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By Root 1478 0

banned the use of satellite dishes to receive anything other than Chinese signals without, however, banning the dishes themselves—everywhere visible atop the sooty apartment blocks of Beijing and Shanghai. This is about as effective as making it illegal to look at pinups but licensing the sale of Playboy. They might of course have banned the sale and use of the dishes altogether, but that would have disrupted a highly profitable industry in which the Ministry of Electronics manufactures dishes and the Army General Staff Department as well as the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television sell them to the general public. And so while government officials rant against corrupt Western culture, their colleagues are busily selling the instruments of corruption. Economic success for the fledgling industry—a dish in every home—will signal cultural failure: McWorld in every home.

Hot wars are conducted by force of arms; the Cold War put propaganda and images to the direct service of political ideas in a struggle for the hearts and minds of men. McWorld’s war proceeds by inadvertence, circumventing heart and mind in favor of viscera and the five senses, seducing peoples with the siren call of self-interest and desire where the self is defined wholly by want, wish, and the capacity to consume. Chinese spectators in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square “ought” to be interested in truthful journalism, but, exposed to McWorld’s videology, they avow to being far “more interested in sit-coms or cops-and-robbers shows than in news programs.” According to Zhang Zedong who runs a state-owned satellite-dish shop, “what people want is entertainment. They’re not so interested in BBC, but rather in MTV …”!12

China has another problem as well: how to enforce its ideologically motivated centralist edicts on regions with a great deal of geographical autonomy that (as instructed) are motivated more by economics than ideology and that often ignore political edicts in favor of market edicts, since the two come from the same central government, but stand in sharp contradiction. In boom regions in South China, Shanghai and the Yangtze River, and Manchuria, the central government’s Jihad against Westernization is largely ineffective. Like Catalonia or Lombardy, such regions achieve some independence from the Chinese centralist regime through direct engagement in world trade. Orders handed down in Beijing commanding banks to stop speculating are flat-out ignored; orders to limit oil consumption enforced by local production controls are simply circumvented by increasing imports from abroad. A family-planning clinic run by the government recently reversed the ideological polarity (one child per family) set by the authorities when it discovered it could earn more as a fertility clinic.13 Some predict that regions on the extreme periphery like Tibet or oil-rich Xinjiang Province may try a Chinese-Quebec and secede from China altogether, although the brutal repression in Tibet suggests how committed the leadership is to retaining control.14 As in the West, the breakdown of a centralist Communist government can mean anarchy—an argument officials have been all too ready to use to oppose democracy since the time of the emperors. According to one official: “All the time in Chinese history, when you don’t have strong rule, you get chaos and warlords. If we try to get too much democracy, it’ll all fall apart again. China will disintegrate, and it’ll be worse than in the Soviet Union.”15

Of course no perspicacious observer would want to argue that China faces an internal Jihad against central, modernizing rule on the scale found in Eastern Europe and the regions of the former Soviet Union; less than 10 percent of the population (less than 100 million people) count as members of the fifty-five ethnic minorities of China, and they are concentrated in the West. Yet there are fears that even as the Chinese nation struggles against Westernization, traditionally remote regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia will step up their own struggle against “Chinafication.