Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

All of the Asian capitalist developmental states have been characterized by what I call “soft authoritarian” governments.⁶ Democracy—understood as a political system in which the force of public opinion makes a difference, a balance of powers exists within the government (what Americans call the “separation of powers”), and free elections can actually remove unsatisfactory officials—exists only partially in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, thanks to the pervasive, potent influence of unelected bureaucrats. In none of the three has an independent judiciary or the rule of law ever fully developed. In South Korea and Taiwan, movements for democratic reform have in recent years finally succeeded in bringing formerly “hard” authoritarian governments under more popular controls. In Japan, public opinion exerts a powerful influence over the government, but mainly through informal and traditional channels rather than the formal institutions of parliament and the courts.

If the government of Japan and its emulator states—South Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore—can be characterized as soft authoritarian, at least during their decades of high-speed economic growth, then China may be an example of “soft totalitarianism,” on a par with governments like Suharto’s in Indonesia or Chiang Kai-shek’s in Taiwan, and considerably softer than the truly totalitarian worlds of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

A soft totalitarian regime directly restricts freedoms of speech and the press, thereby curbing the effect of public opinion on the government. Under soft authoritarianism (as in Japan, for example), such freedoms exist on paper but are attenuated in part by cartelization of the news media—press clubs in Japan can impose collective or individual penalties on journalists who report news that irritates the state—and also by narrow channels of access to advertising, state-owned broadcasting, and state licensing of school textbooks. The public is better informed in soft authoritarian countries because there are always ways around press clubs and cartels, but public opinion remains only a mild constraint on the government. Whereas a soft totalitarian state will employ direct suppression of offending books, imprisonment of authors, state control of Internet servers, and dismissal or imprisonment of dissidents, soft authoritarianism achieves its ends through peer pressure, bullying, fear of ostracism, giving priority to group norms, and eliciting conformity through social sanctions of various kinds. Under both types of regimes, elections are usually to one degree or another only formalities, behind which permanent state officialdoms actually govern.

An ideological shift from an all-embracing communism to an all-embracing nationalism has also helped to hold Chinese society together, giving it a certain intellectual and emotional energy and stability under the intense pressures of economic transformation. One of the weaknesses of communism was its quasi-religious claim to scientific truth, which, once exposed as fraudulent, undermined the values and ideological cement of the regimes that had embraced it. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, the Chinese Communist Party has tried to foster a consensus among mainland and overseas Chinese based not on scientific but on historical claims to power, prestige, and wealth—as well as on a belief that China is once again destined to reclaim its position as the preeminent civilization in Asia and become a global superpower. The People’s Republic of China used to proudly call itself Communist China. Today, the term commonly used is just China, and this new “China” borrows endlessly from its past glories but also plays powerfully on its century-long experience of humiliation at the hands of European, American, and Japanese imperialists. Present-day China is clearly in transit toward some new self-concept, not to speak of a new system of relationships with other countries; it is not yet clear, however, what form or forms these will take.