The Chinese documentary Under the Dome by Chai Jing (柴靜) and its huge number of reported downloads will be evidence to many in Taiwan as an example of how the Chinese government continues to pursue its economic and political goals regardless of the public’s wishes or health.
Such people might dwell on the censoring of the film by Chinese authorities. Others might claim that it indicates how Taiwanese political protests led by students last year have encouraged or fostered the growth of Internet protest in China.
Certainly, the role of Internet technology has been fundamental to what is happening in China — and a measure of it too. Two hundred million downloads and nearly 300 million posts on the Sina Weibo Web site is a lot of activity. It not only measures the extent of protest, but also its changed character, where so much can now be accomplished before a single rally hits the squares of Beijing.
There might even be some brave voices in Taiwan who admit that the whole case so far suggests that the Chinese authorities have indeed been taking the problem of pollution very seriously — as highlighted in speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and others at the Chinese National People’s Congress in Beijing and in that the Web site of the People’s Daily, by far the most powerful Chinese Communist Party (CCP) newspaper, was one of the first to post the film. However, such voices would also be forced to admit that Chinese authorities still fear the loss of control that comes from mass open discussions of this type.
However, it is to hoped that some people with historical empathy will remember that earlier examples of accelerated industrial development — from Britain to the US, Germany to Japan — were also accompanied by serious environmental challenges — and in systems much smaller and slower-growing than that of China.
Even the cities of huge nations with small coastal populations, such as Australia, whose population is about the size of Taiwan’s, complain of rising pollution levels. And people living in Taipei and Kaohsiung know all to well about air pollution.
It is primarily Western-style industrialization that has caused the great bulk of present-day pollution. The US — with all its advanced social and technological systems — is the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide.
However, the Chinese Internet protest about the environment helps to give a measure of the extent of middle-class political consciousness and independence within the CCP regime. It also suggests implications for Taiwan and its relations with China in the present and near future.
It may well be that the prohibition of the mass downloading on Friday last week marks the continuing power and character of Chinese communism. However, such downloading surely proclaims the existence of an intelligent, concerned and active middle-class consciousness, especially among the younger generation and in the cities.
If the categories of small and medium-sized business owners and funded enterprise employees are included, then the number of middle-class people in China defined by occupation or income is around the 300 million mark — about the size of the entire Western European or US populations. In international and cultural terms, that class is on the move; between 2005 and 2013, Chinese annual spending on outward tourism grew by about 600 percent in US dollar terms.
Despite this, the common claim is that the Chinese middle class is not the social locus for democratic cultural change that was the case historically in the West or in Japan, or more recently in Taiwan. Even if they are tourists with rising incomes, they are also a coerced and fragmented class, perverted from any historical role by the power and techniques of an authoritarian regime.
It is clear that the Chinese middle class are not evolving in the same manner as in more liberal democratic nations of the past. These nations created a colonized — in part enslaved — world and an exploitative global trade and investment system that yielded rewards of income and freedom for their own people in a context no longer relevant. However, this is not quite the equivalent of claiming that the 300 million in the Chinese middle class somehow act only as automata or Pavlov’s beasts, reacting obediently to orders or stimulants from a central authority. The evidence is far more complex than this.
In any city market place in China, you can cheaply buy a whole range of music, TV programs and most films produced in the West; these are of course knock-off copies, having faced no copyright charges. At the same time it is impossible even for the Chinese government (who have added DNS poisoning or random misdirection of users attempting to navigate sites banned by the “Great Firewall” to the normal weapons of forced deletion and blocking) to disconnect Chinese youth from world culture for any length of time.
However, more potent is the data coming from such places as the Legal Daily, which has published the Mass Incident Research Report for some time showing that most mass protest is urban, focused on areas of fast change such as Guangdong, Sichuan and Henan provinces, concerning predominantly social disputes, conflicts with police, forced property development and confiscations, and disputes with officials.
Interestingly, the 2012 report showed that 58 percent of disputes arose from perceived threats to the public interest, with most protesters being city residents — both these findings indicating a rising Chinese middle class critical political presence. Students seem to be a small minority of the total.
China, as always, remains enigmatic in terms of normal Western measures of social structure and change. Nevertheless, this leads to my final perspective on the meaning of Under the Dome for residents of Taiwan.
The very confusion over China — both in that country and throughout much of the world — does provide room for the emergence of Taiwan as a cultural and political symbol of what is historically possible.
While Taiwan has emerged from a fundamentally Chinese culture as a wealthy, outward-facing and democratic nation, it is also in-transition, heavily polluted, at times politically exhausted by corruption and still has overhanging territorial issues. However, Taiwan could well emerge as a mediator between the giant of the East and the phalanx of Western wealth and development.
This is not through any great national status, but as an independent existence that speaks for coexistence and cultural suasion rather than confrontation and ideological bigotry.
This might not be the sharpest of thoughts, but is surely preferable to that chaos of response represented by those who see the furore over Under the Dome only in terms of the failure of China to behave like the West.
Ian Inkster is a professorial research associate at the Taiwan Studies Center, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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