The Chinese, Too, Deserve to Be Free
DERBYSHIRE, JOHN
The Chinese, Too, Deserve to Be Free A strategy for promoting democracy in China. BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE Macao, Portugal's 400-year-old colony across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong, returned...
...A confident modern nation can tolerate any number of peaceful cults...
...being laughed at for an honest mistake is more distressing...
...When reading these accounts, Chinese people who know their nation's history cannot but be reminded of the intrigues of the Imperial court and the follies of that older autocracy...
...We can never look them in the eye as equals...
...In Tibet, one person in 12 is a Chinese soldier—a much higher proportion than the Wehrmacht required to hold occupied France in World War II...
...We do not have to sit by, passive, in the vague hope that once China's living standards reach a certain point the Maoists will simply step aside...
...Another fundamental principle of Chineseness in the present age is the aching desire to be up-to-date, to be modern...
...Considering that the place is tiny (eight miles from end to end, with a population of 450,000), that it has no discernible economy beyond gambling and prostitution, and that the Portuguese have been trying unsuccessfully to give it back to China since they got out of the colonial business 20 years ago, you might suppose that this was a matter of minor importance...
...The twentieth century's most percipient observer of the Chinese soul, the writer Lu Xun, noted, "We Chinese are forever either looking down on foreigners as uncultured savages, or else gazing up admiringly at them as paragons of science and democracy...
...A regime whose leaders have never experienced the give and take of democratic politics will be inept at, and temperamentally hostile to, the give and take of international diplomacy...
...Yet the argument misses the ambivalence of Chinese attitudes to the outside world ever since that world gatecrashed their consciousness 150 years ago...
...Never mind warnings from the State Department's China desk that such complaints are "unhelpful...
...In recent years a number of memoirs and exposes of the early decades of Communist rule have been available to those Chinese who cared to seek them—perhaps most famously the 1994 book by Mao's doctor, Zhisui Li, which every Chinese seems to be familiar with...
...Never mind the self-righteous bluster we get in return...
...Their reaction is not pride at the continuity of their nation's political culture, but shame that they are stuck with methods of statecraft long since abandoned elsewhere...
...I propose the following...
...The notion that foreign suggestions will always be rebuffed, and its often-heard corollary that nothing foreigners do makes any difference in China, both miss this tension in Chinese thinking.While the Chinese and their leaders may scoff at foreign prescriptions for their country, in the back of each Chinese head is a little voice whispering that the foreigners might be onto something after all...
...The current territory of the People's Republic includes three vast regions whose base populations are not Chinese: Tibet, Eastern Turkestan, and Inner Mongolia...
...This is a lever which, if skillfully pulled, can serve the end I am proposing...
...Meddling in our internal affairs" is not just a useful slogan for the ruling gang to use when brushing off foreign criticism, it is also an appeal to a fundamental principle of Chineseness...
...Shame them...
...Weart's conclusion is the one implied in his subtitle, and it is perfectly convincing...
...We must extend official recognition to governments-in-exile for the Tibetans and Eastern Turkestanis, with ambassadorial residences in our capital and proper accreditation of diplomats...
...Their cultures have nothing in common with China's—not even an alphabet...
...These considerations dispose of one of the main objections to our project, the one posed by Kissingerian realpoli-tik: How is it any business of ours what sort of government China has...
...Having recognized Taiwan, therefore, we might, a few years on, if our project were successful, find ourselves withdrawing recognition...
...From the point of view of the project I am proposing, the case of Taiwan presents some ambiguity...
...So it must be with Tibet and Eastern Turkestan one day, if we are ever to have democracy in China...
...To achieve a complete national reunification is the shared aspiration of all the Chinese people including the Taiwan compatriots, and an inevitable historical trend which no force on earth can ever resist...
...If the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations declares that "Tibet has always been a part of China," the U.S...
...Certainly there is a widespread understanding among Chinese people—at any rate those with some education— that the current political system of the mainland will not do...
...Tibet and Eastern Turkestan, however, are outlying Imperial possessions held by brute force...
...The diplomatic arsenal of the current Chinese regime—as of any authoritarian regime—is stocked mainly with lies, threats, and insults...
...As Spencer Weart has shown—^and as Demosthenes noted 23 centuries ago— relations between democracies and oligarchies are always unstable...
...Socialism was sleek, shiny, and efficient...
...A bunch of middle-aged people want to practice a meditation cult, and you think this is a threat to your nation...
...Today's China, however, is not so hermetically closed, and challenges to the CCP's lies can filter through to at least some Chinese citizens...
...Expose their lies...
...True, there will be a rather melancholy comic-opera aspect to these missions for a few years...
...But if Weart's arguments are sound, the outlook and skills required to rise to the top in a Leninist oligarchy are inevitably threatening to international peace and order...
...On this score, the Chinese Communist party is at a terrible disadvantage with its own people: They perceive it to be old-fashioned...
...Recognize Taiwan...
...Much of it is devoted to developing good working definitions of "democracy" and "war...
...When Jiang Zemin says that the people of Taiwan long to be reunited with the Motherland, someone of authority in the Free World should be heard to say that this is not so—that the people of Taiwan have no desire to surrender their freedoms to a clique of Leninists with Swiss bank accounts...
...it was scientific...
...Their Chinese settler populations would have little incentive to stay on after independence and most would drift back to China proper...
...Unlike the Baltic states, which had a higher standard of living than Soviet Russia, Tibet and Eastern Turkestan are poorer than metropolitan China...
...Most to the point, no democratization of China will be possible until they are freed...
...The regime might react in irrational ways to some of the steps I have proposed...
...Thebes, the Anglo-Dutch War of 1652, John Derbyshire i^ a critic and novelist living in Huntington, New York...
...The West is at the apogee of its wealth, power, and influence...
...Since the party rests its legitimacy on lies and on long-exploded pseudoscientific theories about "inevitable historical trends," simple repetition of the truth undermines it...
...Chinese officials who have to deal with foreigners are instructed that the proper attitude is bu kang bu bei—neither arrogant nor servile...
...We are not helpless...
...The project I have sketched is not risk-free...
...Weart describes a number of historical instances in which fatal misunderstandings arose between a democracy and an oligarchy...
...The world is a much smaller place than it was even 20 years ago, and what is said at one end of it can be heard at the other...
...The last of these is probably a lost cause, as Manchuria has been for a hundred years...
...The lies, however, should be exposed...
...Wrong: For China, it was a very big deal indeed...
...Most recently they have been countering queries about the suppression of Falun Gong with references to the Branch Davidians...
...In a completely closed society, they hear nothing else...
...After the calamities of the Mao period, nobody now believes that...
...Let us let them know that we long for a free and democratic China, a "normal country," with which we can compete in friendship to our mutual benefit...
...I believe it is an embarrassment we should be willing to endure with equanimity...
...It may be that if China were a democratic nation, the people of Taiwan would wish to join it...
...The insults should be ignored and the threats met with calm, clear declarations of firmness...
...Being too close to the Chinese heartland, it has been swamped with Chinese immigrants, and the Mongolians are now a minority...
...They will be listening, enough of them...
...A regime that considers disagreement with its policies to be treason will register even the mildest foreign criticism as belligerent hostility...
...Action on our part will generate reaction, and the current odious system will only be strengthened...
...Oriented toward negotiation and compromise, the democracy makes a concession...
...Oriented toward coercion and deceit, the oligarchs take the compromise as weakness and assume that the democracy will never take a stand...
...Another line of objection is the appeal to the Law of Unintended Consequences...
...Loud foreign complaints about human rights abuses are answered with blustering defensiveness from Chinese officials...
...According to this reasoning, a loud and persistent campaign to push China in any direction will generate resentment not only among the Chinese leadership but among their people, who have been indoctrinated for a hundred years to believe that all their problems arise from foreign countries' meddling...
...the War of 1812—are scrutinized in the light of these definitions...
...We should deal with the world as we find it, accommodating ourselves to China's interests when prudent, encouraging its leaders to do the same in respect of our interests...
...Democracies—suffi-ciently inclusive, well-established democracies—do not go to war against each other...
...It is true that foreigners' prescriptions for China meet loud scorn from Chinese people...
...Let us make plain to the Chinese that while we respect them and their civilization, with its glittering achievements in art, literature, and technology, we deplore their current political arrangements and think them a danger to ourselves and to the world...
...Recognize governments-in-exile for Tibet and Eastern Turkestan...
...They need us far more than we need them...
...All the obvious counterexamples—Athens vs...
...ambassador should stand up at the first opportunity and point out that this is untrue, citing historical chapter and verse...
...Twentieth-century history—in Spain, Turkey, Austria, Portugal, and Russia—^suggests that for a despotic imperial power to democratize fully, it must first shed its colonial possessions...
...Westerners, therefore, both through our news media and private contacts and through our government representatives, should complain loud and long about human rights abuses in China...
...The state ideology of the Beijing regime is partly irrational, indeed anti-rational...
...Never mind: Some of what we say will sink in, inducing shame—a potent force for changing Chinese behavior...
...but those Baltic states are now free, their missions issuing visas and organizing cultural exchanges...
...Forty years ago, when it was still possible to believe that state socialism was the way of the future, the CCP could tap into this desire for modernity...
...Let us say loud and clear what we stand for...
...In short, it's about Taiwan...
...Behind the show of indignation with which Beijing spokesmen greet such remarks, there is much blushing and squirming among ordinary Chinese...
...The notion that only the Chinese understand China is dear to their hearts...
...I would add only that a major jolt of this sort would, after an initial firestorm of indignant bluster, contribute to the delegitimization of the Chinese Communist party among the Chinese people...
...As part of their training, Chinese officials are equipped with prefabricated arguments rather like those that used to be supplied to pupils in Catholic schools for confounding Protestants and atheists...
...This alone is sufficient cause for us to rack our brains for ways to help China democratize...
...Well, I should like to suggest a counter-project for the West...
...Our administration speaks breezily of "strategic partnership with China," while China's government-controlled press snarls that the United States is "aspiring to world hegemony...
...With Hong Kong and Macao safely back in the bosom of the Motherland, the "recovery" of Taiwan is now Project Number One for the rulers of China...
...Never mind Chinese accusations of "interfering in our internal affairs" and the clumsy tu quoque rebuttals...
...One of the depressing things you discover if you live in a dictatorship is that after decades of indoctrination, most people—including even dissidents— end up believing at least some of the official lies...
...but down among the people themselves, such complaints, if properly pitched, can generate shame...
...By being firm and principled, we can accomplish a great and wonderful thing: We can help a mighty nation find a path to constitutional government and ensure peace for ourselves and our children...
...Spencer Weart points out what political scientists from Aristotle onward have noticed: that a nation's dealings with other nations tend to the same style as its internal practices...
...Subtitled Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, it is a long exploration of Kant's notion that free peoples are inherently peaceful...
...A war with China would be a catastrophe, and if we can help make it unthinkable—as unthinkable, say, as war between the United States and Canada—^we should surely do it...
...Supposing the West could be convinced of the desirability of this project, what steps could we actually take to help China towards democracy...
...Whatever the risks, the indefinite perpetuation of the current system is much, much riskier...
...Our project should be to bring constitutional government to China...
...Thus emboldened, they strike—and are astonished when the democracy strikes back...
...Those steps must therefore be complemented with clear, consistent declarations of intent and with as much support as we can gather from our democratic allies in Asia...
...BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE Macao, Portugal's 400-year-old colony across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong, returned to Chinese sovereignty at midnight last December 19...
...Their leaders, too: Take a look at the gifts that came into your house over the recent holiday season and count those marked "Made in China...
...Continued Chinese occupation of these nations is an international scandal...
...What a primitive attitude...
...The case for recognizing Taiwan was put very ably by John Bolton in the August 9, 1999 issue of this magazine...
...They are, for example, trained to riposte with remarks about segregation in the Old South any time an American raises issues of human rights in China...
...Their people have suffered horribly under Chinese rule...
...A Western campaign for democracy in China, if conducted with some tact and good sense, could harness this yearning...
...Doing wrong and getting away with it disturbs a Chinese person's peace of mind much less than it does an Anglo-Saxon's...
...I have just been reading historian Spencer Weart's 1998 book Never at War...
...Current U.S.-China relations conform uncomfortably to this pattern...
...Reading these accounts, it seems that conflicts like the First World War arise not because one side has lost the diplomatic game, but because the two sides are not actually playing the same game...
...China, like Japan, has a "shame" culture rather than a "guilt" culture...
...We can help bring to an end the long night of imperial despotism in China and watch with joy and satisfaction as freedom's morning breaks at last over that proud, beautiful, long-suffering land...
...At present war is all too thinkable, for reasons that derive from the nature of the Chinese Communist regime...
...Not for moralistic reasons, though there would be great moral satisfaction in accomplishing such a thing, but from simple prudence and the desire for peace...
...A regime that tolerates no internal dissent will be intolerant of other nations' concerns...
...There is therefore, I believe, a widespread hunger among educated Chinese people for a more modern form of government—"to be a normal country like the others," as one expressed it to me...
...President Jiang Zemin, in a speech marking the occasion, got right to the point: "I am sure that our compatriots in Taiwan will share the joyful sentiments of the people in Macao...
...This is a more potent argument...
...So there was to the missions of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as recently as the 1980s...
...for democratization of China within its current borders would lead to secession by these regions, as the Communists surely know...
...and the different styles, rooted in different responses to internal challenges, that democracies and oligarchies bring to the diplomatic arena offer endless possibilities for misunderstanding and miscalculation...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 21
