The Chinese Wall
BORK, ELLEN
The Chinese Wall It separates reality from wishful thinking in the West. BY ELLEN BORK Last March, the largest demonstrations against Chinese rule since the late 1980s took place in Lhasa...
...As a concession to international protests, Beijing agreed to a meeting with representatives of the Dalai Lama—though its policies toward Tibet remain unchanged...
...To report The China Price Harney bunked in a dormitory with young women who traveled from their rural hometowns, with little money and no skills, to fi nd jobs in boomtowns...
...This is a tightly written, thoughtful account of the working conditions and economic incentives behind China’s production of consumer goods for overseas markets...
...With the Olympics only months away, the suppression briefl y focused attention on China’s policies since its occupation in the 1950s...
...First conceived by Mao, the railroad is more political imperative than commercial proposition...
...The awkward writing distracts from the compelling and urgent problems faced by Tibetans and those who wish to help them resist Beijing’s destruction of their culture and society...
...On a visit to a party school in Shanghai, Sorman asks about human rights and government accountability: “The Party listens to the people and addresses all of their concerns,” the school’s head tells him...
...One excellent chapter deals with a struggling human rights movement, which tries to use existing laws and regulations to secure compensation for horrendous workplace injuries and illnesses...
...Sorman places his hopes with the many dissidents he meets, such as Ding Zilin, who for nearly 20 years has been trying to make the government accountable for the 1989 massacre of democracy protesters, including her son...
...While Americans love to mock Europeans for their slavish deference to Chinese leaders, on human rights and security matters the West is united in an approach built on the mistaken assumptions Sorman illustrates...
...During a recent year-long trip to encounter “representative[s] of the present debate between the authoritarian power structure and its opponents,” Sorman meets with dissidents, religious believers, Tibetans, and others who belie the confl ation of China with the Communist party that pervades much thinking about China in the West...
...The China Price tackles a subject Americans take even more seriously than the oppression of Tibet: cheap Chinese imports...
...Empire of Lies was originally published in France, and some passages are directed toward French intellectuals and politicians in ways that may seem irrelevant to American readers...
...BY ELLEN BORK Last March, the largest demonstrations against Chinese rule since the late 1980s took place in Lhasa and spread beyond the boundaries of the offi cial “Tibet Autonomous Region” to neighboring Tibetan areas in neighboring provinces...
...Maybe—but she goes too easy on the central authorities, whom she criticizes mainly for lax oversight of local offi cials rather than for a one-party Communist system that (among other things) jails labor and anticorruption activists...
...Unfortunately, the narrative proceeds in a disjointed way, culminating in an anticlimactic journey to Lhasa on the train...
...Ellen Bork works on human rights at Freedom House...
...Western policy is premised on the notion that economic growth will lead inexorably to reform...
...The Chinese responded by arresting and prosecuting monks, vilifying the Dalai Lama, and launching a campaign of political indoctrination...
...The head engineer nearly drowns in quicksand...
...With little to lose, Harney argues, this generation of migrant workers, the second since the beginning of China’s economic reforms, is savvier about their options, and more assertive...
...The builders must fi nd a way to secure tracks on top of unstable permafrost...
...An audacious construction project requires innovation in a harsh environment...
...a leading lawyer in the human rights defense movement...
...No matter...
...The balance of power, long tilted in favor of factories,” Harney concludes, “has begun to shift slightly, but inexorably, toward labor...
...Guy Sorman does not neglect the Communist party in Empire of Lies, a bracing, polemical, and encyclopedic account of its pathologies, among which are corruption, forced abortion, and social unrest...
...Western style democracy would mean going backward for China...
...Alexandra Harney resists relying on caricatures—enslaved workers toiling around the clock, happy to earn a Yuan—but some stock villains do make an appearance, such as the unscrupulous factory manager who dupes WalMart’s obtuse (or worse) inspector with a “shadow factory” set up near the real one, complete with phony timecards and other faked evidence of compliance with labor standards...
...and Liu Xia, an artist married to a dissident intellectual who calls herself a Jew to identify herself with victims of another totalitarian regime...
...Here are the elements of a great story...
...Altitude sickness kills at least one worker, after which China stops disclosing deaths...
...The locals hardly benefi t. Few Tibetans fi nd work on the railroad, towns are relocated, and the landscape and culture are degraded...
...When Sorman’s interpreter wonders (out of earshot) if the cadres really believe such nonsense, he tells her that “the Party’s real thinking and the training that it imparts have less to do with content than with the incessant repetition of these circumlocutions...
...One of the most grandiose of these projects is the Qinghai Tibet Railroad, linking Lhasa to Beijing, and the subject of China’s Great Train...
...China’s leaders hope it will help them secure Tibet’s international borders, subjugate the Tibetan Buddhist population, and extract abundant natural resources...
...Wal-Mart and other manufacturers come in for more sympathetic treatment when Harney explains the complex problems companies face in monitoring their operations, and the contradictory outcomes well-intentioned efforts sometimes produce...
...In addition to religious persecution, these include massive population transfers of Han Chinese and infrastructure projects...
...They are indefatigable in the face of long hours and spartan living conditions, probably because their prospects at home are so poor...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 10
