China and Godwin’s Law

Well it’s 08/08/08 and the Beijing Olympics are now upon us.

Long term readers of ToK (The Tree of Knowledge) will appreciate that I’m something of a Sinophile, a predilection that isn’t particularly popular on either the left or the right in Australia at the moment.

While the human rights record of the Chinese government is obviously indefensible and deserves public attention and debate, I’ve been a little bothered at the increasingly overt hostility that’s entered into the public discourse on China in the lead up to the Olympics.

Beijing 2008-Berlin 1936 analogies are becoming increasingly prevalent and it is getting to the point where the only acceptable way to voice disquiet at China’s record on human rights at the moment is shrill, ALL CAPS absolutism, else you be viewed as some kind of Nazi collaborator.

In light of this, let me be clear about what I mean when I say I’m uncomfortable about the direction that the public debate about the Beijing Olympics has taken. In my view:

Chinese human rights offenses are indefensible and ought to be publicly criticised. However, the level of demonisation of the Chinese that has become prevalent in the lead up to the Olympics is both unrealistic and counter-productive.

Given that people will already be taking offence, let me explain in more detail.

Unrealistic Demonisation

I think the Nazi parallels that are being drawn at the moment are completely unjustified and evidence of how criticisms of China leading up to the Olympics have lost touch with reality. Let’s be frank - there are no gas ovens in Tibet, nor does China have designs to enslave a continent. Yes, there is a propagandistic element to the Beijing Olympics (as there is with many Olympics), but the Chinese aren’t holding themselves out to be the master race. There may be analogies with Moscow, 1980 or Mexico City 1960 depending on what goes on during the games, but certainly not Berlin.

I think the Nazi parallels are a symptom of broader misunderstandings of China by much of the West. Depictions of China in Op Eds and the blogosphere at the moment are depressingly simplistic. The more benign accounts are cartoon caricatures in which evil CCP Henchman and PLA Goons, supported by spineless Western governments out for Chinese Cash, repress a helpless population that yearns for democracy. The more malign pieces characterise the Chinese population as monolithic and almost inhuman, “a nation of 1.3 billion tightly-controlled, heavily-indoctrinated people”.

When I read accounts like this it makes me wonder whether the people writing them have ever visited the country or even met a Chinese national, because they certainly don’t square with my experiences. China is not a free society. Its citizens are constrained by the constant threat of brutal repression. But the trajectory of societal development is clearly towards increased personal freedom. There’s a legitimate discussion about whether the pace of this societal change is adequate and whether the propagandistic imperative of the Olympics has caused a regression, but nobody could argue that China under Hu Jintao is less free than it was under Jiang Zemin, or less free under Deng Xiaoping than it was under Mao. China today is more complex than the totalitarian police state caricature.

A good example is the “Great Firewall of China”. Western journalists and tourists are shocked that they can’t access Wikipedia on their fly-in fly-out China trips and assume that the Chinese people are brainwashed with a censored perspective of the world. However, as an excellent article in The New Yorker about Chinese Nationalists (not communists) recently described:

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool - an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server - a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States - some sixty-seven thousand - has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

Of course, it’s simpler for outsiders to see the Chinese as being behind a modern equivalent of the Iron Curtain and so that’s the news frame that prevails in the media. It’s just that reality is more complex.

Similarly, China’s people are far from a brain-washed, homogenous mass. While there are still absolute taboo topics with hideous consequences for transgressors, there is currently a vigorous political/philosophical debate occurring in China. As Mark Leonard has written in his recent book What Does China Think?:

I had imagined that China’s intellectual life consisted of a few unbending ideologues in the back rooms of the Communist party or the country’s top universities. Instead, I stumbled on a hidden world of intellectuals, think-tankers and activists, all engaged in intense debate about the future of their country …

Inside China - in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet - debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.

… While it is true there is no free discussion about ending the Communist party’s rule, independence for Tibet or the events of Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading newspapers and academic journals about China’s economic model, how to clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or North Korea.

…

So is the Chinese intelligentsia becoming increasingly open and western? Many of the concepts it argues over - including, of course, communism itself - are western imports. And a more independent-minded, western style of discourse may be emerging as a result of the 1m students who have studied outside China - many in the west - since 1978; fewer than half have returned, but that number is rising.

Those Chinese students that I have met on university campuses around the world have been just the same as students from any other country - and just as varied. The protests over the Olympics torch relay are a good example of this. Some of my Chinese friends didn’t care at all. Some were greatly offended at what they perceived as double standards from the West on Human Rights. But I never heard Communist talking points. They weren’t defending the Chinese Communist Party, they were just speaking out at what they perceived as an unfair focus on them by a hypocritical West.

In fact, through the whole debacle, many of my Chinese friends at the LSE were the most offended by the suggestions in the Western press that they were acting at the behest of the Chinese Embassy.

And while we’re trying to understand Chinese attitudes better, consider the findings of this survey of Chinese public opinion released this year:

According to a new survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a staggering eighty-six percent of Chinese are satisfied with the country’s direction, up from forty-eight percent just six years ago. Eighty-two percent say the economy is good, up thirty percent from 2002. Not surprisingly, these high numbers put China as the top-rated country out of 24 countries polled.

Two-thirds (66%) of Chinese describe their personal economic situation as good. (Pew did not ask Chinese respondents whether they believed the Chinese government respected their rights).

Before people rush to discount survey results of tightly controlled, indoctrinated citizens, consider that the survey also found that “seventy-eight percent say corrupt officials are also problematic”. My view is that if the respondents felt constrained in their responses they wouldn’t have been slagging off their local party bosses.

Again, the reality of the situation on the ground is far more complex than the caricature of the Chinese people as a tightly controlled and repressed populace.

Unhelpful Demonisation

The second aspect of the current discourse on China that I find troubling is the fact that the level of demonisation that’s currently out there is not just unrealistic, it’s actually counter-productive.

Those who really want to open up Chinese society should ask themselves what approach is most likely to help facilitate democratic reform in the country. The Chinese people had a right to be outraged at a disabled girl in a wheelchair being accosted by a French trot while holding the Olympic flame. They have a right to be upset about being labelled as Nazis. The kind of crazed hostility that permeates much of the protests in the lead up to the Olympics has undoubtedly hardened and radicalised opinion within China. In my view, they’ve hurt the cause of freedom in the country.

As Christopher Patten, someone with a great deal of experience in dealing with the political complexity of working with the Chinese Government, has said:

What is clear is that we should seek to work with, not against, China. That does not mean giving up our own views on human rights and the rule of law. Chinese officials are often contemptuous of those who give the impression that they are prepared to sacrifice what they really believe for some usually illusory gain. But China deserves the respect of trying to understand and know it better.

I’m not an apologist for human rights violations. I’m not arguing for cultural relativism. I’m not asking for people to embrace China or even to stop criticising it. Speaking out against Chinese Human Rights violations is good. All I’m arguing that there is a need for a greater degree of understanding to inform our efforts.

At the very least we should be applying Godwin’s Law.