Controlling/Managing the Chinese people?

I'm a little late on this due to my 24-hour weekend working cycle, but if you hadn't heard about Jackie Chan's recent remarks in China: here's a short debate in the Times about it.

There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."

Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.

All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.

The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.

Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.

The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.