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Posted on 06/11/2005 2:58:59 PM PDT by Pokey78
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.
How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even free-ish - society.
Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.
The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.
China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.
Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.
India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so.
China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.
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"China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact."
I'm not really sure what Steyn meant by this.
No doubt about Europe. But is Steyn correct about Russia? I hold out more hope for her than for the EU.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Certainly, Nixon was a better option than McGovern or Humphrey, but he was no conservative. I believe he was only anti-Communist where he believed it would be to his political advantage. He was purely a political animal. I'm sorry that you prefer to play the "mind-numbed robot" to the extent that you blind yourself to history of American involvement in China and Nixon's mistake there, and to the point where you laugably pretend that Nixon was concerned about Mao's butchery, but I'm not about to join you in fantasyland. I suppose I should have been warned by your chosen freeper name.
I believe he was only anti-Communist where he believed it would be to his political advantage.
%%%%%
On what do you base this opinion? Nixon may not have been as conservative as you would like, but you are the first commentator that I have read that doubts his deep antipathy to Communism.
Besides having an R behind his name, the main reason that Nixon was reviled by the media of the time was his successful prosecution of Alger Hiss - a commie darling of the left.
How many times have I heard Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton speak of the inevitable decline of the United States?
Bump for post-golf reading.
Thanks for the ping!
OUTSTANDING! Mark Steyn is OUTSTANDING! Thanks for posting.
First of all, China abandoned communism about 20 years ago. It's capitalistic, but it's state-run. That's fascism, not communism.
They kept the name of the Party, but that's it.
The Party considered political reform and an introduction of political freedom, but they freely admit that they felt they had to make a choice between democracy and getting rich. They chose rich.
The final point where Steyn is wrong is that the Chinese intend to force 400 million of their rural residents into the major cities over the next 15 years. So they will participate, to some extent, in the growing Chinese economy. They'll be the cheap labor that assembles the cars for export to europe and America.
Fascism does work. And as long as you don't desire to dissent and aren't at the bottom of the economic ladder, it's a far better existence than under true communism.
China is a 4,000 year old country and has essentially governed itself that entire time, with very brief periods of foreign occupation. The borders have changed very little.
It's not going to unravel this century.
Steyn BTTT
You just answered this article perfectly.
Couldn't afford the elevator?
So...he's still down there?
bttt
I base it on listening to the tapes. You may disagree, but based on listening to those tapes, Nixon was a man who seemed to be obsessed with power above all else. And I doubt he was as "obsessed" with anticommunism as he was in the 50s by the time of his Presidency, or he wouldn't have Vietnamized or gone to China.
That the media hates someone does not make them a conservative. If that were true, there'd be a hell of a lot more conservatives.
I love steyn bump!
BTTT!!! Thanks Pokey!
Anyways, if Tibet and the Muslim provinces can't break away, and they steadily ratchet up the screws on Hong Kong, I guess I would not count on their kindly self-destructing implosively. That is not to say there aren't tensions, and potentials for revolution we can and should be exploiting. We should. But we sure aren't right now.
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