Citizen diplomacy with China

China China China. It is everywhere, the big theme. What's up with China? Are they catching up with us? Have they surpassed us? Are they friend? Enemy? Are they stealing from us? Do they have a right to, given how much was stolen from them and how they were treated? Behind many, if not all questions today, sits China.

But what of the Chinese? Can we speak of them as one? There are, after all, about 1.4 billion of them living in China, and another 46 million of them living abroad plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. That's a lot of people. Surely there is a lot of diversity in there.

Within China, particularly since the Tiannanmen Square events of 1989, the government has tried to stoke nationalism and patriotism based on a victim narrative: China was great, then the West came and subjugated it following the Opium Wars, then Japan occupied... China's self-injuries in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution have been backgrounded. It was foreigners that did it.

But the West doesn't understand the extent to which Chinese patriotism is an artificial phenomenon. Surely there is just pride in the tremendous strides China has made since the death of Mao. It has done incredible things. By many measures the most progress made by any segment of humanity ever.

But in some sense I digress from where I wanted to take this. Back when the Soviet Union was our bete noire, we had an understanding that fundamentally, we had a problem with the Soviet government but not necessarily the Russian (and other Soviet) people. I don't think we have that mindset to the same extent today. For the most part, at least for people of my generation, we don't have good connectivity even to Chinese people in America, let alone in China or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora to understand how they think and where they're at. My guess is that they are in a much wider range of places than we think they are. The tightening of Chinese authoritarianism does not help, to be sure. The broad support of civil disobedience in Hong Kong, the recent Taiwanese elections, and tight capital controls maintained by Beijing indicate that centrifugal forces remain strong.

So I need to talk to more Chinese people. Then again, I need to talk to more Trump voters too. I need to talk to more people.