Changing China, changing the world

As the Beijing Olympics 2008 not only muscles are being stretched, also the political arguments are heating up. I’m watching on a regular basis activists of groups arguing against the Olympics this year. Apart from being seven years too late, this movements seems to lack specific arguments, as I have argued before. The simplicity and lack of informed arguments is shocking.

Fortunately, for a whole slew of international organizations the 2008 Olympics are also a reason to visit the country, discuss with their counterparts and try to gauge how the Olympics might be changing China. While I encourage those visits, since they are often long overdue, I must also issue a warning: be prepared, be very well prepared.
When I arrived halfway the 1990s in China my mission was also to witness the change of China, for better or for worse. And the country has not disappointed me. Observing and participating in that change has become a pleasant and intensive experience, to the degree that any addiction can become pleasant and intensive. The pace of change in China is worse than opium, is one of the one-liners I use at the beginning of explaining China to visitors who think the country has not changed since June 1989.
What I did not realize when I was in China, was that the country has been changing me too. Not always for the better, but it has changed me for sure. There I was, representing the European media industry, stagnant at best, in an atmosphere where oxygen had been replaced by this new kind of opium, called change. I had my first experiences with the internet in China and by the time I discovered that the position of foreign correspondents was undermined by the disruptive changes at the media industry at home, looking for alternatives was not that scary anymore. For many foreign journalists, who did not have my China experience, these have been troublesome years at the industry is consolidating.
I have become more flexible too. I was in Holland already suspicious, since I came from the roman-catholic south of the Netherlands, much more easy going than the law-abiding protestants from the rest of the country, but still culturally handicapped by an overly reliance on books, bibles, moral and other laws. I still remember the strange sensation when I, from law-abiding Holland, rode a bicycle in Shanghai without buying first the still-compulsory license to ride a bicycle. “You are a foreigner,” said my Chinese friends, “nobody will stop you.”
I learned to work the bureaucracy. When I encountered injustice, one of those characteristics of any bureaucracy, I would get angry and try to correct the wrongdoings. In China you don’t. When you encounter an insurmountable barrier, you find another way.

Visiting China, therefore, is dangerous. When the parade of delegations and other visitors make it to China, they will see amazing change. But they should keep an eye on themselves: what is it going to do with them? The problem then is, how do you tell them at home what you have seen? More cynical seasoned journalists would just write up what their audiences want to hear, sometimes arguing that the reality is just a bit too difficult for their ignorant audiences. They might be right, since if you try to write down what is really happening, you encounter not only skeptical colleagues back home, but indeed a larger audience that loves to have its own prejudices confirmed.

In that way, 2008 will be a shock for many first-time visitors to China.