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"FacebookPinterest\n\nGQ: I saw you on TV as a China expert. I was like: I never knew Tom Scocca was a China expert.\n\n Tom Scocca: The book through no particular feat of planning on my own happens to be arriving at a moment where everyone is like \"Tell us about our Chinese masters.\" National self-esteem is in a bit of a trough right now. It's like people tacitly want to know what it's going to be like when we're all living in China.\n\nGQ: It's kind of like in the '80s when Japan was buying up all of Manhattan and we were all sure they were going to rule the world.\n\n Tom Scocca: It is. It is. Although the difference in that case is Japan was a smaller country, which was sort of deriving all of its momentum from money. Definitely the way people talk about China is as a replay of the sort of '80s arm-wrestling thing. You know, who is going to be the best country? Who is going to win \"The Best Country-Hood\" competition?\n\nGQ: That's an important competition.\n\n Tom Scocca: The one thing that is clear is that no one is going to lose the competition between the U.S. and China and go away. The whole future oriented question of who is going to dominate whom is a misguided question.\n\nGQ: So are you saying we're going to lose?\n\n Tom Scocca: It all depends on how you count. Take the Olympic medal count. We count our bronze medals. Chinese people don't count bronze medals for anything.\n\nGQ: Does that point out anything about our national psyches?\n\n Tom Scocca: Maybe we're content to have bronze semi-success. But the US is still much richer than China and we're still number one.\n\nGQ: Sweet.\n\n Tom Scocca: Yeah. Officially to China the goal is only moderate prosperity.\n\nGQ: Again that's not very American of them.\n\n Tom Scocca: No.\n\nGQ: Do you believe that goal?\n\n Tom Scocca: China has 1.3 billion people, many of whom are still in abject poverty. So if everyone in China achieves just moderate prosperity that's a large slice of the world's resources. And part of the question that interested me in doing this book as China is trying to reinvent itself is: how scalable our American conception of what the good life is.\n\nGQ: Well that's the question that we faced as well. When we realized that not all of us can have a beautiful house with a gated community. \n\n GQ: Tom Scocca: Right, not everybody gets a lawn. Not everybody gets a car. I mean right now I guess like 1 in 5 people in Beijing have a car. But that's 4 million cars where there were 3 million cars three years ago. There were 2 million cars two or three years before that. And you know, you have your 10-day traffic jams.\n\nGQ: So why did you want to do the book?\n\n Tom Scocca: I wanted to do the book because I had been going back and fourth between New York and Beijing. And what was clear to me was that there was this tremendous change happening there. That just from day to day, week to week, certainly from visit to visit. The sidewalk was disappearing under your feet that the new stores were being gutted with newer stores. And all of this was focused around the preparation for the 2008 Olympics. And I realized that New York was going to be New York whenever we settled into it.\n\nGQ: I actually have some friends that live in Shanghai and are addicted to the lifestyle. Because it's like... You know it used to be that, even if you were middle class in America there were plenty of places that you could go in the world where you could feel rich. I always thought it played into the American conception of our own awesomeness. \"Even though I kind of suck in America, just by being American I get a higher station than everyone else when I go to Mexico!\" There are fewer and fewer places like that for us any more.\n\n Tom Scocca: Actually while we were living in China, you could feel the dollar sagging under you. By the time we left, things that used to be crazily cheap were no longer crazily cheap. And this new luxury infrastructure was built where all of the sudden there were these shopping malls that were threatening your purchasing power.\n\nGQ: There were real live Chinese rich people, who were richer than you as an American. Americans don't like that!\n\n Tom Scocca: Yes. And there were stores being set up to cater to them. The high-end consumer in China is a very enthusiastic consumer. We were in a kitchen goods shop, and there was a Chinese guy shopping. They were showing him some pot and explaining that it was much more expensive than this comparable pot, and he just announced to them: \"I am a rich person. I want the expensive one.\"\n\nGQ: Who is the most interesting person you met doing research for the book?\n\n Tom Scocca: The most interesting activity was the weather modification office and the various scientists and farmers with artillery pieces who were trying to shoot rockets into the clouds to make it rain.\n\nGQ: How serious are they about modifying the weather?\n\n GQ: Tom Scocca: They're very serious. Pretty much every time there is a potential rain system around Beijing the rain modification office is shooting rockets into it to try and encourage it to rain.\n\nGQ: Does it work?\n\n Tom Scocca: Well it's very hard to do a controlled experiment on it. And the literature on the subject can be contradictory. But they claim success.\n\nGQ: Does it reflect anything about the national psychology of the place?\n\n Tom Scocca: Yes. There is this belief that nature can be mastered. And that the application of technology and effort can change whatever it is that you want to change. That was a belief that lead to a lot of problems, especially in the early years of Mao.\n\nGQ: Speaking about Mao, there's a perception that there's no chaos in China. That there is a central power and all bend to it. \n\n Tom Scocca: One of the things that you realize once you're there, which is at odds with what you'd expect as an American going to the last big-time communist country, is that there's not that extremely centralized authority. Authority is pervasive, but it's not that centralized. There are lots of competing power centers and bureaucracies.\n\nGQ: Would you say that there is a central thesis to your book? \n\n Tom Scocca: What I say in the beginning of the book is that China has a lot of Chinese people in it. It's about the ideas tied up in the fact that in the U.S. everyone seems to believe that what we have now is as good as it's going to get and if we change anything, if we regulate the health industry, we're just going to make everything worse. There is a great deal of overreaching in China. There was the high-speed rail disaster this month that they had. But they are shooting people up into space now. The Chinese space program is doing man space flight. As we're just backing off. This is a country of limitless ambition.\n\nGQ: So here is the true self-centered American question. What do they think of us?\n\n Tom Scocca: They want to know what we think of them.\n\nGQ: It's like going on a date.\n\n Tom Scocca: Yeah. And that was part of the experience. Being a part of the international press corps, who were there to witness the emergence of the new capital, new China. The tables were always being turned. There was always a moment, at whatever event where they were unveiling this or unveiling that, where they turned the camera on us and said, \"What do you think\"?\n\nGQ: How would I like China as a tourist?\n\n Tom Scocca: The food is fantastic.\n\nGQ: It's not all, like, knuckles?\n\n Tom Scocca: Well I'm a fan of knuckles.\n\nTom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You is out now from Riverhead books."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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