China's President Jiang Zemin's (
What makes it bizarre is of course its reference to unstoppable historical trends. Surely there are two historical trends that have proven to be a lot more irresistible than the goal of the unification of China. One of them is the global meltdown of communist regimes, the other is an almost equally worldwide demand for more participatory government.
The only way to avoid the former, as North Korea and Cuba have done, is to effectively seal a society off from the outside world. But China left this only known path to communist longevity in the late 1970s; there is no going back now.
The second factor is perhaps more arguable. It is true that as South Korea and, of course, Taiwan developed they met a demand for democracy that their governments just could not be repressive enough to counter. During the so-called third wave of democratization, Eastern Europe, Latin America and some parts of Africa embraced democracy. Even in Asia since the mid-1980s, dictatorships fell in Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Singapore presents the counterexample that Jiang and his cronies seek to emulate, where the democratic aspirations of the population can be bought off by admittedly startling economic success. However, Singapore, a small, highly compact society with a homogeneity not of population but of aspiration, is very different from China, a vast land literally teaming with different interest groups and constituencies.
One of the great ironies about China's much vaunted and deeply failed attempt to introduce more representative government at the village level is that the tensions between competing interest groups that immediately arose were simply too great for the system as it is to cope with. The obvious way for such a society to move forward is to increase freedom of speech, let ideas be debated and let a consensus form.
But debate, to China's leaders, still carries too many echoes of Red Guard groups yelling at their rivals through loudspeakers. Thesis, antithesis, what's next? In democracies, generally a lot of horse-trading, which results in a synthesis acceptable to most -- original expectations having been trimmed. In China, however, the third step is taken to be violent upheaval; history bears this out, they may say. Better, therefore to make sure that no debate ever gets underway.
And, of course, it is precisely because China has rarely, at least for the last 1,000 years or so, been open to lively wide-ranging debate on issues of national importance that the only way to express political dissent has been through the violence of open revolt -- something of which Taiwan, by the way, has a long history of, having had 68 revolts in 212 years of Ching Dynasty rule.
Understanding here should not be confused with forgiveness but, unfortunately, this seems to be the case internationally. China is even the leading candidate to host the 2008 Olympic Games, a symbol of international peace and harmony, despite the fact that China's leadership behaves with bestial brutality toward its people and should be international pariahs. Why is it that Jiang and his ilk are never held accountable for what, elsewhere, would be quickly labelled crimes against humanity? Perhaps it is all part of the tendency to worship power for its own sake. Western leaders flatter China because they are awed by the power Jiang and his clique command. It's the same attitude that led to so much sycophantic reporting in the democracies of Germany's society and its Nazi leadership in the 1930s. And look what that led to.
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