Old prejudices in new media

Several years ago, I found myself in a university basement, everyone with drinks, playing a sort of silly but strangely entertaining impromptu get-to-know-you game. We simply went around in a circle, each declaring "I like [something]" and everyone who agreed took a sip. After several rounds, I was running low on ideas and thought I'd say "I like Japan" having lived there and all but as soon as I thought it, I thought, no, they have a pretty bad history with the US and Europe, world war Axis and all, so I'll say China-- they were on the "right" side of World War 2 and have been the victims of so many imperial attacks.  Whatever this may say about the skew in my own quick thinking, I was still actually viscerally shocked when I said "I like China," took a sip, and everyone else at the table kept cups adamantly down even to the extent that now I remember an audible expression of dislike uttered in response.  And it was only then that I remembered, oh yeah. Everything that has happened in China since world war... 1949, Communism, Mao, Cultural Revolution, etc... I really don't know how I forgot it in the moment or how my general consciousness could have forgotten the general attitude toward China of not just red-blooded patriotic American capitalists and democracy-philes, but even those much leftier-liberal types that tend to congregate in Ivy League graduate schools.

That is, it seems that no matter what your political stripe, be it "closer" to socialism or as far as you can get, it's always open season to hate China. And, I get it. I do. There are horrific human rights abuses, there is widespread environmental degradation, there are big problems, they are complicated, the country is very very different from the USA, and that is scary. We should be concerned about those problems, but really, I don't actually feel a lot of "concern" from most of the English-language coverage I see of China's problems. I just see old fashioned bigotry.

A few weeks ago, some other internet journalist hit the nail on the head, I thought:
Westerners are so convinced that China is a dystopian hellscape, they'll share anything that confirms it.

That piece is a brief debunk, but another acquaintance picked up on the western obsession with China's air pollution and added to it the consistent scares over poison and chemicals in products manufactured in China. I'd add to that the attention that FoxConn electronics factory suicides garner.  These are serious issues that should be attended to and there are serious abuses here that should be rectified.

But here's what bothers me: the message in these news stories is never about our global complicity in these national issues, through, perhaps foremost, our relentless consumption of what China is producing. Why are those poison-in-children's-toys scares always divorced from any scrutiny to how the pressures to make more things faster and cheaper might lead to industrial contamination? They come off as if it's some kind of privilege for China to get to make products for an insatiable, stingy West and we've discovered that they were maliciously slipping something into the cheap, disposable toy. We looked at FoxConn as if it weren't our iPhones and OUR insatiable greed for more, newer, faster, cheaper, fancier things that undergird the process of production. Isn't it the rampant industrialism that is causing China's air pollution disaster? And who is driving the demand for those that industrial output?

So one part of it is denial. And I think the other part of it is leftover, tenacious racism and bigotry. Could there be a certain kind of scapegoating going on here-- a fierce abjection of the feared other especially when they start to look a lot like us, when they're the supplier to our junkie dependence on more stuff?

It's not the whole world that seems to slip into this category, but by no means is China special. I felt the same dynamics going on in media reactions to Russia lately, especially to the "gay propaganda" issues and of course the Olympics. Of course I'm deeply concerned about what's going on in Russia right now in terms of freedom of speech, treatment of homosexuals, and the Ukraine. Here's someone who was voicing some similar concerns:

Sochiproblems is a bigger embarrassment for the US than it is for Russia

This writer takes a slightly different tack than I do, but I think is asking for something similar to what I think we're missing. For one thing, as this writer makes clear: the government and the people of the country are not the same entity. In both these cases all the people of these large, very large, nations are not only generalised, but elided with national and economic structures, as if the activists being suppressed and workers being exploited were not also Russian and Chinese!

The very way in which we structure and disseminate our information about issues in China and Russia perpetuates old stereotypes and phobias about our historical enemies much more than it expresses any real concern toward alleviating the very real problems that these countries face. It obscures our own complicity and imbrication with those issues and it ignores any gesture toward solutions in favor of fear-mongering and othering.

There are innumerable other instances of these problems of media and thinking. Indeed, such oversights might be a continuing hallmark of our continuing struggle to see past (and post) the legacies of colonial violence, world war, and political partisan hatred. That's hard and the issues are complicated. But I think it would behoove us to start on these issues by thinking more carefully, clearly, and compassionately about those places we don't understand.