Why I’m picking the Chinese side

IT MAY be hard to believe sometimes, but journalists rarely reveal their political affiliations. Columnists, commentators and opinion writers, too, are cautious; that’s what I believe, anyway.

Our choices about the things we write sometimes reveal our base ideas, beliefs and values, but we rarely go as far as explicitly picking a side. We tend to focus on ideas, at least I do, and reflect on history, evidence, interpretation and framing, all of which place us, wittingly or unwittingly, on “a side”.

One of the things I attempt, with varying degrees of success, is to point out inconsistencies and contradictions. Hard as it may be to believe, dear reader, you may never know what I think about anything or which side I am on, politically at least.

I am sure the reader is sophisticated enough to know that months and years of writing about the dangers of fascism, the politics of revenge, corruption and swirling distrust (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and many others going back to a discussion about criminocracies nine years ago, long before I touched people on their John Steenhuisen) outweigh the one or two commentaries and opinions on the Democratic Alliance and minority white-led liberalism.

Let me take this opportunity, then, to pick a side. There are intellectuals and writers who are subtle when they do so, most notably people who make their living from and have their identities pegged to status quo patriotism and who wait for press releases from K-Street, Foggy Bottom, Downing Street, the European Commission office of Ursula von der Leyen, the Pentagon and Nato.

The chimera of objectivity

Riffing off my old colleague Tim Cohen (the parliamentary press gallery of the last white parliament was not quite “the trenches” but we were there, and for this and another reason I will always remain a loyal friend), who said the quiet part out loud when he announced that he would vote for Songezo Zibi in the May election.

“There is a fiction around journalistic impartiality that is more honoured in the breach than in the observance,” Tim wrote, but “I do think it should be observed, even imperfectly, because supporting the idea of impartiality alone is a useful indicator of honesty and fairness.”

I agree with most of that. There’s a caveat. Surely, if you sit in the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal, you’re hardly partial to the plight of workers and communists; honesty and fairness are forced through a stack of sieves graduating Wall Street and capitalist interests. And objective news is not always based only on factual information, somehow detached from interpretation where writers are uninvolved, specialists and purely technical.

The news, more so analyses and commentary, consists of specifically crafted stories designed and purposed for members of a shared real or imagined community. It is important to proceed, therefore, from George Orwell’s observation that “the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity”.

Orwell picked a side during the Spanish Civil War in about 1936, saying a decade later: “It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.”

The limits of status quo patriotism

Patriotism is often associated with nation states/countries because they provide citizens with a “national” identity and issue passports, both of which confer on citizens privileges, rights and access. This patriotism is narrowly associated, then, with the nation state.

Writ broadly, a status quo patriotism shores up broader historical orders and sustains mythical utopias. In the same way that national patriotism typically leads to a biased sense of pride and myopia (about the “nation” — some people are patriotic only when the rugby Springboks play), a global status quo patriotism may be similarly myopic.

The postwar liberal international order with the US and “the West” at the helm is such a utopia, and true belief usually leads to wilful obfuscation and intellectual occlusion. The best among us always find a way to justify the worst and most brutal behaviour or conduct of our family, country or leaders, and highlight the worst and most brutal behaviour of others as evidence that they are the bad ones.

For instance, the events at Tiananmen Square on June 5,1989 were a cruel disaster, but the My Lai massacre (the mass killing of as many as 500 unarmed villagers by US soldiers in the Vietnamese village on March 16, 1968) is tucked away somewhere. The tragedy is dismissed in the imagination of status quo patriots.

In the same vein, the “moral myths, roots and racial myths” of the US war on drugs are accepted and sanitised, but the Opium Wars have been ignored and airbrushed from history, with serious attempts to reframe Britain as innocent in a shameful attempt at blaming the victims. Examples abound. (Countries have the right to self-defence, but people do not have that right).

There are, to be sure, journalists, academics or public intellectuals who would present themselves as “objective”, a sad mark of scientism, and liberals who cling to “the right side of history” with tooth and nail as if history is more “scientific” than the past. Their politics determine their morality.

The least one can do is acknowledge our history, biases and prejudices, as opposed to wishing away or waving a magic wand at injustices of the past — especially when we are implicated — so we can “move on”. Imagine telling victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and holocausts across the centuries to “get over it” and “move on”.

The main problem with the “objectivity” pony and trap is that it draws on and in turn sustains status quo patriotism, which is cleverly couched in the language of objectivity, impartiality and even “truth”. Writing about the media and US wars abroad, specifically about the US war on the Iraqi and Afghan people after 2001, the sociologist Richard Kaplan said: “We need not condemn, but only recognise, the centrality of patriotic values to the operations of the daily press” and “to account for the press’s pose and prose, an understanding of the news as a detached, impartial, factual account of the day’s most important events will not suffice”.

The points in Kaplan’s passage return to what is written above. The least we can do is acknowledge our past, our place, and the biases that shape our responses to the world. Many voices in the media and in think-tanks would have us believe that the world we have is the best we’ll ever have, and that any change or transformation can occur only with the blessings of, and within the bounds of acceptability defined on K-Street, in Foggy Bottom, on Downing Street, the office of Ursula Von der Leyen, the Pentagon and Nato, or the Institute for Strategic Studies in Pretoria. I’m afraid that era has come to pass.

China is the future

I pick the side of historical change, as opposed to status quo patriotism. Any future world order will take shape under leadership from Asia, specifically China. This is the side I pick.

It does not mean I am myopic. It has to do with the biases and insights I have gained over a number of years and the passage of China over the last three decades. Whereas the liberal political economy of the US has promoted crude capitalism and consumerism as its true north and has emerged as a plutocracy (see this book), China has steadily and progressively lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

I believe directly addressing poverty through purposeful pro-poor social policies is necessary in any society. While the US has (until now) expanded its military reach (the sun never sets on the American military base), China has had no such ambitions. It may in the future, but if we are speculating about the future can we also not speculate that the US will again go to war in the coming years? We don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons (I am completely opposed to nuclear weapons), but it’s okay for the US to have them; the country responsible for the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chinese people, investors and entrepreneurs around the world have been excited about the positive messages on further “opening up”, “modernisation” and institutional reform announced by Chinese leaders last week. The Economist was (predictably) unimpressed and dismissive of a statement after last week’s third plenum of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, “Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernisation”.

Chinese stocks closed higher after the third plenum. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index was up 0.17% and the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.27% higher. I mention these because there would be great excitement if there were good news from the Nasdaq or Dow Jones.

Domestic and foreign entrepreneurs and observers said the third plenum sent a positive and warm signal not only to China but also the world, elevating their confidence about further investment and development and injecting stability into the world amid growing geopolitical tensions and protectionism.

None of these things has made me ideologically blind, at least not sufficiently blind to ignore the dozens of wars the US has fought around the world and render them permissible, or what wars may come. These are the things that have helped shape my writing over several years.

Let me leave the last word to every liberal’s favourite journalist, Orwell in 1946: “Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

So there, I said it. I choose historical change that challenges status quo patriotism and see the future world order through a stack of sieves that prioritise poverty, economic expansion, pacifism and diversity, as opposed to excessive individualism in a uniform culture of consumer capitalism.

♦ VWB ♦

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