Those Who Want To Avoid Confronting China Are Right
Chinese President Jiang Zemin is in Washington this week, and Americans are bitterly debating how he should be treated. On one side is the Establishment: foreign policy experts, corporate chieftains, the prestige press. The Establishment says China, the world's fastest-growing economy, is a country the U.S. should try to stay friendly with. On the other side is a motley collection of protesters outraged by China's persecution of Christians, its enslavement of Tibet and its increasingly bellicose attitude toward its neighbors. They want the U.S. to reduce its trade with China, to denounce China's human rights abuses and commit itself to a tougher military line against China.
It's almost always true in disputes like this that the Establishment is wrong and the motley protesters are right. But every rule must admit of exceptions. This one time, the Establishment is right.
The people who want to avoid confrontation with China know as well as anyone the oppressiveness and corruption of the present Chinese regime. But they know two other things as well.
First, in order to enrich their country, the Chinese Communists have accepted an immense reduction in the power of the central government. Compare China today and China 20 years ago. Back in 1977, the government dictated the costume that every Chinese must wear, decided where every Chinese must live, assigned everyone a job, controlled everyone's income, prohibited all private accumulation of wealth. Today, China still curbs political rights. But in the non-political world, totalitarian control has given way to considerable personal freedom.
Richard Bernstein of the New York Times, a veteran China watcher, tells the following story. When he was in China in the late 1970s, he became friends with a political dissident. For that contact with the West, the dissident was thrown into a prison camp. Twenty years later, Bernstein returned to China. His old friend picked him up at his hotel in an enormous Mercedes limousine and drove him to one of the chain of clothes stores he now ran. The police still followed him, the former dissident said, gesturing behind him to a crummy little Chinese-made car tailing the Mercedes. And his phone was tapped. But so long as he kept quiet, he was permitted to enjoy his property in peace.
Bernstein is actually an advocate of confrontation with China. But I think his story has a different moral. Over the long haul a country cannot sustain economic growth if businessmen cannot trust the courts to enforce contracts fairly, if they cannot get accurate information, if their property is not respected. Which means eventually China will have to choose. If the leadership wants wealth and national greatness, it will have to concede an independent judiciary, an at least partially free press, and secure property rights. If it withholds those liberties, China will remain poor and weak. Which means trade with China, by strengthening and enriching its business class, will be, over the long haul, a force for liberalization.
Second, say those who want to avoid confrontation, it's well to remember one reason the U.S. prevailed against the Soviet Union was that Soviet aggression united almost the whole world against it. The U.S faced the Soviet Union at the head of an alliance that included almost all Western Europe plus Japan,Canada, Australia and so on.
If China turns aggressive in the next century, it, too, will create an overwhelming coalition against it: not just the U.S., but also Japan, Taiwan, India and the united, democratic Korea of the future. If the U.S. tries to mobilize those countries against China now, it will probably fail. As yet they see no danger. Would it not be wiser to wait until such time (if ever) as China has actually provoked its neighbors into desiring U.S. help -- rather than resenting and resisting it, as they would surely do now?
History, a teacher of mine used to say, never repeats itself: it only seems to, to those who don't pay attention to the details. This is not 1946 and China is not the Soviet Union. It may someday become dangerous. But for now it ought to be treated with wary respect.
Originally published in the Financial Post.