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| Jacob Abrahamson Class of 2017 |
After the initial culture shock of arriving in China, one of the first things I noticed was how similar some things are to America.
Of course, it's surreal being this far away from home in a place I never thought I'd get to see. Very few people speak English, and I speak zero Chinese beyond "thank you," so it is certainly hard to communicate and go through all functions of daily life. Yet, there is certainly a sense of familiarity that has come from years of erosion of pure communism into an interesting hybrid.
For example, visitors to China from America who fear Chinese food (don't, it's better than ours), need not worry about never finding Western-style food. The beer tastes the same, Shanghai's French concession has little bistros, you can find bars with pizza and burgers, and every fast food restaurant is there with slightly different menus. Big Mac, I learned the other night, is a phrase accepted in both Chinese and English. A friend and I actually discussed that if Shanghai had Facebook and drinkable tap water, it wouldn't be too difficult to live here long term.
After learning about soft power in our lectures, I find all of this extremely interesting. According to one of our lectures, Ronald Reagan said that Hollywood beat the USSR, not the military. It's clear by walking down the street here or watching an infomercial on TV that a similar things is happening due to trade between China and the Western world. Whether it wants to or not, China is importing elements of capitalism by working with nations like the United States. The way our global community operates require that these superpowers have these relations with one another, but it appears to me that China is compromising much more than the US when it engages in trade.
This, to me, hints at a path away from communism and towards a more open system that will allow the Chinese people to succeed. This gives me hope for the world because it means that the US will have more and more partners in the global community to engage in trade with. But it also gives me hope for individuals, because with capitalism comes a more fair system for average people who will begin to gain the basic human rights that all Americans accept within our system, the first being a right to earn a wage in decent working conditions. This is the path to democracy, and it appears that China is on it slowly, but surely.
This may be a lot of conclusions to draw from a Big Mac, but it is what I have observed in my short time in Shanghai.
Jacob Abrahamson is a senior McConnell Scholar studying history and political science at the University of Louisville.