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Friday, August 01, 2003

The Greatness of China Lies In China (A Rebuttal)

3:19 PM

(Xiamen, P.R. China) Old Cold War tin-soldiers just can’t seem to holster their pop-gun mouths even when the rest of the world long ago moved on to more realistic concerns than whose ballistic missile is or was the biggest and aimed the better. Is this because they are afraid of becoming as irrelevant as their former adversaries—the vast majority of the over-65 Communist Party functionaries of the world?

Thanks to the Internet, and the relative lack of news censorship in the People’s Republic of China, I have read several strangely anachronistic, Cold War-rhetoric assessments of today’s China in the Op-ed pages of major American Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Washington Post by a gentleman with whom I unfortunately share a first and last name. Since I am here, in mainland China, and he is not—and to my knowledge never has been—perhaps my investigative journalist-trained view will be at least of equal value as his. [I am a visiting professor of Literature in the English Language Department of Xiamen University.]

Since this Joseph A. Bosco—we even share the same middle initial, luckily, I no longer use mine in my by-line—habitually offers small-minded, mean-spirited testimonial and old school reactionary arguments on three points, we will mostly rebut in kind.

Political reform: While the other Mr. Bosco accurately credits the thrice purged Deng Xiaopeng with engineering the radical sea-change that transformed the world’s most populous nation from a controlled economy to a dynamically market driven one in the span of only two decades, he still cherishes painting him with the same old tar-brush as he does Mao Zedong—as do all of his ideological brothers of the right. Of course, he also applies the same shop-worn brush to the recently retired duo of President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zue Rongji, who together steered the course that resulted in one of history’s most amazing social and economic turnarounds. (He has yet to weigh in on newly elected President Hu and Premier Wen.)

It should be pointed out, however, that eternally attacking the ghost of the seriously flawed—and long deceased—Mao perhaps should not so often be done from a national glass house so full itself of shameless spirits and their truly shameful legacies. Say, for instance, one whose sitting President’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, one of Nazi Germany’s earliest and most enduring bankers, more than a year into America’s participation in the war to rid the world of that aberrant regime was found guilty of violating the Trading with the Enemy Act by Congress, censured and stripped of his Nazi-nourishing companies. (A scandalous statement? Yes, but true. Look it up.)

Political reform? Try explaining our version of that to Chinese university students who ask how a candidate can receive less votes than his competitor but become President of the United States because a partisan handful of judges decree it.

Try explaining political reform to those same students from the perspective of a country that habitually backs dictators of the militarist right only because said dictators sign up on the “right” side of an ideological concept that is meaningless to all but the advantaged.

The other Mr. Bosco attacks China for not yet evolving into a multiparty democracy when its Asian neighbors such as Japan and South Korea have done so with “political stability and economic prosperity.” Really? If recent memory serves, until 1945 Japan was a dictatorship with a living “God” as its ruler. Democracy and prosperity came only after a crushing defeat, an occupying U.S. Army and a Constitution written by an egomaniacal American general, and then propped up with billions of American dollars for some three decades—or until Detroit defaulted its automobile monopoly through corporate complacency, and American technology companies fell asleep at the transistor. But then Japan’s fractious society couldn’t hold onto its economic and political ascendancy for very long, could it? And Korea? Until 1945 it was a vassal state of Japan—North and South. Then came another war, an occupying U.S. Army and a lot more U.S. dollars.

South Korea and Japan: democracy and prosperity with “Made in the USA” stickers. And both “prosperous Asian democracies”, most particularly Japan, also benefited incalculably from not having to spend otherwise needed currency on its military sector. In the case of Japan, not a single Yen, since it was prohibited by law from doing so. And South Korea obediently and happily spent American dollars—and GI’s—to match its aggressively belligerent former half missile-and-tank for missile-and-tank while it spent other U.S. largesse to stimulate its quite late-blooming modern economy.

What did China get from the United States after the Red Army significantly helped us defeat Japan? A very bloody war against mostly American troops in Korea; the Cold War and a completely cold shoulder from any U.N. member who couldn’t risk American disfavor; and the costly effect of the “domino theory” in Southeast Asia.

Anyone who understands the painful history of China from the late Qing dynasty until the Second World War—from about 1840 till 1945—would also understand why only an all-powerful central government could have brought a unified China into the modern world as a sovereign state after a century or more of humiliation, occupation, splintering and cultural colonization by every Western power—plus Japan—that had a gunboat or two. The alternative, which the U.S. was financing prior to the Japanese invasion—and again after its defeat—would have been a nightmare beyond imagination: the largest totalitarian military dictatorship of the far right in the history of the world. Let us not forget that Chiang Kai-shek staffed his pre-World War Two advisory staff with Nazis (but more on the old Generalissimo later).

No. The chance for true democracy in China during the 20th Century was lost when the Western powers chose to demonize peasant and worker movements instead of nurturing them the same way we did militarist dictatorships. But it is definitely coming. Why? Partly because the people of China are gaining the means and information they need to determine their own future. But mostly it is because the increasingly irrelevant “old” Communist Party—and it knows it—has replaced the European version of Marxist-Leninism with an officially sanctioned idiom that its people have understood since before the birth of western culture: “It is glorious to get rich!” And golly damn they are going at it with a singleness of purpose that should warm the hearts of capitalists everywhere. And it is—because most if not all of them are falling all over themselves in the rush to set-up shop in China.

Of course, some folks in America take exception to this new twist on “Communism,” claiming that paying workers in South China the equivalent of 40 U.S. cents an hour is terrible on two fronts—exploitation of the workers, and the loss of jobs in America. On the former, it needs to be said that forty-cents over here isn’t what it is in the USA. Over here, in the smaller cities that one hour buys lunch in a sit-down restaurant. In other words, not too far from par with the minimum wage in America—when adjusted for what one’s currency actually buys and not a meaningless extrapolation comparing Bananas Foster with bananas. In the larger cities, professionals and skilled workers take home the U.S. equivalent of a whole lot more—and they are buying new homes, new cars, and fancy clothes at a bewildering clip. As to the loss of jobs in America? Well, that’s free-market free-trade capitalism for you.

However, if you really want to judge how smart some of those old “Long Marchers” were when it came time to change with the times, go deeper into the country-side where the backbone and soul of the Middle Kingdom has always lain. Where old Deng chose to start the “Reform and Opening up” that is the focus of so much attention today. He allowed the farmers of the failed collectives to start real farming again. He allowed them to plant what they wanted, and to sell the result at the best price they could get—in the cities, where workers in the gray-belching factories would spend an extra tenth of a Yuan for a fresh melon that tasted good and sweet like the old days.

Soon the farmers were selling all they could grow at prices rising with demand; they were actually making profits, and spending them on goods from the cities. The workers in the city saw this and as Deng had known they would, they began to clamor for the right to prosper also. And so it began—as so many things do in China: with fruits of the earth and sea.

20 years ago there was hardly a public restaurant in China; old China hands seem to remember two or three in Beijing. Today? They are everywhere, in cities and towns big and small, several on every block. And it’s not foreigners mainly chowing down on the world’s greatest cuisine three meals a day. We do, mind you, it’s just that there aren’t that many of us.

Is there still heartbreaking poverty in China? Yes. Just as there is still heartbreaking poverty though-out Los Angeles County, and every county in the United States. Much fewer beggars, though. Socialism is good for something.

The other Mr. Bosco also writes of “rampant corruption” in China. True, almost every week we read here in the many newspapers available about government officials, civil servants and influential businessmen somewhere in China being arrested and charged with some form of profiteering or corruption. But they are getting arrested. Occasionally one is even executed if he steals millions. I wonder if that would have deterred an Enron or WorldCom executive?

To truly appreciate the accomplishments of China since Deng started reinventing Chinese socialism, all we have to do is look northward to Russia. I was working in Moscow as a journalist in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union; it was—and in many ways, still is—lawless chaos that was both frightening and heart-wrenching. The mighty Soviet colossus, the great Russian bear, was reeling on her knees. Homeless beggars were on every corner; and criminal thugs were the only rule that was effective, brutally so. No, I’ll take China’s way, thank you very much.

Military expenditures: The other Mr. Bosco takes China to task for wanting what the great (and no longer so great) Western powers have: military equality. It appears he is saying that a nation of 1.3 billion people, a very large nation in land mass, with neighbors such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia—and its breakaway republics with breakaway military hardware—Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, plus their near neighbors in the Middle East, Iran and Iraq, all with indigenous Islamic fundamentalist movements, does not need a strong military. He says that Beijing military policies are based on “paranoia” and a “sense of perpetual victimhood.” Who is he kidding? Certainly not the Chinese.

Perhaps he believes only the United States should have a short memory when it comes to military threats. Of course, the last time we had armies fighting pitched battles on Continental soil was in 1865; and the last time we had foreign armies marching on the contiguous 48 states was in 1815.

During just the 20th Century, it is easier to name the countries that did not have armies invading, occupying, or policing some part of China! In the lifetime of current middle-aged Chinese citizens, shots in anger were fired on Chinese soil by troops from Russia, India, Vietnam and the United States, counting only the most serious.

The other Mr. Bosco writes that China has no need of a “blue water navy”, that China should depend on the U.S. to preserve “freedom of the seas”. An interesting notion that: the only lasting superpower, that actively tried to topple Chinese sovereignty almost continuously for most of the last half of the 20th century, China should depend upon for “secure sea lanes”? Likewise he writes that a non “expansionist” China “need not fear containment”; and that “Benign American military superiority, inevitable in any event, is not a bad scenario for China’s future development.” Again, who is he kidding? With that notion, not even American citizens, I would think.

Since when has it been sound governmental concern for any nation to depend upon a very recent, dubious ally at best, and an avowed enemy at worst, for its national security? China wasn’t flying a spy plane over American territory in April two years ago. Even the fledgling 13 states of the new American republic chose not to rely on anyone for its safety. And at no time since have we entrusted the security of the American dream to any nation other than our own. But the other Mr. Bosco arrogantly assures that China, the oldest continuously governed civilization on earth, the legendary Middle Kingdom, should submit its sovereign future to a nation that invaded Nicaragua to arrest a single corrupt dictator it empowered. A nation that continues to blockade a small Caribbean island that ceased to be a military threat to anyone a long time ago simply because politicos are afraid of losing block-votes in South Florida. A nation that is at this moment practicing a “strike first” policy of national defense which is without precedent in modern statehood.

On his third point, the matter of Taiwan, the other Mr. Bosco would have you believe the issues are about Chinese aggression and human rights. Perhaps a little history is needed for perspective: I sit writing this on old Amoy Island—now Xiamen Island, its Chinese name before the Western powers took it as a “concession” after the Opium Wars of the 19th Century that guaranteed England could continue selling the opium it banned to its own population to the Chinese whom they purposely addicted in order to have something to sell to a nation that mostly had products to export, not buy. From here the Taiwan issue is so close that on clear days I can see Taiwanese controlled islands patrolled by armed troops.

Where I sit is—or actually was—ground-zero of the long-expected final conflagration between the “Reds” and what’s left of the Nationalist legacy of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—easily continental East Asia’s worst war criminal of the 20th Century. As China’s supreme war lord of those dark days in Chinese history, old Chiang, first Japan’s and then America’s favorite son in the east, certainly murdered, tortured, imprisoned and starved more of his own people intentionally than Mao is accused of killing in the long struggle to regain Chinese nationhood.

Middle-aged Americans will remember these islands from the “hot” days of the Cold War, when Quemoy Island, Matsu Island, and Amoy were in the news almost daily as the forces of Chiang, and batteries of the People’s Liberation Army, traded artillery barrages in punctuation of their mutual indignation at the existence of the other. It was here in 1949 that Chiang made a last cursory stand before escaping across the straits to the Chinese island Province of Formosa (now Taiwan) which had been freed by the Allies from years of occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army. (He did this carrying with him much of the 3 Billion U.S. Dollars that American tax-payers had given him to resist Japanese invaders, which he chose to pocket instead.)

This issue is close here not only because it is a rifle-shot away, it is close because almost everyone here and in Taiwan are close relatives, sharing the same dialect, religion, festivals and folk customs. These people, on both sides, want to see each—and they do! Often. They just have to fly to Hong Kong first, then catch a connecting flight to Taiwan, at best a four hour plane ride, instead of a puddle-jump straight from the modern Xiamen International Airport less than a hundred miles across the Taiwan Strait. They do this because the Mouse-that-Roars Government in Taiwan wants to continue the charade that it is the legitimate government of China and will not allow direct air-flights or ferry-boats or container shipping between it and its largest trading partner lest anyone get the notion that it is giving even an inch of irrationality in its denial of reality. Not only is this a Taiwanese human rights abuse, it's costing its businessmen a lot of money.

What is the reality? As I said earlier, Xiamen, and Fujian, the Southeast China Province of which it is part, was ground-zero because it was here that the imminent battle between past and present would be fought. Because of this, the once prosperous coast of Fujian was left to despoil because why waste money maintaining a battleground. Then, a little over a decade ago, a visionary mayor of Xiamen had a dream: Build it and they will come. As one of the five Special Economic Zones first decreed by the Central Government to exercise fiscal autonomy in quest of capitalist ventures, Mayor Hong Yong Shi built a modern infrastructure where there had been only a great University, famous old Buddhist temples, fishing villages and a strategic army base atop Five-Old-Men Mountain facing the Strait.

And they came. Who came? Mostly Taiwanese businessmen—by the thousands. What happened? A small, beautiful tropical island city, with great hotels, shopping establishments to rival Beverly Hills, a spacious freeway that rings a coastline which is breathtaking and a city without car-horns (illegal—I told you he was a visionary.) Who stays in the hotels, shops in the stores, drives on the freeway? Oh, a few Westerners who work for Kodak or Dell—but mostly Xiamen natives and hordes of Chinese tourists from Tibet to Shandong, from Lionang to Sichuan, people who only a decade or so ago couldn’t dream of a real home, much less vacations to parts of their homeland they only knew from folktales.

Taiwan and the Mouth-that-Roars? Beijing knows that all it has to do is continue being patient—repeating its litany, “One country, two systems”—and reality will over-come schizophrenic sabre-rattling. In 1994, when some military fool in Taiwan ordered a short artillery barrage at Xiamen, wounding 4 workers, China didn’t fire back. And not a peep was heard about it in the Western press. In 1996, during military maneuvers, when China fired missiles into the Taiwan Straits, purposely hitting only water, the western media went ballistic, and the other Mr. Bosco found himself a cause, which he has milked with vengeance ever since.

When the Falun Gong cult recently jammed mainland satellite TV broadcasts from sites in Taiwan—with the apparent complicity of government—China didn’t put gunboats into the Strait. They ordered a new satellite system from France that will be immune from sabotage.

The other Mr. Bosco actually had the temerity to write that “China has never governed Taiwan.” His belief in the stupidity of readers is testimony to his own. Shame on him. Even through the periodic occupations by Japan over the past millennium, the Dutch back in the 17th Century, and old Chiang Kai-shek starting in 1949, Taiwan has always been a province of the Middle Kingdom. Maybe he meant this Chinese Government has never ruled China. Now that is true. But only because the People’s Republic of China has had enough restraint to eschew a very messy invasion and opt for the Chinese way of doing almost everything: patience.

As to the general charges of Human Rights abuses, and heavy-handed government control? Of the latter, I can report that I am free to lecture in my classes on any subject I wish—and I do. I and my lovely spouse (a famous pioneering rock-journalist during the 60’s; she teaches in the Economics Department, go figure) are free to go anywhere we wish at anytime we wish. Not long ago, on a hike over Five-Old-Men-Mountain behind our apartment on our way to the Ten-Thousand-Rock-Botanical Garden, we just happened to walk right into the army base on the summit. I was sure we would at least have our ID’s checked. No, soldiers and officers just waved and went on about their duties.

Human rights abuses? Yes, they are present and selectively sanctioned by segments of the totalitarian government. But then let us ask Mr. Lumia if he believes his human rights were abused by members of the NYPD. Or the relatives of the charred occupants of the Branch Davidian Church in Waco, Texas? Or the hundreds of thousands Hispanic or African-American young men incarcerated for mandatory decades only because they used or sold crack-cocaine instead of the white-man’s powdered version of the drug? Or any of the thousands of American Muslims imprisoned without charges or due process? We could go on; but the point is made—even the freest, greatest nation on Earth has its aberrant moments and miscreant zealots.

To paraphrase and answer the other Mr. Bosco again: If China has nothing to fear militarily from America, then America has nothing to fear from China. Here they wept for the victims of 9/11—and still do. Not like our “Allies” in Europe, where many people cheered. Just the other night, when my spouse and I were “dignitaries” at an English Language Competition for youngsters—everyone over here is learning English—a nine year-old, for her recitation, performed President Bush’s televised address to the nation after the attacks.

Yes, the greatness of China is China. China will define the 21st century, so one-trick pony ideologues such as the other Mr. Bosco might do us all a favor and stop trying to convince her we aren’t her friend.

3:19 PM / Editor / permalink 0 comments

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