Yiren Congzheng: 'Actors engaging in politics', or Arnie as seen from Beijing

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California has a different impact on the Chinese public and its intellectual elite. Its pure theatre is reminiscent of China’s own 1990s actor-turned-reformist, Niu Qun; yet it is also a sober warning to those who invest their hopes of political progress in the US Democrats.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the newly elected governor of California - popularly known as the most democratic state in the United States - is a source of great amusement to those many specialists and experts here in China who habitually take a profound interest in American domestic politics. Nonetheless, they were stunned by Schwarzenegger’s victory.

There are two sides to this.

First, Schwarzenegger’s success in replacing Governor Gray Davis is seen as a supremely cultural moment, an act in a stage play, devoid of political implication. Schwarzenegger is held in great admiration and awe here by the general public for his tough-guy leading roles in several Hollywood blockbusters exported to China in the mid-1990s. Terminator III, currently running in all three different tiers of Beijing’s movie theatres, has once again made him a cultural hero.

The Chinese press hails him not only as a larger-than-life heroic lead, but as living proof of the American Dream. Schwarzenegger’s victory is widely associated with that of former governor of California, Ronald Reagan – who shared a similar Hollywood background, and was elected for two consecutive terms by the Californian electorate in 1966 and 1970, then by the American electorate as a whole in 1980 and 1984.

In fact, American politicians who go from rags to riches and power, such as former Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and now California’s governor-elect – these kinds of Horatio Alger self-made heroes have long been held up as role models for a new generation of China’s statesmen, together with the more vocal entrepreneur-turned-middle class.

As a result, the Chinese press – as well as TV networks like Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, a network with a rising reputation for journalistic dissent – have covered the event enthusiastically and in great depth. At a time when China and the US are intensifying efforts to exchange not only technological know-how, but also their rich cultural heritage, traditional or modern, the Chinese general public finds itself exposed to a host of new role models.

Thus, far from provoking political despair, Schwarzenegger’s coup d’etat on traditionally Democrat-controlled turf has impressed a large segment of the population here. According to the Beijing-based (and Chinese-language) news website, www.sina.com.cn: “Arnold’s election may have inspired quite a few performing artists in the show business to re-evaluate their market value: they are ready to engage in politics.”

A Chinese precedent

This is not without precedent in modern China. In 1996, one Niu Qun, a Beijing-based artist who had gained nationwide popularity as a superb comedian performing traditional Chinese banter, resigned from his post with a state-funded troupe – an almost suicidal act at the time – to run in the local election. Representing a poverty-stricken constituency in a small county in Anhui province, Niu Qun succeeded in ousting the incumbent, the county magistrate. Though it was a hard battle to fight, Niu’s success charted a new course in the country’s history of political reform.

Asked to explain his victory, Niu attributed it directly to his “face” – a most valuable asset he could always rely on to defeat seemingly impregnable rivals. Consciously or not, Niu was here invoking both Chinese and American predecessors who had inspired him to follow in their footsteps.

Indeed, the beginning of Niu Qun’s career as a comedian coincided with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House in the early 1980s, when Reagan’s image in China changed overnight from ‘public enemy number one’ to China’s best friend. In 1984, following his visit to China, Reagan became unofficial ‘man of the year,’ his portrait splashed on the covers of almost every Chinese news magazine, and his biography selling like present-day “big Macs”. The biography, written by Chinese scholars to underscore Reagan’s Irish origins and the Hollywood actor’s background, could only help popularise those self-made heroes who rise from the bottom of the social ladder to reach the top of the political hierarchy.

Interestingly enough, the peak of Niu’s reputation had to wait until the climax of Schwarzenegger’s career in the Terminator series. All three – Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Niu – have been repeatedly linked by scholars on the mainland, and cited as yiren congzheng, a Chinese phrase which can be literally translated as ‘actors engaging in politics’.

In short, at a time when the nation is faced with steep political and economic challenges, people are only too willing to look to these superman/tough guy heroes on or off the screen, in China or America, wherever they can find them – especially rendered much larger than life by some spectacular cinematography and hi-tech special effects – for answers.

A Democratic failure

But there is a second side to the Chinese reaction: Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial march towards Sacramento also struck fear into the hearts of those Chinese experts in US affairs who believe that with Gray Davis go the hopes of the progressive politics that have dominated Californian politics since the 1990s.

Davis’s defeat, hitherto widely seen as reinforcing the major trend towards political conservatism symbolised by George W. Bush’s election in 2000, is causing much concern among the nation’s intellectual elite. It detects in Schwarzenegger’s Californian victory the fatal seeds of a transcontinental alliance between the conservative South and traditionally liberal West, which will ultimately strangle the Democrats in the 2004 presidential election. This was just an early Republican litmus test in a Democrat backyard.

Many in China note with concern the way that Schwarzenegger, having cautiously disassociated himself from President Bush’s ultra-conservative politics on various occasions, is now already seeking a closer spiritual alliance with Bush on a range of both federal and local issues – such as his opposition to the tripling of the car tax imposed by Davis, and tax increases in general, as well as his promise to repeal the bill signed by Davis granting drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens.

So like their counterparts elsewhere in the US and outside, Chinese scholars – in the spirit of the song Where have all the flowers gone? – bemoan the incompetence of Democratic candidates in California. In China’s American studies community, figures like Tom Hayden are almost a household name. What happened to his heroic resistance?

So Governor Davis’s failure is seen here as in many ways representative of the Democratic party’s general failure, dating from the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If it is true that the voters who signed the petitions for his recall are signalling a historic demand for a change of political direction, then the Democrats must draw the lessons and adapt, and fast.

If they fail to do so then dismay and disappointment will not be limited just to those who have supported them inside the United States of America. In China, for example, there are quite a few of us who believe that it should not take a macho hunk like the former ‘Mr. Universe’, funded to the hilt by big interests groups, to force them to do the job. Step-by-step efforts at regaining the upper hand for a politics that works for more than the elites should already be underway. As China races for growth and the influence that it brings, we need an American politics that is more worldly than that of President Bush, not even less.