Common Interests, Common Ground

It looks like you don’t have to be a communist to hope things go well with China. A revealing and important Times poll published Sunday showed that many in the large Chinese and Chinese American population in Southern California are, at this point anyway, optimistic about the hand-over of Hong Kong to the Chinese. That shows maturity and good sense. There’s plenty of time to blast China if it mishandles Hong Kong, as well it might. But until it does, if it does, why not wish Beijing the best?

In Hong Kong itself, alas, the bickering between East and West gets more bitter by the day as the witching hour approaches. The British, who can be very picky, are giving the Chinese, who can be very prickly, a hard time during these final two weeks. They are even persisting with their die-hard, losing-cause campaign against the Beijing-created Provisional Legislature, which, whether the West likes it or not, will become the official legislative body July 1. The Clinton administration, supporting London, is finding it lonely out there on the Anglo American front: The reaction from the rest of the world to this continuing cat fight is not favorable; many governments feel the best course is to get on with the hand-over and let China and Hong Kong’s new chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, handle things their way.

A different kind of Sino-U.S relationship seemed to be evolving last week at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In a significant and growing phenomenon here in the Western United States, private groups and nonprofits are reaching out to China with an apolitical warmth and human touch that somehow eludes our governments. It happened at the new $800-million Getty Center, a fairyland of Richard Meier buildings perched on 110 acres of L.A. mountainside. I was sitting in on a quiet seminar for five leading educators from China, here to learn about America’s public schools and how we teach music, art and theater to our kids. Arts education is increasingly being viewed here--and in some circles in Asia, too--as a necessary curricular element, not an extracurricular one. The education officials took copious notes on just about everything laid on them by the staff of the Getty Education Institute for the Arts. In one session, Mark Slavkin, the former L.A. school board president who is now a Getty program officer, sought to explain America’s almost comically complicated system of public school governance. Then he tried to explain the current LEARN reform in Los Angeles that emphasizes “school-based management.” An awkward silence ensued as the translator converted Los Angeles English into Beijing Mandarin. I feared Slavkin was losing them. Wrong! “Ah, school-based!” chuckled Yang Rui Min, a smiling member of China’s State Education Commission, “We in China have our own saying: “Get rid of the yoke on the principal!” Slavkin added bluntly: “The history of U.S. schools has been about adding more rules and regulations. We have rules for everything.” That honesty paid off. Wei Liqing and Yang Li, also from the education commission, looked at one another as if to say, America isn’t that much different after all.

Later, at institute director Leilani Lattin Duke’s home, a Chinese delegation member admitted that China was deeply divided over the value of arts education and explained that powerful sectors back home favor a hard-core, Singapore-style approach, with the bootstrap-and-calculator emphasis on math and science that tends to put down as so much frou-frou arts and humanities curricula. But these cultural realms in fact have the proven ability to enhance the intellectual level of a nation’s work force. I didn’t mention to them that America also gets mired in similarly stupid, one-or-the-other debates.

Later, Slavkin, reflecting on his eight frustrating years on the L.A. school board, laughed: “They’re supposed to be the totalitarian society and we’re supposed to be the democracy, but in some ways, with all our educational codes and layers of authority, we might be as rigid and authoritarian as China.”

I like it when Americans look at Chinese society and see that we’re not so almighty superior in every respect. I hope many hundreds of Getty-like flowers bloom across America to bring Chinese and Americans face to face, to compare notes, to make friends, to reduce tensions and to gain mutual respect. As it happens, the Getty wants to send its own delegation over there next year. By that time Hong Kong will have been part of China for many months. What will be the state of Sino-U.S. relations then? It might not be the pretty picture that has been on display at the Getty.