The announcement, on Tuesday, that the United States has charged five members of the Chinese military with economic espionage—for hacking the computers of American companies—is an acknowledgment that its diplomatic relationship with China is moving toward confrontation. After trying to negotiate, embarrass, or threaten China’s military hackers into retreat, U.S. prosecutors have adopted what Jack Goldsmith, at Harvard, calls a “calculated escalation of pressure.” It is symbolism in service of setting a precedent. Though there is little chance the five suspects will ever set foot in a U.S. courtroom, their photographs and handles—KandyGoo, UglyGorilla—under the heading “Wanted by the FBI,” are now emblems of diplomatic deterioration. (Within hours, the accused had become objects of admiring fascination in China.)
Still, it would be easy to overlook the sign of a deeper, countervailing trend in China’s relationship with the West. On April 26th, the Beijing government abruptly banned the country’s most popular American television show, “The Big Bang Theory.” Earlier that month, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, had launched the latest in a string of campaigns to clean up the Web, to rid it of porn, rumors, and other “harmful information.” It is part of a broader effort to push back the tide of foreign pop culture that has eroded the state propaganda agencies’ control over what people in China watch. Online video revenue grew more than forty-one per cent from 2012 to 2013; the number of visitors using phones and other mobile devices to view that video grew by seventy-three per cent, to a hundred and seventy million.
“The Big Bang Theory” was a prime beneficiary. After seven seasons, the subtitled Chinese version of the show had achieved iconic status—all without the remotest involvement of the government’s vast media apparatus. By the time the show was banned, Chinese episodes had been watched online no fewer than 1.4 billion times. When the actors, such as Johnny Galecki, visit China, they are mobbed by fans. In Beijing, any tall, slim, dark-haired American male is likely to have been told once or twice that he looks a bit like Sheldon, the most Spock-like character on the show.
Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way. When the government, for instance, breaks up demonstrations in the name of defending China’s stability, or blocks Web sites to protect China’s honor in the long-running divide with Japan, it is often the self-described “angry youth” who rise in defense of the flag. But in this case, the ban hit a nerve. In the city of Wuhan, in central China, student members of the Center for Protection for the Rights of Disadvantaged Citizens of Wuhan University issued the rough Chinese equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding to know why they had been deprived of their favorite show.
In response, the state agency that oversees the broadcasting and censorship of media explained, vaguely, that “The Big Bang Theory” and three other banned shows (“The Good Wife,” “NCIS,” and “The Practice”) were either out of copyright or had been found to violate Clause 16 of the rules around online broadcasting, a clause that prohibits pornography, violence, and “content that violates China’s constitution, endangers the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, provokes troubles in society, promotes illegal religion and triggers ethnic hatred.” That explanation was met with guffaws. On Chinese social media, people joked that they should rename their own country West North Korea, and censors soon blocked that phrase.
The old justification of “content that violates China’s constitution” is unsatisfying, because the show’s fans have more immediate reasons to like it—personal, compelling reasons—and they are less willing than earlier generations to be quieted by a general suggestion of impropriety. A show about interesting, self-conscious, studious science buffs who struggle to talk to girls resonates with Chinese college students and recent graduates. For my book, “Age of Ambition,” I spent time documenting, among other things, the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced. In China today, a rising generation faces not the need to conform but, rather, the need to stand out—to define yourself differently, to make yourself distinctive and noticeable to employers and to members of the opposite sex (or the same sex). Being a fan of an ironic foreign show is a status signifier, and young Chinese don’t relinquish those lightly.
It is a remarkable state of affairs: at the very moment when the U.S. and Chinese governments are moving in a direction of greater conflict, the slow, steady accretion of foreign pop culture on the Chinese Web has given people on both sides of the Pacific more in common than ever before.
Let me be clear: sitcoms are not policy. The point is that the U.S. and China are in the curious position of facing a deepening rivalry at the very moment when their own citizens are sharing ever more of the same tastes, jokes, preoccupations, anxieties, and pleasures. The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)
Culture alone, high or low, does not point a path to better relations. But it’s important to acknowledge the convergence of our lived experience, if only as ballast against the rising tension between the U.S. and China. The men and women who would be most affected by a downturn in the world’s most important diplomatic relationship have more in common than they might imagine.
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Photograph by Peter Parks/AFP/Getty.
