Learning to Wait

Monday, January 20, 2025

Learning to Wait

What does it mean if the Chinese economy tanks? Who can even say with assurance it will, in absolute terms, tank? Not me. I’m just a lumpkin that hangs around and takes notes. I’ll leave the predictions for the China thinkers and writers with their daily media and Substack contributions. It’s what they do. Then, they argue, in small-scale depictions of the sorts of power struggles that are the foundation of all idiotic behavior.

What I most wonder about is how the Chinese government — and by government, I mean one person — wants China to have a vibrant middle class, but a middle class absent all the things we normally associate with an enlightened group such as reasoning ability, creativity, and personal initiative in pursuit of one’s self interest within the larger society....(?)

One of many questions underlying the conversation about China is whether China’s quest to expand its middle-income group is saddled with conflicting ideas. On one hand, the middle class is supposed to usher in an age of domestically driven consumption, driving the economy’s expansion. On the other hand, an ever-increasing list of off-limit topics — political, economic, social — seems designed to empty out the minds of the middle class.

Overall, the government spends much effort in policing people’s thoughts and society in general, and then exercises its censorial prerogatives in making political taboos evaporate. The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak encapsulates the condition.

Instead of managing its discovery as a neutral public health issue and working with the wider world to understand, the local officials focused on the political implications of information flow, how that flow conformed to Party orthodoxies, and ultimately their own careers. Everyone watching out for their own backside isn’t how the world moves forward. The result of this mentally stunted approach is developing as a major drag on China’s march into the future.

How can China advance into the world order with a healthy functioning economic and social order while at the same time spending trillions promoting ideals and enforcing laws suppressing initiatives that fuel the phenomenon?

This is the fundamental question I and anyone else interested in China’s rise had been asking ourselves as we sat in quarantine. I welcomed any response. I had a lot of time on my hands. What to do with all that time?

Wait.

Waiting is central to many Chinese activities. The Chinese know how to wait. It is a nation of folks accustomed to waiting within unpredictable timeframes. I continually practice, working on developing satisfactory waiting skills. Generally, my friends and family are impressed with my waiting, but I lack experience, resulting in rough, poorly formed waiting.

I make amateur mistakes and break presence by revealing waiting is not my preferred state, with obvious amateur tics like sighing, or stretching my upper body, or anxiously looking around for an empty checkout line when they are all obviously jammed, or looking around for an exit no one else has seen. Chinese immediately recognize these traits as amateur waiting and look away, embarrassed in the obviousness of my inexperience.

I need to learn inscrutability while waiting. Let my facial muscles relax into jowly unsmiling acceptance, staring into the distance, not focusing on anything in particular, achieving a facial expression conveying nothing resembling an actual emotion. Present, but not present. Inscrutable. Become the wait.

A few more days or weeks or months of waiting and I think I might be capable.