The Beijing Olympics are drawing the attention of the world to the People´s Republic of China. That of course was the intention of the Chinese leadership when they applied for the games. But the attention China has been getting has not all been of the kind the Chinese leaders were hoping for.
Of course the world is seeing China´s impressive economic progress since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping began 30 years ago. It is seeing that tens of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty - more in one country at one time than ever before in history. It is seeing the great strides China has made in industry, agriculture, science, education and culture. The world should see all those things, and it should acknowledge them and welcome them.
But the world is also seeing a less pleasing aspect of modern China. It is seeing a country where people are still imprisoned for criticising their government or calling for change, or even for drawing attention to social issues such as the AIDS epidemic. It is seeing a country where corrupt officials are exploiting and mistreating workers and peasants, and where those people have no right of redress. It is seeing a country where there are no free trade unions, and where industrial health and safety are ignored in factories and mines. It is seeing a country where people are still persecuted for their religious beliefs. It is seeing a country where massive environmental problems, caused by China´s rapid industrialisation, are not being addressed.
Most fundamentally, the world is seeing a country where the people - 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the population of the world - have no right to choose their own government, but live under an authoritarian regime which came seized power by armed force nearly 60 years ago and has ever since refused even to consider relinquishing power or allowing the people a say in their own government.
The Chinese government hopes that the Olympics will bring them favourable publicity. To achieve this it is doing things that no democratic government could or would do. It has ordered the closure of hundreds of factories in and around Beijing to try to reduce the level of air pollution during the games. It has arbitrarily demolished thousands of homes to make way for games venues and new transport links. It has forcibly removed thousands of people from the city for fear they will cause trouble, or just because their appearance might reflect badly on China. It has confined thousands more to their homes under threat of punishment if they make trouble.
These things should come as no surprise to anyone. Apart from the factory closures, they are exactly what the Nazi German regime did in the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and what the Soviet Communist regime did in the run-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Every time the IOC awards the games to a country with a non-democratic government, this is what happens. This is what dictatorships do when they want to make themselves look good. The IOC must have known that this would happen - that tens of thousands of ordinary Chinese would suffer in various ways, ranging from having their home demolished to being banished from their city to being threatened with a labour camp - so that the Chinese regime could make itself look good during the Olympics.
Some argue that while all these things are true, they must be balanced against the fact that the presence of millions of foreign visitors in Beijing and throughout China, and the scrutiny of the world´s media, will bring pressure on the Chinese government to reform and will increase the pace of liberalisation. Perhaps this will prove to be the case. I certainly hope so, but I remain sceptical. The same thing was said about the Moscow games, but such hopes were not realised. Although the Soviet Union collapsed within a decade of the Moscow games, I don´t think anyone would suggest that there was a connection between the two events.
I don´t expect the People´s Republic to collapse within a decade of the Beijing games, and nor do I hope for such an event. Unlike the hidebound Soviet rulers, the Chinese have already done the hard part - they have ditched the failed ideology of communism and made a successful transition to a market economy. That is why China has become increasingly prosperous and powerful over the past 30 years. Compared to that achievement, political reform is relatively simple. All that is required is for the Communist Party to agree to give up its monopoly of power and allow the Chinese people to choose their own government.
This may strike many as a totally unrealistic prospect. Dictatorial regimes, conventional wisdom has it, don´t voluntarily give up power, especially when powerful economic vested interests are tied up with the continuation in power of the current rulers.
Well, sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong. Nobody predicted 20 years ago that Indonesia would today be the most successful democracy in South-East Asia. If the Suharto regime fell, it was said, the result would be violence, chaos, the break-up of the country and the triumph of Islamist extremism. None of these things happened. Under the leadership of a series of presidents committed to democratic transformation, Indonesia has achieved stable democratic government, has resolved two of its most difficult nationality issues in East Timor and Aceh, and has broken the back of the Islamist terrorist network that was threatening to destabilise the country.
I´m sure you are all aware of the point of view that argues that the achievement of prosperity through the adoption of a free market economy necessarily leads, sooner or later, to the adoption of a democratic, multi-party system of government - that economic liberalisation and political liberalisation are inseparable. This theory, which was based on the experience of Europe in the nineteenth century, has had plenty of critics, who have argued that the European experience cannot be translated to the societies of East and South-East Asia. These critics have pointed to what some call the "Singapore model," referring to countries where the achievement of prosperity has /not/ been followed by a transition to liberal democracy.
In responding to these critics, I like to refer to the "Taiwan model" and the "South Korean model." Here are two countries which had had authoritarian political systems since the 1940s. Over the past 20 years, as their economies have boomed and their living standards have increased, Taiwan and South Korea have become successful, stable democracies, with regular changes of government and unfettered political freedom. In both countries, long established authoritarian elites voluntarily gave up power, because they recognised that authoritarian rule was no longer in their countries´ interests. Perhaps we can now also point to a "Malaysian model" - after 50 years of one-party rule and politics based on ethnic division, Malaysia this year had an election which saw the emergence of a genuine opposition forged through a multi-ethnic alliance.
Will we see something similar happen in China over the coming decade? I have no particular insight into China´s political future. But I reject the view which holds that such a thing /cannot/ happen, which argues that China is so different to all other countries that it is not bound by the same historical laws. I reject the view that the Chinese people are the only people in the world who do not desire freedom - freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, access to a free media, free trade unions, a free civil society. I think the Chinese people, both in the People´s Republic and overseas, have given plenty of evidence that they understand and want these things.
The Chinese people also want stability, of course, and given China´s history they have an understandable fear of disorder and disunity. The Chinese leaders have played on these fears by telling the people that democracy equals disorder, that if the current regime falls there will be chaos and that China will disintegrate. But I give the Chinese people more credit than that. China is not like the Soviet Union, an artificial empire cobbled together out of disparate nationalities and held together only by force. It is a great and powerful state and represents an ancient civilisation. If India and Indonesia, with far less ethnic and linguistic unity, can maintain their national identities as vigorous democracies, so can China.
Obviously the current Chinese leaders do not want to give up their monopoly of power. Equally obviously, they cannot be forced to do so, either by foreign invasion or domestic insurrection. After the experiences of the twentieth century, no-one would wish to revisit on China the horrors of war or revolution. The peculiar combination of a booming market economy and a powerful authoritarian state, equipped with the latest technology for the surveillance and policing of its population - the system becoming known as "market Stalinism" - is certainly a new phenomenon. But then so was the reign of terror of the NKVD in its day, and in the long run no amount of surveillance or repression was enough to save the Soviet regime.
What forces, what events, then, might lead them to change their minds at some point in the not-too-distant future?
Perhaps paradoxically, I would argue that the strength of Chinese patriotism is the one force that might lead to a political breakthrough of the kind that South Korea and Taiwan achieved in the 1980s, that Indonesia has achieved over the past decade, and that Malaysia may be on the brink of now. All Chinese want to see China resume its rightful place as a great power, treated with respect by the rest of the world. That will not happen if China continues to be mired in corruption, and corruption is the inevitable consequence of capitalism without the public accountability that democratic government brings. Nor will it happen if China becomes part of a "Eurasian bloc" of despotisms, allied with the likes of Putin, Ahmadinejad and the Burmese junta, rather than aligned with the leaders of Asian democracy such as India and Indonesia.
Over the past century we have seen two attempts to elevate nations to great power status using totalitarian methods - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Both failed ignominiously, in the process causing millions of deaths and destroying most of Europe. Meanwhile, nations whose political and economic systems are based on the principles of freedom have continued to grow in power and prosperity: most notably the United States, but also Britain and France, and since 1945 also Germany and Japan. India is now embarked on the same path, and may well overtake China in some important respects before long. Russia, sadly, has chosen to return to the path of authoritarianism, and will therefore continue to decline, despite the current illusory prosperity caused by the oil price bubble.
I´m sure a growing number of intelligent people in the Chinese elite can see that China will not realise its ambition to return to the front rank of world powers until it has a political system based on the rule of law, security of the person and of property, respect for human rights and restraint on the power of the state. Sooner or later, and it may be sooner than we expect, China´s leaders will be faced with a choice between their ambitions for their country and the continuation of their own grip on power. They will look for an alternative model.
They will not have far to look, because just over the Taiwan Strait they will see a flourishing Chinese-speaking democracy. They will see a political party, the Guomindang, which once ruled by fear and force, but which voluntarily gave up power for the good of the country. They will see that the Guomindang, having admitted and apologised for its past misdeeds, has been forgiven by the people of Taiwan and is now in power as a freely elected government. That might seem to intelligent and far-sighted people to be a very attractive scenario, certainly far superior to the fate of the Soviet Communist Party. I have never doubted that many people in the Chinese elite are both intelligent and far-sighted.
The so-called "market Stalinist" system that the Chinese regime has constructed seeks to combine the dynamic wealth-creating power of capitalism with the surveillance and repression typical of all communist states. They hope that by these means they can create a state which is both rich and powerful, and controlled by them and their heirs forever.
In doing so, however, they have forgotten one of the basic precepts of Marxism: that capitalism, in its relentless drive for profits, always creates opposition to itself, in the form of a militant working class. China today has the largest industrial working class in the world, the largest in the history of the world. Although denied the right to form free trade unions or political parties, the Chinese working class is far from passive in the face of the massive exploitation to which it is subjected by both Chinese and foreign corporation, especially in the new economic zones such as Shenzhen. There are frequent strikes, riots and other disturbances in China´s cities: in 2005, by the government´s own figures, there were at least 87,000 such incidents.
As a social democrat, I believe that capitalism only succeeds in the long run when its socially harmful effects are controlled through the operations of free trade unions, free political parties and political democracy. My party, the Australian Labor Party, was born out of the struggles of militant unions against the uncontrolled capitalism of the 1890s. Today it works within the framework of liberal democracy to ensure that the wealth created by the dynamic force of capitalism brings prosperity to all Australians. This is in the long term interest of the capitalist system itself, as intelligent business people well know.
China over the past 30 years has built a successful capitalist economy, a powerful engine for generating wealth. But it has built an engine without safety valves. The safety valves of capitalism are free trade unions, free political parties, free media and free elections. Without safety valves, the most powerful engine will eventually explode. This after all was what happened in Russia in 1917, where the Czars also tried to build a form of national capitalism while preserving their own autocratic rule. The result was the Russian Revolution, from which the Chinese communists claim their political descent. Thus the Chinese communists have thus forgotten their own history. But history has a way of reminding us of its lessons, and sooner or later the Chinese leaders will have to relearn this particular lesson.
How can people outside China help the Chinese people make the possibly painful but undoubtedly necessary transition from market Stalinism to social democracy? Certainly not by boycotts and embargoes. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has firmly opposed any boycott of the Olympics, and I think we should accept the wisdom of his advice. The United States has had a trade embargo on Cuba for more than 40 years, and this has only strengthened the Castro regime by enabling it to blame all its failings on the Yanqui imperialists. "Constructive engagement" is a much-abused term, and I am opposed to it when dealing with criminal regimes such as those in Burma, Sudan or Zimbabwe. Although China enables these regimes, it is not such a regime itself, and I think the democracies are right to engage in constructive engagement with China provided basic principles are not violated.
But constructive engagement does not mean the abdication of responsibility. China wants certain things from the West, and it should be made clear that it will only get those things on terms. One thing China wants is access to western markets, since its current prosperity is largely built on exports. Another thing it wants is raw materials to fuel its expanding economy. A third thing it wants is western high technology. A fourth, less tangible, thing it wants is respect, to be treated as one of the concert of great powers that make the important decisions.
I am in favour of giving China all these things, but on appropriate terms. I am in favour of free trade, but trade can only be truly free when it is based on freedom. So long as China continues to exploit its workforce by artificially holding down wages, to prohibit free trade unions, to despoil its own environment through unsustainable mining and industrial policies, and to ignore its own industrial health and safety laws, then it cannot be treated on the same basis as Japan or South Korea when it comes to trade liberalisation. I am in favour of political and defence co-operation with China, but not when it throws internet bloggers, human rights lawyers and AIDS activists into prison without due process. I am in favour of treating China with the respect that it deserves as a great power, but not when it acts as it did recently in the Security Council, lining up with Russia to protect the gangster regime in Zimbabwe.
Such a "carrot and stick" approach, combined with the mounting economic and social evidence that China cannot continue down its present contradictory path much longer, will play a part in persuading the Chinese leadership that if it truly wants China to become the great, prosperous and respected power it should be, it must begin to plot a new course for China, one that involves them sharing their power with the Chinese people, perhaps through a transitional process extending over a decade. Other Asian leaders have done so, without seeing their countries disintegrate or their social order collapse. They are now reaping the rewards, while China risks being left behind, economically and politically. If Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea can successfully manage this transition, then surely the Chinese leaders, backed by three millennia of wisdom and experience, can find the courage to do the same.
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