Our Role, Our Responsibility, Our Indignancy

My uncle recently asked my opinion on a suitable metaphor for the development of China.  He is teaching a humanities class to high school students and wants to introduce a bit of Chinese tradition into the curriculum.

I lacked any amazing ideas.  The expanse and current trajectory of Chinese history afford an innumerable measure of words.  The Chinese never fail to mention their 5,000 years of existence.  It is a type of self-recognition, a stabilization of tumultuous times in the not-too-distant past.  It seems every corner of Asia, most recently Thailand and Myanmar, suffer neoteric setbacks of the human condition.  Usually, and painfully, of a massive order.

So I have been thinking of the additions and defining points of contemporary Chinese humanity.  After all, humanities classes, the study of the distinctly undefined by natural science, are an exercise in determining contributions to life itself.  How is life changing in China?

The Sept/Oct issue Foreign Affairs features an article by Elizabeth Economy titled “The Great Leap Backward?”  Economy, a terrific name for an FP writer, does an extremely apt job of describing how the economic development of China will be crippled by its wanton disregard for its own environment.  She also insists that the answers must come through a bottom-up approach, in which the citizens themselves must recognize the need for change rather than await the outcomes of an undulant authoritarian government.  In short, Chinese must go green.

The one weakness of her article rests in her intractable Western identity.  She insists the West, mainly the U.S., must help China recognize its inefficiencies and remedy them.  Like the good doctor on a house call.  ‘Hey, China, heard you had a bit of a cough from all the smog.  Take three of these and call me in the morning.’

The fact of the matter is that America is well aware of the looming Chinese environmental crisis, and I am hesitant to assume it wishes to alleviate the ailment.  After all, as large MNCs and government agencies well know, this condition is not a product of China; it is a byproduct of American enterprise.  We have manipulated China, from its farms to its factories, into our personal economic playground.  We can kick dirt in the sandbox at recess, but when that afternoon bell rings we head home.  We leave it to some poor chump to come shovel it all back in, to clean up our mess.

Knowingly, wittingly, we have dumped (outsourced) our worst polluting industries to China, i.e. CFC-producing manufacturers after the 1990 effort to save the ozone layer.  Continuously, and mercilessly, we have demanded products from China at whatever the cost.   Occasionally someone makes a fuss over child labor, but how often do we hear concerns over the environmental living conditions of all people in a place where 750,000 die every year from airborne pollutants?

We made China this way.  Now we are demanding it amend this part of its history, without taking any responsibility for it.  But, hey, that is what Americans do.  That is what we are good at.  “Why do they hate us?” Right?  “Why can’t China clean up its environmental mess?” Right?

It reminded me of another recent article I read.  Here, in this piece by Howard Bryant, we see a very poignant depiction of the American psyche.  One where history is ignored.  One where reaction belies repentance and repercussions beget animosity.  One where we tie the notions of justice, reality, and equality around the eyes of a women and make her pose like AbuGhraib.