Who shares Bai Yansong’s Chinese dream?

Bai Yansong speaking at Yale

While in the US to film a travel program, CCTV program host Bai Yansong gave a speech at Yale University. Nimrod at Fool’s Mountain translated Bai’s speech, “My Story and the Chinese Dream Behind It,” in which he talks about the changes he’s within China over the past four decades, and how Sino-US relations have progressed during that time.

It was in this kind of forty years that I went from a far-away border-town kid who had no possibility of having a dream, to a newsman who could be at a big festival celebrated with all of humanity and who could communicate and share the happiness with them. This was a life story that took place in China. And in this year, China and America were not far apart. There was a bit of me in you and a bit of you in me, we needed each other. It was said that President Bush spent the longest time in any country abroad as President, and that was during the Beijing Olympics. Phelps took eight medals there, and his family was there by his side. All Chinese wished that extraordinary family well. Of course, every dream will pass. In such a year, China and America almost simultaneously found their new “I have a dream” moment, and it was so coincidental, and so deserving.

But this “Chinese dream” was not shared by all who heard the speech or read the transcript. Bai Yansong is a popular CCTV personality, but for his detractors, he represents the sort of insufferable, pretentious attitude that the liberal “elite” media take toward the rest of the country. And his public opposition to the Carrefour boycott last spring did not endear him to the members of China’s more nationalist online communities.

Translated below is a response to Bai’s speech by Wang Dashui, a blogger on the left-leaning Caogen blog host who sees Bai’s dreams as lacking the qualities that a representative of CCTV speaking for his country in the United States should possess:

On March 30, CCTV host Bai Yansong and a TV crew went to the US to shoot a feature, “Bai Yansong’s Eyes on the US.” On the 31st, Bai and his crew drove from New York to Yale University, where he gave a speech titled “My Story and the Chinese Dream Behind It” to Yale students and teachers. The speech was broadcast on CCTV on April 13 and afterward quickly propagated across the Internet, whereupon it became a major point of interest.

Reading the transcript of Bai Yansong’s speech in the online media, this writer saw, after a moment’s thought, that Bai Yansong had openly belittled China on at least four points while in the US:

First, in the first part of his speech, he bluntly stated, “For the past twenty years, China has dealt with three US presidents, but now that I have come to Yale I realize that it was actually dealing with just a single school.”

Oh, Bai Yansong! Your journey and speech in the US, and your reporting, are not some private affair. A TV host went to America with a TV crew to shoot “Eyes on the US,” and hence all public speech by that CCTV host represents not only the TV crew but CCTV as well, and in a certain sense, the will of state. You can’t possibly be unaware of that basic knowledge. And because you’re well aware of it, you have no reason whatsoever to apply some sort of literary or philosophical viewpoint to critique a decade of Sino-US relations, and you particularly should not have described a decade of bilateral relations using such an affront to national character and dignity as “a country’s decade-long dealing with a school.” Were the last ten years of Sino-US relations really as you described them? Everyone knows that China’s foreign policy has never been anything of the sort, yet you undercut the voice of your own country in a moment of carelessness.

Second, he said in his speech, “In 1968, China and the US were separated by a vast distance, no less than the distance between the Moon and the Earth.” But, one might ask, would the overall power of a China that already possessed the atomic bomb really be separated from the US by a distance “no less than the distance between the Moon and the Earth,” as Bai Yansong said in his speech? Beginning from that time, US presidents would no longer dare to take a nuclear China for granted.

Third, he said in his speech, “The US is facing an extremely difficult financial crisis. Of course it is not only America’s problem: the entire world is seriously effected. Chinese people today especially hope that the US will recover as soon as possible because we have hundreds of billions worth of money in America. We also have large quantities of goods waiting to be loaded onto freighters to be shipped over here. If the US economy sees improvement, then these goods mean raises for Chinese workers, employment opportunities, and family happiness.”

For one thing, he is clearly ignorant of how much foreign reserves China holds in America. It’s not “hundreds of billions worth of money,” it is “more than one trillion dollars.”

For another thing, this financial crisis was brought about by the long-term greed of America’s financial system, and responsibility for its escalation into a global crisis lies with America; other countries are all victims. Continuing to buy US treasuries is actually a way to bring America back from the dead, certainly not because we would go bankrupt with nowhere to sell our goods. We can therefore see from his speech that he is ignorant of the actual situation and of basic facts, and thus in a moment of carelessness belittled his own country and brought a degree of harm to its prestige and credibility.

For yet another thing, we can take a look at his basic point: we have “hundreds of billions worth of money” in America, so what’s bad for America is bad for China. In particular, if Americans don’t spend, then we Chinese don’t have any outlet for our goods, and hence some people will not see pay raises, nor will there be employment opportunities or happy homes.

Notice how important and lofty he sees the dependence of China’s economy on America. Yet the US is a country where industry is an empty concept: a popular criticism goes, “I don’t want to work, but I want to live in a big house.” Particularly in today’s global financial and economic crisis, if China does not continue to buy US treasuries, and if it does not provide the US with large quantities of consumer goods, the storm of the American financial crisis will only get worse.

Furthermore, don’t the goods we produce represent wealth that we possess? And in possession of a massive amount of wealth, are we unaware of how to share it among the people? Heck, we’re not the ones in debt right now — it’s the US that’s in debt to China.

Moreover, while the global financial crisis is still going on, China continues to export large quantities of goods to the US and continues to purchase US treasuries in order to support the US economy, not out of a form of economic dependence. If we were to adopt a policy of total economic conservatism today, the unemployment rate would only grow worse in the US, not in China.

During the storm of great international financial crisis, a famous media personality is not only unable to distinguish what’s important or to identify causes, he actually interprets active assistance a passive, awkward situation. Is this mindset anything other than belittling his own country?

Fourth, he also said in his speech that he was once kid from a remote place who had no dreams because living conditions were difficult for the country at that time, but ever since the resumption of Sino-US relations in 1978, China’s situation improved, and he later tested into Peking University, joined CCTV after graduation, and bought his first private car in 1998.

But why didn’t he compare the second year after the resumption of Sino-US relations? In 1980, China’s passenger jet “Y-10” had its wings clipped and went under. Twenty years later, in 2000, China needed to export 700 million shirts to the US to be able to purchase a single Boeing 737, rather than using the production power of 100 million shirts to manufacture its own 737-equivalent Y-10 jet. For Chinese industry, the Y-10 was our baby….

To further the idea, if the Y-10 project had not been discontinued, we may have already been able to take that 100 million shirts’ worth of production power to manufacture a 737 equivalent. And China’s auto industry could have been far more advanced than it is today. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary for the majority of the country’s citizens to own their own cars, nor would that be anything to boast about.

When every individual’s personal dream is intertwined with the dream of all of the country’s people, that country and its people have immense potential. If a so-called famous media personality is ignorant of this basic truth, it’s worth considering whether or not he deserves to remain in that position.

This is a smokeless financial war. CCTV talking head Bai Yansong, I ask you to strengthen your consciousness about the country and your nationality, and improve the quality of your politics, economics, and citizenship. It’s probably best if you avoid narrow-minded “golden millet dreams” in the future.

Wang Xiaodong, who was on the opposite side of last year’s Carrefour boycotts and who does not hold a high opinion of Bai as a journalist (see “Bai Yansong is no Song Zude”), wrote of a different kind of “Chinese dream” in one of the chapters of Unhappy China:

I believe that big goals are highly important for cultural originality. Big goals were present in the days of Mao Zedong — whether they were entirely correct is a separate issue, but after big goals vanished, listlessness set in, and it is impossible to bring forth viable cultural products in such circumstances.

Let me return to the Century of the Olympics. “The Olympics have been China’s dream for a century,” is a pretty awful thing to say. The Olympics are a good thing and they were carried off pretty well. The pride that the Chinese people feel is genuine. But to call the Olympics the dream of a century is factually incorrect. China’s dream at the beginning of that century was to rescue the country, and for a time after the country was successfully rescued, the dream was to liberate all of humanity, to dispel the wicked so the good people of the world could live in peace.

Hosting the Olympics was China’s dream a few decades later. Today, then, China needs big dreams, ten thousand times bigger than hosting the Olympics. The words of some officials are risible, things like “the Olympics were an unprecedented challenge” — starting when? How far do you go back? Yesterday? You may be correct if you’re just counting yesterday and today, but if you go back eighty or ninety years, or even just fifty, then it’s not really an unprecedented challenge for China. Domestically and internationally, China faced tons of challenges over the past decades that were ten thousand times bigger than the Olympics. I remember once, not long after China’s bid for the Olympics was successful, a German reporter interviewed me and said in an extremely condescending tone: this time your bid was successful, so you’ve got to be really proud. I immediately pounded the table and said, “What do you know?! China has been a world superpower for thousands of years and has held tons of events larger than the Olympics! Set aside those millennia — even in the last few decades, China has done many things greater than the Olympics. Wasn’t fighting the UN forces to resist the US and aid Korea bigger than the Olympics?” He was dumbfounded.

Wasn’t the reform and opening up greater than the Olympics? And the Three Gorges Dam, and Shenzhou V, Shenzhou VI, and Shenzhou VII too? Wasn’t the challenge of the Wenchuan Earthquake greater? Hosting the Olympics was a good thing and we’re all pleased, but at the very least our elite should understand that it was just for fun — having fun and enjoying ourselves a bit is good, but that’s all it is. To call that China’s dream of a century is a little pathetic. This mindset of mediocrity, always moving downward into an ever lower and more vulgar position, is something that has to change.