Plotting China's Democratic Path
(by Madhuri S Sondhi | The Asian Age | September 10, 2004)
Is China headed towards a democratic future? Is perestroika without glasnost the best method for unravelling totalitarianism? Can China whitewash her past, and is her present what engagement advocates wistfully imagine it to be? These are some of the questions raised by Bruce Gilley, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, now researcher at Princeton (China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead, by Bruce Gilley, Columbia University Press, NY 2004). His answers aim to be both realistic and optimistic, that yes, China can make it to democracy: indeed, he fervently desires and believes so on the basis of a persistent democratic undercurrent running through modern Chinese history. Finally, he outlines a possible scenario for its future attainment.
He traces this current starting with Sun Yat-Sen in the 16-year aborted democratic experiment from 1912-1928 during which there were 43 Cabinets in Beijing, through the feeble attempts at restaging it during the Maoist years, within and without the Communist Party, culminating in the student movement and massacre at Tiananmen Square in the post-Mao period. Despite its gory end, he views 1989, which he personally witnessed, as a date which future historians will regard as a turning point for democratic evolution in China, just as we view the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as a decisive turning-point in the defeat of the British Empire. However, the reportage at the time in Lahore's British publication, the Civil & Military Gazette devoted one unvarnished paragraph to the event with the superb confidence of a firmly entrenched imperialism. And indeed, Tiananmen, though cruelly unforgiving of the students and dissenters, was followed by some relaxations in economic and social affairs.
However, Gilley is clearly not a typical China-watcher, and his assessments of the Communist regime during the past and present may surprise our current China apologists — be they academics, journalists, multinationals, or plain uncomfortable neighbours.
With a 10-year's journalistic stint in China he looks at the country's brutal repressions and failures with unstinting objectivity. His résumé of the misdeeds of the CCP makes chilling reading, of which we may mention only the figure of 55 million citizens slain (documented by Chinese scholars) during Mao's maniacal Great Leap campaigns and other drives for power. It beggars the imagination how Indian fans of China and Mao compare India's democracy unfavourably with China's totalitarianism. It took Amartya Sen to point to the advantages of democracy in managing famines and hunger (albeit without a guarantee of efficiency) — now Gilley advantages democracy for long-term economic growth, creativity, management of disease epidemics, handling of internal conflicts (democratic India gets a good mark) and most of all, for containing military aggression.
It is on this last point that faith overtakes reasonable caution in Gilley's argument. Opposed to any clash of civilisations thesis, he concurs with Fukuyama in imaging a future world painted in various shades of democratic governance. With a firm faith in the principle of democratic peace, that democracies do not war with other democracies, he over-insures his thesis of China's inevitable democratic future arising out of internal socio-political-economic changes by a series of policy recommendations to foreign powers.
He desperately urges the United States and China's Asian neighbours not to provoke China but to baby her along during her democratic infancy and adolescence. To the former he advises economic support for the fledgling democratic institutions that will emerge, especially pro-reform media, policy think-tanks, judiciary and legal systems etc.
To her Asian neighbours Gilley warns "Strategically, India, Spratly Islands claimants, Central Asian countries would need to ensure that they do not provoke a flaring nationalism in China... India for example could agree to withdraw troops from the 90,000 sq km of former Tibetan territory (sic) that is now inside the line of control it defends. Japan might declare a ban on its nationals landing on the Senkaku islands." Taiwan, whose de facto independence should nevertheless be backed by the US and her allies is advised to dampen her claims till, note, democracy creates a less fanatical irredentism resulting from "the burdens of empire inherited from the Qing dynasty." Tibet and Xinjiang, where "Chinese rule was imposed by force and kept in place for decades by repression" might yet under a new democratic regime perversely demand independence which even a democratic China might be unwilling to grant. He quotes Chinese scholars who warn: "If this issue (of Tibetan independence) cannot be resolved, it will be difficult for democracy to flourish." As though a nation's yearning for human rights, civic freedoms, humanitarian concerns and pluralism can be held hostage by the similar concerns of one of their colonies. Britain's democracy did not collapse after decolonisation: it was strengthened — such is the logic of democracy.
Last but not least, Gilley's thesis ignores the linkage between economic-military growth and aggression which would be threatening enough on its own, but combined with China's central nation complex is disquieting to those who observe with trepidation the growth of this giant. Modern China, right from the democratic days of Sun Yat-Sen has displayed an unyielding desire to consolidate her own empire, making use of anti-western or imperialism rhetoric when useful. For example, based on spurious interpretations of history, she claims it is right for China to colonise Tibet, demographically swamp it, economically exploit it, while condemning the Macmahon Line as imperialist legacy. Indeed several China-watchers see tendencies in the present-day ruling elites with their push for military modernisation and bid for regional hegemony as leading to an aggressive national socialistic dictatorship. Gilley's whole effort seems geared to provide an alternative to that catastrophic possibility, but it appears in some respects, more wish than realistic possibility.
Appeasement, as we know, has never paid, neither with aggressive governments nor today's terrorists. The theory of democratic peace does not have as its premise a sacrifice of nationhood and human rights. Immanuel Kant who has become the canonical reference for all democratic missions, imagined a world of equal republics in voluntary association. In an age of European expansion he explicitly rejected the right of any country to occupy another's territory. He did not advocate republicanism (which we read as democracy) at the cost of a neighbouring country's rights and freedoms.
Gilley fudges the trade-offs between democracy and nationalism to the detriment of the latter — but only for non-Chinese (and non-American) countries. Cynics and realists east of Suez might see in Gilley's theory an attempted pacific solution to America's anxieties about a strong possibly expansionist China: make China a democracy at any cost so that all inter-state regional problems get solved through patient negotiation with no need for American intervention and its attendant uncertainties. The cost of peace includes what might be interpreted by China's neighbours as unacceptable loss of their sovereign rights, a virtual Pax Sinica (or Sino-Americana) hardly more palatable than the erstwhile Pax Britannica. The rewards promised to the US are a three-quarters "democratised and hence peaceful" world. A similar scenario of a democratised and peaceful Middle East rid of terrorists was visualised by the American President on the eve of the second Iraq war. And history has yet to assess the costs of paying for such a dream.
Friends of Tibet (INDIA),
PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050
www.friendsoftibet.org