Post-Tiananmen China Good Description of U.S.

The Gray Lady has been churning out the column inches for more than a week commemorating the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, which is today, June 4 (liu si to the Chinese). I've generally been ignoring the coverage because China, like Syria, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, is an "official" enemy and is treated as such by the Times. So the reporting one gets is tendentious. Worthwhile information is imparted but through the screen of U.S. foreign policy.

This morning on the train to work I decided to jump from the front of the paper to the op-ed page. There I read an interesting opinion piece, Tiananmen, Forgotten, by Beijing-based journalist Helen Gao. Gao argues that after Tianamen the Communist Party successfully depoliticized culture for the educated masses. Young people in China today are mesmerized by status and consumerism and not political transformation.

What struck me about Gao's description of present-day China is how closely it fits the United States:

To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement. 

Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.

This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.

My optimism in 2011 for the Occupy movement was based on the inability of college-educated youth to find work after the Great Recession. Without the state being able to blinker a new generation with rewarding careers -- "concrete symbols of success" -- youth would turn to political struggle to effect change.

But the truncheons came down and the encampments were cleared, Obama walloped Romney, and we went through a series of theatrical performances in Washington D.C. -- the Fiscal Cliff, the Sequester, last October's government shutdown, the Obamacare rollout, etc. Now we're back to where we were before Occupy Wall Street.

Gao marks the cultural barriers to change in China, but she is also describing the neoliberal West:

If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. . . .

Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little. Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the minor harms in our daily lives caused by state power. 

Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.