Beyond Peace (19 page)

Before I went to China in 1972, one observer speculated that Mao's first question to me would be “What is the richest nation in the world planning to do for the most populous nation in the world?” During my five days of meetings with Chinese officials, they never raised economic issues. Their concerns were exclusively strategic, focusing on the growing military power of the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, on my seventh trip to China, the focus had shifted exclusively to economic issues. While the Chinese leaders may worship in a communist church, they live by capitalist scripture. They are committed to free-market economic policies—to capitalism with a Chinese face.

It is not surprising that Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew, an ethnic Chinese, saw this coming twenty-five years ago. “Mao is painting on a mosaic,” he told me. “When he passes from the scene, the rains will come and wash away what he has painted, and there will still be China, always China.” Politically, China
has one of the most doctrinaire communist governments in the world. But economically, its people and most of its lower-level leaders are more Chinese than they are communist. The private sector, fueled by Chinese entrepreneurs and free-marketers abroad and at home, is growing far faster than the public sector. This process is irreversible.

While most Americans give China high marks for its free-market economic policies, they rightly criticize the government's continuing denial of political freedom to the Chinese people. However, we should place Chinese developments in historical perspective. After serving for six years as
The New York Times
bureau chief in China, Nicholas Kristof observed that even today's political atmosphere represents a huge improvement for most Chinese. “The government smashes those who oppose it, but it no longer tries to regulate every aspect of daily life,” he wrote. “Now Chinese have regained their private lives from the Communist Party. Once again they can display personalities. Dissidents are still brutalized, but life for the average peasant who knows that politics, like explosives, are to be avoided is relatively free. It is no more than the freedom of a bird cage, but most birds would prefer to be flying around in a cage than to be skewered on a rotisserie, which is what life in China used to be like!”

Freedom is contagious. Economic freedom inevitably leads to political freedom. This happened in South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, and other countries ruled by dictatorial regimes. It will happen in China, but only if economic freedom is not suppressed by frightened political dictators or sabotaged by shortsighted U.S. policies cutting back on trade with China because of its human-rights abuses.

China is not of purely economic importance for the United States. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, it has not hesitated to assert its interests by military means. In 1951, it entered the Korean War. In the 1950s, it put military pressure on Taiwan's offshore islands. In 1962, it clashed militarily with India.
In the 1960s and 1970s, it supported the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists in the Vietnam War. Between 1968 and 1969, Chinese and Soviet armies repeatedly clashed over the Ussuri River region. In 1979, China attacked its ideological stepchild, Vietnam, after Hanoi invaded Cambodia and persecuted ethnic Chinese in Vietnam.

Today, China and Russia exist in an uneasy “Asian détente.” China's hard-liners would prefer to see the failure of Yeltsin's democratic government, because it would lessen the ideological threat of Russian democracy and weaken Russia's ability to protect its interests in East Asia. At the same time, Chinese officials fear a new resurgent, nationalistic Russia because it would inevitably clash with China over important economic regions in East Asia and force China to divert its attention from other areas.

The major concern for China's leaders lies to the east. Japan has become the economic rainmaker in Asia, investing more than $60 billion in the region. The Chinese welcome Japan's economic investments, but they are highly suspicious of the motives behind Japan's policies in Asia. China's rulers remember Japan's brutal aggression before and during World War II. That is one reason China is eager for the United States to continue its role in Asia. Even the most hard-line communist leaders in China recognize that the United States poses no threat to China and serves as an important restraining influence on its Japanese and Russian rivals.

It is ironic that many liberal scholars in the United States who strongly supported our opening to China in 1972, when Mao allowed neither political nor economic freedom, now oppose close U.S.-Chinese relations because of China's denial of political freedom and abuse of human rights. Cutting back our trade with China by revoking China's most-favored-nation status would be a tragic mistake. We cannot improve the political situation in China through a “scorched earth” economic policy. Revoking China's MFN status would hurt the free-market reformers
and entrepreneurs who hold the key to China's future. Not only would it devastate the mainland's economy, it would lay waste to the surrounding region as well. No other nation in Asia supports our linking most-favored-nation status to human rights. It would do irreparable damage to Hong Kong, which serves as a conduit for over 45 percent of China's exports, and to Taiwan and Macao, which depend on trade with Hong Kong for their survival.

The threat of MFN revocation is vigorously opposed by almost all Chinese, including most dissidents, who view the high-profile grandstanding of U.S. politicians as a calculated effort to humiliate a proud nation and its people. They know that the term “most-favored nation” is a misnomer. Only 10 of the 188 nations in the world do not have that status. Several of the 178 who do have it have human-rights policies as bad as, or worse than, those of China. Ironically, many liberals who oppose extending MFN to China were among the first to endorse lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam—like China, one of the world's most repressive hard-line communist regimes.

Winston Churchill once said, “Russia fears our friendship more than our enmity.” This can also be said of China's leaders today. While they know that China's economic progress depends on the continuation of free-market policies, they are aware that economic freedom is a mortal threat to a political dictatorship.

We should strongly protest China's human-rights abuses whenever and wherever we can. But punishing China's leaders for human-rights abuses by restricting and reducing our economic contacts does not serve the long-term interest of those Chinese who want more political freedom. It may make us feel better, but if we close the door to economic reform, we will lock out all prospects for peaceful political change on foreign policy in the foreseeable future. That is too high a price to pay for a sense of moral superiority.

We should also resist lecturing the Chinese about their birth
control policies. Abortion is a highly inflammatory issue in the United States. I believe that no decision is more uniquely private than whether or not a woman should have an abortion. Government should not interfere with an individual's right to make that decision. I know that a great number of fair-minded people strongly disagree with my position. What we can all surely agree on is that we should not impose our views on this highly controversial issue on other nations, such as China, with massive population problems. Leaders of such nations have to choose between allowing abortion or condemning millions of people to starvation because of overpopulation.

Whatever the motives of China's critics, they are hampering the conduct of the constructive relations that we must have with the world's most populous nation, one of the world's nuclear powers, and potentially the twenty-first century's richest nation—and they are jeopardizing the best hope of the Chinese people for lives of freedom and prosperity.

The stakes are incredibly high. Nick Kristof, writing in
Foreign Affairs
last year, put the issue in perspective:

China is becoming a fourth pole in the international system. This is particularly true when one looks at “Greater China,” consisting of the People's Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. According to World Bank projections, Greater China's net imports in the year 2002 will be $639 billion, compared to $521 billion for Japan. Likewise, using comparable international prices, Greater China in the year 2002 is projected to have a gross domestic product of $9.8 trillion, compared to $9.7 trillion for the United States. If those forecasts hold, in other words, Greater China would not just be another economic pole; it would be the biggest of them all.

Today, China's economic power makes U.S. lectures about morality and human rights imprudent. Within a decade, it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades, it will make them laughable. By then the Chinese may threaten to withhold most-favored-nation
status from the United States unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem, and South-Central Los Angeles.

China is justly criticized for promoting weapons proliferation by selling arms whenever and wherever it can, including to many pariah states. The United States' complaints about other nations' arms sales is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. We have cornered 56 percent of the world arms market, with $13 billion in sales annually, compared with $800 million for China and $1.5 billion for Russia. Although we are far more discriminating than others in choosing our clients, we are not in the best position to criticize others. The only way to stem proliferation is to reduce arms sales across the board internationally, including our own.

Unlike human-rights grandstanding, the strategy of continuing economic cooperation and relying on diplomatic pressures has had some success. China released its most famous dissident, Wei Jingsheng, after holding him in prison for almost fifteen years. Other dissidents have received lighter sentences in large part because U.S. government officials kept up the pressure for their release and lodged complaints in international conferences. In the end, democracy and human rights will be more effectively enlarged by the expansion of market forces and the influence of Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Taiwan than by frontal assaults on the government in Beijing.

It is risky to make predictions about China. To paraphrase Lord Curzon, Great Britain's Viceroy in India one hundred years ago, China is like a great university from which the scholar never gets a degree. Most observers agree that there will be a struggle for power after Deng Xiaoping leaves the scene. Those who assume there will be a renewal of political warlordism in China are focusing too much on China's past and not enough on the new China we must deal with today. Regional leaders want more autonomy from a central system that inflicted great harm on them during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, but they are loyal Chinese who do not seek independence.
The greater danger is that China will be divided by a new economic wall between the rich in the coastal provinces and the poor in the interior unless more progress is made in bringing the benefits of economic prosperity to all.

Two groups are in contention to succeed Deng. Moderates favor an expansion of the rule of law, movement toward a federal system, creation of genuine private property, and rapid elimination of subsidies for agriculture, rents, and business. The more doctrinaire group favors a strong Communist Party—but one that is becoming less a revolutionary party than a ruling, technocratic party. Its leaders would prefer to see restraints on growth in the private sector and generally slower economic growth. They have a greater suspicion of the West, especially the United States. They want a continuing strong role for state corporations, even if government subsidies are necessary. Both groups claim that they support free-market reforms. They disagree on the pace and extent of those reforms.

China is permanently locked into the world market. There will be no return to the economic isolation of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even the most reactionary hard-line communists, while totally opposed to political reforms, have no choice but to support the free-market economic policies that have tripled the income of the Chinese people in the past ten years.

The good economic news from China has obscured some of the enormous problems China's new leaders will confront. The specters of corruption and unrestrained greed haunt China. This is not grease to make the economic mechanism run smoothly, as in Korea and Japan. It is money taken directly out of the system. The central authorities are trying to put the brakes on corruption, but they cannot touch the main perpetrators, the high-level party cadres and the so-called red princes. There are too many Chinese leaders who have their hands in the till for us to expect an attack on this problem now. But thoughtful Chinese leaders know that a government that tolerates corruption will inevitably become the victim of corruption.

The Chinese share with the Germans a pathological fear of
inflation. Many remember the last days of the Nationalist regime in Shanghai, when money was carted around in wheelbarrows and inflation helped destroy a dying regime. An austerity program aimed at a soft landing, launched in May of 1993 by Vice Premier Zhu, China's leading economic official, seems to have worked without causing a nosedive in GNP growth. But the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989 reminds us of the danger of political unrest if inflation leads to an economic downturn.

How the post-Deng struggle will end depends mainly on what happens within China. But developments outside China, including those in Russia, can affect the result. If the Russian experiment in economic and political freedom succeeds, China's moderates will benefit. If Russia's reforms fail, this will encourage the reactionaries.

The policies of the United States will also affect the outcome of the succession struggle. If we cut back our trade with China's free-market sector in order to punish China's leaders for their human-rights abuses, we will weaken those who want to increase political freedom.

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