Guest Column
Living without Freedom in China
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Living without
Freedom in China
By Edward Friedman
It's not easy for American students to know what it means to live
without freedom. They know all the bad things about their own
country-Virginia Tech, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Enron and
Halliburton scandals, the LA riots, elections stolen, federal
attorneys fired for pursuing criminals rather than a political
agenda, etc. How democratic is America?, they cynically wonder.
When you tell them how awful these other places are, they ask,
aren't you just whitewashing your own society?
The hardest place to understand what the lack of freedom means is
China, which is nothing like the Stalin model or Cuba or North Korea.
It's by no stretch of the imagination a totalitarian society. In
post-Mao China, Chinese travel abroad in huge numbers. The country
has the fifth largest tourist population in the world, on its way to
being number one. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are
abroad; in internet use, China is about to overtake the U.S. as
number one in the world. It's a market society, brutally
competitive; the economy is less state-owned than France or Austria's,
for example. Life is not dominated by communist block units; you can
buy your own house or car, there's no forced labor. You can choose
your physician freely; most young Chinese would say they live in a
free, democratic society.
So what does it mean to say that Chinese people live without freedom?
First, it is a brilliant system at making people complicit with the
unfreedom. For days after the June 4, 1989, massacre in
Beijing of democracy supporters headquartered in Tiananmen
Square, there was great tension in the city between people who live
there and the occupying army. How did the party respond? Teachers
were ordered to teach their students a new song: "The Army loves the
people, the people love the Army." Parents couldn't say the song was
untrue lest their children repeat this back at school. You can't bring
up your children the way you want to.
This is true for many lies the Chinese are forced to let stand
uncontested. There still are committees for the defense of the
revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon
ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren't
complicit, maybe you won't get a passport. It may be held against your
child when s/he applies for college. You and your family will be
shunned in the neighborhood. You could be committed to a psychiatric
hospital.
China is not the worst stable authoritarian regime in the world: a
North Korean might consider it free. Even foreigners who go to
North Korea and then come back to China feel they are returning to a
free country. But you get faced every day with decisions that bring
it home to you that you're not. If your child is ill, should you
go to the pharmacy and buy some medicine? Of course, but medicines are
often frauds in China. There have been cases where baby formula is
bogus and children have died from receiving no nutrition. China has a
ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no
CDC, no NIH. It's also the world leader for people dying in industrial
accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water,
which is unpotable. A Chinese journalist recently went to 10
Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained
of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test
his blood. But he didn't give them his blood, he carried in a thermos
with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to
him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would
cost them endless money for treatment.
China has people who see the problems of this corrupt, arbitrary
society and try to do something about them. There are courageous
lawyers and journalists. The leading political crime in China is
land seizures. The economy is growing at a fantastic rate, which
means that you can sell pieces of land to a developer for a lot of
money. You don't want ordinary people to get rich. All the
goodies are grabbed as much as possible by the ruling group. Over
97 percent of all millionaires in China are relatives of the top
party elite. There are those who complain and resist, who stick to
their guns. Lawyers come in to defend them. Accordingly, China is
first in the world in the number of lawyers, journalists and Netizens
in prison.
These things are hard to see when one is visiting, but there are signs
one can see if one looks hard. Go to the railroad station at midnight,
and you will see tens of thousands of people sleeping in the street.
It is probably the most unequal stable society in the world.
Income in the poorest rural areas has been declining. There's no
union, with one exception: the government is now promoting getting
unions into multinational corporations, but as an instrument of
party control, not to help the workers. The Party doesn't like
foreigners doing things they don't know about. They want their
agents in the places where the foreigners are, to control things as much
as they can.
Freedom means the ability to hold your government
accountable. There is no way to do this in China, and people die. China
is said to have 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, and some
would say it would be 20 out of 20 if they didn't lie about the other
four. Everything is corrupt. The only way you can get anything
done is through corruption. This creates a sense of no morality. But
people want meaning in their lives. So there's a tremendous
religious revival. All over China, all religions are reviving.
The Party fears it. How does it respond? It crushes Christian
house churches, it doesn't like Lama Buddhism, it's careful about
Hui Muslims, but beyond that, it's pushing essentially its own
state religion, a combination of Han chauvinism, in which Chinese
worship the yellow emperor, and an authoritarian Confucianism. The state
is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to
explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world
as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism.
It's going to spread Confucian societies all around the world,
it's going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality
of people because it has this moral authority and all others are
inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world
is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center
of it.
China is a superpower. Its economy is rising, its military is rising,
and Chinese people in surveys are more popular in most countries of
the world than are Americans right now. China's going to be using
this money to serve certain purposes. Among them are undercutting
the power of the United States, democracy and human rights and
supporting authoritarian regimes. Whether it's Sudan or Nigeria, they
can buy up the oil and governments don't have to listen to any kind of
international pressure about conforming to human rights. China has
already defeated the international human rights regime.
China's rise means that freedom is in trouble. The era we're in is very
much like the era after WWI. Authoritarian models are rising and are
becoming more attractive. I can imagine a future in which
unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis
and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries,
London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China
regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese
model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.
In describing this Chinese rise and how I believe it has the potential
of being a threat to freedom in an extraordinary way that we haven't
seen since the end of WWI, I am not trying to suggest that Chinese
don't care about freedom; people do not need a Greek-Roman Christian
heritage to care about freedom. That kind of claim is
parochially and culturally very narrow. The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius
is one of Confucius' disciples). The word "individual" never
appears in the document. The language was
shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters
of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C.
Chang. Of course this is December 1948, the day after the Genocide
convention was passed. The communists didn't come to power for
another year.
There is no trouble in understanding freedom and human rights in
any culture in the world. People living in tyrannies may in
fact have a better understanding of what freedom is about than
American teens, who think it's just that you get your driver's
license in your late teens. The Chinese regime has fostered a
nationalism to trump democracy. People are taught that they are
threatened by democracy, that democracy would make people weak.
Party propaganda has it, "How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to
build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they
never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic
direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what
happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like
Chechnya and Bosnia? That's what the Americans really want. You are
fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian
system." The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the
Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They're proud to be
Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can
be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught
that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have
babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get
divorced, and don't care what happens to their elderly parents. Why
would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems
to work with many Chinese.
So what is growing in China is an authoritarian, patriotic, racially
defined, Confucian Chinese project which is going to be a formidable
challenge not just to the United States but, I think, to democracy,
freedom, and human rights all around the world. China is going to seem
quite attractive to many people. That is why it is so very
important to understand what living without freedom really means.
_______________________________________________
Edward Friedman is professor of political science at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. This essay is based on his presentation at
Living Without Freedom, a History Institute for Teachers sponsored by
FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5-6,
2007, held at and co- sponsored by the National Constitution
Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI's
History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A.
McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation;
this program was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation. See
www.fpri.org for videocasts and texts of this and other lectures.
For further information or to inquire about membership in FPRI,
please contact Alan Luxenberg at
al@fpri.org or call (215) 732-3774 x105.
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