The ceremony on Friday night was exemplary. The chair of the Nobel judges, Thorbjorn Jagland, left the prize on the empty chair that should have been occupied by the imprisoned human rights activist Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), had the Chinese authorities allowed him — or his wife — to travel to Norway to accept it. An audience including some of the world’s most august people offered a standing ovation. There was a haunting violin recital of Chinese music.
The same could not be said of China’s behavior. It was stung into a diplomatic and propaganda campaign against the Nobel Peace Prize committee that has reached new heights of ham-fistedness. For everything China has done over this affair has been ill thought-out and self-defeating. The regime must be very fearful indeed about the potential of the society on which it has been sitting for years to erupt — and the surprisingly lively pro-democracy movement to go viral — for it to mobilize against one solitary activist to such an extent. What we have witnessed is not the strength of a new great power in the making as today’s China is commonly understood — but profound and psychotic weakness. China’s anti-peace prize campaign is born of deep apprehension of its own vulnerability and lack of legitimacy.
China improbably claimed that the award was to a criminal, and thus mocked the Chinese legal system that had convicted him to 11 years’ imprisonment. It campaigned to persuade countries not to attend the ceremony, with the implicit promise of reward for those who conformed and penalties for those who did not. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Russia duly obliged. It has cracked down on its domestic dissidents with even more force and paranoia than usual. And it launched its own rival Confucius peace prize as a symbol of Asian values and priorities.
This was meant to reinforce the idea that there was now a new global center of economic and cultural power anchored in non-Western values based in Asia in general and China in particular. But the Confucius peace prize was a complete fiasco. It was awarded to a Beijing stooge, former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan (連戰). He then did not turn up to accept it, so the organizers turned to the trusty notion of asking a garishly lipsticked six-year-old girl to accept the prize in his stead as symbol of innocence. What had been designed as a celebration of Confucianism ended up highlighting its embedded flaws. Today, in its name, the Chinese state can set up an alternative peace prize and award the alleged honor to whom it pleases in a completely opaque process. If this represents Asian values, the world should shiver.
The party has a long record of opportunistically exploiting Confucianism to shore up its appeal. Liu Shaoqi (劉少奇), in the 1940s one of the five-strong leadership group around Mao Zedong (毛澤東), argued that the essence of becoming an effective communist was the same as becoming a good Confucian — inner steel, self-criticism and self-discipline. Yet even while he wrote, the same party could damn Confucianism for trapping China in hidebound pre-modern traditions, corruption and suffocating poverty. Today that criticism is forgotten. The party now needs Confucianism too much to dare to be critical.
Part of the overreaction to Liu Xiaobo is that the party leadership knows that regime change in the Confucian Imperial era always came through revolt from below — and that when Liu Xiaobo dismisses Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) as leader of “the communist mafia” he combines effective and highly personal attacks on the new communist mandarinate with principled adherence to human rights and constitutional democracy. This was the position of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), who toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911, appealing to universal values. The danger is obvious.
If the strains in the economy were less acute, the party could be more relaxed. But China escaped the full force of the world recession only by resorting to a reckless credit-driven expansion; state-owned banks have near doubled their lending in just three years. As a result, today’s Chinese banking system has trillions of dollars of non-performing debts that make the US and UK banking system in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis look positively sound. The world economy cannot absorb the volume of Chinese exports; there is not the demand. The gravely unbalanced Chinese economy is a bubble about to pop. It needs root and branch reform — reforms that go to the very foundations of communist rule.
But without economic growth the regime has no prop on which to rely; if it cannot provide jobs and the prospect of prosperity, its only rationale is that it alone can hold the vast country together. This is no longer a party that can plausibly argue it is the custodian of a communist revolution; nor is it a party legitimized by the ballot box. It was the conjuncture of economic difficulties, notably inflation, and legitimacy that ignited Tiananmen in 1989 — and many senior officials, including the likely next Chinese president Xi Jinping’s (習近平) father, were very sympathetic to the protesters’ demands because one way or another China had to find its way to legitimate government. For 20 years the arguments have been put on ice.
Xi Jinping is the leading candidate of the fifth generation of China’s leaders to succeed Hu; but it was the fifth generation of leaders in the Soviet Union who found that the lack of legitimacy, five generations after the revolution, plus endemic economic problems were unmanageable.
The conservatives in the party do not know whether to trust Xi Jinping; he could be, given his father’s views, China’s Mikhail Gorbachev — ready to bust open the Chinese political system. And Liu Xiaobo could be China’s Andrei Sakharov — the Russian human rights activist given the Nobel peace prize in 1975 just before the fifth generation of Soviet leaders took over, but only to disband the Soviet Union because there was no other way forward.
Xi Jinping cannot take the succession, which could yet be very bloody, for granted. This is how to understand the mobilization by the world’s second-biggest economic power against one human rights activist. The big political actors in China have not spoken out, leaving the statements and explanations to minor foreign office spokespeople. They want to keep their powder dry for bigger battles.
It is lonely arguing that China is in deep economic and political trouble. But what has happened over Liu Xiaobo suggests that there are some in agreement — the men at the top of the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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