Reflecting on China

While I had never had the opportunity to visit China prior to the China Study Trip, I felt relatively prepared for what I might encounter on the basis of having remained relatively informed of the country’s social, economical, and political happenings over the last decade. Although I anticipated some differences in the manner in which these three factors facilitated life in China in comparison to Canada, I felt confident that my experiences would closely mirror my pre-conceived notions concerning the dynamics of living and working in the People’s Republic of China. While most of my hunches – for instance, that as China’s prosperity grows that its youth will begin to increasingly identify with Western cultural values – were correct, there was one key observation that significantly deviated from my expectations.

Based on what I had learned over the years about the Communist Party’s role in governing the social, economic, cultural, and political landscape of China, I had anticipated that politics would constitute a much more pervasive and relevant element of life for Chinese than I encountered. Here in the West, China has for the most part been framed as a society in which embracement of, and membership in, the Communist Party remain key determinants of personal and professional success, yet I found very little evidence in my interactions to suggest that politics facilitates anything but a passive, subtle impact on the lives of this country’s citizens, serving, instead, primarily to engender national pride and unity and to provide clear and rigid guidelines for what is considered appropriate and desirable behaviour. Aside from the large presence of the army in Tian’anmen Square and the odd sight of pairs of soldiers standing erect by Beijing’s main highways as we traveled through the city, there was little that would signify to the uninformed tourist that the PRC is anything but a democratic state. I learned through engaging Chinese youth that China today is not all that different from Canada in many regards, particularly with respect to the youth’s embracement of Western, and more specifically European, pop culture. Alcohol is widely available, nightclubs in Beijing and Shanghai rival those of Tokyo and Seoul in setting and atmosphere, and the Chinese are becoming increasingly materialistic and less idealistic as their wealth increases. The student-led riots of the late 1980s that culminated with the massacre at Tian’anmen Square are a distant memory, and far less socially relevant today than I had suspected they might be. While I initially had difficulty deciphering why the Chinese had distanced themselves from their recent past, by the end of the trip I had realized that the Chinese are united in their optimism for the future, and believe that dwelling on past injustices would bring more harm than good, particularly since the consensus among many of whom I spoke with is that the country is on the right path, and that change must occur slowly enough so as not to upset the social fabric of Chinese society that has been so carefully woven and altered under the ubiquitous eye of the government.