Giant lies about China

The orchestrated wave of calls to boycott the Olympic Games in Beijing that began in the United States and moved on to Europe has recently reached Israel as well. Everyone is angry at China: the right, because it is ruled by the Communist Party; the left, because of the success of capitalist reforms there; and "the Western world" (and its disciple Israel), because China is so different, yellow and threatening. That is how it is in the West: Sometimes they hate Japan, other times they hate China (always the stronger of the two), and they cannot accept the success of countries where most of the inhabitants have never heard of the Ten Commandments and the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem.

It all combines to stir up an anti-Chinese wave: justified complaints (such as against the oppression of Tibet) alongside pure fictions (the extraction of organs from followers of the Falun Gong sect), as well as innumerable half-truths, half-understandings and unexamined cliches. All of the evil that happens in China - corruption, forgeries or environmental pollution - is certainly the fault of the "regime" and the "Communist government." (Only in the enlightened West are we able to distinguish between criminals and the country as a whole.)

Every cliche is acceptable, without even a minimal need to check the facts. (These include the tens of thousands who are executed every year, according to a recent article by Uri Misgav in Haaretz, or the "100 million" Falun Gong disciples in other publications. Both of these numbers are sheer fantasy). In any case, those "yellow people" do not have a well-oiled public relations machine, so we can say anything we want about them without risking libel suits.

The critics have no understanding of the complexity of Chinese society, which is undergoing tremendous changes - more rapid and more extensive than anything humanity has ever known. The environmental pollution in China may be shocking, but remember that the developed, industrialized countries moved their polluting factories to Chinese soil. And how much does a Chinese citizen pollute compared with a European or an American?

It is possible to bemoan the low wages in China, but it is also appropriate to note their rapid rise in recent years and the improvements in workers' rights, including those of "temporary workers" in the cities, that are taking place before our eyes. It is possible to thunder against China's large economic gaps, but it is also necessary to consider the regime's huge effort to improve the lives of villagers and the billions it has invested in recent years in village infrastructure and in eliminating taxes on farmers.

It is possible to believe the reports of counterfeit and defective goods imported from China (such the Mattel toys recalled in August), but it is also worth noting the dramatic increase in the number of Chinese patents and inventions and the increasing protection of copyrights. China clearly has a very long way to go before it becomes a prosperous society, but no other country can match its success in dramatically improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people in recent decades. A bit of learning about China would not hurt anyone who wants to write about it.

Sometimes it is a matter of ignorance, pure and simple; sometimes of cynical racism. When Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg call upon China not to aid (even indirectly) the genocide in Darfur, one may ask: And what about your own country, the great United States of America, whose weapons proliferate like a plague in the Middle East, which has destroyed Baghdad, and whose machine guns have trickled easily into the hands of Shi'ite and Sunni militias? Do the U.S. and its citizens have the right to preach morality to others?

Oh yes, I forgot. Americans, after all, are white, and therefore they are entitled to speak in the name of democracy and Christian compassion. It cannot be helped that the Chinese are too different, and therefore always guilty.

The writer is a lecturer on Chinese history and politics in the East Asian Studies Department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.