As the World Shrinks

Last weekend, a self-selected group of world economic leaders gathered in New York City at the World Economic Forum for a round of self-congratulatory discussions on the future of globalization. At the same time, thousands of anti-globalization activists attending the World Social Forum danced for the cameras through the streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The protesters complained that globalization homogenizes the world’s cultures. They also charged that it has a devastating impact on Western manufacturing jobs, because tens of millions of Third-World workers, eager for jobs in the overseas factories of Western companies, are willing to work for wages far lower than those paid in the U.S. or Europe. This is hard to dispute.

On the other hand, the corporate leaders believe that as the tide of globalization lifts their yachts, it will also lift the Third World’s rowboats. Measured by the relative reduction of poverty in places like China, India and Uganda over the past decade, this reality also seems to be true.

It seems to me that both sides share a set of wrong assumptions, for which I blame the media.

We journalists--particularly TV news people--have done a terrible job of reporting on what globalization is actually doing to this single, shrinking world we all share. Until Sept. 11, the U.S. public that relies on television news didn’t know much about the rest of the world beyond the sad fact that Princess Di was dead. Since then, we’ve done a bit better. But in terms of globalization, we seem to have failed to point out something essential: To be for or against globalization implies that we can control it. From what I’ve observed, the salient feature of globalization is loss of control.

Admittedly, my big picture is built only of the many small things I’ve observed first-hand. But it seems to me that whether I’ve been looking at organized crime in Russia or the Falun Gong in China or drug lords in Colombia, I’ve seen the same thing: governments losing control as market forces take hold. And that loss of control has resulted in something else--more freedom.

Think back to 1994. when then-President Bill Clinton reversed the human-rights positions of candidate Clinton. The key to winning freedom in China, he began saying, was not sanctions, but trade. He asked us to believe that somehow the number of new high-rise buildings going up in China would correlate directly with an increase in freedoms for China’s emerging middle class. At the time, Clinton’s reversal seemed to me an act of political expediency. Then, I began going to China.

In the summer of 1994, the first time I worked in China, globalization was just beginning to take hold. People were reluctant to express themselves publicly, even in Shanghai, the most developed city. We asked people if they felt free, but got little for our efforts--other than a stern lecture from one of our mandatory government escorts. Crowds would gather around us when we videotaped on the streets, but melt away rapidly if the camera panned over them--as if even being seen in a crowd shot was too risky.

But globalization was creating a new middle class. Hundreds of millions of people around the world, including in China, were interacting with economic and cultural forces outside their borders. On a superficial level, this globalization could be tracked in the loss of local culture--in the spread of McDonald’s outlets or in the sudden proliferation of bottle blonds. But as governments began to lose control of their economic and cultural borders, they began to lose control in other areas too.

In the mid-’90s, this loss of control by governments was most often reported on obliquely. Reporters focused on the rise of multinational criminal groups, such as the mafias in the former Soviet Union and the drug-trafficking organizations in Latin America.

But in China, where the government had controlled so much of life, this loss of control meant the government couldn’t repress people as effectively. Each time I returned to China in the ‘90s, the Chinese people seemed to have gained new freedoms. On my sixth visit, in July 1999, we looked at an emerging spiritual group called Falun Gong. Each morning, members of the group meditated together in public places. They hardly seemed threatening--largely a collection of retired people. But after organizing a protest in Tiananmen Square in April 1999 that drew some 10,000 protesters, the group was under pressure from the government. From what we could see, Falun Gong did not seem to be bowing to the government’s pressure. Early one Monday morning outside the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, we interviewed some Falun Gong members, who warily stated their resolve.

The next morning, the Falun Gong movement was banned by the Chinese government. Thousands of people were rounded up. But the ban only underscored that fact that, in the new climate fostered by globalization, an unsanctioned movement had grown to the point that it had actually frightened the government.

Even more striking is the existence of tens of millions of “underground” Christians--Chinese who attend churches not sanctioned by the government and therefore illegal. In January 2000, a colleague found a Chinese American missionary who regularly visited China to minister to the underground Christians. Last year, after nearly a year of planning, we joined him in Hong Kong and then traveled to the mainland. Our trip began with him delivering religious books to a secret training center for ministers that occupied the top two floors of a medium-rise apartment building in a neighborhood of dozens of identical structures. We ended the trip literally underground, in a Central China basement of an abandoned industrial building where 80 leaders of one of China’s largest Protestant sects were meeting.

In between, we traveled a lot in the dark, never stood by windows, sometimes lived in very rough conditions and heard many stories of persecution. Because, although the Chinese government has granted its people more social and economic freedoms, religious and political freedoms are still something people have to secretly create for themselves, as the underground Christians have. Despite the secrecy, people were willing, even eager, to talk to our cameras, provided we did not name them nor divulge the cities they lived in. The fact that so many ordinary Chinese were willing to defy their government--something that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier--said a lot about development, globalization and freedom.

After our story aired on both Channel One and ABC’s “Nightline,” I wondered if I’d be able to get another visa. But we were back in China last August. In Guangzhou, we approached young people in shopping malls to ask them how free they felt. This time, no one was camera-shy. And they were frank: “If you obey the government,” one said, “they will give you enough human rights. But if you do something they don’t like, they will never give you any human rights.” And there’s the paradox of progress: People feel free enough to say that they’re not entirely free.

The same loss of control is going on in other authoritarian nations. On the first evening of my first visit to Iran, in 1993, I was arrested and detained for three days for interviewing people in a Tehran park without a government escort--something tantamount to spying back then. On the first evening of my most recent visit, in the summer of 2000, two young Iranian men took us out to videotape them trying to pick up women in the section of Tehran they call “Flirt Street,” a place kids cruise in defiance of religious hard-liners. Iran is one of the world’s youngest nations in demographic terms, and thanks to all those hidden satellite dishes and bootlegged CDs, the kids are no longer under complete control.

Admittedly, it’s easy to show Chinese praying or Iranian kids holding hands in public to convey the weakening of repression. It’s harder to show--or even really to see--how the weakening of government is affecting large globalizing nations that are already democratic, such as India and Brazil. Globalization seems to work as a kind of promise in the developing world, where even those not yet receiving its benefits can hope that they’ll be next. But as governments cede control of their economies to market forces, they may also have less ability to help populations that could turn suddenly restive if the new economies falter. Since loss of control is likely to be tough to reverse, it seems like we--all of us, the whole world--are going to find out.