Posted on: Sunday, December 5, 2004

By Tom Plate

Will the real China please stand up?

On the one hand, witness the dazzling international effort by China's leaders to paint a benign and progressive face on this rising power.

Yet this same effort glosses over a persistently discouraging picture on China's home front.

Abroad, Wen Jiabao, China's premier (and powerful No. 2 leader) has been superlative in selling his Asian neighbors on a user-friendly image of China.

At the recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Laos, Wen's leadership led not only to an unprecedented Asian trade pact but also to a stunningly explicit promise from China that it would behave as a good neighbor in all matters economic and political.

Given China's extraordinary rise, the effort makes sense. Wen and China's No. 1, Hu Jintao, have made a dizzying number of foreign sales calls in the last year. That's certainly good for China, which is, in fact, becoming increasingly competitive for world leadership while trying to appear overwhelmingly cooperative.

But it may not be so good for America.

A recent trip by Hu to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Chile dazzled experienced Latin watchers. "Hu was amazing in Santiago," said Jacqueline Mazza, a Latin America specialist at Johns Hopkins University and an Inter-American Development Bank officer in Washington. "I have never seen the Chinese with their act so together as now. If I were George Bush, I would start to worry."

China's aim, of course, is not to prompt worry but to beguile total ease over China's rise. It's also in China's interest to get President Bush to tone down Taiwan's irksome, pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian. And it's in Beijing's interest to keep its satellite territory Hong Kong running as smoothly and cheerfully as possible.

A growing number of Hong Kongers, among many others in Asia, are increasingly impressed. "China obviously has a terrific leader with Wen," said Hong Kong law student Maggy Chan, an international relations specialist. "He seems sincere and almost Clintonesque in his charm with others."

China's leaders may be succeeding with their diplomatic offensive, but what is really going on inside China? To be sure, the place is nowhere near as closed as it was under Mao.

Still, a strikingly bleak and upsetting view comes from a journalism and communications professor at Peking University, Jiao Guobiao, who recently lambasted in public his government's propaganda ministry. His foray into honest give and take landed him major coverage by Western media, but it also cost him his job.

Jiao somehow managed to wangle an exit visa to give talks in the United States, including one at UCLA last month. Jiao, a short, neat, pleasant man in a leather jacket and chatting in staccato Mandarin, wasn't buying Wen's glowing party line.

Jiao described China even today as a mainly terrified society, as closed to the outside world as the authorities can possibly make it in this globalized age, fearful of its media conveying the truth, and, as always, distrustful of the foreign media.

No wonder Jiao lost his job! His stark rendition of China's current conditions came as a shock to those of us in the West who had been hoping the worst is over.

Jiao regards the Communist Party's censors and propaganda functionaries as Orwellian thugs. In the absence of radical reform, if not gradual evisceration of the party, this modest man doubts that China can move toward any kind of openness, including democracy.

So whom do you trust? The plain-speaking professor or the pin-striped, smooth-talking international salesmen? Maybe, of course, both versions have truth to them. Jiao's version speaks to the everyday grim reality of China, while Wen speaks to the grand vision of China to which he and Hu presumably aspire.

Even so, there is a huge gulf between the two views. It's the job of Wen and Hu to bridge that gulf. But to do it, they need to allow more honest men like Jiao to speak out — or China will wind up fooling not just the world but itself as well.

Tom Plate, a UCLA professor, is founder and director of the UCLA Media Center, which co-sponsored Jiao's talk.