas Bowlby. Instead of reaching a deal, they were imprisoned and tortured. Parkes and Loch were later released, but fifteen of the twenty-six taken prisoner were killed, including Bowlby. According to one of the Sikh soldiers imprisoned with him, Bowlby’s dead body was eventually fed to dogs and pigs.

  The British and French armies decided they needed to extract symbolic revenge. Elgin later said that he wanted to find a way to punish Xianfeng personally without hurting the residents of Beijing. His solution was to burn the Summer Palace. Xianfeng had already fled, and the compound was unguarded when the French and British troops arrived. At first, the soldiers went on a spree of frenzied looting and plundering, smashing porcelain vases and jade ornaments. After a day, the officers reasserted control over the troops and organized them to complete the main mission: to methodically destroy the elaborate Summer Palace complex.

  Outraged at the death of its correspondent, The Times supported Elgin’s actions, but even at the time, at the height of empire, the Anglo-French force was denounced at home. Victor Hugo said that Elg
in was worse than his father and famously warned that the incident would come back to haunt the British and French. The marquess of Bath described it as an act of “vandalism” that was comparable to the sacking of Rome or the burning of the Alexandria Library. On his way to China three years earlier, Elgin had written, “We have often acted towards the Chinese in a manner which is very difficult to justify.” But although he later regretted burning the Summer Palace, he defended the decision on the grounds that it was necessary to set an example, so that other Europeans in China would remain safe. It had been a “painful duty,” said Elgin, who went on to become viceroy of India. Some of the soldiers he commanded realized the consequences. “The people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the palace,” Charles George Gordon, who was then a young army captain, later wrote. “You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them.… It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.”