By Ben Silverman

Shanghai is the most western of Chinese cities, but it certainly isn’t a part of the west The Shaghainese are perhaps the most prosperous people in the largest country in the world. They seem to be born with an instinctive business savvy, and they are eager to form closer relations with the wealthy nation across the Pacific whose investment capacity is unparalleled in the world.

They have also been raised in Communist China, fed by the government’s newspapers and TV programs and taught by the Marxist school system. It’s a city that draws in millions of migrants from around this huge and diverse country, but its recent, rapid growth and development may have changed its old status as a bell weather of the nation’s thoughts.

Last December I was invited to visit someone in one of Shanghai’s new fancy western hotels. I’d been living in the city for a couple of months, teaching English at one of the universities and exploring Chinese culture. When I entered the room at the Fauhauzhen Lu Holiday Inn, I immediately was drawn to the satellite television. Considering I hadn’t watched American TV in 3 months, I flipped it on immediately. I watched CNN for over an hour and was completely taken aback by what I saw.

Western newspapers are difficult to obtain in Shanghai. The International Herald Tribune, which is printed in Paris, is shipped up from Hong Kong every morning and available the next day to guests at hotels like the Holiday Inn for exorbitant prices. Websites, such as The Washington Post and CNN are blocked. English readers are stuck with the China Daily, the English language newspaper and a half hour English language news program on China Central Television. As a result, my understanding of what was happening in Afghanistan was shaped by the way Chinese government presented it. I call it “America’s war” because that’s what everyone over here calls it. There’s no talk of coalitions or global cooperation. The Chinese government simply says that it supports “America’s war against terrorism.”

When I came to China on one of the first flights resumed after September 11th, everyone asked me what was going on in my hometown, where I was on that day, and how things were going. They asked with curiosity, expressed their sympathy and inquired caringly if I knew any victims. But, while they were saying those words, I often detected that they were fighting back a slight smile.

“It was so strange being in Beijing on September 11th,” a Danish girl recently told me. “I found out about it when I woke up in the morning. My neighbor came up to me excitedly and asked me if I knew what happened in New York. I said that I didn’t, so she started to tell me. She was so excited that she could hardly get the words out. Neither of us had televisions, so we went to another neighbor’s house. Everyone, including the children, gathered around and watched, completely mesmerized as they showed images of the planes crashing over and over. I was horrified. How could this have happened? But everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves a great deal.”

By the beginning of October, people were starting to collect videos that had footage of the attacks. They watched them for pleasure. The footage became so popular that the Xinhua news service, a branch of the Chinese government, released an official tape. The narrative said, “Look at them run scared from their tall buildings. Look at the agony on their faces. Never again shall we fear these people. America is a paper tiger!” People watched the new official videos obsessively as well. “I think that they (the Chinese) get sexual pleasure out of it, watching images of the attacks,” a Polish friend of mine said.

Then the bombing started. The half hour English language news that night spent five minutes on the topic. America was bombing Afghanistan, taking out runways, power lines and communication centers.

The next day, I went to People’s Park in downtown Shanghai where a diverse collection of Chinese people typically gather to have discussions and to practice their English, like New York’s Union Square Park in the 1930’s. People began asking me what my country was doing. But I knew no more than they did. They assured me that I should feel safe in China. “You’re safe. Nothing will happen here. Our authorities have everything under control.” I admitted that I felt much safer in Shanghai than I would if I were in New York City.

“You really are the terrorist nation,” one college student said to me. “Who are you attacking? Al Queda? The Taliban? Those groups are in the country, but you are not attacking them. You are attacking the Afghans. You are taking away their access to food, water and medicine. You are destroying what’s left of their country. You are using them as an example to scare the rest of the world into submission. That’s terrorism.”

Eventually the topic changed to America’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the crash landing of an American spy plane in China’s province of Hainan Dao. The resentment of the U.S. as this mighty, arrogant superpower was clear.

Recent inoculations that will save over 30,000 Afghan children a year are a major example of the ways that America’s expulsion of the Taliban has improved the average Afghan’s life. But that reality was not resonating in the Shaghainese student’s voice, which instead reflected resentment at the United State’s disregard for the loss of innocent life in recent history.

The love of America is equally clear. Everywhere I go throughout China, the first question I am asked is, “Ni shi nei guo ren?” (Where do you come from?) When I respond, “Meiguo,” (Beautiful Country, the literal translation of the Chinese word for America), people, including teachers, cab drivers, rickshaw wallahs, and shopkeepers - smile and give me a thumbs up. They don’t do the same for Australians, Danes and Brits. Why, I’ve asked them? “America is a place where people can make money,” a restaurant owner in Guanxi province told me. He was a member of the Communist party and proudly showed me his card. Then he went on to praise former President Clinton and talk about how great it must be to live in a country where anyone who wants to can make money.

At Universities in Shanghai, a huge percentage of the students want to study in the United States. They wear American clothing styles and try desperately to learn English, a necessary language if you want to earn money in modern China. It’s easy to think about why resentment exists though. When I asked one of the students in Shanghai how he felt about the necessity of learning English while few Americans study Chinese, he sighted, “If one language was spoken by a minority,” he said, “and that minority controlled 95% of the wealth, you’d learn that language, too.”

The United States would like to think of itself as a beacon of freedom, but people are not as often drawn to the civil liberties as they are to the money. Most people want a piece of the superpower’s inequitable quantity of wealth - and that’s it. While citizens of the United States proudly proclaim that they live in the freest nation on earth, folks over here on the other side of the earth take note of the country’s inconsistencies. When the Bush administration fired staff at the Voice of America because they broadcasted Mullah Omar, people took note in China. VOA is widely listened to, particularly the news. And when the administration punished the media outlet for broadcasting dissent, two Shaghainese students told me that it showed that the United States government really wasn’t so different from their own.

“Our government bickers with your government,” people tell me. “But we love Americans. You are our American friend. We have no problem with Americans. We just let our governments do their thing.” But when Americans look at China, is their hostility directed towards the totalitarian government, or do they mistakenly include the Chinese people?

What alarmed me most about the CNN broadcast I saw in my Shanghai hotel room was the way that it didn’t dwell on the Afghan people too much. Chinese papers wrote long artic n’t understand how you could have a war just to find one man,” several Chinese people have said to me. “Americans just like seeing some bombing every few years,” many people have said to me. They really believe that. There’s the image over here of America as being a country that’s so arrogant, so callous and concerned with itself to such an enormous extent that it will bomb other countries for its own pleasure. It would suggest that the prosperity and security the United States has enjoyed for such a long time has raised a generation of people who fail to fully realize the horrors of suffering. And, so, while we are admired for our wealth and the plentiful opportunities our country offers its citizens and those lucky enough to study here, we are also accused of being blind to the suffering that we are charged with dishing out around the world.

Western media spent a few months repeating that the Arab world has a “long proud history,” which is surely true. But one should also take a look at China. The spectacular historical sites in the city of Xi’an were built at a time when Europe was in anarchy. The Shanghai Museum contains exquisite porcelain and bronze works dating back before there was recorded history in Europe. China’s “modern capital,” Beijing, is older than Washington, D.C.