The past two years have seen China resorting to Orwellian tactics by intervening in how Taiwan’s name is used, something that the White House has called it out on. However, it is not only the administration of US President Donald Trump that has pushed back on Beijing’s bullying.
The European Parliament, in its EU-China relations report, called on the EU and member states to resist Chinese military provocations against Taiwan and bullying that threatens peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.
In a speech on Thursday last week at the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank, US Vice President Mike Pence slammed China for its invasive posturing in areas ranging from national security to political values and trade, and its attempts to change the international order.
China is behaving in a manner that gradually confirms comments made by then-US president Bill Clinton at a 1998 speech at Peking University, where he said China was swimming against the tide of history.
Ever since the US government adopted a policy of engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1972, the West’s China policy has essentially been the modernization paradigm, assuming that economic and social development would usher in an opening up of the political system and eventually democratization in China.
Seventeen years after democratic nations allowed an authoritarian China into the WTO, China’s GDP has increased nine-fold. In 2010, China’s economy overtook Japan’s to become the second-largest in the world. Last year, it had a GDP of US$13.17 trillion and a GDP per capita of almost US$9,000.
Yet China has failed to show the slightest trace of a democratic revolution or an increase in political participation, the development of free elections or the establishment of independent oversight mechanisms.
On the contrary, it continues to curtail its citizens’ political rights, restrict media and Internet freedoms, and deny personal freedom of expression and religion.
Pence’s address indirectly acknowledged the failure of the engagement strategy that the US has followed for 40 years.
China has continued to take advantage of the free and open environment in democratic countries and engage in unfair trade practices, such as forced technology transfer and piracy of copyrighted materials.
It has also used sharp power against higher education institutions, think tanks, media outlets, and elected representatives and government officials in democratic countries, permeating and influencing foreign governments — through personnel exchanges, cultural events, courses and broadcasts — and expanding its authoritarian values to further its core interests.
At the same time, it is using the rapid economic growth made possible by its authoritarian system as a tool to suppress its people and perpetuate its the regime stability theory to legitimize one-party rule.
China is one of the world’s least free and least democratic countries. From the first wave of democratization starting in 1828 to the end of the third wave in 1990, the majority of countries in the world have sought to establish a democratic structure of government.
Decades after the economic reforms implemented under former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), 75 percent of the world’s countries have, through political reform, power shifts or democratic transfers of power, transitioned from one-party states, military dictatorships or strongman rule into partially or completely free systems.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2017 report showed that China ranked 139 out of 167 countries, in an evaluation based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation and political culture.
In The End of History and the Last man, US political economist Francis Fukuyama wrote that democracy was the ultimate form of government in human societies.
However, China is still trying to forge its own way, with the debt diplomacy of its Belt and Road Initiative, and foisting its non-liberal, undemocratic model of governance on the world.
From an international relations perspective, the Chinese communist regime will be able to rely on its economic reforms for regime stability in the short term; however, in the long term China will surely follow the historical trend predicted by modernization theory. The CCP will eventually collapse.
Masao Sun is a former diplomat.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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