Capitol Ideas/Asia Watch
Bethell, Tom
From the air Tokyo's outskirts looked as trim and orderly as a sunlit landscape in a child's picture book. It was a long bus ride into the city, past compact, economical pastures. To our left a...
...You know how the Moonies call themselves Christians...
...He recited statistics from memory, but his wisdom was of the conventional kind...
...But there were lots of construction cranes in place, some of them working...
...We had fierce disputes about the future of China...
...Then again, it occurred to me they just might go ahead and build SDI without waiting for us...
...As in Korea, the sense of a huge, middle class moving forward in unison was overwhelming...
...No doubt China made them uneasy, too...
...sense of order probably can cmly be felt when a country is at its peak, as one guesses must be the case with Japan today...
...I'm beginning to think it would be a good idea for the Filipinos to kick us out of Clark Field and Subic Bay...
...The children in their straw bonnets seemed to echo an earlier and better time in the West...
...Someone asked Mrs...
...China's draconian population control policy—one child per family—makes a mockery of the idea that the Communist Party has yielded power...
...The policy is bound to have a destructive effect on China if it is implemented for any length of time...
...The red carpet was curled up at the edges, almost tripping the accidental president on her approach...
...Beichman said, as we moved away...
...Off the main roads were miserable miles of hovels hidden in the bushes...
...TWenty men could take this...
...Aquino & Co...
...In Tokyo's case it had something to do with a sense of order, almost a tranquillity, pervading this immense industriousness...
...Actually, he added, McNamara had also suggested that the program seemed draconian, so I shouldn't grumble perhaps, but he also confirmed my suspicion that the Chinese had adopted this policy in the mistaken belief that Westerners Know Best...
...At the Sheraton Great Wall the China Daily was slipped under our hotel doors...
...I gather they were privately appalled by our ignominious retreat from Vietnam, and they must wonder whether we have the will to do anything other than bully our allies...
...It had stock market news ("Gold, Platinum Prices Soar on World Marts"), cricket scores, and no anti-American stories whatsoever as far as I could see...
...There was a big Kodak ad in Tiananmen Square, where the masses used to mobilize at Mao's bidding, and many smaller ads on Democracy Wall...
...Junk of junk, that's subjunk...
...He is a friend of mine," he said...
...said Arnold Beichman, the leader of the once-Leninist, alwaysLeninist faction—resolutely opposed to sentimental optimism about China...
...They didn't even sell screws and rags five years ago...
...doors not heavily reinforced...
...You're dreaming...
...Growing up I used to think that London was the big city of the world (having been born there...
...The Chinese we met seemed to be pro-American, and Peking itself seemed far less repressive than Moscow...
...All this can happen under the protective disguise of socialist labels and without sacrificing political power (as the Kuomintang showed in Taiwan...
...We must move on hurriedly to Peking...
...A car bomb could level the whole building," he said...
...This, as succinctly as I can put it, is the case for optimism about China's economic liberalization...
...We went upstairs to a reception given by the People's Institute of Foreign Affairs...
...No surveillance of the streets, it looks like...
...I retained this impression over the next three days...
...The hardUners on our tour had one unassailable point...
...We were granted an "audience" with Mrs...
...Embassy we were addressed by Ambassador Mike Mansfield, who spoke to us from behind a desk, like an old Presbyterian Sunday school teacher...
...Waiting outside in the bus later, Neil Livingstone, a terrorism expert who was on the tour (and had noted the minimal security of Peking's pubUc buildings), had kept his eyes open in the Malacanang...
...record store...
...Evidently they had also bought up stocks of records available in American stores in the fifties and sixties and were now selling them for $50 each...
...It's hard to say what provokes such emotional judgments...
...That would give them something to do...
...At the U.S...
...They take big shmattas and they make little shmattas...
...In short, the Chinese surely understand that if they are to withstand Soviet aggression they must do it on their own...
...Why this should be I don't know...
...is totally unreliable (as I also told as many Chinese as I could lay my hands on...
...pipepuffing Third World intellectuals were seated at tables...
...From that you're going to get a consumer economy...
...Jude Wanniski said...
...Now, as a group of us drove by taxi through the center of Tokyo, it dawned on me that this was the new New York, the world's leading city...
...But Alvin Rabushka of the Hoover Institution expressed a cautious optimism...
...The question is how close a parked truck could get to the guest house...
...when she came in no Secret Service equivalent...
...To our left a Disneyland castle, then onto an elevated motorway, and so into the center of the awesome metropolis, spread out around us for miles like a gigantic Swiss watch...
...We went to the U.S...
...Packs were unstrapped from backs...
...Next I saved $5 by not buying a cup of coffee...
...She gave a dimpled smile...
...Aquino if he could "be of any help" when she came to Washington...
...It's as though their national ambition is to outproduce us, and now that they have (I guess) succeeded in doing so, they may pause to wonder, fatally, what the point was...
...Agency for International Development in the middle of Manila...
...Everyone seemed to be well dressed...
...Thus China will have to build up its own military strength quickly, which will require a modernized economy...
...Will these people never learn...
...a big contrast to the Japanese English-language papers...
...The Chinese, I believe, do sense America's spiritual weakness (epitomized by Reagan's recent Summit groveling...
...Be of any help' in Washington...
...Not Robert McNamara . . ." Indeed...
...You don't see that at the White House...
...For one thing they have almost slavishly imitated so many things American...
...And look at those overhanging branches...
...That's the only way Congress will be persuaded to shut off the foreign-aid spigot...
...One senses the possibility that the Japanese could lose heart for some unpredictable reason...
...Prices in Tokyo were a shock—buying anything at all made one feel like a rube in the big city for the first time...
...As long as the dollars flow in, Mrs...
...Moreover, if China really does modernize it will need all the people it can get...
...Such a Tom Bethell is The American Spectator' 5 Washington correspondent...
...Marion Magid said that Tokyo made New York seem like Calcutta...
...D (Tom Bethell visited East Asia in August with the World Media Association...
...So I continued to believe until I arrived in New York in 1962...
...A. said, a few weeks before coming to Washington on a begging mission for more handouts...
...Our $50 billionayear trade deficit with Japan was "intolerable," he said...
...If they take a wrong turn the whole country will tend to take it in lockstep...
...won't be able to get an undistorted picture of the Philippine economy...
...We can only help ourselves: with the assistance, of course, of other peoples...
...How long they can keep it up is open to question...
...That's how the Chinese call themselves Leninists...
...C'mon Alvin...
...It is almost certainly the Chinese city where the Communist Party has retained greatest control, yet even here the sense of movement was to me palpable...
...The bus drove off, past the guest house...
...Shmattas [rags...
...Aquino at the Malacanaiig guest house where she has semi-democratically taken up residence, a few paces from the palace...
...China is a big nothing...
...The U.S...
...Have you noticed there's a kind of euphoria that seizes people in the presence of power...
...Office buildings teemed with toilers after 6 p.m...
...There's not much to Peking—no "there" there...
...A newsstand offered a three-day-old New York Times for $8...
...Guards loUygagging...
...I found a way to thread my way through them, and so came to the Beijing Hotel across the street...
...They just hear about it...
...Women squatting on their haunches seUing screws and junk," replied Beichman...
...Arnold Beichman was wearing his Adam Smith tie with the knot on a level with his breast pocket, the two top buttons of his shirt undone His spectacles were attached to a chain and bouncing off his stomach...
...Later, as he was getting onto the bus, he said despondently, almost to himself: "The trouble is no one reads Lenin...
...Leninism is a theory of power," Beichman said...
...It crossed my mind that the Chinese might have adopted this atrocious policy at the behest of American population planners, and I was wondering whether one could discern the not-so-fine hand of Robert S. McNamara, the Rockefeller Fund, et al., when I was introduced to a refined Chinese who had been educated at the American school in Peking before World War II...
...But I did my best with several people in the room...
...If officials can check up on the menstrual cycle of tens of milUons of women they can control anything...
...Embassy, where they were building anti-terrorist barricades at the gates...
...I went to a very good record store, called Wave, in Roppongi, where they had American jazz records not available at any U.S...
...Our ambassador, Winston Lord, came to the reception, as he did to our meeting with the deputy foreign minister...
...I told him that I had grave misgivings about their population control policy . . . "I was talking to McNamara about it only the other day," he said...
...Chinese bicycle flotillas floated silently down the street...
...nothing on top of the walls...
...Why is this a bad deal for us...
...Junk...
...We stood in Hne to shake her hand...
...Disheveled, sunburned Scandinavians lolled in the lobby...
...The same...
...Part one of his report, "Seoul Searching," appeared in last month's issue...
...foreign aid to the Philippines—to be mainlined like heroin directly into the Philippine budget...
...no closed circuit TV...
...They cannot give up power...
...At the Tokyo Hilton we were greeted by deeply bowing kimono'd figures...
...no sensors...
...I assured him that Robert McNamara had been wrong about everything from the Ford Edsel to the Tanzanian development model, when the urbane gentleman interrupted me...
...There is only one way that can be achieved (as the Chinese know by now, having had the opportunity to observe their countrymen in Tkiwan and Hong Kong): by permitting voluntary exchange, free prices, and contracts...
...Lord, whose wife is Chinese, contrived to be diplomatic without being merely reserved, and he made a good impression on our group...
...Standing about were medalsome military and an odd bevy of female aides de camp...
...Inside Stephen Bosworth and the "country team" told us that we should support a big increase in U.S...
...Neil noted how close it was to the wall...
...It was also moving to see these poor people whose talents have been suppressed for so long but whose time of release may now be at hand...
...They send us cars and television sets and we send them pieces of paper manufactured at the Bureau of Engraving & Printing (called dollars...
...But by then immense damage would already have been done...
...We went on to the Philippines, and here we were recognizably in the Third World: rusted corrugated roofs atop lean-to sheds, drooping banana-plant fronds, great big modern building occupied by U.S...
...She's very exposed," he said...
...The Japanese will no doubt look back on this as their golden age...
...We want to instill in our people the desire for selfreUance," Mrs...
...The answer I always received was that, if the population policy did turn out to be harmful, it would be abandoned...
...Alas, there is a certain logical difficuhy involved in an American telling a Chinese not to listen to American advice...
...Communism itself was of course an earlier Western import...
...Here we dole out our destructive welfare...
...They're not going to give up Leninism...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
