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What Americans Don’t Understand About China, Why Chinese both home and overseas prefer the Chinese government
May 17, 2023By Peter Coy
Keyu Jin is in the West but not entirely of it. She’s fluent in English and French, studied at Harvard and teaches at the London School of Economics. She knows her way around Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. But she is still a proud Chinese. She lived with her parents in Beijing during two recent maternity leaves. And she has just written a book about what she calls “reading China in the original.” Unfiltered, that is, by a Western perspective.
It sometimes comes as a surprise to Europeans and Americans that Chinese people who have seen and enjoyed the best of the West nevertheless prefer China. What about the lack of democracy and the repression of minorities such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans? The pollution? The threats against Taiwan and incursions in the South China Sea?
Jin doesn’t ignore China’s faults and failings in “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism,” which was published on Tuesday. But she tells a nuanced story that deserves attention at a time of extreme tension between China and the United States.
Consider this, for example: The United States is a democracy, and China isn’t, of course. But the latest World Values Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020, indicates that 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the United States. Similarly, 93 percent of Chinese participants valued security over freedom; only 28 percent of Americans did so.
“Chinese citizens expect the government to take on larger roles in social and economic issues and do not see interventions as infringements on liberty,” Jin wrote.
Wrapping your mind around those stark cultural differences is the first step toward “reading China in the original,” just as you get more out of reading Baudelaire in the original French or Mad magazine in the original English.
In her opening chapter, Jin described her collision-of-cultures experiences as an exchange student in the 1990s at the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in the Bronx. Outside of class, she was asked, “Do you feel oppressed?” She quickly got involved in local politics. “That a proud Youth League member of the Communist Party could find herself immersed in an American family actively involved in democratic campaigns, conventions and fund-raising seemed utterly surreal,” she wrote.
Much of the book recounts China’s economic miracle. In her final chapter, “Toward a New Paradigm,” she wrote that China’s leadership “fervently wishes” to avoid vast inequality that breeds distrust and extremism. “China seeks an olive-shaped income distribution for its people, ample in the middle and narrow at the extremes.”
China, she wrote, requires that its companies be hefa, heli and heqing — that is, lawful, reasonable and empathetic. Chinese government at all levels “will need to recede to the background while letting markets and entrepreneurs do the work” — but the mechanisms for making that happen “are not yet part of the new playbook.”
When I interviewed Jin a couple of weeks ago I asked whether she had pulled punches to avoid offending China’s leadership. “I don’t talk about political issues,” she said. “To be frank, this is an economics work.” She added: “Perhaps it would be helpful for Americans to be aware that in China, the problems are overwhelmingly domestic. Chinese are not always thinking about America.”
To me, her freshest chapter is about China’s “mayor economy.” China aspires to have a meritocratic bureaucracy (although corruption remains serious). Officials who excel at one level are moved up or transferred laterally to gain experience. For comparison, imagine if Ron DeSantis tried to please President Biden so Biden would promote him to governor of California from governor of Florida.
Political leaders at the township, municipal and provincial levels used to focus on raw output, relying on state-owned enterprise to churn out more steel, cement and so on. But now, in Jin’s view, these “mayors” are focused on harnessing the creativity of the private sector.
But, I asked Jin, isn’t President Xi Jinping trying to reassert government control over the “commanding heights” of the economy? “Don’t read too much into grandiose messages,” she responded. “The reality today is that the private sector is fully in the driver’s seat.” The best evidence of that is the Chinese economy’s slow rebound from its Covid shutdown, she said. “The reason it’s sluggish is precisely that there’s a lack of confidence in the private sector,” she said. “The old playbook of calling on Team China to do large infrastructure, that is no longer working.”
I asked her about Chinese leaders’ fears of a disengaged “lying flat” generation. It’s real, she said: “Lying flat is associated with few marriages and reduced expectations.” On the other hand, she said, young Chinese aren’t exactly giving up; they just don’t want to do manual labor or other unappealing work: “They’re interested in innovating to solve society’s problems, not just survival of the fittest.”
Young Chinese “are more open-minded, more socially conscious, more tolerant, more accepting of diversity,” she said. But that does not make them pro-American. “They like Hollywood and the N.B.A. and they like their experience in the West,” she said. “But it’s not contradictory with the fact that they choose to be close to home and invent local culture.”
For the Chinese, “the bottom line is to avoid an American-style capitalism,” Jin said, coming back to the metaphor of an olive-shaped income distribution. Essentially, she said, “China wants to be a bigger and smarter Germany. More managed capitalism.”
Opinion | What Americans Don’t Understand About China
A lot gets lost in translation. The Chinese-born economist Keyu Jin wants to change that.
