The China Record by Fei-Ling Wang;

Author:Fei-Ling Wang;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

“We All Fake It”

Related to the endless and countless games of numbers, deeply entrenched power-fetish-based cynicism, and omnipresent corruption already reported in this book, the attitude that “we all fake it” has become a dominant norm that has pervaded Chinese society at large. Even the astronomical and much-envied “net wealth” of many, if not all, PRC billionaires seems to be full of hot air.199 This state of affair has led to all sorts of morally and legally questionable behavior by many if not the majority of ordinary Chinese in their daily lives—which may also be taken as a significant sign of widespread nonviolent social resistance, protest, and revolt against the authority of the party-state. Short-term behavior, ad hoc and nonstop bargaining, deceptive activities, fearful mistrust, disregard of rules and contracts, and unscrupulous selfishness seem to dominate many people’s social and economic lives, with social trust in China “dropping to a record low,” as proclaimed by the CCP’s own mouthpiece.200 A PRC sociologist went even further: “there is a huge problem of trust in China today, people have lost basic trust and the whole society is permeated with deception and fakery.”201 Fakery and deception in particular have reached the highest levels, as bemoaned by officials in front of the PRC Premier: “The village lies to the town, the town lies to the county, with lies all the ways to the State Council.”202 In 2015, a British researcher at the University of East Anglia found that citizens of the PRC were by far the most dishonest out of the 15,000 people from fifteen nations studied, with 70 percent of them found lying, and they, together with the Greeks, also evaluated their fellow countrymen as the least honest.203

Reflecting social ethics and perhaps partially responsible for the skyrocketing divorce rate in the PRC, as reported in the previous chapter, Chinese people now have “the world’s highest rate of infidelity,” according to PRC sexologists, with 34 percent of men and 13 percent of women self-reporting extramarital affairs, while “70% of married couples are not in love at all.” This places China next to Thailand and Western Europe for the world’s highest rate of infidelity, while the infidelity rates for American men and women are reportedly 20 to 25 percent and 13 to 15 percent, respectively.204 Two large online surveys in the PRC found in 2016 that 51 percent of the respondents (38% of women and 60% of men) had “cheated”; 88 percent of respondents approved of teacher–student relationships; and 69 percent of couples (77% of wives and 59% of husbands) regretted their marriages. Yet, 75 percent of PRC respondents still view infidelity as morally unacceptable, an attitude that is seemingly very mismatched with their actions, suggesting a widespread culture of deception and hypocrisy. By comparison, online surveys in 2019 found that 16 percent of US respondents had “cheated,” basically in line with opinion survey findings that 85 percent of Americans view infidelity as morally unacceptable. Public attitudes also generally match actual acts of infidelity in just about all other countries surveyed.

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