Even before images of the first cruise missile strikes on Baghdad reached Chinese television screens, the country's intellectuals were debating the US-led war against Iraq and the government's response. Commentaries in leading newspapers and online journals demonstrated a diversity of opinion seldom seen in the country's state-controlled media, and precipitated wider discussion in people's living rooms.
Most debates addressed whether the war was justified. Opinions were voiced in newspapers and in online forums such as the home page of the media school of Qinghua University, widely known as "China's MIT." It posted an anti-war petition with over 1,000 signatories, mostly academics.
Although this grassroots response adhered to the government's anti-war stand, it remains surprising in a country that discourages unscripted political discourse. So it was even more surprising to see pro-war sentiments expressed publicly, such as the petition that appeared in the Guangzhou-based weekly newspaper 21st Century World Herald. That petition voiced a taboo viewpoint: that "human rights are of greater value than national sovereignty."
In a rare challenge to the government, Beijing-based writer Yu Jie (余杰), one of the petition's authors, wrote that China ought to support the war on Iraq. Only by embracing universal values and distancing itself from "evil states," Yu argued, can China rise to the level of the world's mainstream democracies.
Others, such as Han Deqiang of Beijing's aerospace university, who wrote an anti-war commentary that accompanied Yu's essay, scoffed at such an idea. Han called pro-war Chinese intellectuals hopelessly naive and overly "immersed in the American dream."
But others supported Yu Jie's critique. The Beijing-based dissident writer Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), an activist intellectual in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, questioned the government's motives for opposing the war. Since 1989, Liu wrote, the Chinese government has nurtured a strident nationalism to boost its own legitimacy. Moreover, Liu argued, the government's marginalization of pro-war sentiment and promotion of anti-war views accords with its broader effort to ascribe almost every domestic and international disaster to American hegemony.
Although the surface of this debate is about America and Iraq, the subtext, as always, concerns China. Indeed, the debate revealed political fault lines among Chinese intellectuals that could never be openly exposed on domestic policy.
Ultimately, the two main camps of China's intelligentsia -- the "neo-leftists" and "old liberals" -- ask the question that has divided Chinese intellectuals for a century: what does it mean to be Chinese and also to be modern? Does it mean following the West (as liberals advocate) or, as the neo-leftists suggest, is there some Third Way between Communism and western-style democratic capitalism? Most fundamentally, can the scope of economic disaster witnessed following the Soviet Union's collapse be avoided?
Both groups comprise scholars from numerous fields, state intellectuals serving in government think tanks, journalists and even some dissidents. Liberals are known to favor more thorough economic and political reforms, such as democratization at the grassroots level and a free press. Conservatives insist on a more cautious approach that avoids the "shock therapy" and drastic overhauls experienced in postcommunist Eastern Europe.
Unlike in Western countries, where intellectuals often engage in head-on public confrontations, most intellectuals in China speak obliquely. The invasion of Iraq presented them with a relatively safe topic with which to discuss issues that are normally off limits, such as human rights.
Scholars used the Iraq debate to ask whether a state relinquishes its sovereignty when it loses popular support -- a highly provocative topic in China.
"A modern sovereign state, first and foremost, bases itself on the recognition of individual rights and democracy," according to Wang Yi, a liberal scholar. "That is to say, given the nature of the current Iraqi regime, it has no right to ask for treatment as a sovereign state."
In the pro-war petition, Yu Jie and others made an explicit link between Iraq and China, likening former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to his "colleague and predecessor," Mao Zedong (毛澤東), who "disguised the illegitimacy of his authoritarian regime in the name of the people."
As the war progressed, pro-war voices increasingly fell silent. Some media critics ascribed this to a combination of official censorship and the effect of the scenes of Iraqi civilian deaths played (and replayed) on China's new 24-hour news channel, created especially to cover the war in Iraq.
In any case, speaking out carries a price. The relatively independent Nanfang Daily Group, whose members include 21st Century World Herald and the Guangzhou-based liberal magazine Southern Breeze, was closed by the government for "redesign." It may be allowed to publish again, but no one knows when. The Hong Kong newspaper The South China Morning Post reported that it would have been closed, permanently, if not for the personal intervention of Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), China's new president and communist party chairman.
Despite these setbacks, the debate benefited China's intellectual climate. As ideas advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Orwell, and Vaclav Havel enter China's public discourse, interest grows in such Western thinkers and their political insights. This alone amounts to a great leap forward for intellectual freedom.
Feiwen Rong is a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and has worked for Dow Jones Newswires in Shanghai.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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