LONDON–In the 1970s it was Brazil that was going to be the superstar of the decade – – and perhaps for ever more. In the 1980s the talk was of Japan. In the 1990s China. Brazil and Japan came unstuck in different ways – – Brazil, after decades of being the century’s fastest growing economy (along with Taiwan), because it overspent and, in its massive state and social sectors, chronically underperformed. Japan because its quasi feudal company and ministerial structures too well protected the dross as well as the gold in a system that never could bring itself to embrace capitalist meritocracy in all its parts.
Now the indications are increasing that China will be the third big falling star of the latter half of the twentieth century. China perhaps after all “is not a miracle about to be performed”. In China the veneer of end-of-the-century technology and know-how is eggshell thin.
China, since the days in 1793 of the mission of Lord Macartney, emissary of King George III, has kept its distance from the West, preferring to be as “self-contained as a billiard ball”, to quote the great historian Alain Peyrefitte. It was Peyrefitte who argued in “The Collision of Civilizations” that Macartney’s decision not to kowtow to the emperor gave the Chinese the impression that their civilization was denied. Thus they withdrew into their bunker and have remained for the last 200 years prickly, ultra-sensitive, quick to take offense and too ready to assume the worst of the West’s motives.
Thus among Sinologists has developed a strong school of thought that there is only one way of dealing with China–a sort of delayed, reversed, kowtow, always leaning over backwards neither to provoke nor annoy China, even allowing China to re-write whatever language it is negociating in. This is combined with the propensity of many in the West, both in politics and business, to project the economic growth rates of the Deng Xiaoping era right into the distant future, while taking little note of its paucity of legal and institutional framework (unlike its rival India or Hong Kong) to contain such endeavour. Reasoning of this kind, assuming China will soon mature into a superstate, seems to blight good sense. “It encourages China”, as the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has written in his provocative new book “East and West”. “to think it can become part of the modern world entirely on its own terms. Were that to happen it would make the world a more dangerous and less prosperous place.”
Patten who with this book demonstrates that he is certainly the most literate and perhaps the most thoughtful of contemporary western practising politicians, draws on his experience of playing an inherited bad hand to try and secure some sort of democratic security for the city state he was charged to hand over to the communist mainland. “Hong Kong deserved better of Britain” he writes. “It was a sad way to go”. A modicum of a redeeming feature is Patten’s appraisal of lessons learnt and how to deal with China in the future.
Since the Communist Revolution in 1949 western governments in their China policy “have offered us with rare exceptions, a choice of extremes–flab or flint, engagement or constraint”. Lurching from one to another has made little sense. President Bill Clinton having criticised George Bush for pampering Beijing’s dictators has come perilously close to doing exactly that himself.
The decision earlier this year by both Europe and the U.S. not to censor China at the UN Human Rights Commission marked the low point for contemporary western policy. Engagement is one thing. Blindness, timidity and forsaking the root-essentials of what western society has achieved after its own painful evolution is another.
Patten has it right: “I’m not scared witless of the People’s Republic of China, nor mesmorised by China’s might and majesty. I am on balance more scared of things going wrong in China–the splintering of China, the breakdown of governance. China is at the end of an era. Marxism and Maoism are dead. What does the communist party have to offer other than cynicism and decadence?”
Sometimes, as Patten concludes, one has to pinch oneself to remember who needs who most. Perhaps, to begin with, we should never forget the simple but important fact that China represents only 1.7% of all western exports added together.
It is quite pathetic, it is laughable, but above all distasteful that western countries regularly betray each other, and in so doing the human rights activists inside China, in an effort to better position themselves in this quite modest market place.
If, as Patten argues, the West could stand shoulder to shoulder and say once and mean it, “stop using economic and trade threats; you are in no position to do so; it is unacceptable behaviour”, Beijing would get the message.
