China and liberty

Sometimes, without always intending to, television can capture an image which jumps at you. For me, two examples were especially striking. One was on the BBC news of 19th October 1999: a closed horse-drawn carriage clattering its way along the Mall, in London, towards Buckingham Palace. It contained the Queen of England and her official guest, Jiang Zemin, President of the People's Republic of China. Honour guards flanked the royal carriage. The sky was a perfect blue, with flags fluttering in the autumn breeze: red for China; red, white and blue for Britain. The procession was watched by a few thousand people, mostly tourists, and a handful of Chinese waving paper flags handed out by Chinese embassy staff. Then, suddenly, a tiny commotion: a man who tried to unfurl a banner was grabbed by police officers. The banner read, in Chinese: "Free all political prisoners." The man was Wei Jingsheng, the dissident who spent 18 years in Chinese prisons for advocating democracy. His arms were pinned behind him as he was bundled away from the eyesight of the smiling, plump, bespectacled figure who happens to preside over the world's largest remaining dictatorship. It was a shocking picture. Why was this allowed to happen in a country which prides itself on being a bastion of democracy and free speech?

The second television image was broadcast a month earlier. It was only a fleeting moment in a documentary film about the restoration of Sino-US relations in 1972. Henry Kissinger, looking a bit like a cat which has just caught a mouse, explained how to deal with the Chinese. The Chinese, he said, "are probably smarter than we are" and so we must always be straightforward with them. This, from a man whose diplomatic and political moves were not always straightforward (he was deceiving his own country's state department at the time), was a remarkable statement. But it was the first part of the sentence that was most arresting: "probably smarter than us." Why? Why should this shrewd and arrogant Harvard academic have assumed such a thing?

Let us look first at the image illustrating official British policy of preventing any Chinese critics from spoiling Jiang's day. Its main reason is not hard to figure out. Britain wants to expand its business with China. There is nothing wrong with this. Trade benefits not only British business; commercial interests might also help to open Chinese society to the outside world. Nor is there anything amiss, in principle, in giving the Chinese head of state a friendly reception. The disgrace lay in helping to silence his critics.

It was known that Jiang, like most dictators, gets easily upset by signs of protest. The British foreign office had done its homework. When demonstrators were allowed to enter Jiang's line of vision during an earlier visit to Switzerland, he turned to his hosts and said they had lost themselves a good friend. To be a "friend of China" still means the same as it has meant for many centuries. Barbarians are expected to pay tribute to the dragon throne, kneel before the Chinese emperor, and knock their heads on the floor as a sign of submission. And it is still as true as it was 300 years ago that opportunities to trade are only offered to "old friends." Trampling on people's right to protest, then, even on British soil, is the price the British government is prepared to pay for being a friend of China. If it doesn't kowtow, the reasoning goes, then surely the French or the Germans will.

Since Britain exports nine times more to Belgium than it does to China, and trade with the People's Republic is still minuscule compared to trade with, say, democratic Taiwan, this commercial zeal might seem a bit odd. But the promise of vast riches keeps beckoning, like a mirage. Just imagine: it is no longer a question of selling oil lamps to a hundred million, but cars, computers and television sets to over a billion.

Only a few weeks before Jiang's European trip, business executives from all over the world had gathered in Shanghai, under the auspices of Time Warner, Inc, to celebrate 50 years of communist dictatorship in China. In the old tradition of barbarian tribute-bearers, they too went down on their knees, as it were, and knocked their heads to the ground. The chairman of Time Warner, Gerald Levin, called Jiang "my good friend," and pains were taken to avoid any subject which might upset the Chinese. The chairman's good friend responded by making a harsh statement against foreigners trying to "impose" their ideas of human rights on China. And he banned that week's issue of Time magazine for including an article by Wei Jingsheng. None the less, the businessmen carried on kneeling. The chairman of Viacom, Sumner Redstone, buyer of CBS, said that journalistic integrity was a fine thing, but that should not mean "that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate."

No wonder that China's rulers are convinced that all westerners care about is money. It is an old prejudice in Asia, which has long served as a face-saving antidote to feelings of inferiority, fostered by colonialism and economic backwardness-the prejudice, that is, that westerners are crude and greedy, whereas Chinese-or indeed Indians-are spiritual people. The prejudice has been confirmed over and over, ever since European trade delegations arrived in Peking at the end of the 18th century to kneel at the dragon throne. And when Europeans could not do business by kowtowing, they would go to war. Either way, clearly gold was all they had on their savage minds.

There is an irony here, in that the western view of Chinese people was burdened by a similar prejudice. Most Europeans only knew the Chinese as immigrants in southeast Asian ports. These Chinese made their living by trade, giving all Chinese the reputation of being congenitally mercenary or, in the less than charming words of a 1930s Thai politician, of being "the Jews of Asia." Hence, perhaps, the view that if only you got things right, fortunes would surely be made in China.

In fact, however, the question of commercial greed goes beyond relations between east and west. Mercantile nations governed with a certain degree of liberty, such as Holland, Britain or Venice, were always accused of this by more authoritarian regimes. Remember Napoleon's phrase about England being a nation of shopkeepers, or Kaiser Wilhelm II's summing up of the British Empire as a commercial enterprise - unlike the German Reich, which would spread the blessings of the German spirit across the globe whether people wanted it or not. There is a link between business interests - or at least the freedom to trade-and liberal, even democratic, politics. Money tends to even things out, is egalitarian and blind to race or creed. As Voltaire said about the London stock exchange: Muslims, Christians and Jews trade as equals, and bankrupts are the only infidels. Trade can flourish if property is protected by laws. That means protection from the state, as well as from other individuals. The disturbing thing about China, or indeed Singapore, is that this axiom has been challenged by a different model: the combination of political oppression with commercial liberties. The temptation to grovel to the Soviet Union was never great, because there was no money to be made there. China tempts us with riches as long as we keep praising its emperors.

Henry Kissinger has made a good living by telling businessmen how to make money in China. And he has been a good friend to Beijing. After the Chinese government had crushed a peaceful, unarmed, civilian protest movement with murderous violence, Kissinger spoke up in its defence. And yet I believe that business is not the main reason why Kissinger has long been mesmerised by the Chinese dream. It reveals, rather, an attraction to the idea of a perfect order; and a strange susceptibility to what might be termed the Chinese mystique. The key lies in the words: "probably smarter than us." It is a dangerous assumption to make about an entire people; Jews in particular should be sensitive to its echoes. The idea that a particular race or nation is peculiarly intelligent (and good at business) can have negative as well as positive connotations. The image of the devilishly cunning Chinaman, not entirely unlike the Nazi caricature of Jüd Suss, is what inspired Sax Rohmer's famously villainous creation, Dr Fu Manchu.

It is hardly possible to see shades of Fu Manchu in Kissinger's Chinese counterparts in 1972 - Mao surely lacked the finesse for such a role, and Zhou Enlai, though his hands, too, were sticky with blood, was more a toadying courtier than an arch-villain. But perhaps it was not superior intelligence that impressed Kissinger about the court of Mao Zedong, so much as its atmosphere of raw power. Mao may have been a mass murderer, but as we know, someone who kills one man is a common criminal, while someone who kills millions is a great man. The feeling that we can do business with such a great man can be a form of self-flattery; it is as if some of his power rubs off. Reading Kissinger's memories of his encounters with Mao leaves the impression that the German-born representative of the world's most powerful nation was overawed by the dictator of an impoverished, third world state. But Kissinger, unlike Mao, could never have caused the death of millions by simply acting out his fantasies. For that, you had to be a great leader. And great leaders, thank goodness, are something democracies do not normally provide.

Despotism was always part of the Chinese mystique. For centuries, China offered Europeans a utopia or dystopia on which they could project their fantasies. Voltaire saw China as a rationalist utopia governed by enlightened scholar-officials. His was an intellectual's fantasy. Ezra Pound saw in the Confucian state a blueprint for perfect order, a nation of disciplined people acting as one under the firm leadership of the emperor. His was a fascist's fantasy. He saw parallels between imperial China and Mussolini's Italy. Some years later, Chairman Mao was widely admired by western intellectuals for having the absolute power to conduct social experiments on a billion obedient people. This was left-wing fascism. But it, too, was a typical intellectual's dream.

Kissinger is an intellectual, but he is neither a fascist nor a communist. His fascination with power is more in keeping with his identification with Metternich. His ideal world is like a huge chessboard, with great men making smart moves to keep the game in balance. Order is what great men, including Kissinger, like best. Democracy is a messy western eccentricity, and there is absolutely no need to encourage its introduction in China. Democracy in China would bring disorder. What Sinophiles always admired about China were precisely its blueprints for social order: Confucian in the past, communist in the present.

It is interesting to contrast Kissinger's fascination for China with his open contempt for Japan. This is not uncommon among Sinophiles, who tend to see China's old enemies through Chinese eyes. But Kissinger's particular gripe with Japan is that Japan has no great leaders. The lack of a strong central government, with politicians he can play global chess with, maddens him. Kissinger's contempt for postwar, pacifist, mercantile Japan echoes that of another great man, Charles de Gaulle, who once referred to a Japanese prime minister as a transistor salesman.

Japan is hardly a model liberal democracy. Its bureaucrats are even more authoritarian than the French. Political domination by a corrupt conservative party lasted longer than the Christian Democratic stranglehold of Italy. But compared to almost every other country in Asia, Japan is an open, liberal society, where free speech and the right to vote are taken for granted. And although the common image of pre-modern Japan is that of a samurai police state, that too is only partly accurate. Japanese emperors never wielded the power that Chinese emperors did; and while military strongmen did rule Japan, their rule was not absolute. The government of 17th and 18th century Japan was based on compromises which gave the merchant class far greater freedoms than traders had in imperial China.

In a way, then, old Japan, not China, was the precursor of the "Asian model" to which China aspires: the combination of political autocracy and commercial freedom. Japan hardly fits that model any longer; Singapore comes closest. It is not a model which European or American politicians easily advocate in their own countries. But many do openly admire it when applied to Asia. Here, too, an old pattern becomes visible. Asia - and China in particular - was not simply a blank page on which Europeans projected their fantasies. The fantasies reflected domestic discontents. Voltaire's admiration for the "rational" Confucian mandarinate was an expression of his anti-clerical views in France. Ezra Pound's fascistic ideas about China reflected his loathing of bourgeois democracy. The same goes for the Parisian Maoists in 1968.

Western businessmen kowtowing to the Chinese communist government, and their fawning admiration for Lee Kuan Yew's propaganda for anti-liberal "Asian values" is part of the same thing. In other words, the grovelling is not just opportunistic. Pandering to the Asian way expresses a sense of unease with messy democratic practices which stand in the way of business - the business of government, as well as business per se. We find this unease among bureaucrats of the EU, too. Why not let bankers and énarques take care of our affairs? Surely they know better how to do it than those vulgar politicians. And politicians themselves, impatient with the carping of critics and voters' demands, must sometimes look enviously at the way Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow Asian autocrats are able to get on with things.

We are often told by admirers of the Asian way that China is going to be just fine because, after all, nobody in China believes in communism any more: they are all capitalists now. The people who say this are often businessmen and bankers so puffed up with capitalist triumphalism that they are blind to the political dangers which could so easily harm their own interests-let alone those of a billion Chinese. A regime whose government is not based on popular consent, whose only claim to continue a monopoly of power is the promise of growing wealth, is a fragile regime. Mao's absolute rule was based on brute force and indoctrination. President Jiang cannot muster the same brute force, and the dogma is all but dead (the businessmen are right about that). All Jiang has left is the carrot of more money, and when that doesn't work, he can tap a nasty strain of nationalism. Since all countries are subject to economic lows as well as highs, China's universal get-rich-quick scheme is fraught with dangers. In any case, not everyone is getting richer even now. Wealth, as always, is unevenly distributed. The Chinese hinterlands are still terribly poor; hundreds of millions of unemployed are roaming around the country in search of jobs. That is why the Chinese government is nervous about the smallest hint of dissent.

Modern Chinese nationalism has its own history of humiliations, some real, some imagined, some deliberately fabricated for political ends. But it has much in common with malign forms of nationalism which Europeans know well. Wilhelminian Germany was a great power, boosting its industry and flaunting its wealth. Like the Chinese regime today, late 19th century German governments saw the economy as a tool to project national power. Germans were free to make money, but not to exercise their political rights in a democratic manner. The reign of Wilhelm II was marked by a defensive, resentful nationalism, that encouraged people to blame any setback on foreigners, or on outsiders in their midst. In the Kaiser's worldview, Germany was surrounded by hostile powers which wanted to keep Germany down.

The Chinese government, too, is fostering the notion that the outside world begrudges Chinese power. But nationalism in China is a double-edged sword; its manifestations often hit the Chinese government, too. In the last century nationalist rebellion was aimed at the "foreign" Manchus who occupied the dragon throne. In the 20th century, rebellions usually started as protests against foreign humiliation of China. The May Fourth Movement, in 1919, began with student demonstrations against their own government, which allowed German possessions in China to be handed over to the Japanese in exchange for financial loans. The student unrest in the 1980s also began as a protest against Japanese business infiltrating China. And when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by Nato, was the government pushing the rioting students, or vice versa?

The notion, then, that the Asian way of boosting capitalism, while suppressing political dissent, is stable, should be met with profound scepticism. Japan or India could probably weather grave economic crises, because their democratic systems, however imperfect, act as shock absorbers. That is not true of China. If, or rather when, the Chinese economy crashes, we can expect much violence, self-inflicted, in the form of rebellions and brutal crackdowns; or inflicted on the outside world, with Taiwan the first but not the last victim. The consequences in the rest of east Asia are unpredictable, but surely unpleasant. And because the US is the policeman of east Asia, the west will inevitably become involved.

So even if we leave all humanitarian concerns aside, even if we act purely out of self-interest, we should encourage democracy in China by criticising the so-called Asian way. To regard such criticism as colonial arrogance might seem tolerant and liberal-minded, but it is foolish. The point is not to expand the power of westerners, but to enable the Chinese people to speak freely, elect their own rulers and have a share of power themselves.

This is why I was rather put out when I was told that the text you have just read could not be delivered as a lecture to Volkswagen employees in Germany. Volkswagen has two large car plants in China. The theme of the lecture series, to which I had been kindly invited to contribute, was "World Citizens." The idea was that Volkswagen people might come to a better understanding of the outside world. China, it seemed to me, was a most suitable topic. Volkswagen thought otherwise. The message I received contained only three words: "China not allowed."