China bashing has been popular in the US since the Korean War broke out in 1950, and seems to be reaching another peak leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. What was to have been the grand re-opening under new management of the People’s Republic is turning into a pile-on of complaints ranging from currency manipulation to suppression of dissent.

China exacerbates this bashing syndrome when its government responds by battening the hatches. Just last week, authorities suspended nearly all business travel visas to major cities until late September, and Beijing police were videotaped beating up journalists .

But four years working on a book project focused on the first half-century of China’s government convinces me that most critics are missing a bigger and, in some ways, more ominous picture. The revolution that created the PRC just 59 years ago is still going on and, like the United States of America at age 59 (in 1835), “modern” China remains a work in progress, facing challenges that, in a nation of 1.2 billion people, seem insurmountable.

Those impatient for an outbreak of democracy and free expression should keep in mind that when the People’s Republic of China was established as a communist state, some 4,000 years of feudal history and culture was turned on its head overnight. That means the value system of today’s China is still in its infancy, and it is a battered child at that. After suffering the Japanese army’s World War II brutality, the country fought a bloody civil conflict. Within a year of its end and the formation of the PRC, the Korean War erupted, killing millions and driving China into diplomatic and economic isolation.

The Mao years produced chaos, famine, murderous repression, and the decade-long dark ages known as the Cultural Revolution, ending with the chairman’s death in 1976. In the 1980s, China finally began to participate in the global economy, and it’s been less than a decade since the country was able to throw its weight around on the world stage. The Chinese are still deciding what it means to be Chinese in the new millennium.

A former State Department expert from the Nixon-Kissinger years put it this way: “China has leaped in short order from the 12th century to about the 18th. They have a long way to go to catch up to the rest of the world.”

High-ranking Chinese officials I met bemoaned the demonization in the world press of the country’s trade policies, its appetite for natural resources, and its military buildup. They argue that China is no threat to anyone but the Chinese, whose overwhelming domestic problems will keep its leaders preoccupied for decades. “We don’t have time to worry about the rest of the world,” one said.
The stresses on Chinese society have been well-documented, but one statistic stands out for me as starkly emblematic: by some estimates, 300 million Chinese, a quarter of the population, still lack potable drinking water. Environmental damage and degradation is widespread, and the Chinese people are increasingly demanding that government do more to fix it.

Meanwhile, rapid inflation, overbuilding, stock market speculation, epidemic corruption, and a yawning chasm between have and have not pose real threats to civil order. Roland Manarin, a leading investment manager based in Omaha-Nebraska, recently told CNBC that his visits to China persuade him that asset values there are still so inflated that the country may prove to be “the next Enron.”
The pain is already being felt. China’s new middle-class of individual investors dominate share trading on the young Shanghai Exchange and the Shanghai Composite Index has fallen by about 50 percent from its October peak. Nine out of ten of those newbie investors lost money in the first half of this year, according to Beijing Heavenstone Consulting Co., an economic research firm.

Heavenstone further reported that 80 percent of the people surveyed in a recent television poll placed blame for shrinking stock prices on the government, not their own risk-taking. This is predictable in a country where government institutions are still responsible for the majority of economic activity. But it’s one more irritant in a restive society struggling to define itself.
China’s leadership will be fortunate to be able to keep the lid on all this pressure bubbling up from below. A veteran international banker with extensive experience in China recently told an Asia Society of Southern California conference that, “If China can manage to create several hundred million new jobs, it might be able to avoid another revolution.”

On top of all these problems, China now faces the prospect that Beijing’s stubborn smog will stain its pride in hosting the Olympic games. Recent violence in Tibet continues to reverberate, and the Sichuan earthquake has triggered charges of corruption in building code enforcement that may have cost the lives of thousands of only children.

Bashing China these days is, to use a vivid Chinese expression, like beating a drowning dog. It’s too easy. It’s also hypocritical, especially when the bashing comes from the US where our government may not beat reporters, but it does illegally spy on us; where we aggressively defend the environment while consuming and wasting more than our share of the earth’s resources; and where we condemn Chinese militarism while using force to achieve regime change halfway around the world.

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