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

Lee’s emphasis on American society’s internal cohesion was telling in an Asian context. China’s leaders remain preoccupied by the disintegration of societies pressured to adopt Western-style economic and political practices like the former Soviet Union and Suharto’s Indonesia. In their eyes a decision to permit free association when there are so many inequalities of many different kinds left over from the old order or created by the new one is more likely to lead to a political revolution than to produce political harmony. On March 15, 1999, in a news conference that included foreign reporters, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji said, “Don’t support these so-called pro-democracy activists. They will bring neither democracy nor the rule of law to China.”¹³

Chinese leaders—and foreign investors—also ignore human rights in their mutual exploitation of a cheap labor market. One prime way of doing so and of justifying what they are doing is to spread the idea that human rights (as conceived by Westerners) have no basis within Chinese culture. This kind of rhetoric is very common throughout Asian ruling circles today. The Burmese military (and their Japanese financiers) use it to keep Nobel Prize winner and National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest even though her party won 82 percent of the seats in the 1990 Burmese election; the Singaporean government and courts used it in 1995 to execute a Filipina housemaid, Flor Contemplación, for murders probably committed by her Chinese employer;¹⁴ and the Chinese government used it in sentencing Democracy-wall activist Wei Jingsheng to prison for a second fifteen-year term merely for suggesting that there might be a fifth modernization (democracy) in addition to the four favored by then party leader Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese government finally released Wei, deporting him to the United States after President Jiang Zemin’s visit in 1997, but the governments of Burma and Singapore have proved to be deaf to foreign criticism on human rights grounds. The Chinese government’s record of releasing political detainees when the issue is raised with it discreetly has not been bad. In his press conference of March 1999, Premier Zhu said, “We welcome foreign friends criticizing us in our work, but don’t be impatient,” noting that he has grown accustomed to “friends from abroad pulling out lists” of pro-democracy activists whom they want released from jail.¹⁵

In the final analysis, two aspects of human rights policy transcend mere political rhetoric and deserve our attention over the long haul. First, the United States must strive to retain the respect of the relatively small group of Chinese elites who will eventually come to have influence or hold power in the next century. Tibet’s exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, divides the Chinese people into three broad categories in terms of their attitudes toward politics.¹⁶ The first category is made up of the leaders of the Communist Party. “Their main concern is keeping power in their hands,” says the Dalai Lama, and they are in that sense no different from other Asian ruling elites, like the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the military in Burma, whose main concerns are preserving their own positions of power.

The second category is made up of intellectuals and students. “This is the group which ultimately will bring democracy in China. . . . No outsider, not the United States, nobody, can bring democracy to China, except those people.” A sound human rights policy would attempt to maintain the respect of these people through appropriate, supportive activities in our own country and in international organizations without continually pretending that something is being accomplished by “constructive engagement,” the current euphemism for the ineffective sermonizing and browbeating tactics used by the State Department and others to attack China verbally on the issue. Personal diplomacy by officials who are well informed and sensitive to Chinese society is always more effective when we are trying to win freedom for people who have risked their lives for ideals we support.

The Dalai Lama’s third category is made up of the masses, concerned with “daily livelihood,” for whom “democracy is not much relevant in their day-to-day life.” The Dalai Lama argues that those engaged in a positive human rights policy toward China should seek advice from the second group on what ought to be done about preserving the rights of this third group.