Throat Singing in Asia
November 25, 2005
On the way home from China, President George W. Bush was treated to some Mongolian throat singers.
You don’t eat them –– you listen to them.
But it’s not like going to a Garth Brooks concert.
I first heard a throat singer years ago when I hosted National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and did a story on a guy who was practically the 50 Cent of the form.
If you’ve never heard it, let me describe it: It’s usually just one person who, with the unique placement of throat and tongue, creates and marries two seemingly incongruous sounds into a strange hypnotic and rumbling warble.
To me, it sounds like the cry of the love-child of the Emergency Broadcast System and the pea soup gargle of Linda Blair from The Exorcist.
It’s just a blended tone that you don’t translate. You just feel it.
The form seems particularly suited for politicians. It’s a more efficient way of talking out of both sides of your mouth.
So I’m trying to imagine Bush in Mongolia, with his diplomatic face, trying to hum along, maybe even tap his foot, while listening to these odd sounds.
Surely, it was no stranger than the stuff coming out of Bush during the eight-day visit to Asia.
No one expected any real news from a trip that was mostly intended to establish a human face on the next long-distance phone call.
But what the trip did produce was more of the stark contrast between the old democracy, the United States and the new emerging “democracy” –– that modern hybrid known as China.
Bush’s problem? He was using the old rhetoric of the Cold War past.
There was Bush, pushing China for more freedom and democracy, even though his administration has single-handedly been responsible for some of the greatest inhibitors of freedom the U.S. has seen in modern times.
How do you have any moral authority when you lock up a Jose Padilla and throw away the key? Or if you have ordinary people held on trumped up immigration charges in holding tanks all over the U.S. under the guise of the USA PATRIOT Act?
Little wonder that China, in spite of Bush’s attempts to bring up human rights issues, can thumb its nose at the idea of releasing any Chinese dissidents to help out Bush’s cause. In fact, China jailed a few of them during the visit.
When you’re George Bush, the man who executed prisoners with glee while governor of Texas, talking about human rights doesn’t carry that much weight.
If Bush wasn’t trying to sell China on being more like the U.S., he was trying to tell Beijing to be more like Taiwan.
Yes, Taiwan is no longer the repressive state it once was under Chiang Kai-shek or his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. But it’s also no paragon of democracy. Some of the democratic reformers may be in power, but the military is also strong with few willing to test it.
Still, the reformers have achieved some status, unlike on the mainland.
The communists aren’t willing to give in to democratic reformers to that extent.
Not unless they own a McDonald’s franchise.
China is free enough to be capitalist, but not enough to negate communism. It enriches the entrepreneurs and discourages the freedom fighters.
It’s money, yes; ideology, no.
It’s the weird throat song of China most people don’t understand.
It’s the bind the U.S. is in as it tries to figure out a China policy.
How do you deal with a country that willingly wants to trade ($245 billion last year), and who really is now more partner than enemy.
The Wall Street Journal cites a Treasury Department report that puts Chinese holdings of U.S government debt at $252 billion.
China has more control over the U.S. than you think. It’s the advantage of being the No.2 world superpower. All the benefits of democracy, none of the nasty aftertaste.
So do you see how hollow the rhetoric becomes as Bush mentions policy like human rights, or even piracy of intellectual property?
The U.S. doesn’t have the leverage it used to have.
If the subtext of the trip was for Bush to engage in the beginning stages of negotiation with China, then it only showed how the U.S. lags in understanding the new China.
You can’t tell China to be more like us anymore.
It only laughs back at us.
Why would China want to?
China isn’t in a war with Iraq.
China is growing, and has its future ahead of it. Cities like Shanghai would embarrass 90 percent of America’s great cities.
So maybe the question is should the U.S., in certain ways, be more like China? Or, has it with the PATRIOT Act and the like, already done so?
That’s the rub. It used to be that the U.S./China rhetoric would easily expose the hypocrisy of China.
Now it’s the other way around.
It’s happened because of the unique hybrid that China has become.
Maybe Bush got a sense of it while listening to the throat singers in Mongolia.
Reach Emil at emil@amok.com.
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