China Is Not
As Strong As We Think
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON--In the 1970s it was Brazil that was going to be
the superstar of the decade - - and perhaps for ever more.
In the 1980s the talk was of Japan. In the 1990s China.
Brazil and Japan came unstuck in different ways - - Brazil,
after decades of being the century's fastest growing economy
(along with Taiwan), because it overspent and, in its
massive state and social sectors, chronically
underperformed. Japan because its quasi feudal company and
ministerial structures too well protected the dross as well
as the gold in a system that never could bring itself to
embrace capitalist meritocracy in all its parts.
Now the indications are increasing that China will be the
third big falling star of the latter half of the twentieth
century. China perhaps after all "is not a miracle about to
be performed". In China the veneer of end-of-the-century
technology and know-how is eggshell thin.
China, since the days in 1793 of the mission of Lord
Macartney, emissary of King George III, has kept its
distance from the West, preferring to be as "self-contained
as a billiard ball", to quote the great historian Alain
Peyrefitte. It was Peyrefitte who argued in "The Collision
of Civilizations" that Macartney's decision not to kowtow to
the emperor gave the Chinese the impression that their
civilization was denied. Thus they withdrew into their
bunker and have remained for the last 200 years prickly,
ultra-sensitive, quick to take offense and too ready to
assume the worst of the West's motives.
Thus among Sinologists has developed a strong school of
thought that there is only one way of dealing with China--a
sort of delayed, reversed, kowtow, always leaning over
backwards neither to provoke nor annoy China, even allowing
China to re-write whatever language it is negociating in.
This is combined with the propensity of many in the West,
both in politics and business, to project the economic
growth rates of the Deng Xiaoping era right into the distant
future, while taking little note of its paucity of legal and
institutional framework (unlike its rival India or Hong
Kong) to contain such endeavour. Reasoning of this kind,
assuming China will soon mature into a superstate, seems to
blight good sense. "It encourages China", as the last
British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has written in
his provocative new book "East and West". "to think it can
become part of the modern world entirely on its own terms.
Were that to happen it would make the world a more dangerous
and less prosperous place."
Patten who with this book demonstrates that he is
certainly the most literate and perhaps the most thoughtful
of contemporary western practising politicians, draws on his
experience of playing an inherited bad hand to try and
secure some sort of democratic security for the city state
he was charged to hand over to the communist mainland. "Hong
Kong deserved better of Britain" he writes. "It was a sad
way to go". A modicum of a redeeming feature is Patten's
appraisal of lessons learnt and how to deal with China in
the future.
Since the Communist Revolution in 1949 western
governments in their China policy "have offered us with rare
exceptions, a choice of extremes--flab or flint, engagement
or constraint". Lurching from one to another has made little
sense. President Bill Clinton having criticised George Bush
for pampering Beijing's dictators has come perilously close
to doing exactly that himself.
The decision earlier this year by both Europe and the
U.S. not to censor China at the UN Human Rights Commission
marked the low point for contemporary western policy.
Engagement is one thing. Blindness, timidity and forsaking
the root-essentials of what western society has achieved
after its own painful evolution is another.
Patten has it right: "I'm not scared witless of the
People's Republic of China, nor mesmorised by China's might
and majesty. I am on balance more scared of things going
wrong in China--the splintering of China, the breakdown of
governance. China is at the end of an era. Marxism and
Maoism are dead. What does the communist party have to offer
other than cynicism and decadence?"
Sometimes, as Patten concludes, one has to pinch oneself
to remember who needs who most. Perhaps, to begin with, we
should never forget the simple but important fact that China
represents only 1.7% of all western exports added
together.
It is quite pathetic, it is laughable, but above all
distasteful that western countries regularly betray each
other, and in so doing the human rights activists inside
China, in an effort to better position themselves in this
quite modest market place.
If, as Patten argues, the West could stand shoulder to
shoulder and say once and mean it, "stop using economic and
trade threats; you are in no position to do so; it is
unacceptable behaviour", Beijing would get the message.
September 17,
1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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