China's Hunger Games (The Diplomat)

Breaking North American box office records and winning over audiences and critics alike last weekend was the movie adaptation of the first part of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling teen science fiction trilogy The Hunger Games. The movie has inevitably been compared with the 2000 Japanese hit movie Battle Royale, where a former high school teacher, at the behest of the Japanese government, kidnaps his former ninth grade class and forces them to kill each other on a remote island until only one is left standing. In the dystopian The Hunger Games, after a holocaust has wiped out most of North America, the prosperous metropolis Capitol enslaves and starves 12 surrounding districts. Each year, for 75 years now, as a way to both entertain the masses as well as remind them of their failed rebellion and subjugation, the Capitol organizes the Hunger Games circus, where two teenagers from each district must compete in a “Battle Royale” last-man-standing scenario. Some adults have observed that the Hunger Games’ immense popularity among adults and teenagers is linked in part to its publication date: 2008, when the sub-prime crisis hit and Lehman Brothers collapsed, ultimately leading to the birth of the Occupy movement. But while that helps explain its enduring appeal among adults, it doesn’t explain its appeal among teenagers. To understand that, it’s important to note that the Hunger Games trilogy has many antecedents: the books of Roald Dahl, the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and other cultural works held deep in the hearts of children for articulating their deep distrust and disgust of the adult world’s obsession with power, and especially with what Holden Caulfield famously called “phoniness.” Indeed, in the final part of the Hunger Games trilogy (spoiler alert!), the heroine Katniss Everdeen, after having survived two battles to the death because of her purity and resolve, becomes a pawn in a power struggle that could ultimately wipe out humanity. In many ways, the closest comparison to the Hunger Games isn’t Battle Royale, but Orson Scott Card’s science fiction series Ender’s Game, where a boy prodigy is manipulated by adults into wiping out an alien species: both are terribly written and plotted out to the angst and disgust of adults, and both capture the imagination of teenagers because it articulates in their terms their angst and disgust with adults. And this mutual angst and disgust is natural and healthy, as Judith Rich Harris so convincingly argues in The Nurture Assumption. For decades, both psychologists and parents believed they mattered to teenagers’ development, when in fact evolution endowed teenagers with enough imagination, resilience, and empathy to survive in a world without adults as long as they had each other. It doesn’t matter if children listen to Mozart or are taken to the museum on weekends, if they’re an only child or if their parents are divorced – but it does matter to their social, intellectual, and emotional development if they are given the space to develop and maintain a close circle of friends. And, for a variety of reasons, our children are being given less time to be children and to associate with other children. In fact, modern day parents in many parts of the world have developed a paranoia about protecting their child from other children. The antithesis of the Hunger Games, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, so eloquently encapsulates the adult fear of the brutality of the teenage mind that it’s a pity it’s not true: If you strand a group of teenagers on an island, no matter where they came from, they would learn to help each other. In fact, psychologists have discovered that if you put a group of teenagers who don’t speak the same language together they quickly develop a new pidgin language to communicate with each other – and to do so would require a level of trust and co-operation among teenagers that, judging from the way we regulate our schools, we adults had always assumed they weren’t capable of. The Nurture Assumption’s message to psychologists and parents is so right it’s unnerving: Leave the kids alone, and they’ll still do fine without us. So what’s neither natural nor healthy is how across the world we adults have institutionalized supervision and control over every corner of our children’s lives that was thought neither desirable nor possible a generation ago. In both America and China, parents circle over their children as they do homework or play soccer or go on “playdates” with their carefully vetted friends, and quarrel with their teachers over their children’s grades and their coaches over playing time. America’s version of the Hunger Games is the Ivy League admissions game, and China’s version of the Hunger Games is the national college entrance examination or gaokao system. In all these zero-sum last-man-standing games, teenagers deprive themselves of sleep, friendship, and compassion in order to please and entertain the adults who supposedly love them most, but who instead are fixated on winning bets and bragging rights within their social networks. In the Hunger Games, the Capitol cannibalizes the youth of the surrounding districts to deprive them of the nourishment of hope and a sense of the future – the endless possibilities and the regenerative spirit that the young represent. The Capitol is both rational and honest about why it cannibalizes the world’s youth like that. But we are neither. So now, do we begin to understand why teenagers around the world love the Hunger Games so much?

Understanding China (The Diplomat)

Western observers often describe China as “inscrutable,” but perhaps a lot of the mystery surrounding the Chinese condition comes from the fact that Western eyes are so focused on China’s culture and history that they are blind to China’s geography and demographics, which are ultimately the roots of the culture and history. To explain China, we need to understand three basic principles about China: 1) China is so vast in terms of land and people that it sees itself as an enclosed universe onto itself. 2) China’s overpopulation and its limited natural resources mean that the Chinese economy and political system are both based on a national zero sum game of exploiting the peasantry. 3) This exploitation of the peasantry is so convenient and lucrative it becomes the elite’s raison d’etre, which in turn leads to a stagnant inward-looking authoritarian political order and philosophy that fears progressive ideas as much as peasant rebellions. To see how these three principles explain China, consider Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. It’s a brilliant biography which attempts, through the prism of the extraordinary career of one of America’s finest tactical field commanders, to explain how an army of one million Japanese could overrun a nation of 400 million, and why once Chiang Kai-shek had successfully manipulated the United States into helping China against Japan he began demanding bribes for defending China. In becoming Chiang Kai-shek’s advisor and director of America’s Lend-Lease program in China, the Sinophile Joseph Stilwell wanted to infuse Chinese soldiers with the American fighting spirit of individual initiative he had seen so triumphantly prevail over the ancien regimes of Europe in World War I. Stillwell’s major enemy in teaching the Chinese to stand up for themselves wasn’t the Japanese, but Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese ancien regime he so personified: “It was a long time before Stilwell could bring himself to admit that Chiang did not really want a well-trained, well-equipped fighting force; that such a force represented to him less a boon than a threat; that he feared that an effective 30 divisions might come under a new leader or group, undermining or challenging his own control, and that Stilwell’s proposal to remove incompetent commanders would remove those loyal and beholden to him; that he was not interested in an army that could fight the Japanese but only in one that could sustain him internally; that for this believed it sufficed to have more divisions and more guns, planes and tanks than the Communists.” Chiang thought like so many Chinese leaders before him, believing that China’s size and culture would eventually shallow the invader, and thus his priority was to maintain his position within China, not strengthen China’s position in the world: “[Chiang] had made the same choice as his predecessor, Prince Kung, Regent at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, who said the rebels were a disease of China’s vitals, the barbarians an affliction only of the limbs.” Much more painful for Stillwell, a general who prided himself on his closeness to and compassion for the infantryman, was to see the contempt the Chinese elite had towards the people they led, a contempt borne out of both fear and reliance. One of Chiang’s officers told Stilwell that one battle’s 600,000 Chinese casualties was “really a good thing [because] Chinese soldiers are all bandits, robbers, thieves, and rascals. So we send them to the front and they get killed off and in that way we are eliminating our bad elements.” Educated at West Point, Stillwell was from a distinguished military family, and was shocked to hear from the same officer that “the Chinese learned long ago to make the lower classes do the fighting. At first the nobles fought, but they soon got over that and made the people do it for them.” Soon enough, Stilwell witnessed for himself the Chinese elite’s callousness. While Stilwell was in India preparing for the Burma offensive, the Chinese soldiers sent to his command were packed on a cargo plane and naked because their officers thought “it would be foolish to waste uniforms if the men were to be given new ones anyway.” When an American officer complained to his Chinese counterpart with a list of the soldiers who froze to death on the plane, the Chinese offer threw the list into the garbage can. Stilwell eventually became so disgusted with Chiang’s regime that he compared America’s Asian ally to its European nemesis: “a one-party government, supported by a Gestapo and headed by an unbalanced man with little education.” But Tuchman, armed with the hindsight of history and perspective, understood that Chiang’s situation was as hopeless as Stilwell’s mission of reform was impossible. China’s size and population made it unmanageable and ungovernable, and those who rose to the top could not lead, but at best hang on: “For a hundred years the Chinese had struggled to unburden themselves of misgovernment only to have each effort of reform or revolution turn itself back into oppression and corruption, as if the magic prince were bewitched in reverse to turn back into a toad. China’s misgovernment was not so much a case of absolute as of ineffective rule. If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more... “Chiang Kai-shek’s authority, like that of Europe’s medieval kings, rested on the more or less voluntary fealty of provincial barons…Chiang was not an activist possessed of compelling energy to overturn the old. He changed nothing. He was a holder with no goal but to hold.” In 1944, Stilwell was recalled by President Roosevelt at the Generalissimo’s behest, and he died of stomach cancer in a San Francisco hospital shortly after. The cancer had been spreading for quite some time, but Stilwell, oddly enough, never felt any pain. Did he feel no pain because he was so absorbed by his China mission, or did he feel no pain because China had taught him not to feel anymore? We’ll never know the answer to that, but we know what happened to Stilwell’s China and what will continue to happen to China. Here are the book’s final words: “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”