Pragmatism Sells in McWorld : The spread of commercial culture is unconnected to human rights. U.S.-China relations are finally reflecting this reality.

Americans traveling abroad sometimes feel more at home than they would like. You can hardly find a foreign capital without fast-food joints or a television without MTV. A Madonna CD is almost always at hand. If you get thirsty, there’s no problem finding a Coke. If you get sleepy, there’s probably a Hilton or a Radisson or a Holiday Inn nearby. And if you can’t fall asleep, there’s “Dynasty,” “Donahue” or “The Simpsons” reruns to help ease the night. How very comforting. But also how discomfiting--not only to foreigners worried about their cultural identities but sometimes to us Americans, too. We know that America is much more than the sum of its golden arches, that toys are not us, that Madonna is really not the national mother figure. But the historic fall of communism and the rise of common technologies has created irresistible global market opportunities. Even where communism hasn’t yet fallen, commercialism sloshes over the greatest of walls. In China, one new McDonalds goes up every week; the official magazine of the Ministry of Culture occasionally prints Playboy-like nudes. The huge Tian An Men Square statue of Mao waves benevolently over Beijing’s masses as they rush past a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet: 26 of them grace the horizons of half a dozen Chinese cities and many more are soon to be hatched. But is everyone who has qualms about this Universal Church of the Market really a latter-day anti-technologist, a Luddite? A lot of us worry deeply about the spiritual and emotional quality of our lives.

China’s leaders are also worried: They, as do other Asian leaders, fear the rising goo of McWorld, as Rutgers University Professor Benjamin Barber calls it in his important new book, “Jihad vs. McWorld.”

China’s interface with McWorld is particularly tense. This fateful nation of more than a billion people is in the throes of a potentially convulsive succession struggle. It is witnessing perhaps the greatest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. In the boom regions of South China, along the Yangtze River and in Manchuria, the central government is losing control. Indeed, the government itself sometimes seems uncertain about what to do: It theoretically bans watching Western TV shows on satellite dishes, but makes so much money selling those dishes that it has put its citizens on the “honor system.” Right. What time is “Baywatch” on, Zhou?

China’s bustling market economy, like those of Singapore and Vietnam, is not driven by a democratic culture. McWorld is only interested in markets, sales and profits--not in whether the goverment is democratic.

While communism remains discredited, there is no good evidence that capitalism’s McWorld inevitably leads to McJefferson. In China, repression has kept things under control. With local kinship networks at the bottom end and the overarching structure of government and party at the top, there’s nothing in between; China has few of the intermediating groups and associations that are kindling for the flame of democracy. Though its economy is on fire, its polity remains a near-vacuum. As Barber, in Los Angeles last week to promote his book, told me: “You can’t e-mail the successor generation of Chinese leaders a copy of the Federalist Papers and watch democracy bloom overnight. China is not decades from democracy, but generations.”

What, then, is China’s fate? Chai-anan Samudavanija, a noted Thai scholar, believes that most Asian societies will look quite different from America in decades to come. They will, he says, be societies with an activist bureaucracy, a soft (probably) authoritarian center and a distinctive Asian conception of the role of the citizen. But Japanese business guru Kenichi Ohmae argues that China “is going from a centrally controlled state that was oriented toward Beijing to a commonwealth of reasonably autonomous region states”--in part due to the awesome power of the McWorld information and imagery machine that even the strongest central government can’t suppress. While history sorts out who’s right, Washington has to do business with Beijing today.

From California, with its 700,000 Chinese Americans and fast-growing Asian trade relationship, China seems like some enormous egg poised precariously on the great wall of history.

China’s unrepentant abuse of human rights appalls Westerners, but there can be no final end to the practice until China develops a civil society that allows democracy to take root. The Clinton Administration’s separation of human rights from trade is motivated not by fancy long-range strategy but by a largely mercantilist foreign policy that puts economics over politics. But the result is salutary: Some Administration officials believe that today’s meeting between President Clinton and China’s President Jiang Zemin will produce unexpected progress on the human rights question. It may just be that by avoiding an aggressive in-your-face diplomacy with a 5,000-year-old culture for which public face is just about everything, Washington now has a China policy that may not inspire the poets but seems about right for the age of McWorld.