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Time to give China its due
By Jeremy Kinsman
CBC News: Analysis & Viewpoint
April 16, 2008
CBC News: Analysis & Viewpoint: Jeremy Kinsman
It is not surprising that the world today is conflicted about China. The fact that it is one of history's greatest civilizations, rising to reclaim its long held pre-eminence, appeals to our imagination. At the same time, its vastly increased leverage on vital international, economic and political issues makes everyone else apprehensive.
All the current happy talk about tourism and China's shiny new urban landscapes cannot obscure the fact that the Communist party still calls the shots. If protests challenge Beijing's leadership, the shots can be lethal, which clearly colours the world's view of what China is all about.
In this vein, the prospect of Beijing hosting the globe's most expensive TV spectacular in August — the 2008 Olympic Games — has enabled a perfect storm of international angst in which China's attempt to showcase its achievements has become drowned in protest and name-calling. This in turn threatens a resentful nationalist backlash on China's part, with costs for us all.
Of course, both sides in these confrontations overstate their case. The current generation of authoritarian Chinese leaders are not "Butchers and Monsters" as a recent Maclean's cover story wildly claimed.
In fact, the reputation of the current Chinese leadership looks to be on the rise, particularly within the country itself, because it has permitted its citizens unprecedented lifestyle freedom, personal safety, private enterprise and the right to live anywhere and exit the country, not to mention the self-confidence that comes from world-leading economic growth.
All, of course, on the condition that the Communist party's monopoly on the power of decision is not challenged.
Getting along
One indicator of China's new status, which is often overlooked, is that today's young people are much different from their Tiananmen student predecessors in the 1980s.
As former Time bureau chief Matthew Forney put it, "educated young Chinese are the biggest beneficiaries of policies that have brought China more peace and security than at any time in the last 1000 years."
Today's student generation seem to have little wish to rock the boat and this new willingness to go along to get along is one effect of changing the education system to replace the clunky pre-Tiananmen ideological indoctrination with a self-congratulatory stress on China's achievements.
The new belief system may indeed ignore growing income disparities, endemic corruption, pollution and the broad suppression of political rights. But these are inconvenient truths to a generation pumped-up with the adrenalin of consumerism and personal expectation.
This generation, it seems, was hoping for the world's admiration at the Olympics, looking for it to reflect back warmly on themselves in the way that Expo '67 did for a cool and transforming Montreal.
But if the showcase produces international opprobrium rather than admiration, their disappointment will be lasting.
As China watcher Philip Bowring notes in the International Herald Tribune, "almost all of China is offended that the world is keen to lecture them." This includes the vast Chinese diaspora, as a demonstration of 5,000 Chinese-Canadians showed on Parliament Hill this past weekend.
China's Tibet
What China particularly resents, it seems, is that the current lecture is over Tibet.
Westerners and Chinese have developed contrasting narratives when it comes to Tibet. Scholars differ over the extent to which Tibet was a self-sustaining state in the past. But few suggest that the old Tibetan theocracy was ever a government by and for the people.
For the Chinese leadership, however, the overriding fact is simple: It considers its occupation of Tibet strategically vital in a region that has been traditionally threatening.
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday state bluntly in their 2005 book Mao: The Unknown Story that "From the time he conquered China, Mao was determined to take Tibet by force."
A 1959 rebellion in Lhasa gave him his chance and led the young Dalai Lama and 100,000 adherents to flee to India. In Tibet, mass starvation and imprisonments followed. The religion-hating Communists could not eradicate Buddhism, so they tried to co-opt what they could not deride and subsumed the local population in a sea of Han Chinese migrants, which had the effect of submerging Tibetan culture.
In the adjacent, western border province of Xinjiang, the Uighurs, a Turkic and Muslim people who briefly knew a separate existence as East Turkestan, have been similarly submerged.
In reaction, they fomented a separatist movement that Beijing labels "jihadist terrorism," an overreaction perhaps, but one that explains why Chinese-Canadian Huseyin Celil received such a lengthy jail sentence for allegedly promoting Uighur autonomy.
A strengthened leadership
By now, literally millions of Han Chinese have migrated to Tibet and Xinjiang. This inflow has fuelled economic progress and development in what had been marginal economies, though to the overwhelming benefit of the Han Chinese who are, at best, insensitive to ethnic minority identities.
The resentment that had built up on the part of certain Tibetans was what produced the violent anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa that sparked an outcry around the world last month.
But when selected clips were shown on TV across China, Han Chinese, who comprise over 90 per cent of China's population, were outraged. The subsequent crackdown was overwhelmingly supported in China, including by professed democrats.
If anything, the Chinese Communist party's leadership position is stronger because of its stand on Tibet. And it may have gained anew by the ensuing sideshow over the Olympic torch protests.
So, what comes next? It is not a bad thing, of course, to get through to the Chinese that the West is not thrilled by Beijing's lip service to the notion of political and minority rights.
But does it get through? Despite the so-called Great Chinese Firewall, the 200 million internet users in China seem to know how to connect to the proxy servers that get around their government's official embargos.
However, many agile Chinese bloggers lack understanding of Western media. They take the "Butchers and Monsters" epithets personally. So even if they have reason to resent Communist party controls, overwrought foreign rhetoric pushes them resolutely to their home side.
Retaliation?
All Chinese accept that governing China is not a simple proposition. At the same time, most expect credit for their new-found success. That it is denied is widely believed the result of double standards (by a West that invades other countries and played loose with its own minorities in the past) or unwillingness, especially on the part of Americans, to accept China as an equal.
In the current climate, as Western media grab for the sensational headlines and video clips and as Western politicians play, Hillary Clinton-style, to the home audiences, we in the West should be braced for some kind of retaliation.
The costs could be economic. In May 1999, after the U.S. mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists, widespread protests across China instinctively targeted KFC and McDonald's as much as NATO.
In small but pernicious ways, this kind of retaliation is already starting. Canadian travelers, for example, report their usual Chinese travel agency/visa dispenser in Hong Kong now makes American business travelers wait three days while Canadians sail through.
This is understood as a riposte to tougher U.S. border security practice as much as anything else. But these unofficial trade barriers also show what a centrally directed administration can do, which ought to be worrying if you owe them over a trillion dollars.
In the big picture, the West needs China's help on many of the overarching problems of the day, like Darfur, North Korea, Burma and Iran. And while we cannot, as France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, warned, simply reduce foreign policy to human rights, nor is it feasible to have a realpolitik that abandons democratic values.
Democracies can and should do more than one thing simultaneously. We in the West should be clear we support the rights of Chinese democrats and human rights defenders as well as cultural/religious autonomy for minorities while at the same time we discuss mutually beneficial trade and security cooperation with Chinese authorities.
While China has improved its governance considerably in the 19 years since Tiananmen, Chinese democrats hope for vastly more, as they should.
But that will come more easily if we maintain confidence among the Chinese that we are paying as much attention to what we are doing as to what they are doing, including the progress they have already made.
By Jeremy Kinsman
CBC News: Analysis & Viewpoint
April 16, 2008
CBC News: Analysis & Viewpoint: Jeremy Kinsman
It is not surprising that the world today is conflicted about China. The fact that it is one of history's greatest civilizations, rising to reclaim its long held pre-eminence, appeals to our imagination. At the same time, its vastly increased leverage on vital international, economic and political issues makes everyone else apprehensive.
All the current happy talk about tourism and China's shiny new urban landscapes cannot obscure the fact that the Communist party still calls the shots. If protests challenge Beijing's leadership, the shots can be lethal, which clearly colours the world's view of what China is all about.
In this vein, the prospect of Beijing hosting the globe's most expensive TV spectacular in August — the 2008 Olympic Games — has enabled a perfect storm of international angst in which China's attempt to showcase its achievements has become drowned in protest and name-calling. This in turn threatens a resentful nationalist backlash on China's part, with costs for us all.
Of course, both sides in these confrontations overstate their case. The current generation of authoritarian Chinese leaders are not "Butchers and Monsters" as a recent Maclean's cover story wildly claimed.
In fact, the reputation of the current Chinese leadership looks to be on the rise, particularly within the country itself, because it has permitted its citizens unprecedented lifestyle freedom, personal safety, private enterprise and the right to live anywhere and exit the country, not to mention the self-confidence that comes from world-leading economic growth.
All, of course, on the condition that the Communist party's monopoly on the power of decision is not challenged.
Getting along
One indicator of China's new status, which is often overlooked, is that today's young people are much different from their Tiananmen student predecessors in the 1980s.
As former Time bureau chief Matthew Forney put it, "educated young Chinese are the biggest beneficiaries of policies that have brought China more peace and security than at any time in the last 1000 years."
Today's student generation seem to have little wish to rock the boat and this new willingness to go along to get along is one effect of changing the education system to replace the clunky pre-Tiananmen ideological indoctrination with a self-congratulatory stress on China's achievements.
The new belief system may indeed ignore growing income disparities, endemic corruption, pollution and the broad suppression of political rights. But these are inconvenient truths to a generation pumped-up with the adrenalin of consumerism and personal expectation.
This generation, it seems, was hoping for the world's admiration at the Olympics, looking for it to reflect back warmly on themselves in the way that Expo '67 did for a cool and transforming Montreal.
But if the showcase produces international opprobrium rather than admiration, their disappointment will be lasting.
As China watcher Philip Bowring notes in the International Herald Tribune, "almost all of China is offended that the world is keen to lecture them." This includes the vast Chinese diaspora, as a demonstration of 5,000 Chinese-Canadians showed on Parliament Hill this past weekend.
China's Tibet
What China particularly resents, it seems, is that the current lecture is over Tibet.
Westerners and Chinese have developed contrasting narratives when it comes to Tibet. Scholars differ over the extent to which Tibet was a self-sustaining state in the past. But few suggest that the old Tibetan theocracy was ever a government by and for the people.
For the Chinese leadership, however, the overriding fact is simple: It considers its occupation of Tibet strategically vital in a region that has been traditionally threatening.
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday state bluntly in their 2005 book Mao: The Unknown Story that "From the time he conquered China, Mao was determined to take Tibet by force."
A 1959 rebellion in Lhasa gave him his chance and led the young Dalai Lama and 100,000 adherents to flee to India. In Tibet, mass starvation and imprisonments followed. The religion-hating Communists could not eradicate Buddhism, so they tried to co-opt what they could not deride and subsumed the local population in a sea of Han Chinese migrants, which had the effect of submerging Tibetan culture.
In the adjacent, western border province of Xinjiang, the Uighurs, a Turkic and Muslim people who briefly knew a separate existence as East Turkestan, have been similarly submerged.
In reaction, they fomented a separatist movement that Beijing labels "jihadist terrorism," an overreaction perhaps, but one that explains why Chinese-Canadian Huseyin Celil received such a lengthy jail sentence for allegedly promoting Uighur autonomy.
A strengthened leadership
By now, literally millions of Han Chinese have migrated to Tibet and Xinjiang. This inflow has fuelled economic progress and development in what had been marginal economies, though to the overwhelming benefit of the Han Chinese who are, at best, insensitive to ethnic minority identities.
The resentment that had built up on the part of certain Tibetans was what produced the violent anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa that sparked an outcry around the world last month.
But when selected clips were shown on TV across China, Han Chinese, who comprise over 90 per cent of China's population, were outraged. The subsequent crackdown was overwhelmingly supported in China, including by professed democrats.
If anything, the Chinese Communist party's leadership position is stronger because of its stand on Tibet. And it may have gained anew by the ensuing sideshow over the Olympic torch protests.
So, what comes next? It is not a bad thing, of course, to get through to the Chinese that the West is not thrilled by Beijing's lip service to the notion of political and minority rights.
But does it get through? Despite the so-called Great Chinese Firewall, the 200 million internet users in China seem to know how to connect to the proxy servers that get around their government's official embargos.
However, many agile Chinese bloggers lack understanding of Western media. They take the "Butchers and Monsters" epithets personally. So even if they have reason to resent Communist party controls, overwrought foreign rhetoric pushes them resolutely to their home side.
Retaliation?
All Chinese accept that governing China is not a simple proposition. At the same time, most expect credit for their new-found success. That it is denied is widely believed the result of double standards (by a West that invades other countries and played loose with its own minorities in the past) or unwillingness, especially on the part of Americans, to accept China as an equal.
In the current climate, as Western media grab for the sensational headlines and video clips and as Western politicians play, Hillary Clinton-style, to the home audiences, we in the West should be braced for some kind of retaliation.
The costs could be economic. In May 1999, after the U.S. mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists, widespread protests across China instinctively targeted KFC and McDonald's as much as NATO.
In small but pernicious ways, this kind of retaliation is already starting. Canadian travelers, for example, report their usual Chinese travel agency/visa dispenser in Hong Kong now makes American business travelers wait three days while Canadians sail through.
This is understood as a riposte to tougher U.S. border security practice as much as anything else. But these unofficial trade barriers also show what a centrally directed administration can do, which ought to be worrying if you owe them over a trillion dollars.
In the big picture, the West needs China's help on many of the overarching problems of the day, like Darfur, North Korea, Burma and Iran. And while we cannot, as France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, warned, simply reduce foreign policy to human rights, nor is it feasible to have a realpolitik that abandons democratic values.
Democracies can and should do more than one thing simultaneously. We in the West should be clear we support the rights of Chinese democrats and human rights defenders as well as cultural/religious autonomy for minorities while at the same time we discuss mutually beneficial trade and security cooperation with Chinese authorities.
While China has improved its governance considerably in the 19 years since Tiananmen, Chinese democrats hope for vastly more, as they should.
But that will come more easily if we maintain confidence among the Chinese that we are paying as much attention to what we are doing as to what they are doing, including the progress they have already made.
