After a year away, James Fallows, longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic and author (China Airborne, Postcards from Tomorrow Square) has returned to China and is now spending a week in residence at New York University’s Shanghai campus together with his wife, Deborah Fallows (Dreaming in Chinese). Since returning to the United States after reporting out of Shanghai and Beijing, the two have been flying across the US in a propeller plane, chronicling their observations of its cities’ economic resurgence in the series American Futures. China Economic Review sat down with Fallows this week to discuss his recent reportage, the state of China-watching from afar, media trends and the future of urban China.
So now that you’re back in town, what are you noticing that wouldn’t have been otherwise visible?
I guess I’m impressed by the absence of sudden change. You know, often people say ‘I came back and six months later everything was unrecognizable.’ We’ve only been in Shanghai this trip but it looks still recognizably like Shanghai, with perhaps the difference of the Shanghai Tower, which wasn’t finished the last time we were here. But otherwise it seems as if it’s a linear extension of the Shanghai we had known. We lived here in ’06 and ’07 before moving to Beijing and came here frequently, so Shanghai looks like a somewhat more burnished version of its previous self with a few more subway lines.
What has it been like China-watching from the States?
I’ll give you two heartening surprises and then one less heartening development. The first heartening surprise is that the elite-level, and speaking of Boston as a shorthand for the academic world, New York as a shorthand for finance, [Washington] DC as government and California as tech—I think in all those areas there’s an understanding of how complex and contradictory China is generally, how you’re always trying to assess what’s going on, and how the United States in all the different layers of connection just basically needs to work along with China.
I think everybody understands this. You very rarely come across people who are saying ‘China is all this way’ or ‘China is all that way.’ That’s one encouraging development compared to say, ten or fifteen years ago where people thought it was monolithic.
The second encouraging surprise from this travel my wife and I have been doing around the country is that I think compared to five years ago there’s much less fear of China than there used to be, and people recognize that. If you’re in the agricultural parts of the US everybody knows there’s a world food market in which China’s an important part; the manufacturing part, they’ve sort of integrated with China more than they feel taken over by China; and so I think there’s a benign to slightly positive view of China in sort of the corpus of America, the heartland of America, compared to just the xenophobic fear.
The less heartening development is in the last year or so, especially in the DC world, of politics, journalism and military, most of the recent encounters with the Chinese government have been difficult. You know, journalists are having a hard time getting in here, the governments are having various contentious issues, so I think there’s a sense that it’s a more difficult phase of US-China structural relations than three or four years ago.
Besides simply not letting journalists into the country, are you noticing any dominant media trends for China?
I think there’s the same structural complexity of the US media in covering China, by which I mean that The New York Times in particular is sort of… they feel obliged to cover political trends in China. Political trends in China, especially recently, have been difficult, and so there’s sort of a skew towards coverage of the problems of Chinese politics, I think, by some of the largest American media outlets.
There may be a corrective to a trend of four or five years ago. I think four or five years ago, especially around the time of the Beijing Olympics, financial crash and China’s recovery from the crash more quickly than the United States, there was a sort of ‘gee-whiz’ tone to a lot of Chinese coverage—that China could do anything it wanted, it could build a high-speed rail in two months, it could just make anything happen. I think that perhaps as a corrective to that there’s been an emphasis, and perhaps overemphasis, on problems, whether it’s pollution or migrant issues or regional issues or whatever.
I think in the long run most people covering China recognize there’s this, just, varied range – as there is in the US itself – between things that are quite impressive and things that are pretty seriously problematic, and so month by month I think the media as a whole are trying to get across the range of opinions as opposed to just one side or the other. So it’s probably healthy that there’s not one China theme in the media, there are twenty China themes.
You’ve spent a lot of your time back in the states on the American Futures series. I’d be interested to hear a bit about what that aerial but also sort of intimate perspective has told you about America’s economy and what kind of questions it raises for you about China.
On America’s economy, we started doing this almost two years ago when the main narrative of the US in general was just negative. It was still in the aftermath of the financial collapse, structural unemployment was still quite large, real estate was a big problem, and national government, then as now, was in a really sort of historically bad and paralyzed mode.
We started noticing some early contrarian indications, so sort of place by place by place you’d say ‘yeah, manufacturing employment is coming back here, downtown is coming back there, and this factory is reopening and that factory is finding ways to find new products.’ I think that’s become more conventional wisdom in the United States now, just as the unemployment rate has continued to improve.
The more surprising point to me, and the one that I’ve tried to emphasize in a couple of talks here, is three of the things that have been most important to US vitality in the long run: Number one, continued absorption of an outsize share of the world’s talent, whether as refugees or as immigrants. That still is going along pretty well despite the rhetoric on the national level about immigration. So we find a continuing sort of ethnic overall successful assimilation. So that is still an impressive theme.
The second important theme is that at just the time when national-level politics seem really just [to have] failed, state-level and city-level politics seem to be working quite healthily. You find cities that are passing tax increases to improve their schools, or their libraries; you find partisan disagreements really not mattering much at all; you see long-term infrastructure projects. And so we found city after city after city where a strong mayor form of government has actually done things that are successful, with an interesting [corresponding result] that a lot of mayors are deciding not to run for the congress or the senate because they figure they have the best job in American politics being a successful mayor, as opposed to be a part of an unsuccessful national legislature. So, seeing the contrast between paralyzed nat
ional politics and successful local politics has been interesting.
And I guess the third thing that’s been impressive has been signs of a talent and technology dispersal, by which I mean, Chinese students think the only places to live in the US are New York, San Francisco, and maybe LA or Boston or DC. We’ve been seeing these tech incubator projects in South Carolina and South Dakota and Fresno and Mississippi and Vermont, and you have simultaneously the big, international clusters of New York for finance and LA for entertainment, but also a dozen other sort of regional, plausibly excellent technology and cultural centers in a way very different from the kind of tier-2 or tier-3 cities in China, and I think that’s something that I hadn’t expected and has been impressive to see.
One other thing that’s been impressive is the innovativeness of a lot of public schools, which I’d thought of as just a disaster area in the United States. But you find especially in areas of technical education – what used to be vocational ed. they now call career or technical education – [they’re] training people for like skilled technician jobs so they’re not just going to McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. So those are the positive things we’ve seen.
What we’re doing in America now is partly borne of just having spent so many bus rides and train trips in China just seeing what we’d see if we went out into the provinces. I’d make two parallels for Chinese readers in particular as they think about the United States. One is I think most Chinese people would feel that the news of China as a whole in all of its complexity is more positive than you’d think just from the Beijing or Shanghai-centric coverage about political problems or pollution, whatever else. So too is the case for the United States. Now I think the regional-level diversity is better than the dominant city narrative you would get.
I guess the second question I would have about China is whether it’s possible to have the same sort of dispersed centers of opportunity and excellence. I think there’s a clearer sense here of tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3, and we’re seeing in the US some of these smaller cities feeling as if they’re actually tier-1.
Here’s a side point with an economic angle: In the six biggest coastal cities in the United States, Boston, New York, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, the price of real estate distorts everything else in life. Real estate is so expensive that everything else becomes a nightmare. Every place else in the US real estate is cheap, and so you can start a company, you can start an arts group, you can start a museum, you can start a school with cheaper real estate. And I guess the question is whether that’s still true in provincial China. I don’t know.
After flying around the US for so long, do you have any plans to try and get up in the air while you’re here?
[laughs] I have ambitions, but no plans. I wish I were more optimistic about the short-term liberalization of Chinese airspace.
Well, they’ve been promising a lot.
Yes.
For a long time.
For a long time now. I saw a story this week about three experimental zones being liberalized I think in Shenyang, Xi’an and maybe Shenzhen. The same ones I was writing about five years ago.
When we reported on the sector late last year, people in the industry were cautiously optimistic. Recently, though, there was an article on private jet sales – which aren’t all of general aviation, but they’re a driver – that made it sound like there had been a tapering of demand.
I actually was interviewing someone about this, and he said that visible jet charters, where people think they might be seen, those are down; he said actually the sale of jets is doing okay—if you’re out in some kind of provincial airport where people think they can use them without getting detected.
That jives with the crackdown we’ve seen on luxury items. What’s your take on that, and on the broader anti-corruption campaign?
You know, I’ve been out of China while this has been going on so I know only at secondhand remove, but the impression among people like me in the United States is on the one hand we know there’s something real that this is being addressed to, and so you can take a healthy sign from an attempt to deal with this if it’s honest. I guess most people in the United States are waiting for a sign of when this moves beyond what could be characterized as political score-settling, or just getting rid of rival political factions. If there’s somebody from Xi Jinping’s own group who gets held to the same standard, that will be noted.
And I guess people in the United States also are highly aware of how some of the most prominent Chinese anticorruption fighters and Chinese nationalists, they have property in the United States, their kids are in the US – it’s a complicated situation. So I think people in the United States are cautiously optimistic on where this will lead, but I don’t think anybody knows [how] to make sense of it.
Among the China-watcher crew in the United States I think their central view is just agnosticism, nobody knows where this is leading, but then sort of the two opposing views are, ‘yeah this will actually be a successful reform effort,’ and others say this is one more step to forestall just inevitable and uncontrollable contradictions, just that there’s not a way to correct all of the stuff that is wrong.
Getting back to cities and urban development, you posted a recent entry of American Futures about how downtowns become, well, actually nice. Part of the post that rang true in particular was the West Shanghai-East Shanghai bifurcation between this very livable, lived-in city of Puxi and the towering skyscrapers and large, empty spaces in Pudong—the latter bearing more resemblance to most new mainland cities.
Having outlined how American cities were able to sort of reinvigorate their downtowns, is there any hope at all for Chinese cities?
[laughs] Well the first thing I’ll say about American cities is, this has been, I guess if I were in the urban planning business I would’ve known this, but it’s been real news to us and really encouraging news, this is a genuine thing across America. Just all over the place you find there are enough places where buildings of the old downtown are still there, and they’re coming back to life. You have Allentown, PA where it was all just pawn shops and blood banks and things like that, they now have a really nice downtown.
On the Chinese front, you start with two premises. One is that the default explanation for anything in China is a real estate deal, and the main way the government is known to keep things going is to build, and build up on a monumental scale. And the additional premise that if an ancestral view of American city design is the Main Street of Disneyland, where you’ve got the little shops and all that – that’s how Americans think their Main Street should look – there is also some kind of at least Northern China [ancestral] view of a grand imperial avenue like Beijing and this huge, crushing architecture.
So far the momentum in China seems to be in the Pudong direction. I’m trying to think of a recently built city that’s not skyscraper-ridden with a Century Avenue-type thing. So
I hope that this will be an area of international convergence, because Europe is ahead of the US on this, the US is now catching up, and maybe Europe and the US together will suggest this idea to China.
That’s why whenever anybody asks us ‘Beijing or Shanghai, which do you prefer?’ of course I say well, we love them both, they’re both invaluable, but you know, Puxi of Shanghai is almost unique in China, you know in having that quality which would be better for China. I’m glad to have lived in Beijing but… [shudders] ♦
Interviewer: Hudson Lockett (@KangHexin)
 has returned to C){kind=link}
You must log in to post a comment.