China Isn’t a Three-Act Script

To a nation that gets a disproportionate amount of its information about China from the movies, the recent burst of Sino-U.S. diplomacy could not have been more cinematic. The pomp and showmanship of President Jiang Zemin’s state visit effected a numbing suspension of disbelief. It was a dramatic screenplay, culminating in the release of China’s most celebrated political prisoner last weekend.

Never mind that an array of grave problems--from trade conflict to weapons proliferation to festering human rights violations--remains fundamentally unresolved. This movie gives its audience a fuzzy feel-good satisfaction.

In Act I, Jiang puts on a disarming performance as a bland party hack, stubborn to the core but lovable. He engages in a vacuous dialogue with supporting actor Bill Clinton in the White House scene, and he shrugs off the loudspeakers of human rights protesters on location at Harvard. A cast of stealthy diplomats makes sure nobody loses face. The American public is left with a renewed appreciation that today’s Chinese wear business suits instead of Mao jackets or army uniforms. In this joint production, they are hardly the menacing thugs that proponents of neo-Yellow Peril in Congress and kindred agit-prop filmmakers would have us believe.

Act II: Every blockbuster needs a love interest. In this story, it is the lurid passion between American business and the communist state. These are starry-eyed lovers trapped in a fatalistic romance. To wit, Boeing gets a $3-billion deal to sell commercial jetliners, which puts rival Airbus at a disadvantage with Beijing in a scintillating love-triangle subplot. The message is that American business stands ready to “constructively engage” itself in China’s phenomenal economic growth. And what’s good for Boeing, after all, can only be good for Chinese consumers, as well as political prisoners.

Act III: For the climax, Beijing rewards its American friends by springing from his dank prison cell its most eloquent pro-democracy martyr, Wei Jingsheng, who is dispatched to freedom (in Detroit no less) and very possibly consigned to mute oblivion in exile.

Let’s skip over the fact that Wei leaves behind an uncounted and unaccounted for population of jailed dissidents. Not to mention a growing number of business people being arbitrarily detained in China’s gulag in petty commercial disputes.

For the denouement, shall we talk about corrupting the rules to allow Beijing’s premature entry into the World Trade Organization, a move guaranteed to undermine the integrity of the fledgling global trade cop?

Sorry, an urgent flash has just come in and we must change film reels. Now showing: “Gulf War II: Saddam’s Revenge.”

In the short-attention-span theater that is the American mass media, few stories get relegated to such breezy shallowness as the China epic. Its substance is so complex and its magnitude so profound that it cries out for simplification. Yet the task of interpreting and explaining this critically important subject has been usurped by the imagineers of Hollywood. And in the world of entertainment, it doesn’t matter what’s true or false, so long as the story is told with a compelling narrative.

If “Seven Years in Tibet” leaves anyone confused about who the bad guys are supposed to be, all one needs to do is sit through “Red Corner.” In this ode to the righteousness of habeas corpus, visiting businessman Richard Gere gets framed on a murder rap in Beijing and subjected to the Kafkaesque paranoia of the Chinese system. To maintain his pose of moral rectitude, Gere does not get the girl (his gorgeous Chinese lawyer) in the end.

Tragically, movies like these offer a cathartic thrill that distracts the mind’s eye from what is really going on in China. With every day that passes, this emerging superpower struggles with multitudinous change. The forces of reform advance and retreat and surge around obstacles, while intolerable repression and corruption continue. The truth is that U.S.-Chinese relations are going to be fraught with misunderstandings and danger for a long time to come. But China must not be boiled down to a cartoon caricature, friend or foe, no matter how well the script reads.