What an American mother’s changing fears about China say about Sino-US relations
- Robert Delaney says the days of American travellers worrying about the lack of creature comforts in China are long gone. In the current political climate, between the trade war and China’s detention of Canadians, paranoia reigns
“Did you see state dept warning about going to China? Maybe re-think plans to travel there [especially] since you are a journalist. Love, mom.”
I woke to this text a few days before my annual trip to Hong Kong, where I would be reconnecting with colleagues at the Post’s headquarters.
Which brings me back to my mother’s understandable misperceptions.
When, many years ago, I announced to her that I planned to study Mandarin in China, she made it clear that she thought the idea was insane.
I told her she was insane, even though I wondered to myself whether she was right. I filled part of my backpack with granola bars and soy milk boxes in case she was.
The American media aren’t great when it comes to their presentation of other countries.
Consider the current misperceptions about the country’s two closest neighbours: Mexico is full of rapists and killers; Canadians suffer needlessly under a single-payer health care system.
The picture portrayed of China when I was preparing to live there nearly three decades ago was even more distorted. And memories of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were still fresh.
A few years later, China’s economic transformation turned assumptions on their heads for anyone spending time in both countries.
Twenty hours later, I landed at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, which felt like a refugee camp, and then wound up in the decrepit, subterranean hell of New York’s subway.
Critics of this line of argument will point out that China’s lack of private property rights and opposition-free central planning makes the building of modern infrastructure easier. But that’s another discussion entirely.
Regardless of the methods of China’s transformation, that trip in 2005 drove home for me, literally, where I should be concerned about any lack of creature comforts.
The irony in all of this is how, 30 years ago, the concern my mother expressed was about food and heat.
Today, despite all of the intervening years of China’s economic development, as well as bilateral cultural and investment exchange with the US, the concern is about security and freedom. The bilateral relationship is clearly on the wrong track.
In the current fog of detentions and legal proceedings, actions, reactions, justifications, explanations and denials, no one knows who or what to believe. And so it becomes difficult for either side to know what is risky when it comes to entering each other’s territory.
Is this the sum and substance of what is universally referred to as the world’s most important bilateral relationship? For the time being, yes.
Let’s just hope the next turn in the relationship doesn’t validate my mother’s concerns.
Robert Delaney is the Post's US bureau chief
