democratic revolutions?

Bad Elements

Ian Buruma’s Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing explores the views of Chinese dissidents through interviews in the US, Singapore, Taiwan, Hongkong, Shenzen and Beijing through interviews conducted in 1999 around ten years after the 4 June massacre in Tiananmen Square.

In the US he speaks with student leaders of the 1989 protests, the authors of the influential TV series River Elegy shown the previous year, and participants in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 after the downfall of the Gang of Four*. Many have moved on, to become successful business, or the academy. Others monitor human rights in China, yet others crusade, impotently, for the conversion of the Chinese nation to Christianity. Buruma paints them as fractured and largely dismissive of each other.

In Taiwan (this part of the book a revelation to me) and Singapore he speaks to much less well known activists who opposed the freedom denying regime that operated in Taiwan until the late 1980s and those who oppose the authoritarian regime which oppresses still in Singapore. Indeed Buruma in several places argues that Singapore was sometimes taken as a model for China’s authoritarian but capitalist future by those who argued China’s attributes (size, diversity, culture, lack of traditions) militate against democracy any time soon.

Inside China his ‘dissidents’ are a far more idiosyncratic bunch: lawyer famous for defending workers rights, an adherent of a banned but tolerated rural Christian sect, a cautious historian who writes the truth but carefully, the Professor who started the movement to record the names of everyone killed in June 1989 and a journalist no longer permitted to publish her views.

Buruma is at his most persuasive when documenting the kinds of lies that are told at every level of life: those who know about June 4 1989 cannot talk about it, especially not to their children for fear that they say something that gets them into trouble at school – from a teacher who likely as not feels equally the burden of silence.

He ends with a short reflection on the prospects for democracy in China. He wonders why so many Chinese intellectuals are skeptical about the prospects of democracy in China.  He rejects the gradualist argument proffered by many of his in-China interviewees who more fear chaos than hope for truth. He dreams of a velvet revolution, but accepts that there are few Vaclav Havels on offer in China. The conundrum is that to see beyond the lies requires free speech – but that in turn requires a complete change of government; hard to achieve without many seeing beyond the lies.(331)

But are all the barriers lies? He observes the general Chinese sense of inferiority born of 150 years of humiliation by the West. From this, his informants suggest, comes the fierce nationalism blended with a perceived social Darwinism: the struggle among nations for survival. Intellectuals advocate caution; they fear the rule of the majority which, according to a Professor Mao befriended by Buruma would be “tyranny. It took Europeans many years to realize that minorities had rights, too. In China it would be every man for himself. .. Never in history have sudden transitions been a good thing.” (334)

Buruma essentially rejects this. For him the failing of the Tiananmen Square dissent comes down to division among those opposing the regime (335). He sees the  stability valued by the intellectuals as false or shortsighted. There are already cracks in the regime. More and more people see through the moral and political bankruptcy. He makes the untestable claim that the longer the day of reckoning is put off, the greater the chaos, and sees it emerging already in the small scale localised rebellions of farmers against taxes and workers against unemployment in rust belt towns. But there is a difference between seeing through the lies and advocating the certain reign of confusion and likely loss of prosperity that would come with their overthrow, all for an uncertain and largely unprecedented democratic future.

Which is why the problem of Taiwan increases with every year of its successful democracy. Under the KMT, as in Singapore, and ultimately as in colonial Hong Kong for most of its history, Chinese people lived under an authoritarian state. But now the argument that democracy is not suited to the Chinese character starts to look thin, and a democratic future can at least more readily be envisioned.

So is ‘the risk of hanging onto a bankrupt system in the hope of prolonging an illusion of stability worse’, as Buruma suggests it may be. (Whether or not a bad established order is worse than unpredictable change as suggested by Chinese conservatives and David Hume might depend a lot on your personal time frame!). In the end Buruma can see no road to a peaceful transition. “Whatever it is that brings this rotting regime to an end, one can only hope that it will be peaceful. But hope is no the same as expectation.” (337).

Ten years have now passed since Burum’s research. China remains a low-middle income country, but one responsible for 10% of the worlds economic output. Average per capita income was $2010 in 2007, less than a twentieth of that of the US at market rates, about a 10th when looked at through purchasing power parity (ie what you can get for your money). In turn China’s per capita income is 10 times that of many poor African countries. From 1990 to the mid 2000s GDP per capita grew an annual average of 8% and the number of people on purchasing power parity incomes under US$1 per day fell to under 10% (130 million people). Nevertheless 35% of the population still lives on $2 per day or less and income inequality is rising. [Wikipedia and sources there cited.]

*Curious aside: yesterday reading the summaries of some 20th philosophical thinking I came across the Isiah Berlin idea quoted by Buruma in sepaking of Wei Jinsheng: that intellectuals are either foxes – who know many things – or hedgehogs – who know one big thing.

“Wei Jinsheng is clearly a hedgehog*. The one conviction he guards like a precious jewel, and about which he is lucid, always serious, and willing to stake his life, he had already expressed clearly in his 1978 manifesto on the Democracy Wall in Beijing. It goes to the hear of the Chinese problem. “History” he wrote “shows that there must be a limit to the amount of trust conferred upon any individual. Anyone seeking the unconditional trust of the people is a person of unbridled ambition. The important thing is to select the right person to put one’s trust in, and even more important is how such a person is to be supervised in carrying out the will of the majority. We can trust only those representatives who are supervised by us and resonsible to us. Such representatives should be chosen by us and not thrust upon us.” p 96.

This  idea is part of his ‘Fifth Modernisation’, a response to then new supreme leader Deng Xioaping’s ‘Four Modernisations” policy.