'Hope and Fear'

One word can say a lot.

Spend some time with a philosophy or language buff, and you might hear that the Chinese character for “crisis” is actually a combination of characters meaning “danger” and “opportunity.” The basic idea, syndicated “Straight Dope” columnist Cecil Adams explained a few years ago, is that a moment of crisis presents two possible outcomes: either growth and positive change or regression and failure. Sounds like some pretty deep ancient wisdom, right?

Adams goes on to write that many native Chinese speakers don’t see it that way (though some do), saying it’s only coincidental that “crisis” (wei ji) contains parts of the terms for “danger” (wei xian) and “opportunity” (ji huay). But then Adams notes that “wei” and “ji” each have a range of meanings that suggest “crisis” really is a combination of the two ideas, whether the wisdom we attach to the term was intended or not. And isn’t that even deeper?

Perhaps something similar could be said about understanding the growing controversy over the upcoming Summer Olympics in Beijing. International protest of that event has become a drama playing out on television screens all over the world, but the story really started in Pasadena 10 months ago, when human rights activists rallied here in opposition to the announcement of an Olympics-themed Rose Parade float.

During the run-up to New Year’s Day, there seemed to be only two possible points of view.

Human rights activists and advocates for religious and political groups targeted for torture and imprisonment by China’s authoritarian regime argued pretty convincingly that the light-and-fluffy Olympic float whitewashed these critical issues; that a celebration of China’s growing influence demanded an equally strong response denouncing its government’s evil deeds.

Outspoken supporters of the float —  people and companies with business in China, the Tournament of Roses and Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, who helped put the whole thing together — said the Olympics and the Rose Parade stood for ideals of friendship and cooperation, positive things which shouldn’t be attacked.

But like trying to translate Chinese characters into English, answering questions about America’s relationship with China — and understanding what the Olympic Games mean to many Chinese Americans, some 400,000 of them living in the San Gabriel Valley according to recent Census figures — may require some more complex, nuanced thinking.

Strength in numbers
Today in Beverly Hills, the Committee of 100 begins its three-day annual conference about issues facing China and Chinese Americans. A veritable who’s-who of Chinese America, the New York-based group’s invitation-only membership is an impressive gathering of scientific leaders, giants of business and industry, creative visionaries and even human rights activists who welcome — not condemn — the Summer Games in Beijing.

Members expected to speak today, Friday and Saturday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel include Google China President Kai-Fu Lee, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Senior US District Judge Ron Lew and dozens of other education and business figures. Non-members invited to participate in a number of panel discussions include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Academy Award-winning “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee, musician and producer Quincy Jones (an adviser to Olympics organizers) and assorted bank and corporate executives.

The Committee of 100 (some members call it C100) was started in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as a way both to encourage full participation of Chinese Americans in society and to foster a better relationship between the United States and China. Founding members included influential modernist architect I.M. Pei and Grammy-winning cellist Yo Yo Ma, who carry significant social clout among Chinese Americans. Conferences are held annually in New York, LA, San Francisco or Washington DC.

“It turned out to be sort of an honorary society that met once a year,” explained C100 member Alice Huang, a senior biologist at Caltech who is married to former school president David Baltimore. “Members felt if they were ever asked again how Chinese Americans felt [as journalists did in the wake of Tiananmen] they might be able to give some sort of coherent answer.”

Since that time, the People’s Republic of China — having shed almost everything about communism except its authoritarian leaders — has grown into a global economic giant and one of America’s leading trade partners, with some $380 billion in goods moving across the Pacific in 2007. In February, US exports to China totaled $5 billion and imports totaled more than $24 billion, according to a Census foreign trade report. In February 1990, US imports from China amounted to less than $1 billion.

As China’s clout grew so did the value of being organized, made apparent by the group’s advocacy against stereotyping and rushed judgment during the Wen Ho Lee espionage case. In 1999 a federal grand jury accused Lee of stealing nuclear secrets for the Chinese government, creating a media circus before those charges were lowered in a plea deal. Lee later won a $1.6 million lawsuit against the federal government and five media organizations that covered the case.

“Most groups of this kind cast the net pretty wide, but this group has taken a different approach — power tied not to numbers but to the prestige of the members,” said Clayton Dube, associate director of USC’s US-China Institute who formerly held that title with the Asia Society at UCLA. “Some years ago it seemed to be more of a social organization, but now the organization is reaching out in more ways.”

C100 members have recently been pushing in a big way for Chinese language classes to be integrated into public schools, a program backed by Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent David Brewer.

The group also conducts an annual survey of attitudes toward China and Chinese Americans, and issues reports from time to time on various issues such as outsourcing and trade. In 2006, said C100 member and Asian Pacific American Legal Center President Stewart Kwoh, the group even sent an Urban League delegation to China.

As of this writing, said Huang (who also serves on the group’s board of directors), C100 members are trying to reach consensus on “some sort of coherent answer” about the Olympics. Despite the timeliness of many topics to be addressed at this week’s conference — food and product safety, education, trade, the environment, the arts and even China’s legal system — eruption of protest at Olympic torch-bearing ceremonies around the world has propelled human rights to the forefront of dialogue about the world’s fastest-emerging superpower.

Reached by phone in China last week, Google’s Lee could have been speaking for many C100 members when he said the crisis-plagued Olympics really are an opportunity to reach out to people half a world away. That is, unless we let our objections get completely in the way.

“If American citizens say ‘Let’s boycott and not go to the Olympics,’ then connection, communication and understanding will be more limited. It will only make things worse,” said Lee.

Time to talk
It isn’t just the images of tens of thousands overwhelming the streets of San Francisco, London and Paris, where on April 7 activists for greater freedoms in Chinese-controlled Tibet even snuffed out the Olympic Torch during the first leg of its world tour.

As that was happening, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi publicly condemned the Chinese Communist Party’s violent crackdown against protestors in occupied Tibet, where exiled Tibetan leaders say 150 monks and other demonstrators have been killed and thousands have been jailed. State-controlled Chinese media outlets have only reported that 20 non-Tibetan Chinese have been killed, and party leaders have blamed the violence on what they’re calling an attempt by the Dalai Lama to sabotage their moment of glory.

Pelosi also called on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced he will do, and to consider skipping the Games entirely, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced she will do.

Soon after Pelosi grabbed headlines, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton also called on Bush to skip the Summer Games’ opening ceremonies and for Sens. Barrack Obama and John McCain — a free-trade advocate who in 2005 spoke at a C100 gala — to join her in that call.

Like director Steven Spielberg, who quit his role as a creative adviser for the Olympics, Clinton also expressed concern about the Chinese government’s support for genocidal forces in Darfur. Other topics that generated outrage against the Pasadena Beijing float were the authoritarian regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, Muslims and Catholics and its jailing of journalists and community organizers.

Committee of 100 members, meanwhile, are pushing back against calls for a boycott.

“When it comes to issues such as Tibet and Taiwan and human rights, we believe in dialogue. Our motto [and the title for the Los Angeles conference] is seeking common ground while respecting differences,” said Alice Mong, who immigrated to the US from Taiwan in 1973 and left a job in Hong Kong as a senior investment manager to become executive director of C100 in 2003.

Although consistently pro-Olympics, members are finding out that dialogue involves some give-and-take, a way of thinking that influenced conference coverage of sore spots like poison pet food, lead-paint toys and unchecked pollution.

“In the past, being Chinese, we tried to put a good face on everything we discussed. I didn’t want our annual meeting, our public face, to seem that we were apologists for China,” said Huang, who encouraged a more balanced take on China’s problems. “To build bridges, we have to share both the good and bad sides of China.”

But what explains throngs of counter-protestors at the San Francisco demonstration (many of them shouting ‘the Dalai Lama is a liar”), or C100 members’ seemingly blanket endorsement of the Beijing Olympics as something for the world to embrace, not challenge — this sympathy for an otherwise unsympathetic regime?

In a word: Pride. And government has nothing to do with it.

‘Hope and Fear’
As Pasadena’s Human Relations Commission grappled with anti-float activists’ demands for the city to denounce human rights abuses in China — Pasadena City Council members broke with the commission’s eventual recommendation to do so, opting to instead confirm belief in United Nations human rights standards — a Chinese-American businesswoman called out Caltech Falun Gong Club President John Li for rocking the boat.

“Why attack China?” she asked, and was answered with a litany of alleged abuses against Falun Gong practitioners — imprisonment without trial, forced labor, torture — that didn’t seem to impress her. “Why don’t you join the winning team?” she asked him.

For some Chinese Americans, attacking the bad behavior of China’s government is not all that far off from attacking everything — and everyone — Chinese. Though there’s no sign yet of significant anti-Chinese backlash in America, Huang believes tensions between people and superpowers could grow as China’s economic clout rises while American 401K packages backslide.

“I’m very Americanized, and I think the future of Chinese Americans in this country is on a very delicate balance. We’re always haunted by what happened to the Japanese during the Second World War, those even of the second or third generation being treated as an enemy, put in camps,” she said.

Kwoh, who in 1998 became the first Asian-American human rights activist to be named a MacArthur Foundation fellow, shared Huang’s concern. 

“I know that every time the United States has had an Asian country as its No. 1 adversary, Asian Americans have suffered greater discrimination and isolation. As a Chinese American, if we can work to improve the understanding and improve the relationship, then we should because it’s a benefit not only for China and United States as countries, it’s also a benefit for people, including Asian Americans,” he said.

Earlier this year, C100 published “Hope and Fear,” the results of a late 2007 survey of American attitudes toward China and Chinese attitudes toward America. The survey found that as many as three in four Americans blame China for the loss of American jobs and that three in five see increasing Chinese military and economic power as a potential threat to America.

Although China’s human rights situation ranked a close third concern behind job loss and the trade deficit, both Americans and Chinese expressed very positive feelings about the Olympics and its potential impact on China’s global image. After a barrage of negative media attention to the Olympics and human rights in Tibet, what prevailing attitudes are at this moment is anyone’s guess.

“One of the report’s central findings is something we need to pay attention to: Americans identified three or four things as likely flashpoints in the US-China relationship,” said USC’s Dube.

Huang worries also that coverage of Olympic protests could paint Chinese Americans, even if they have nothing to do with the Chinese government, as a monolithic group connected to a threat from abroad. She doesn’t think this has happened yet, but Chinese Americans all share something in common that Americans of Irish, Italian and even Polish descent do not: They look different. They look Chinese.

So perhaps it’s no sampling fluke that the “Hope and Fear” report found white Americans were more likely to hold unfavorable views about China than Hispanics or African Americans.

Like a New York St. Paddy’s Day parade or Cinco de Mayo celebration on Olvera Street, the Olympics were supposed to be a time to be proud about being Chinese, a sentiment American society and media have not always fostered.

“There’s a feeling we’re all of the same Chinese descent. We all value the same heritage and the same roots,” said Lily Lee Chen, who in 1984 became mayor of Monterey Park and joined C100 at its start.

Chen, America’s first Chinese-American mayor, fled China with her parents during the communist takeover and has emotional first-hand experience with the Olympics. In 1984, Monterey Park celebrations brought her father, a member of the government before communist control, together with Chinese who stayed behind — including her stepfather, whom she had not seen in decades.

“The Olympics promotes a more peaceful world. We have to separate politics from Olympic events,” she said.

Support for the Olympics comes from “a sense of pride about Chinese-ness, regardless of the government, regardless of any individual part of [China],” said Janet Yang, a Hollywood film executive who obtained permits for Spielberg to shoot “Empire of the Sun” in China and helped produce a number of films for director Oliver Stone. Yang also brokered the first sale of Hollywood movies in mainland China, initiated production of “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,” produced “The Joy Luck Club” and currently runs her own production company, Manifest Films.

“My whole reason for being in the entertainment industry was really inspired when I was living in China and got to see for the first time in movies and television programs all the different positive portrayals of Asian characters. In the 1960s and ’70s it was very, very rare to see [positive images on Asians in the US media],” she said.

“I realized only after I went to live in China that I had absorbed a lot of the negative stereotypes of Asian characters in media. I was as susceptible to that kind of stereotyping as anyone. I remember almost what a shock it was and a source of pride when China first entered the Olympics. For the first time, I said, here is someone who is Chinese and on primetime American television with a positive portrayal,” said Yang.

Reason to cheer
And then there are those who live in China, who by many accounts are overwhelmingly supportive of the Olympics and equally resentful of outside criticism.

We’re awfully arrogant in the West. We think if we condemn what’s going on in China that they will really listen to us. They won’t. They’re very proud people. They’re not going to have some foreigner come in and tell them what they should be doing,” said Huang.

According to the “Hope and Fear” report, only 8 percent of the Chinese public felt that human rights were a factor in US-China relations. Among personal goals, only 28 percent said they wished to “live as they like,” and 42 percent want “to get rich.”

Google’s Lee said this emphasis on material wealth and hesitance to criticize the government has a lot to do with the growing fortunes of urban Chinese, and is reflected in how they use the Internet — where many Chinese bloggers are more harshly critical of Tibetan protest than any public government statement.

“I think people here are happy. They have more freedom than ever and it is increasing every year. For 30 years, nobody had any money. Nobody had any fun, really, and they couldn’t afford to do a lot of things we take for granted — dinner at a nice restaurant, seeing the latest movie, these things were completely inaccessible,” said Lee. “They are much more intrigued by how to achieve success, how to make money.”

On Google, the top news searches are for finance and investment, said Lee, followed by entertainment news. Although reluctant to discuss government censorship of Internet searches at his company’s request — the thinking is it’s bad PR to make positive or negative judgments — Lee says only a small minority of Chinese are using the Web for news about their country.

Not that they couldn’t find any.

Using a laptop subject to the same government restrictions as China’s 230 million users (there are only 215 million Internet users in the US), Lee was able to find several Pasadena Weekly stories about activists who were critical of the Beijing float. One of them — the July 19 “Roses are Red” — features prominently the criticism of the Falun Gong’s Li, who called the Summer Games “a shameful Olympics” and LA Friends of Tibet President Tseten Phanucharas, who called the float “a propaganda tool.”

People in Beijing, said Yang, don’t understand why Americans aren’t fully endorsing the Olympics.

“They’re just so disappointed and angered by the protests, and they think the media is very unfairly portraying China, that the Western media is very biased,” said Yang.

“I think the Tibet policy could be improved, and I think the human rights record could be improved, but does that make me want to not be friendly to China? Not at all. I think there’s so much to applaud them for,” said Yang of the positive effects of social and economic liberalization.

Common ground?
For leaders of the Tibetan-American community, not greeting the Olympics with protest would be unfathomable.

Phanucharas said she doesn’t understand Chinese-American condemnation of pro-Tibetan demonstrators. “That has always puzzled me all along, this feeling their ethnicity is being attacked [by us] somehow. I certainly don’t take criticism of the American government as a criticism of me,” she said. Phanucharas said she is also concerned that tensions may turn ordinary Chinese people against Tibetans.

Formerly a member of the Tibetan government in exile, Tenzin Tethong believes C100 members are well-intentioned in their calls for dialogue about China and respects their advocacy for Chinese Americans. However, as executive director of the Committee of 100 for Tibet — a group founded by singer Joan Baez and others three years after the Chinese-American C100 and structured in a similar way — he defends Tibetan protest of the  Olympics as necessary.

He doesn’t appreciate calls to pull his punches on Chinese leaders, to avoid embarrassing the Chinese government in the hope of gradual change. Waiting for change, he said, “never works. There’s a tendency to say the Chinese are different, but everyone’s the same. If you shame the Russians, there’s no reason you can’t shame the Chinese or the Americans.”

Kwoh argues differently.

“Political debates should not block cooperation on the Olympics that’s been developed over decades. I think that issues like Tibet, there’s probably a range of opinions in the Committee of 100. But a lot of people disagree with the US on Iraq, and they still need to engage with us,” said Kwoh.

“Many of us are very hurt and disappointed [by protests] after so many years of anticipation and preparation,” said Chen of Chinese Americans.

“It’s more important than ever that the committee talk about these issues,” said Mong. “C100 members are Americans. We have American values. They’re something I’m ready to fight for and that my brother fought for. He’s an Iraq veteran,” she said. “We do not speak for the Chinese government. We, as concerned Americans of Chinese dissent, hope America will deal with [issues about China] wisely. We’re doing our part.”