Commentary: Walker's World - The real China debate
Apr 08 2001 9:09 AM EST
WASHINGTON, April 8 (UPI) -- Deep below the headlines, and far from China's Lingshui air base where the American EP-3E spy plane still languishes, at the heart of the complex relationship between China and the United States lies a controversial theory about the relationship between money, power and freedom.
At its simplest, this theory states that free markets are inseparable from free institutions. Economic freedoms are the springboard from which all other freedoms, of the press and of religion and of thought and political organization, all leap magically into life.
"Over the long run, free trade is good for the development of democracy and human rights in China," President Bill Clinton declared during the United Nations' Millennium Summit last September, justifying the effort his administration had poured into clearing China's path into the World Trade Organization.
This is very nearly a bi-partisan position in Washington. Texas Republican Dick Armey, the House Majority Leader, claims that the Internet is the soft underbelly of Communist rule. As the Internet spreads, Armey enthuses, "The Chinese people will use those tools to spread information, organize politically, protect themselves from the government and ultimately demand a voice in their own affairs . .Free and open trade with China offers the best hope of turning China into a free and open society."
The theory itself is rather more complex, assuming an inevitable feedback and interplay between economic and social life. The more trade, the more wealth seeps into China, which will steadily create a larger middle class, which will in turn require an ever greater voice in the direction of national policy. The middle class has savings, to prepare for their old age and to finance their ambitions for their children.
The theory goes on to suggest that the private property rights that are inherent in those savings have their own requirements: for an honest banking and investment system, for a guarantee against government seizure, for a free press than can convey reliable information that the middle class needs to invest sensibly. Faced with a choice between protecting the integrity of their savings and submitting to a corrupt and authoritarian government, China's new middle class will demand freedom.
It all sounds convincing. And there are some heartening examples in what are today the democracies of Taiwan and South Korea that show the process at work. And the broad relationship between prosperity and politically free countries like those of North American and Europe also seems well established, just like the connection between centralized state rule and financial stagnation that marked the old Soviet Union and today's North Korea.
There are, however, a series of question marks over the broad theory. First, some countries became highly efficient and prosperous without enjoying what we would now call freedom, like the Germany of the Kaisers from 1871-1914, or Imperial Japan until the disaster of 1941.
Second, free countries do not necessarily stay rich. Leave aside the global depression that shattered the prosperity of the United States and Europe in 1931, and consider the British decline of the 1960s and 1970s, or the Japanese stagnation of the 1990s. These examples do not destroy the overall theory, but they do suggest that the relationship between prosperity and freedom is quite as precise as Clinton and Armey assume.
Finally, consider the ruthless efficiency with which Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or the example of authoritarian China in the past two decades since Deng Xiao Ping launched the period of economic liberalization. Perhaps the explanation lies in the way that wrecked and impoverished and essentially peasant societies can for a period produce more wealth and output through state-controlled change, industrialization in Stalin's day, free market prices for surplus food output in 1980s China.
But if that is the case, the grand theory linking freedom and prosperity is weakened. The various counter-examples all point to cases and examples where the connection between free markets and free institutions becomes problematic.
And that brings us back to China. Maybe, like South Korea and Taiwan over the past 30 years, China is on a slow but steady path towards political liberalization. If the theory is right, then China's Communist leaders are wisely and selflessly working themselves slowly out of a job. But that is not quite how it looks from the treatment of the Falun Gong religious group, nor from the technical controls Beijing has put on China's Internet servers, nor from the secretive way the struggle among the Communist Party leadership for the succession to President Jiang Zemin is now under way behind the walls of the Zhongnanhai compound.
The powerful old men of Beijing seem to have something else in mind, which may be as simple as replacing the failed ideology of Communism with the traditionally reliable and unifying ideology of nationalism. That, after all, was the explanation of so many of the exceptions to the theory of free markets and free institutions. Nationalism worked for Hitler and it worked for Stalin. Considering the way Chinese public opinion reacted to the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war, and the popularity of Beijing's tough line on Taiwan, maybe some of Zhongnanhai gang think it will work for them too. They may yet find that nationalism is just as unpredictable a force as freedom, only it can be nastier.
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Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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