AsiaScoop   

China Syndrome

Photographs by Rakesh Sahai

Ajay Singh: Was the West being romantically optimistic when it expected China to allow greater political liberalization and human rights because it is hosting the Olympics?

Richard Baum: There was a certain historical precedent. After all, in 1988, with the Seoul Olympics coming, the regime there did open up and democratize. So there was an expectation that the 2008 Olympics might do the same thing for China. The interesting thing is that the Chinese were aware of that expectation and played into it. The Beijing Olympics Committee made a point of saying that they would use China’s Olympics bid to help their development, their human rights and democracy.

Maintaining social and political stability at the cost of human rights has always been a characteristic of the Chinese government. What are the circumstances under which Beijing might permit greater freedom?

As the government in Beijing feels more confident in its progress, its ability to satisfy human needs and wants, I think it will begin to relax what you might call its pathological demand for stability and unity. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen disturbances and the crackdown that followed, the Chinese leadership has been terrified of unrest and its potential for destroying everything they’ve ever created. So they tend to overreact to anything that smacks of political unrest.

You say ‘overreact,’ but isn’t that how the Chinese characteristically react?

Well, in some ways they called this down upon themselves by thinking that they could build this stage—the spectacle of the Olympic—and that only good things would be shown in the glare of publicity. That was naïve because there are a lot of problems in China that they generally try to sweep under the rug. One of the things they’re doing in preparation for the Olympics is that they’re shipping out all the migrant labourers. They are trying to create a bubble of law and order and social stability on the eve of the Olympics. That attitude—the idea that they can control the environment of an event—belies the problems that lie beneath the bubble and are going to burst through.

What kind of problems?

Tibet is one problem, human rights is another, their policies in Darfur yet another. The more they call attention to themselves and their achievements, the more other people are ready to say, wait a minute, look at this, look at that. So in a sense there’s a dialectic at work here. The more the Chinese want to preen in front of the mirror of international approbation, the more others are going to say that it’s an ugliness, not a beauty we’re seeing.

But isn’t one interpretation also that the Chinese just cannot stand perceived humiliation?

Oh, absolutely. Along with China’s descent from a great global power into the doormat of Asia in the 19th century, came a sense of humiliation and resentment. There’s always been a love-hate relationship between China and the West. The idea that you can publicly humiliate China and expect them to change their policy is unrealistic in the extreme, because of their sensitivity to slights, cultural and national. There’s even a name for it in Chinese—the guochi syndrome, or the national humiliation syndrome. When you look at the reaction to the Western criticism of China in the last few weeks, most Chinese are feeling very patriotic about defending their government. Regardless of how they might have felt about Tibet before all this happened, they feel that the West is using this as a way of punishing China and they’re reacting on the side of the government. The chat rooms, the blogs, the SMS text messages all over China are very patriotic and very angry at the West for stirring up this kind of a storm. And of course very intolerant towards the Tibetans, who they see as having manipulated this whole situation to China’s disadvantage.

Why is Beijing frustrated about Tibet?

They were over a barrel about Darfur and Myanmar when Mia Farrow called these the ‘Genocide Olympics.’ Then, just as they were making some headway in Myanmar and Sudan, Tibet blew up on them. And they didn’t know how to deal with that. At first, they just sat on their hands when there were peaceful protests for a day or two. Then the protests started turning violent and the overreaction occurred. Reports suggest that thousands of people have been arrested.

How does Beijing view the Dalai Lama?

The Chinese are tone deaf when it comes to the Dalai Lama. Just like they saw the Falungong as evil incarnate, they see the Dalai Lama as evil incarnate. They simply cannot deal with him. And it’s doing them no good because they can say all they want that he personally is calling for independence and instigating violence and terror, the truth is that it is not him who is doing that but radical elements in the Tibetan community who are angry and impatient with Chinese rule. To blame the Dalai Lama as an instigator is absurd. He is what he seems—a man of peace and reconciliation. And he’s asking for autonomy, not independence. And the Chinese can’t hear that.

Even that?

Because they see the Tibetan Youth Congress and the Committee for a Free Tibet as calling for independence, they lump that all together with the Dalai Lama and say it’s his fault. They also have convinced themselves—and this is erroneous—that they’ve done a lot of good in not just Tibet proper, the province of Tibet, but throughout the Tibetan Plateau, which covers three provinces in Western China. I’ve spent a lot of time on the plateau and there is an enormous amount of resentment against the Han-Chinese government there.

Resentment against what exactly?

For years and years, it was not so much the naked violence and suppression of Tibetan culture but a condescending, infantilizing, arrogant treatment of the minority ‘other.’ The provincial party secretary of Tibet, a month ago, when these demonstrations started, said something that was appalling: That the Tibetans are like little children who need the leadership of the mother Party to show them the way. That Han arrogance angers Tibetan youth enormously. And the Chinese come back and say, ‘well, the Tibetans are so ungrateful—we’ve put so much money into the development of the West. How can they possibly be angry at us?’ Well, how did the southerners feel about the northern carpet baggers after the Civil War in the United States? Did they embrace them because they brought money? Of course not—they resented them as outsiders who were horning in and taking all the good jobs. The Chinese don’t know how to treat the Tibetans. And this is a leftover from the imperial times when the Chinese had a tributary system towards all outsiders, who had to come in and pay tribute to the Emperor. They had to bring in gifts and perform a kowtow or put their nose on the ground. As a supplicant, you couldn’t deal as equals with the Chinese empire—you were here and the Chinese were there. They still reproduce that in some subtle ways in their policies in Tibet, Xinjiang and elsewhere. So they’ve got a long way to go before they can claim any kind of progress in Tibet and there are a lot of historical overtones to what’s happening there. It was after all on the 49th anniversary of the suppression of the Tibetan rebellion in 1959 that these latest protests began last March.

How is the Dalai Lama handling the crisis?

He’s caught between a rock and a hard place. There are these militants who are constantly pushing him to stand up to the Chinese but on the other hand there is his Western audience, which expects him to be a man of peace, meditation, reconciliation and justice. I think that’s who he really is but I don’t think he can satisfy everybody. Everybody wants a piece of him. The Chinese of course see only the militants on one side and we see only the pacifist, meditating monk. And the Chinese are deathly afraid of what would happen if the Dalai Lama came back into Tibet. They are terrified of his popularity, which is latent now, underneath the surface. The Chinese are so afraid that people will rise up and see him as the real leader and throw off Chinese rule. That’s why they are terrified to even talk to him. They don’t want to give him any legitimacy by negotiating with him.

Some pundits say the Dalai Lama is politically naive and that China has used his failures to great effect over the years.

I think there is some truth to that. Truth is never the monopoly of one side of an argument, particularly a long-simmering historical argument. I think the Dalai Lama has allowed himself to be used on both sides of the issue. Hollywood has used him in a way that I find not very pleasant—there’s a wonderful book by Orville Schell called “Virtual Tibet,” which is all about the Hollywoodization of the imagery of Tibetan Buddhism, which is not a real image. And by the way, the Tibetan governance before the Communists came to power in 1950 was not all that benign. It certainly wasn’t democratic. It was very hierarchical …

Feudal?

It defies feudalism. It was a very primitive kind of serfdom, with a lot of wealth among the monastic elite and a lot of poverty among everybody else.

And the monastic elite are the same people in Dharmsala now.

That’s right. But I do think this traditional god-king idea of a church that is ruthless in its governance—I think those days are gone. I don’t think that if there were an independent or even an autonomous Tibet, you would have a reversion to the kind of serfdom or stratification that you had back then.

Why are there so many unresolved issues between the Chinese and Tibetans?

The Chinese don’t know how to respond to the Tibetans. For one thing, they can’t acknowledge any problems with their governance techniques in Tibet. There’s such insecurity since Tiananmen among China’s governing elite that they can’t admit any wrongdoing or mistake at all. Their thinking is that if they give the Tibetans an inch they’ll take a mile. That’s one of the reasons why Deng Xiaoping never pushed through any political reforms after the early 1980s. He looked at what happened in Poland in 1980-81, when the Polish government removed all price controls and the price of meat and vegetables started rising dramatically in Poland. And the workers began to protest and demand that the government restore price controls. The government gave in, thinking that that would satisfy the workers. But it didn’t satisfy anything—once having taken to the streets, a long-suppressed list of grievances the workers had erupted into demonstrations. The government had to declare martial law or else face the prospect of a Soviet invasion. Deng, who was preparing to introduce political reforms in China, saw what happened in Poland and he decided this won’t work. So he took a gamble, thinking that we have to give people an economic opportunity first and with greater opportunity for improved livelihoods, people’s political demands will recede.

What was Deng trying to save?

The party. He was worried about losing political control. Then came Tiananmen and it scared the hell out of the Chinese leadership. China was this close to anarchy. And the leadership was further spooked in 1989 when Ceausescu was not only overthrown but executed by the very crowds he had been trying to suppress. After that happened, the Chinese realized that they have to have a very tight thumb on social dissidence and opposition of any kind. That attitude makes them very nervous about Tibet. They know their legitimacy is very tenuous in Tibet and that the Tibetans have many grievances. But they can’t deal with them by accommodation. They have a trained incapacity to accommodate, negotiate, compromise. And so they continue to play this all-or-nothing game.

Tibetan radicals have been saying lately that the Dalai Lama wants nothing more than to suppress this ‘revolution’ that has begun in the background of the Beijing Olympics. The Dalai Lama says he wants an end to the violence; the Tibetan Youth Congress says it should continue.

That’s a real problem. Years of frustration have created a hard-nosed, bitter and militant opposition. The more time goes by the more desperate people have become.

Do you think the Dalai Lama says to the world outside Lhasa that the violence should end but that in fact he really wants it to continue?

He gives two messages—an internal message and an external message. This is in the National Public Radio interview this morning (April 15), by the way, with Robert Barnett of Columbia University. What he argued, and I think that he’s absolutely right, is that when the Dalai Lama is talking to his own people, he tells them to keep up the good fight.

He does?

Oh yes—the nonviolent resistance. He has never to my knowledge preached violence. But he does encourage his supporters to keep up the pressure on China.

But isn’t there a link between peaceful protests and what recently happened in Lhasa? Angers explode.

The explanation that I find most convincing is that the peaceful demonstrations were certainly promoted directly by monastic authorities in Tibet and indirectly in Dharamsala. The protests started in the monasteries and then spread to the streets. I think that had the encouragement and support of the Dalai Lama himself. When he says, ‘keep it up,’ I think that’s what he’s talking about. Then, as happened in Tiananmen, there are people with their own ulterior motives and agendas who will take advantage of any breakdown in law and order—the absence of police in the streets—to being to push things in a different direction. Whether the violence was instigated or not I don’t now. But it didn’t take much to instigate.

So, knowing that a peaceful protest can be hijacked, why does the Dalai Lama continue to back such protests?

Good question. Depends on which part of his constituency he’s talking to. I’m not privy to those conversations, but he doesn’t give the same message to us that he gives to his own supporters. That’s clear. One argument, and I think Robbie Barnett feels this way, is that the Dalai Lama has to be very careful addressing his internal audience because he could lose them. They could just bolt and pick up the insurrectionary flag on their own if he can’t serve as a kind of credible restraint. He has to credibly both support them as well as act as a restraint. He’s in a very difficult situation because there are a lot of very angry people in Dharamsala as well as in Tibet who would like to make trouble.

But they can hardly take on the PLA.

The Dalai Lama knows that. I’m not sure these young rebels know that. I’m not sure the kids in Tiananmen knew they couldn’t take on the PLA. I think they thought that virtue and righteousness would prevail and that the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t shoot the people. That was the mantra two days before the crackdown.

On the other hand, if the PLA ends up massacring tens of thousands of Tibetans, it could be the beginning of …

A huge problem. A huge, huge problem.

Maybe leading to Tibetan independence?

It would take something along those lines to do it. But I don’t think the Chinese are stupid enough to do something like that. … We don’t know what’s going on in Tibet these days because of this curtain of silence. It’s a huge area—the Tibetan Plateau is larger than Tibet proper.

So it’s hard to cordon off?

Right. But the Chinese have choked off the traffic at all the transportation hubs leading to Tibet.

Essentially, the Tibetans have no friends. Everyone likes their cause, but …

Yes. That’s why Tibet is not likely to ever be independent. They don’t have oil, they’re not a strategic ally, they’re not on anybody’s trade route.

And India only goes so far in helping out.

That’s right. Tibet is in an unfortunate position geopolitically. They have very little bargaining power.

The only scenario in which the Tibetans could move towards independence is if India aids them in a military initiative.

But that kind of calculus is based on the idea that India and China are going to be at war at some point. And they’re a long way from there. It may get to that. But not now.

What’s the Chinese game plan in Tibet?

They’re trying to outlive the Dalai Lama—they would like him to die so that they can manipulate a successor.

What do you make of a spiritual leader who heads a government in exile?

That’s the problem—he’s a god-king in Tibetan Buddhism, but they don’t have god-kings in the secular world any more. He is heading a government but that’s what other people thrust on him.

The term ‘government in exile’ is not of his making?

I can’t say for sure whether that’s a term he uses or subscribes to. I would think he heads more of a movement than a government. But he is a symbol of many different and completely contrary things. To the Chinese he’s a devil who’s trying to shake them free from what they consider their historical claim to have ruled Tibet consistently for 500 years, which is not true by the way. For a brief time in the Mongol dynasty the Yuans ruled Tibet in the 13th century. Under the Ming dynasty the Chinese didn’t control Tibet at all—at best they had a tributary relationship: Tibet acknowledged Chinese power and paid tributes and treasures and kowtowed to the emperor in Beijing, and even married off some of the Tibetan royal family to the Chinese royal family to cement alliances, as was typical of European politics. But it wasn’t until 1781 or thereabouts that anything like Chinese dominance occurred within Tibet, wherein the Chinese told the Tibetans to behave or else … They didn’t govern directly but—to use a term that is very indefinite in meaning—they were the suzerain authority, not the sovereign authority: They were the dominant power in the area, just as they were in Korea and Taiwan until 1895. And that’s how it’s been in Tibet for most of the last 200 years, except that after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty there was no Chinese control over Tibet. That is, from 1911 to 1945, no Chinese government had control over Tibet. So the Chinese exaggerate a lot when they say that ever since the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century Tibet has been Chinese. It just isn’t true. But it has become part of their national myth.

Why do you think Mao invaded Tibet?

Because he could.

There’s also the argument that no great power will allow a buffer state between another power—in this case India.

Yes, that’s true. There’s also the Great Game of the 19th century in which Xinjiang and Tibet were both pawns between the British and the Russians. I just think Tibet was there for the taking. The Chinese Nationalists tried to rule through warlords in the area and when their power broke down the Chinese had a vacuum they could enter. So they occupied Tibet in 1950. In 1959 the Dalai Lama and his clerics rebelled against China, aided and abetted by the CIA—clearly they were put up to it by foreign forces, and the Guomintang in Taiwan also had a role in that. But the rebellion was sort of like the Bay of Pigs in Cuba—they screwed up. They way overestimated the popular support that would be given and way underestimated the resistance of the Chinese military. So they lost badly and the Dalai Lama and about a thousand of his followers fled to India.

There was no popular support? But the Tibetans do revere the Dalai Lama.

Yes, but they had no weapons—they were literally fighting with sticks and stones. The CIA tried to do some clandestine arms drops. Half of the weapons were dropped in places where they couldn’t be reached. It was a real fiasco. And the PLA came in and put a quick and brutal end to the rebellion. A lot of people were killed, although the estimates have been way out in space—to say that a million Tibetans were killed is way exaggerated. But there is a legacy of hatred among Tibetans because of those events.

What do you see as the other major failings of the Chinese leadership?

Three decades of rapid economic growth has allowed them to kick the can of political reform farther and farther down the road without having to act on it. They’ve had a cushion because of all this economic growth. Deng Xiaoping’s gamble paid off. If you compare Peking University in 1989 with Peking University four years later, when I taught there, you’ll see that by 1993 the students in Beijing were all about opportunities, all about careers, all about money. Deng bought ‘em off—it was a successful bargain that he gave them. And it’s still paying off. Three years ago I taught a course at Peking University, and the students were all about money and status and careers and partners, leading everything but a political life. They are politically dead. The only kind of political activity they take part in is activity the government condones—they can go out and protest against the Japanese, that’s fine. Also, certain environment issues are safe for students to participate in. So the lack of any real political protests by students has given the government a sense that it can get by with mere administrative fine-tuning rather than real structural reform.

What about the argument that China needs to be guided by a firm hand that pushes economic reform and holds a huge and culturally diverse nation together?

The problem is that the authoritarian mentality that drives the Communist Party is really incompatible with what I would call the chemistry of a pluralistic society. There’s a great deal of personal freedom in China today—but freedom stops at the edge of politics. The Chinese leadership has continued to try to control social life, organizational life, mass media, public opinion—without allowing any kind of healthy pluralism, a healthy divergence of opinion and interests. They find interest groups to be a threat rather than a sign of health—and that’s why they have to control religion so tightly.

How long that can continue?

As China modernizes and globalization becomes more profound and pronounced, Chinese are beginning to push at the boundaries of what you could call informational freedom. I don’t think they’re crying out for elections—that’s a Western fantasy. What they do want increasingly is to be able to have their little social organizations, to be able to form NGOs, to be able to read newspapers that offer alternatives, to be able to respond to government policy in a way that officials have to listen to. Accountability, transparency, responsibility—I think those are the issues that are increasingly getting in the way of efficient, effective governance in China.

What effect does corruption have on the nation?

Corruption is a black box that nobody can see inside, and increasingly that’s costing the government a great deal in terms of social disruptions and disturbance. There has been a huge movement in the last five to 10 years against land seizures in rural areas. Huge fortunes are being made because the land in China is all owned by the government. There are private dwellings but no private land. In rural areas, the villages own the land. And real estate developers come in and offer big bucks to village officials who get rid of inconvenient peasants who happen to be living on the land the developers want. The officials give the farmers 10 per cent of what they get and ask them to go away and build themselves another house. The farmers have been a bit slow to realize that they’ve been screwed and are starting to protest and organize. There have been hundreds of thousands of public demonstrations and even riots in the last 10 years over just property and these sweetheart deals between developers and local officials at the expense of ordinary Chinese.

The situation in the provinces is dreadful. Reminds me of the old Chinese saying, ‘The mountains are tall and the Emperor is far.’

By the time the Central Government’s authority gets to the countryside, it’s almost unrecognizable. That’s why corruption keeps breaking out no matter how many anti-corruption campaigns they have. I think the Central Government is doing a pretty reasonable job of responding to people’s needs—it’s the local government that people are angry at. But the problem is there’s no real accountability and no institutionalized safety valve for the people to sound off.

The government is trying to do something about that but it’s doing it through surrogates. For example, every county in China now has an electronic, government website, which is supposed to contribute to transparency by publishing all the rules and regulations and by allowing citizens to feed back their opinions. And the government is supposed to pay attention to this and respond. In a sense it is transparency, but there’s no real accountability because the government is like the Wizard of Oz—you can go and complain to it but you can’t force it to respond in any particular way. You can’t see what happens behind the black box and you have no way of influencing the outcome. You’re still a supplicant—the outsider who visits the Emperor, gives him a gift and hopes the Emperor will respond.

That’s the kind of neo-Confucian patronization and paternalism that is the essence of the government’s effort to avoid real pluralism, real democracy. They’re trying to go back to a neo-Confucian ideal of a benevolent leader who listens to his flock and has their interests at heart but nonetheless is an authoritarian leader. A good leader is supposed to be responsive. But then of course the Romans and the Greeks had the right question about that—who guards the guards? How do you ensure the reliability and honesty of people who have no one to check them. That’s the fatal flaw of the Chinese system.

The problems in society have to be aired. But the government tries to silence anything that’s contrary to official policy. The problem, as they’ve themselves put it, is that they’ve lifted up a rock only to drop it on their own feet. The long-term problem with this government is that they’ve let economic success allow them a certain luxury to not reform their institutions. And I think they may be running out of time.

To what extent does the West, which consumes a lot of Chinese products, have a responsibility to make China set its house in order?

There are two conflicting views of sovereignty here. The Chinese view is that what anybody does in their own borders is nobody else’s business. That’s not something they’ve invented recently for their own convenience. They’ve had a doctrine of nonintervention since the People’s Republic of China was born. Non-intervention in domestic affairs is one of their ‘five principles of peaceful coexistence.’ Now, they’ve lately been moderating their view of absolute state sovereignty under pressure from the outside world, as they’ve become more multilaterally engaged in the world. For example, they’re participating in about a dozen peace-keeping missions around the world. They voted for resolution 1441, which authorized the United Nations to punish Iraq if it didn’t allow comprehensive weapons’ inspections. They voted for sanctions against Iran.

But even as they’re doing that, the West has to confront its own dilemma. The Westphalian notion of sovereignty, which has been in effect for 200 years, is the Chinese view of sovereignty—what countries do inside their own territory is no one’s business. The humanitarian intervention argument is a fairly new one, starting with, I guess, the Yugoslavian situation in the 1990s that led to the war in Kosovo. It took a lot to get the West to intervene—the first instinct was not to. Rwanda later was another case. But the inclination of Western countries not to intervene is becoming harder and harder to maintain because the information revolution has brought about such graphic imagery of suffering in so many places that consciences have been tweaked and political support is to be gained by at least professing support to underdogs and suffering minorities and so on.

Now, as to the question of whether the West has some responsibility for what’s happening in Tibet or China because we buy Chinese products—that’s a line of causation that I think is a bit too long. In South Africa we had the Sullivan rules about doing business under apartheid, a self-restraining pledge not to do business with apartheid industries and enterprises. But South Africa was a small country, with very few Western companies involved. With China, size matters. What do you do if you’re Walmart? Do you go to some other country where they have 15-year-old workers working 20 hours a day? In fact, Chinese working conditions are beginning to improve finally after a lot of external pressure. There’s a new labour contract law, which is going to force employers to pay workers’ wages on time. It allows workers to organize in a way that was never permitted before. And wages are rising in China. In fact a lot of the complaints you hear about China are really yesterday’s complaints. China is improving.

What about human rights?

Most people aren’t dissidents in China. Most people are sort of satisfied to put one foot in front of the other as long as there’s a paycheck at the end of the week and an opportunity for their kids to have a better life. The human rights community in this country talks about thousands of political prisoners—there aren’t thousands of political prisoners in China. Maybe hundreds. There maybe 50 journalists in prison in China, maybe an equal number of Internet bloggers who have crossed the line of political dissent. In a country of 1.3 billion, that’s not so many. And in terms of the prison population, we are way ahead of the Chinese.

What’s really more important than the concerns of human rights activists are the thousands of petty indignities that occur every day to ordinary people—the corruption, getting thrown out of your house without adequate payment, the problems of dealing with corrupt, incompetent, local officials. That just makes people’s lives very difficult. The local governments are self-contained because Beijing can’t police everything and because it rewards officials who deliver on economic growth, stability and, at least until recently, one child per family. Those are the things that get attention—not whether people are happy or whether justice and equality are served.

About the Author

Richard Baum is one of the Western world's most knowledgeable, oft-quoted and experienced Sinologists. Fluent in Mandarin, he has been associated with China for the past four decades and is a professor of political science at UCLA. His latest book, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom, will be published in early 2009.