China: A Reality Check: Truth and lies in the Asian behemoth - a visit to China leaves the impression that the dictatorship remains firmly established

National Review, Sept 17, 2001 by John Derbyshire

This summer I spent six weeks in China with my family, traveling all over the country, visiting with friends, relatives, and ex-students. (My wife is mainland-Chinese with a large extended family, and I taught college in China in the early 1980s.) We mainly stayed in the homes of these people-in Beijing, in the Manchurian city of Changchun, in Xi'an, Chongqing, Wuhan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.

For me the trip was a useful reality check. I have been writing about China for twenty years: two novels and countless articles in the press. Most of this has been based on remote observation: Since leaving China in 1983, I have visited the country only at long intervals, and briefly, and have depended on media reports, academic journals, books, and conversations with friends and relatives recently out of China. To sit down at leisure with Chinese people in an intimate way in their own country, and discuss their feelings about that country, its government, and the outside world, has been instructive and thought-provoking.

I should preface my remarks with a qualification. As can be seen from the itinerary above, we spent most of our time in large cities, and aside from some random interactions with people like cabdrivers and auto mechanics, all the people we spoke to are urban Chinese of the middle or lower-middle classes. I have nothing to tell you about the Chinese countryside, where 70 percent of China's people live, and where incomes are stagnating while taxes soar; nor about the industrial working classes, on which China's near future may very well depend. (Perhaps no foreign event made a deeper impression on the leadership of the Chinese Communist party than the Solidarity movement in Poland during the 1980s. It is clear from their actions then and since that the rise of such a movement in China is the party's principal nightmare.)

Bearing in mind these limitations, what are my main impressions about the mood of the Chinese people? How do they feel about their government? How strong is their desire for political reform?

a culture of complicity

I am bound to say that I left China in a pessimistic mood. So far as I could see, while the level of discontent in China is in some places, and on some topics, very high, it is nowhere near high enough to threaten the dictatorship. Speaking most generally, in fact, I found the Chinese pretty well contented with their lives. Hardly anyone voices warm admiration of the current national leadership, and one often hears expressions of disgust about some particular incident of corruption or incompetence; but people give the Communists much credit for the great improvements in living standards in the past two decades. The memory of Maoist horrors, though not erased, has been considerably repressed. Mao knew, as every successful totalitarian despot knows, that it is important to get everyone involved in the beatings and killings and denunciations. Then everyone shares the guilt, and the few who are sufficiently sure of their own righteousness to make accusations against others are, if anything, resented by the majority. The party's propaganda organs have become skilled at putting the best possible face on past events, glossing them with fictions and excuses (there is an excellent example further along in this article); and these inventions fall on a receptive public-or, in the case of the younger generation, a perfectly ignorant one.

The apparatus of terror is still intact, of course, and the "fear factor" is an important element of Chinese life. I had a pleasantly freewheeling discussion about the Falun Gong with some relatives in a private room we hired at a restaurant. Thus encouraged, a day or two later I asked another relative, who had not been present, what he thought of the movement. This, however, was at an ordinary table in the public area of a different, and rather crowded, restaurant. The poor man nearly jumped out of his skin. "For goodness sake be careful!" he hissed, flicking nervous glances to left and right. "Don't you know it's a banned organization?" Anyone who has lived in a Communist country can tell of similar things, and China is still a Communist country.

However, the fear factor is not the only, perhaps not even the main, determinant of China's current tranquillity, and to overestimate it is to misunderstand both the temper of the Chinese people and the great success of the Communist party these past few years. By way of illustrating what I mean, here is the concentrated essence of many arguments I have had with thoughtful Chinese people. It begins with me urging the necessity of democratic reform, while Anonymous ("Wu Ming" in Chinese, identified as "WM" in the dialogue below) insists that while he is no supporter of the Communist party:

WM: . . . an authoritarian party like the CP is a necessary crutch while we go through the present stage of modernization. Look at Taiwan. They were under authoritarian rule until the late Eighties, when the economy took off. Then they moved to political reform. Same in South Korea. We're nowhere near that point yet.