On The Sunny Side Of The Street

I'm not going to heap scorn upon this China Post editorial.  Because there are days when I, too, think things might work out for the best in the Middle Kingdom:

Today's communist leaders in China are pragmatists, who believes in Deng Xiaoping's "cat theory" of getting results rather than Mao Zedong's egalitarianism of glorifying poverty on an equal footing. The merit of the law should be judged by the answer to a single question: Do the people want it?

But the mainland people may want more-free elections, free press and independent courts, for example. Clearly, the National People's Congress is in no hurry to work on these political reforms, which are lagging far behind. These are the reforms that can best safeguard against the abuse of power by corrupt officials. So, after property reform, political reform must be on the agenda.

Already, grassroots pressure for such reform is mounting. The rising middle class and increasingly well-educated people will demand political reforms that are now put on the back burner. If the past is an indication, we have reasons to be optimistic that such reforms will be carried out in another decade or two, if not sooner.

China's communists may be more pragmatic than they once were, but is that pragmatism directed at doing what's good for their country, or merely doing whatever allows them to hold their positions of power and privilege?  A selfless utilitarian might, out of a sense of pragmatism, be willing to allow himself to be voted out of office in order to better serve the needs of society.  But communist oligarchs obsessed with clinging to power may be much less inclined to do so.

Furthermore, while I agree that the well-educated will demand political reforms, it is not at all inevitable that they will succeed in getting these demands met.  Tienanmen Square happened once, and it can happen again.  And again and again.  Heinlein once depicted a society whose subjects were completely co-opted by a fascist state; they were perfectly free to make all the money they wanted, and as long they tended to their own gardens, the State was content to leave them alone.  The Federation was unapologetically brutal to those who dared meddle in politics, however.

"Starship Troopers" may have been fiction, but a few societies HAVE paralleled it in real-life.  Could China take that path as well?  I wonder...

There ARE indeed hopeful developments in China, but there are others the sober observer cannot ignore.  The creation of the "Great Firewall", continuing persecution against certain religious minorities, a blithely amoral foreign policy - these are all things that suggest China might be moving in a darker direction.

To this list, I might add China's treatment of the free and democratic state of Taiwan.  A few years ago, a Taiwanese industrialist doing business there was threatened, with tax audits and overzealous safety inspections, into signing a document declaring his "opposition" to Taiwanese independence.  It was only last year that Chinese arm-twisting caused an airplane carrying Taiwan's president to be forbidden from flying over Mexican airspace.  And let it not be forgotten that China currently aims a thousand missiles at Taiwan, in an effort to terrorize the population into submission. 

Taiwan is the canary in the coal mine, and how China treats it should be of interest to everyone.  Today, it's Taiwanese industrialists who are being bullied into taking political stances; tomorrow, it may be businessmen from YOUR country.  Today, China prevents Taiwan's president from freely traveling; tomorrow, it may prevent the president of some other democratic country it's displeased with from doing so.

And the missiles?  Well, TODAY they, and other weapons, are targeted upon Taiwan.  And tomorrow?  Well, by now I hope you've gotten the picture.

Comments

[Tom the Redhunter]

Very interesting post

"China's communists may be more pragmatic than they once were, but is that pragmatism directed at doing what's good for their country, or merely doing whatever allows them to hold their positions of power and privilege?"

I think that the answer is the latter, that they're just doing whatever they can to hold onto power.

It's been assumed in the West that with capitalism comes democracy. The Chinese Communists are determined to put the lie to that assumption. At the rate they are going, they may well succeed.

I also think that the 08 Olympics will be a watershed moment. The ChiComs will go all-out to make their country look good, and I am not sanguine about the ability of the Western media to see through it. If the communist rulers are successful in making China look good on the world stage, I fear this will demoralize Taiwan. This, in turn, may lead to a weakening of the will to resist on the island nation.