Of course, there’s a cottage industry of commentators dedicated to complaining about Friedman. And it’s tempting to dismiss him as a lone bloviator, but he’s not exactly a voice in the wilderness. Last year the Times published a baffling op-ed from a self-described “overeducated” Ivy Leaguer who left a dead-end job to move to Beijing and teach English and, bizarrely, used the experience to appeal to the supporters of the then-popular Occupy Wall Street movement:
To the Occupiers and their sympathizers, I say vote—not with the ballot, but with your feet. Now that your encampment has disbanded, don’t just leave Zuccotti Park: leave America. For China. . . . China wants you. Job prospects [for English speakers] are abundant. The effects of the Great Recession of 2008 may be felt in the United States for years, but they barely scratched China.
Maybe this was a humor column. It’s certainly grimly amusing to picture Occupy Wall Street sympathizers packing up en masse and heading to China. There they could express disgust with income inequality in America by watching Chinese peasants do things such as collect and save their own excrement to use as fertilizer in their gardens, lest they go hungry.
Of course, one of the reasons for the kid-gloves treatment of China by the American punditry is that Western visitors are largely confined to the modern cities, and never see how the vast majority of the Chinese population scrapes by. That’s not really a worry, though, because if you want to know how the other 99 percent live—or at least the 95 percent or so that do not belong to the Communist party—the Chinese government is eager to tell our Times-approved tour guide from Bejing what to think:
There are problems here, of course. China is a nation that unapologetically rejects Western democracy—and yet I am surprised to find that Chinese citizens and the news media have as much freedom as they do. For my money, CCTV News English, a channel offered by China’s major state television broadcaster, is more fair and balanced than Fox News.
Saying “There are problems here, of course” in describing a country that has a brisk market in organs harvested from executed political prisoners might be understating things a bit.
Perhaps the overeducated columnist was unaware that, outside of whatever’s being pumped into televisions in Bejing’s English classrooms, the Chinese journalistic establishment has a unique feature known as “internal reference publications.” In China, the state media pump out so much propaganda that the country’s rulers found it impossible to govern effectively without accurate information. So the party set up its own shadow news media that are held to much more rigorous standards, and the reports they produce are not available to the general public. Perhaps a similar arrangement would benefit the readers of the New York Times opinion pages.
Credit where credit is due: Times readers do have an internal reference publication—it’s called the news section. On Christmas Day 2011, a few weeks before the Times op-ed columnist suggested that economically frustrated Americans should regard China as a giant temp agency with exotic food, the following story appeared in the news pages:
China’s state-run media have had a field day this autumn with Occupy Wall Street, spinning an almost daily morality play about capitalism gone amok and an American government unable or unwilling to aid the victims of a rapacious elite. Occupy Wukan is another matter entirely. The state press has been all but mute on why 13,000 Chinese citizens, furious over repeated rip-offs by their village elite, sent their leaders fleeing to safety and repulsed efforts by the police to retake Wukan. But the village takeover can be ignored only at Beijing’s peril: There are at least 625,000 potential Wukans across China, all small, locally run villages that frequently suffer the sorts of injustices that prompted the outburst this month in Wukan.
Indeed, once you venture away from the opinion pages, the Times’s reporting on China is pretty good. This is not just the situation at the Times, either. It’s generally true that while oppression and human rights abuses remain undercovered by pundits and talking heads, the correspondents concerned with who, what, where, and when are giving a far more reliable and accurate assessment of China.
This disconnect reflects the fact that the pundits at the top of the media food chain regurgitate a consensus among political elites who are either in denial or actively covering up the human rights horrors of modern-day China.
The problem of China and Western intellectuals is hardly new. “Four hundred years ago, when Italian and French Jesuits went to China, they saw all that was trivial and missed all that was essential,” writes French author Guy Sorman in Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century. “In Les Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a 1702 bestseller written by French Jesuits, the Chinese people were portrayed as an amorphous superstitious mass, whereas the Confucian mandarins were deemed by our great travelers to be delightful men of letters. So deep was the imprint they left on the Enlightenment philosophers, Leibniz and Voltaire in particular, that Voltaire lived in the hope of Europe being ruled by an enlightened despot and enjoying a godless morality.”
If the mystique that China is culturally ill-suited for democracy can rook the guy who helped invent differential calculus, Tom Friedman has to be a comparatively easy mark. But unlike today’s amateur Sinologists, Leibniz and Voltaire weren’t around to watch a group of supposedly enlightened mandarins turn their country into a giant graveyard, as Mao and his acolytes did.
For much of that time, the Cold War provided at least a fig leaf of justification for ignoring horrific events such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Engagement with China by the West was seen almost exclusively through the lens of containing the Soviets. The human costs of looking the other way regarding China’s misdeeds could be balanced against the potential costs of failing to counterbalance the Soviets in Asia.
But 40 years later in a different geopolitical context, the image of Nixon and Kissinger going to China and winning over the inscrutable Maoists has been fetishized as the platonic ideal of foreign policy genius. Thus the odd legacy of undue reverence surrounding U.S.-China relations. One telling example of this is that the China specialists in our foreign policy-industrial complex are known as “China hands.” If you opened a newspaper and read of official concern that “Norwegian hands will be displeased with the Export-Import Bank’s decision,” you’d laugh yourself silly at the notion of a body of experts on Norway whose opinion must be heeded. But with the China hands, we’re expected to acknowledge that the country’s complexities are beyond the understanding of all but a select few and to follow their lead in obfuscating the Chinese government’s oppression and cruelty.
James Mann, the Los Angeles Times’s former Beijing bureau chief, was so bothered by this state of affairs that a few years ago he wrote The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. The book is a taxonomy of all the transparently misleading buzz words, tropes, and justifications that brought us to the point where we “assume repression as a baseline,” says Mann. The argument is skillfully presented and damning, which perhaps explains its lack of impact. The book has, however, made navigating the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., a little easier for Mann. “There are now people that cross the street when they see me,” he says.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the pervasively optimistic view of modern-day China is that most of us can remember the brief-but-revelatory moment when there was widespread clarity about the essential nature of the regime. Tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The world watched as the People’s Liberation Army fired indiscriminately into a crowd of unarmed protesters. Rickshaws carried away body after body, but still thousands refused to leave. The government eventually succeeded in clearing and blockading the square, in part by entering the crowd with tanks and crushing people under the treads. When protesters tried to reenter the area on June 5, many were shot in the back as they were driven away. Later that same day, one brave man stood alone in the middle of Beijing’s Chang’an Boulevard, bringing a line of tanks to a complete stop, and the image almost instantly became part of the iconography of freedom.
Throughout most of the 1980s, economic liberalization in China had been encouraged. But with Tiananmen Square, the fiction that China was on its way to transforming into something other than a party-run state evaporated. Network news devoted 25 percent of its airtime for 20 days to the situation in China. American political leaders were unanimous in their disapproval, filling the Congressional Record with 3,000 pages of condemnation.
Then in a rather tragic bit of irony, the protesters in Tiananmen Square found interest in their cause overtaken by the failure of communism elsewhere. In August, Poland acquired the first noncommunist government in the East Bloc. In September, massive protests broke out in East Germany, the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and its empire. The courageous Chinese democracy activists probably even played a role in bringing down the Iron Curtain, though they rarely get credit for it. When the kommissars in East Germany began debating whether to violently put down the gathering crowds at the Berlin Wall, no doubt the swift and universal condemnation of the Tiananmen Square crackdown a few months earlier weighed on their minds. The Berlin Wall came down on November 9.
The Bush administration was soon preoccupied with the unwinding of the Soviet empire, and China took a backseat. In his book Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights, James Peck lays out a disturbing narrative showing how quickly concerns about China dissipated following Tiananmen Square. He quotes Douglas Paal, a China specialist on the Bush administration’s National Security Council staff: “We were not interested in adding China to the list of basket cases. We had no interest in pushing them over the edge.” Still, Tiananmen Square was not completely forgotten by Congress. The Bush administration had extended Most Favored Nation status to China, and Democrats twice proposed legislation that would tie China’s trade benefits to improvements in human rights. Both bills attracted significant support from Republicans, and both were vetoed by Bush.
But to the extent there was bipartisan agreement about China’s human rights abuses, that comity was definitively wrecked by Bill Clinton. As a candidate, Clinton had attacked Bush for not supporting the human rights legislation and decried the “bloody butchers of Beijing.” In his 1992 acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Clinton promised “an America that will not coddle tyrants, from Baghdad to Beijing.”
Once president, though, he found that China’s cheap labor force and huge consumer market were of increasing importance to American business. Clinton initially convinced Democratic leaders to shelve their China legislation by promising an executive order to link trade and human rights. The order was revoked within a year as business interests grew skittish over the looming deadline. In the early 1990s, the U.S. government had regularly issued statements in defense of Chinese dissidents. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, the practice had been curbed substantially.
U.S. rhetoric turned positively triumphal, as if Communist China would be swept away any day now. The Congressional Record was no longer full of denunciations of Chinese human rights abuses, but assurances that continued economic engagement would usher in a free China. Naturally, Clinton was a major proponent of this argument. In 1997, he told Jiang Zemin, “You’re on the wrong side of history,” confident that economic engagement would “increase the spirit of liberty over time . . . just as inevitably as the Berlin Wall fell.”
By 1999, there was already almost no daylight on China between Clinton and soon-to-be President George W. Bush. “The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral,” Bush said in one of his first foreign policy speeches. “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.” He added, “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”
But 24 years after Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist party in China is still thriving. It looks increasingly like China isn’t necessarily on the wrong side of history, so much as critics of China are on the wrong side of the American business and foreign policy establishment.
There’s a strong case to be made in favor of economic engagement with China. To the extent that China has awkwardly embraced capitalism in the last 30 years or so, economic conditions have undeniably improved as a result. In a country with a billion people whose living standards are deplorable, that’s not something to dismiss lightly. But at the very least this progress must be weighed against the high cost of American business interests going out of their way to silence criticism of China’s human rights record in order to curry favor with the Chinese government.