“Cold War”

You don’t see that term bandied about by the media, but it certainly feels like one. I grew up in the 1980s, so I remember what a Cold War feels like and today it smells a lot like what I remember from back then. China & The US (along with its Western allies) seem to be locked in an endless tête-à-tête online with hackers as the frontline soldiers. It’s getting so that the daily newspaper has started to read like a bad Will Smith/Gene Hackman movie.

This whole Google vs. China vs. The US vs. the UK thing has started to really dominate conversations of late and in the past 48 hours I’ve spent a lot of time considering it all.

Last night I had an unexpected, very long dinner with my close Chinese friend Melody. Over some Sichuan food we fell into a deep conversation about the seemingly intractable problems that face most Westerners who try to reconcile their cultural differences with Chinese culture. How to live here? How to develop lasting, meaningful relationships? When you get down to it, there are many different ways of thinking about things and many cultural expectations on both sides that seem to clash interminably.

Her example was serving tea: When you tell a Chinese person how to properly serve tea, you tell them to first put some leaves into a vessel, then add hot water. Pour some water into a cup, then empty the cup immediately, filling it again. Continue to empty & re-fill until the tea is right color. To a Chinese person, this all makes perfect sense and they can immediately carry out each step. But to a Westerner… Melody predicted my reaction exactly: I wondered, how much tea goes into the vessel? How much water gets added? How much do you pour out? Which color is the right color?

I needed specific measurements and instructions. A Chinese person would just KNOW. They have access to some general social knowledge that I just don’t have. I’d have to learn it from scratch first, have it spelled out for me.

It works the same in reverse. Try explaining baseball to a Chinese person who has never heard of the game before. I have. It’s hard. There are simply too few common cultural reference points for information to be easily communicated without having to continuously stop and explain simple terms like “inning” or “pitch.” Even the most sports-oblivious American can understand what those words mean in the context of game.

In the end, it’s really the same as any relationship. You develop your own language. Melody & I are in the process of developing ours, as I am doing with my other close friends here. We ended our discussion with the knowledge that, based on our own experience, people from our two very different cultures can, with just a little bit of openness and effort, bridge our divides.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in the world right now.

Shortly after dinner ended I arrived at work and I plugged into my Twitter feed. I saw this article posted by one of the laowais that I follow. It was a short piece about how Google is attacking the Chinese “problem” the wrong way. I liked the comparisons of China to Apple, but one passage really jumped out at me:

It’s easy to sit over here on this [US] side of the world and look down upon the spotty human rights track record of China and turn one’s nose down in disgust. However, whether it’s in marriage, business, politics or friendships, I have never seen a lasting resolution to differences of philosophy come without first having empathy for the other person’s viewpoint. Shouting louder or pushing harder may give way to temporary change, but it lacks the conviction to make that change lasting.

That’s a really great worldview to have, and it made me wonder why our political leaders don’t speak that way a lot more and why the people at Google didn’t sound more like an offended partner rather than an assaulted victim.

I quickly re-tweeted the link and posted a copy of it on my Facebook page. It garnered this response from my friend Kelley:

Mike – explain to me what it is about this article you like? He says Google is screwing things up & doesn’t know how to get things done in China. What things- making money? He doesn’t suggest any alternatives, just points out that the US has no moral standing to judge China’s human rights issues. He implies China’s censorship is based on a fatherly desire to shield its citizens from porn! Mike, you can’t search “Dalai Lama” on Google in China. Maybe you won’t even see this post now. I appreciate a company taking the right stand – what appears right can have a big impact.

Kelley challenged me and asked great questions, while at the same time illuminating some of the differences that cause Westerns and Chinese to misunderstand each other. Where we see “censorship” the Chinese see a necessarry reaction to something that may cause chaos within their society. And if you know your history, whenever you get chaos in Chinese society you get millions of people dead in bloody struggle. That’s just not something that the Chinese are willing to risk for our quaint ideas about “free speech.” Especially not when they have another 1 billion people to raise up out of poverty.

It is misunderstandings like this that are causing us to view our clashes in a militaristic light.

First, let’s get over the whole spying thing. Is it bad? Absolutely. Should it be happening? Of course not. But don’t fool yourself. Everybody is spying on EVERYBODY. We spy on the Canadians and they spy on us. We spy on the Brits and they spy on us. We spy on Israel and they spy on us. Sometimes incursions even get exposed and make it to the front pages (hello, Jonathan Pollard), but they never provoke the kind of threatening rhetoric that China’s attacks do.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be pissed of and that we shouldn’t even retaliate. But we need to put what’s going on into perspective, like we’ve done with our NATO allies, among others. These are squabbles amongst friendly competitors, not clashes of nations whose goals are to dominate the other.

So what about the rest? What is Google getting wrong and why are they really pulling out? What about America’s moral standing and right to criticize? What about censorship? How SHOULD Google/the West fight back?

I’ll get to that next.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Cultural Differences, Friends, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.