I am attaching an email conversation between me and one of my committee members, which clarifies my standpoint and approach on Chinese political and social issues. Small change applies in order to protect people involved's identities.
Dear XXX:
I would like to begin from another question my advisor asked me when we had lunch two months ago. Following talk about The $1.4 Trillion Question, an article on the Atlantic, he asked: "Will a rising China pose threat to the States?" My immediate answer is "absolutely no. It's not China and the States at odds, but a small group of ruling class with an agenda of domination and a few big companies that have no boundary, sovereignty or ethics, versus the working ordinary people all around the world. The Chinese elite class, including bureaucratic capitalists and self-serving intellectuals, will join the concert. That's why these two administration can get along with each other in the past eight years." And I said that the capitalism is an automatic system and once on the track there will be no way back. China is already on this track, if not worse given a long history of feudalism, highly hierarchical bureaucracy, and prevailing meritocratic ideology. The question we should ask is this: "If the ruling class of these two big powers cooperate to promote a domination agenda, an agenda for elite class, what will it look like for tomorrow's world?"
For the past five years in the States I have already discussed with people with different perspectives, Chinese or American, liberal or conservative, about an approach I think will be doable to make China a better place and thus a more responsible to its own people, a more respectful member to this earth community. To be honest, I have been disappointed. It seems that the extreme leftist would like to employ a radical approach, if not revolution, to roll the clock back to the "old good days," while the liberals who believe that the human society has come to "the end point of history", i.e., liberal capitalism, want China to ride on the global capitalist train. Both sides share one same thing: the people in China could not represent themselves, but be represented by the elites, whether the revolutionary leftists or the politically correct liberals. Both are with-me-or-against-me approach.
A social justice education program is urgently needed in today's China. The mission of such a program could be to forge a civic society in which social organizations can play a bigger role in its functions and ordinary people can voice for themselves. When people in the United States talk about social justice, it's most probably referred to race, gender (or transgender), or sexuality, but class matters in China. The textbooks we are using are completely urban, consumerist, middle class oriented, with rare reference to the rural, working-class contexts. More important, it's always the working class ethnic minorities, female, rural people suffer most from the social injustice. I just pick up a recent article on NYT to support this point:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/0 ... china.html?ref=asiaTo deliver the change, we need more progressive social workers, more social justice activists, and more community service. There are really many things to do in the existing Chinese political and social framework. For one example, most Chinese employers would have their HR ads on the newspaper like this way: "We are looking for a male, under 35, with master degree and over three years of relating working experience in XXX field, in good health. . ." This kind of obvious age, gender, and health condition discrimination should be banned by an anti-discrimination law, which does not exist at this point. A lot of Chinese students in the States chose to stay here because of these kinds of barriers. And we need to increase the compulsory education years for all children, enforce the minimal wage for the labor workers, forge a universal health care for all citizens, fix the broken social security system for the retirees who contributed to this country's prosperity, and lift the news censorship that is stupid and virtually unnecessary. I think it will take a whole generation to make it happen and education is the key.
