The attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been almost too foreign for the Chinese public and media to digest. Chinese lawmakers do not shake hands at supermarkets; they do not have the leeway to criticize their own laws. China has its share of violence by the mentally disturbed, but none of the perpetrators have ready access to nine-millimeter Glocks.
But when Chinese commentators confronted the recent news from America, they were struck most of all not by differences between life in Beijing and Tucson, but by the differences between the current mode of American political discourse and its own history. “Over the past two years, the health-care reform that Obama has advocated has created a vast divide within American society and between diametrically opposed political parties, while immigration has separated the American people into two camps that cannot bear the very existence of the other,” a scholar named Zhang Guoqing wrote Monday in the Beijing News. “Against the background of a high unemployment rate, and the trouble in stimulating the economy, this type of social divide presents enormous hidden dangers.”
For years, the Chinese press trafficked in a caricature of American politics. It played up stories of corrupt lobbyists and wacko longshot candidates—and sprinkled it with the occasional fistfight in the Korean and Taiwanese legislatures—all part of an unsubtle message from Party propagandists about the dangers of rampant democracy. But in recent months, the Chinese press has shown a dwindling need to exaggerate the dysfunction. From afar, the notion of virulent polarization over the prospect of reforming a health-care system has baffled the Chinese. “Implementing a project designed to care about people’s lives has spawned a revolution. Both parties are paying a heavy price, even as people are living in terrible conditions,” a Chinese commentator on Sina’s equivalent of Twitter, wrote Monday, before adding a poke at China’s own opaque and authoritarian political system. “Look at our [health-care reform] plan, and how simply it all is: It only has to be passed by committee full with God knows who.”
Talk of revolution, violence, extremism, and madness has more place in China’s political history than America’s. For all of the Chinese defensiveness and pride about their own system, they have tended to admire the inherent strength in the American system: the resiliency, peacefulness, and reason. But, from the Chinese vantage point, that strength is waning these days. “The arguments between two parties has grown harsher and harsher,” Professor Yuan Peng, of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations said after the shooting. That polarization, Yuan predicted, “will have an immense negative effect on society.”
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