BOOKS:
Soothing China

By Lloyd Macauley Richardson

Lloyd Richardson on The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression by James Mann

The author of two previous books about China — Beijing Jeep: A Case Study of Western Business in China (1997) and About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (1998) — James Mann had a big hit in 2004 with Rise of the Vulcans, a group biography about the Bush foreign policy team. Here he returns to his first love. In the introduction to this book, Mann explains his continuing fascination with the subject:

Twenty years ago, after covering China as Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, I returned to the newspaper’s Washington bureau. Editors asked me what I might be interested in covering. . . .  America and Asia, I replied. They acted as if I were crazy. That’s not a full-time job, one editor told me; there’s not enough to write about. It was late 1987, and back then virtually all of the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and intelligence reporters in Washington were of necessity covering American policy toward the Soviet Union (then in the final years of the Cold War) and the Middle East (then as now a mess).

No, really I protested. Asia policy is worth covering in Washington. Honestly. . . . And so, with my newspaper’s grudging assent, I began to follow Asia once again, particularly China, but from a different perspective — this time not as a foreign correspondent living in Beijing, but as a Washington story, an American story.

In this new book, Mann examines China’s prospects for a democratic future and finds them dismal. More important, he asks why nobody in the United States seems to care.

Mann identifies two scenarios that commentators tend to raise when speculating about China’s future. For the occasional right-winger who would genuinely like to see China’s communist system fail, there is the “Upheaval Scenario.” Proponents  foresee an apocalyptic meltdown coming any day now. China’s system is inherently unstable, say these doomsday advocates. Growth is limited to the urban economy and is unsustainable. Anyway, no amount of growth can satisfy the demands of the rural Chinese masses as they seek their fair share of China’s new-found prosperity. Rather than a smooth transition to a democratic utopia, China will sink into the abyss of social disorder and/or regional disintegration. For those of us looking for any crack in the Chinese communist trade juggernaut, this outcome is not displeasing — though we all recognize that it would wreak havoc on the Chinese people, who have probably suffered enough over the past 80 years. Those of us who can honestly foresee this as a possible outcome for China are in the overwhelming minority.

By far the more prevalent view is what Mann calls the “Soothing Scenario.” Deterministic enough to embarrass the most committed Marxist, this view holds that (in China at least) political liberalization will follow economic liberalization as surely as day follows night. This could be the way events unfold in China over the next decades. Or it could be just so much wishful thinking. Mann does not object to this position on its merits. His complaint is that this scenario has become dominant, and proponents have stifled serious debate on our China policy by stigmatizing all who disagree with them. Dissenters are labeled “China bashers” or dinosaurs still suffering from a “Cold War mentality.” They are extreme, or “ideological.” If they suggest that the “Upheaval Scenario” might in some way be the fault of the Chinese Communist Party, then they are “provocative,” “troublemakers,” or, worst of all, “pushing the envelope.” Once properly labeled, these people can be safely ignored. Such is the state of the debate about China policy in the United States as Mann describes it.

Who, then, are the soothers? And why are they so anxious to control the terms of debate about China? They fall into two categories — the China hands, who are experts on China, and the China cheerleaders, members of the general public who love those cute Pandas, chopsticks, and everything else Chinese.

The soother-in-chief can always be found in the Oval Office, and this has been true for three decades without regard to political party. The president’s role is enabled by U.S. government experts — political appointees and career bureaucrats — who work on China policy at such agencies as dod, State, and cia (collectively, the “China hands”). These official types are joined by the other China hands outside government: “leading academic experts on China, business executives who are eager to trade and invest in China, and the think tanks and other elite organizations.” In other words, our elites are all soothers. But these are smart people. Why do they choose to be China’s sycophants? Are they just wrong-headed? Are they stooges for the party line?

Mann’s answer to these questions is “follow the money.” China’s massive exports to the United States have given it lots of dollars to spread around, and China has not been shy about using these funds to achieve its political ends. Most soothers, as it turns out, benefit directly or indirectly from current China policy. They like their scenario; it distracts the rest of us, so we don’t notice the highly lucrative trade and investment carried on with China by American companies and their enablers.

One related aspect of this problem that Mann does not address is the pernicious effect of good old-fashioned careerism, at least where the true China hands are concerned. Of course money is always important; but many China hands are just plain afraid to take the risk of being declared persona non grata by the Chinese government. This is a concern not just with the current job, but with future promotion as well. Take the State Department as an example: If you are an Asia type, the odds of getting to senior levels in the Department are remote unless you have punched that China ticket. And if you don’t get to the senior level, your value in private industry after your retirement is severely curtailed.

Mann suggests another reason for soothers’ hypersensitivity to conflict with China — a sensibility grounded in the McCarthy era. Particularly in the case of the older China hands, these are individuals who know what real hard times are — no access to China’s libraries and museums, no junkets to the Great Wall — because they remember when all China was one vast Forbidden City. These experts have an intense interest in avoiding a return to the bad old days, so whatever you do, don’t rock the boat. Don’t say anything to insult the Chinese people. They still feel awful about their oppressive colonial experience.

There is something about Mann’s attempt to link this hypersensitivity to McCarthyism that does not ring true. A few years ago, Ambassador Richard Walker wrote an article for the National Interest about his experience in academia in the 1950s and ’60s when he was a promising young scholar at Yale. In the article, Walker decries the McCarthy era and McCarthy’s private reign of terror. At the same time, he is clear that one of the unintended consequences of that period was to strengthen the hand of leftist faculty — or at least the China apologists — in academia, John King Fairbank at Harvard being only the most obvious example. Some of us who were students in these China Departments during the late 1960s and ’70s could also attest to the approving tone of our faculty whenever they mentioned the Chinese revolution. This phenomenon, coupled with the leftist anti-Americanism that permeates our educated classes in this country, is more than enough to ensure that China policy is now controlled by a generation that is very comfortable dealing with the Chinese, warts and all. In other words, soothers may soothe not because they’re hypersensitive to Chinese feelings, but because they’re genuinely committed to the cause of a communist China.

Whatever the motivation, there can be no question that, for the soothers, the main goal of our China policy is to avoid conflict. In my experience, the Reaganites were a little less squishy on China than some earlier administrations, but the panda-huggers quickly reverted to form once Bush 41 took office. The soother mantra is “Don’t upset the Chinese.” This is often followed by “You don’t want to help the hard-liners, do you?” — as if all that stands between us and Armageddon is a tiny but fearless band of closet liberals on the Chinese Central Committee. Unfortunately for us, these people really are communists — every last one of them. They may be rich communists, but they’re still communists. The only point of doctrine on which they diverge among themselves is who will get to lead the victory parade up Pennsylvania Avenue.

The white house bears its share of blame for the constant need to please that so epitomizes our China relationship. There is nothing like a trip to China to demonstrate the dignity of the office of the president. For their part, the Chinese do a wonderful job at keeping the U.S. relationship at the presidential level. Nothing can be routinized. The Chinese are masters at flattery and have ensured that every American president since Nixon has understood how essential it is to have a personal relationship with China’s leaders. Lost in all the ego-stroking is the fact that when American presidents travel to Beijing bearing gifts, they only reinforce the Chinese view of the U.S. as a difficult-to-manage vassal. And what do American presidents get out of that personal relationship in return (apart from the photo ops)? As it turns out, not much. We give and give, and give and give, but no amount of presidential obeisance will stop the Chinese from going ballistic over even the most trivial incident if it’s to their advantage. Threatening to downgrade relations is just course-of-business for the Chinese communist leadership, whether the issue is U.S. arms sales to Taiwan in the 1980s; Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to Cornell (his alma mater) in 1995; the incident off Hainan where the Chinese fighter bumped our ep-3 in 2001; or any of a dozen crises in between. And why do they act like this? Because it works. No U.S. president wants to be the one to call a special meeting of the soothers to tell them — well, that he’s lost China again. Notice, however, that in a true emergency, when the president really needs to get someone on the hotline, he is likely to find that the personal relationship doesn’t count, because the head guys are suddenly all out on the golf course.

Events following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre illustrate the point. The U.S. Embassy was literally in a war zone — even fired upon by Chinese troops. Meanwhile, efforts to convey diplomatic protests were stonewalled. Our ambassador at the time, James Lilley, finally decided he had to return to dc for a meeting with President Bush to strategize on a tough, meaningful U.S. response. The president had already authorized a range of sanctions against China, but they were having no effect. The president was particularly frustrated because he had been unable to open any sort of direct channel to the top Chinese leadership, notwithstanding the close personal relationship that the president believed he had with Deng Xiaoping and others. (Remember this was a president who had been intimately involved with China since 1974.) Not only did the personal relationship fail to bear fruit, but the president’s frustration led to a terrible decision — to send a high-level secret mission to Beijing. This was a bad enough move in itself, signaling to the Chinese as it did that they really didn’t need to take U.S. sanctions seriously. Compounding the error, however, is the message the president asked the mission to convey: As Lilley wrote in his book China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage and Diplomacy in Asia (Public Affairs, 2004): “He [the president] needed some give on the part of the Chinese government to get the Congress and the media off his back [emphasis added].” This message says it all. Why would the president of the United States want to put himself in the position of brokering better treatment for China when it has behaved so badly? Why shouldn’t the American people, their representatives in the Congress, and even the media be outraged at China’s behavior?

So much for the China hands. But what about the China cheerleaders, the otherwise normal Americans who have bought into the Soothing Scenario? Mann explains how the China lobby mentality works with those who are not by any means China experts but who see nothing wrong with our current China policy in any case. Mann explains how the American middle class travels to China, feels the part of the 800-pound panda that is most like them, and concludes — mirabile dictu — that “the Chinese are just like us.” Or worse, “China is just like the United States (if you ignore that Stalinist thing).” It is easy to see how people reach that conclusion, wrong though it may be; as Americans in China for short-term tourism or business, we see the modern cities with their “skyscrapers, neon, fast food, and fashion,” and China doesn’t look that foreign to us. We encounter cab drivers and other ordinary citizens who seem unafraid to criticize their government in their conversations with us. Pretty normal, right? From this private talk, we assume that public talk is just as open. But that assumption is dead wrong. Mann points out that private talk is cheap, and the government can afford to ignore it until someone goes from talk to organization. Then they crack down with a vengeance. Mann argues credibly that this is the only way to understand the Chinese government’s over-reaction to Falun Gong as an example.

One thing we don’t see in our brief visits to China, as Mann rightly notes, is “the many hundreds of millions of Chinese in the countryside.” It is only natural to respond to the commonality that we think we see — middle-class people leading middle-class lives. Americans are a forthright people; we take things at face value. We expect the same of our institutions — social, economic, and political — and we are suspicious of any lack of transparency in them. Not so, our Chinese friends. For them, personal relationships still trump rules. In America, if we need to renew our driver’s license, we go the dmv and stand in line. We don’t like it, but we accept it. No self-respecting Chinese would stand in line. Everybody in China has a friend at dmv. If they need to renew their license, they get their buddy at dmv to handle it for them. This kind of thinking is just like walking on the grass. The grass will be fine if only one person does it, but if everyone does it, there’s no more grass.

It is true that the Chinese communists have succeeded over 80 years in destroying to a large extent the ties of kinship, tribe, religion, and similar relationships found in traditional society. But no vacuum is left because the void has been filled by party ties. The result is that, in 80 years, Chinese society has gone from obscure to opaque, at least from a foreigner’s perspective. Even people who have done business in China for decades will admit they are never quite sure who they are dealing with on the other side of the table. Like so many mob bosses, the party apparatchiks don’t let a deal get to closing without securing a piece of the action.

You therefore have to ask who the middle class is in China and what “interests” its members seek to protect. These are important questions to consider in asking “Whither China?” At the very least, it should make us uneasy with those who argue that liberalization is inevitably coming to China as it did to Taiwan and South Korea. Mann demonstrates how specious that argument is: “China’s emerging urban middle class is merely a tiny proportion of the country’s overall population — far smaller than in Taiwan or South Korea. There are an estimated 800 million to 900 million Chinese peasants . . . most of them living in rural areas.” And the implications of these numbers? “If China were to have nationwide elections and if peasants were to vote their own interests, separate from those of the Starbucks sippers in the cities, then the urban middle class would lose.” Mann goes on to observe that the aggregate population of China’s 10 largest cities is only 62 million — big in absolute terms but only five percent of China’s total population. So given the choice, what do you sacrifice first — your “rice bowl” or your right to vote?

For Americans, by contrast, it is the absolute numbers that impress. If you are a producer of a consumer product, you’d die to find 60 million customers in a single national market. But it makes you lose sight of the fact that this population is just a drop in the bucket, considered politically. Confronted by the stark facts of their own political reality, China’s middle class might find a number of scenarios more palatable than real representative democracy — their slogan might well be “Anything but pluralism!” That would even fit on a bumper sticker. It is these hard facts that drive Mann to ask whether there might not be a third scenario for China. Mann suggests a couple of possibilities. The middle class might continue to support the party as preferable to the alternatives. Or, if the party proves ineffective in managing rural protest over the glaring inequities between urban and rural life, the middle class might back a takeover by the military or the security apparatus — stability triumphing over plurality.

Some sort of third scenario becomes even more plausible when one considers the actual identities of China’s “middle class.” The Communist Party is generally estimated to have about 70 million members. Assuming that party members keep a close eye on any profitable enterprise, this suggests that a substantial proportion of China’s middle class consists of party cadres and their relatives, or people who owe their jobs to enterprises controlled by party cadres and their relatives. How independent-minded can we expect the middle class to be under these circumstances?

But while the middle class may not be a big deal in China, they are highly effective in managing American public opinion to the Party’s benefit. That’s because China’s middle class are all alumni of the same institutions attended by U.S. elites — what Mann calls the “Embattled Elites Equivalence and Commiseration School.” These worldly folk — like entrenched elites everywhere — have come to understand that they have more in common with their class comrades in other nations than they do with the nativist zealots who would overrun their government, given half the chance. These people are sophisticates. They understand that sometimes you have to make common cause with the enemy.

As Mann explains it:

The good guys in America and the goods guys in China have to team up to fight our opponents in both countries. There are critics in the United States who want tougher policies toward China, and there are hawks in China who seek tougher policies towards America. Let’s join together against them.

There is not much doubt that our China policy over the past decades has been beneficial for elites in the United States and China. Mann suggests it is not clear how the less fortunate in either country might feel about this policy. In China, a lot of peasants go without to subsidize middle-class progress in the cities. Here at home, a lot of manufacturing jobs have migrated to China in the past decade, and a lot of technology has gone with them. Good economics, perhaps, but certainly bad policy. Again, Mann does not conclude from these facts that current China policy is bad or wrong. He just asks why we cannot have an honest debate about what our interests in China are and whether current policy is the best way to advance those interests. And the time to have that debate is clearly right now.

Some would say that, since everyone wants political liberalization for the Chinese people in the long run, there is no real disagreement as to substance, but only as to timing. To these perennial optimists, Mann says:

Two or three decades from now, it may be too late. . . . By then China will be wealthier, and the entrenched interests opposing democracy will probably be much stronger. By then China will be so thoroughly integrated into the world’s financial and diplomatic systems, because of its sheer commercial power, . . . there would be no international support for any movement to open up China’s political system [emphasis added].

Then we’ll have to ask, who integrated whom and into whose world order?

In the meantime, China may not see democracy any time soon, but it will still be a lot sooner than we will see that “honest debate” about China policy that Mann pleads for.