Pacific Rim: off and running

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Priscilla L. Buckley, William F. Buckley, Jr.

In China today Marxism is a mere formality, invoked only because it is a creed that legitimizes, or seeks to do so, the terrible, extravagant ordeal of the People's Republic of China. In fact, one close observer notes, there is today within China greater economic freedom than in Russia and most of the Eastern European ex-satellites. The nation is flooded with televisions and VCRs and journals that bring in a taste of life in the freer world. What is developing, one man picturesquely describes as a "pluralistic authoritarianism." All the vectors are in place: the very old guard will be dead before 1997, the government will need to find 140 million new jobs to take care of the population, and it will recognize that capitalism is the only way to do this. Whereas ten years ago 75 per cent of all economic activity was done by state agencies, that proportion is reduced now to 50 per cent.

What development, if any, could interrupt this move toward progress? Well, China has much to fear from the live detritus left by the Cultural Revolution, ten years during which mad Mao simply suspended education and encouraged every subhuman instinct in the large inventory within the human nature. "It is important," one senior commentator observed, "that elder Chinese who matured before 1965 should continue to govern late into their own lives, and that younger people, who reached school age after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, should exercise responsibility at a younger age than they normally would." The threat of gross mismanagement by the alumni of the Cultural Revolution is real, and another threat would be destabilization, the kind of thing that could lead to civil war. Still a third threat would be massive inflation, he continued. "Everybody now recognizes that it was inflation that finally killed off Chiang Kai-shek. They can't afford to run any such risk."

Sun Rising

I AM SITTING at the desk in my 15th-floor bedroom at the Regent Hotel; in a few minutes the bellboy will come for my bags. There is a great plate-glass window in front of me, and I'm looking across the bay to Hong Kong Island in the early morning light--at tall, angular glass and concrete buildings silhouetted against the background hills: exciting, modern, clean-limbed, glowing --and thinking of some of the things we have learned in the past week: That if there is one unifying factor at play in the area it is a wariness of Japan, which runs from outright hatred in Korea, against which Japan's sins are many, to fear of Japan's industrial might and its aggressiveness in business matters in Taiwan and Hong Kong .... That most American businessmen in the area, and a good part of the U.S. diplomatic establishment, favor President Bush's stand on continuing Most Favored Nation status for China on the grounds that higher tariffs would hurt the thriving and market-oriented southern Chinese provinces rather than the ideologically rigid north .... As a footnote to history we learn that Taiwan would have remained in the UN at least one more year had a Soviet functionary in New York not persuaded the representatives of Yemen, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to go shopping with him in White Plains the morning the critical vote was taken. All three had pledged to support Taiwan .... That, hard as it is to believe, at one weekend recently over one billion Hong Kong dollars ($7.8HK = $1U.S.) were bet on Hong Kong racetracks. ... That the U.S. business community here favors establishment of formal diplomatic ties with Vietnam, which they regard as a wide-open market. The businessmen argue that Hanoi (sans the backing of the USSR and the PRC) is no longer a danger to its neighbors .... And finally that the recent violent upheavals in Thailand may be the beginning of Thailand's move toward democratization, following in the steps of Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, where economic freedom preceded political reform. Unlike the Soviet Union, in these areas perestroika led to glasnost, not the reverse.