Presumptious caption, no? And I'm sure the title is wrong as well. Something you know about China is partially right, whether it's that Cantonese has 9 tones, or that Shanghai cuisine pales in comparison to other provincial cooking. Maybe you even know what happened at the third plenary session of the eleventh central committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
But even if you speak Mandarin with a Beijing accent and spent some time playing cards on the street with Uyghurs, you should already know that everything you know about China is wrong. Everything I know about China is wrong, too, and there's one simple reason: there is no such thing as China.
There are 1.3 billion people in China, but many of them would describe themselves in regional or ethnic terms before they would call themselves Chinese, and many would not even do that, which is not true in America. But the country is not just divided on perceptions, it's divided in reality. The poverty divide between rural and urban areas is outrageously different.
When you say "China", are you talking about the wealthy elite living in Shanghai, or are you talking about the dirt farmers of Guizhou? Do you mean the ethnic Tibetans who view themselves as an occupied territory or the ethinc Koreans hiding their kin from Chinese authorities and deportation back to the DPRK in the Northeast?
When you talk about the China threat, do you mean the threat of implosion or explosion? The possibilty of a dissolution of the country into three or more fragmented nation states? Or do you mean the threatened invasion of Taiwan?
When you speak about the Chinese leadership, do you mean Hu Jintao, a technocratic bully with little charisma and less leadership ability? Or do you mean the activist farmers and rural leaders who broke out in 74,000 protests in 2004?
There is no such thing as China. It is a concrete literary term to describe opposite conditions that often don't share anything in common other than a moniker. The political leadership wants you to think that there is such a thing as China, because then we don't ask about other things, like East Turkmenistan, or Tibetan regions of Sichuan.
When Hu Jintao comes to visit and experts get on to debate the coming conflict with China, or the coming friendship, realize that they are both wrong. If there is a conflict with China, it will not be with the dirt farmers of Guizhou or the urbanites of Shanghai, but rather because of policy discussions that involved neither of them.
I realize that this contradicts the "Rise of China" model that everyone is so fond of, and I'm fine with that. I don't think China is rising. Some things described as Chinese are, to be sure, but other things that can also be called Chinese are falling rapidly.
I don't know China, either, because my brain is not capable of processing the differences. I'm just saying: don't trust what they tell you on China, because they're not right. There's no such thing as China.