華盛頓郵報的對中國人民主認識的很客觀的文章

對我們憤青和那些對自己無法定位的人來說，這篇文章很有參考價值

Is China Really Working?

From: Pomfret's China

Wow. Thanks to all of you who took the time to write. I hope I can keep up with you in the coming months!

One question I had reading the comments is this: Has China succeeded in creating an alternative model to that of Western liberal democracy? Does China』s amalgam of 19th century capitalism and 20th century one-party government represent a significant systemic challenge to the United States and its buddies in Western Europe? Simply put, is China succeeding where the Soviets failed?

One of the responses got me thinking about this. It came from Alec Lin, who described himself as a participant in the student-led demonstrations in 1989 that led to the bloody crackdown on June 4th around Tiananmen Square.

Lin』s posting captured for me an extremely important point about Chinese today that often goes unnoticed in the West. Basically, many Chinese are fed-up with hectoring from the Westerners.

In the early 1980s when I first went to study in China, America, in the eyes of my Chinese classmates, could do no wrong. I was bunking with seven guys at the time in a 10x15 foot room. When lights went out at 10 pm we』d turn on the radio and listen to VOA』s news summary. A discussion would ensue with my roommates talking about America with a mixture of envy and awe. China wanted to be America.

I left China in 』82 and then returned in 』88, this time as an AP correspondent. The US was still the goal and the God for many Chinese. Beijing was buzzing with talk of political reform; the model, if there was one, was America. Anyone remember the Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square? A tank flattened that Statue of Liberty-wannabe and those American Dreams in the crackdown of June 4.

The next decade-plus saw many Chinese intellectuals lose faith in the West, even as hundreds of thousands of them came here to study, do business and live - and as the government embraced an economic developmental model (the automotive industry, big universities, privatized health care) that seemed ripped from the pages of US economic history.

Alec listed four reasons why he has become disillusioned.

1) Familiarity breeds contempt. A longtime resident of the US, Alec』s gotten to know us and realizes that democracy indeed deserves two cheers, not three.

2) The gloss came off the American model. The failure of the Soviet transition to a freer country brought home the point that China was not only not going to morph into America; it risked becoming Russia.

3) China's OK, I'm OK. China』s real successes since 1989 - a doubling, almost tripling of GDP and significant advances in individual rights (something almost totally overlooked in the recent coverage of China) - sparked a widespread sense of patriotic pride among the Chinese. (Note to skeptics: The biggest demonstration in Tiananmen Square after the 』89 crackdown occurred on July 13, 2001, when the IOC awarded China the Olympic games. And it was spontaneous.)

And finally, 4) Get off my back, or what Alec called "collective ennui" toward Western "lecturing and chastising" about China. As the great Chinese blogger Hong Huang says: "I am tired of people treating me like I live in a concentration camp." This alienation has brought many Chinese in the elite to the conclusion that while their one-party system doesn』t deserve three cheers, it could, like ours, deserve two. And it's convincing others - in Africa and the Middle East - as well.

But is this model sustainable?