ORVILLE SCHELL
Despite Xi Jinping’s crackdown and Donald Trump’s silence on human rights, China has a vibrant democratic legacy that may yet reassert itself
The growing distrust between China and the U.S. will be on full display next week as President Xi Jinping arrives at Mar-a-Lago in Florida for meetings with President Donald Trump. The tension isn’t just a result of Mr. Xi’s policies—a fierce crackdown on dissent, militarization of the South China Sea, intensifying protectionism. Nor is it just a matter of Mr. Trump’s combative campaign rhetoric against China and his early embrace of Taiwan.
For many longtime American observers of the relationship, the worries run deeper and have to do with disappointed expectations about China’s political development. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their milestone trip to see Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai almost a half-century ago. By the time Deng Xiaoping arrived in the U.S. in 1979 to normalize U.S.-China relations, the feeling of optimism was palpable. American apostles of engagement looked to a brighter future for China after its long Maoist seizure. Their hope was that trade, cultural collaboration and educational exchanges would coax the great country back to a path more convergent with liberal values and American interests.
As Mr. Xi consolidates both his own power and the dominant role of the Communist Party in Chinese life, such hopes now look naive. The Soviet Union collapsed, Mr. Xi says, because “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist” its downfall. Unwilling to countenance a similar fate for China, he has opted for greater autocracy. As he told European dignitaries in Belgium in 2014, “Constitutional monarchy, imperial restoration, parliamentarianism, a multiparty system and a presidential system—we considered them, tried them, but none worked.” For China to “copy a political system or development model from other countries,” he said, “would not fit us, and it might even lead to catastrophic consequences.”
On the eve of Mr. Xi’s first meeting with Mr. Trump, who has shown little interest in the cause of democracy in China (or elsewhere), it is fair to ask whether it is not time, finally, to stop expecting that China will liberalize any time soon.
There are certainly plenty of reasons for pessimism. Beijing has placed ever tighter restrictions on the press, packed its jails with human-rights activists and suppressed even Hong Kong’s limited experiment with “one country, two systems.” In contrast to previous eras of reaction, recently won social and cultural freedoms remain intact for ordinary Chinese, but a far-reaching turn to democracy has become increasingly hard to imagine.
Still, some historical perspective is in order—not because Mr. Xi shows any signs of relenting in his oppressive agenda but because it would be a mistake to confuse the present reality with permanence. Democratic ideals have deep roots in modern Chinese history and have surfaced again and again over the past century. This legacy should serve to remind us that not all Chinese, even in the worst of times, have been resigned to a politics of one-party rule.
Sun Yat-sen, often called the father of modern China, on the balcony of his house in Guangzhou, China, 1923. PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES
The idea that China would develop into a constitutional republic was first and most forcefully proposed at the beginning of the previous century by Sun Yat-sen, the so-called father of modern China. Sun had studied in Hawaii, converted to Christianity and become a medical doctor before starting his campaign against dynastic rule. When his republican government replaced the collapsed Qing Dynasty in 1912, he called for “three phases of national reconstruction,” starting with a period of martial law, followed by an interlude of “political tutelage” and culminating in constitutionalism. “Without such a process,” he insisted, “disorder will be unavoidable.”
Sun’s concerns about the difficulty of even starting to implant liberal democracy in China were quickly confirmed. His presidency lasted just 41 days as the country slid into the control of regional warlords. But Sun persisted, going on to establish the Nationalist Party, whose role in promoting democratic ideals in China proved to be long and tortuous.
But even amid the strife of the warlord era, the dream remained of a very different China. During the May Fourth Movement of 1919, thousands of students, intellectuals and workers took to the streets to protest Japan’s grab of German concessions in China at the conclusion of World War I and to rally for “science and democracy.” Hu Shih, a prominent intellectual of the movement who later became Chinese ambassador in Washington, wryly summed up the spirit of the era: “The only way to have democracy is to have democracy. Government is an art, and as such, it needs practice.” His generation intended to overturn China’s conservative and absolutist traditional culture so that, in the words of another activist, the Chinese people could rid themselves of the “4,000-year-old garbage can on our backs.”
Throughout his own trying decades as president of the new Republic of China in the 1930s and ’40s, Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded Sun Yat-sen as the leader of the Nationalist Party, was no model of democratic practice, often suppressing opposition and basic civil liberties. In theory, however, he never wavered in his devotion to Sun’s road map to constitutionalism, insisting that, after the necessary period of “tutelage,” the Nationalist Party would “carry out its original purpose and return sovereign power to the people.”
Chiang Kai-shek after being presented with the Legion of Merit medal by U.S. Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell during World War II, Aug. 3, 1943. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Such hopes were dashed in 1949, when Chiang and the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan by Mao after the Communist Party’s triumph in the Chinese civil war. But Taiwan has been a vindication of the Nationalists’ hopes. A process of liberalization began there in earnest in the mid-1980s with the lifting of martial law and a new tolerance for protests and opposition parties. Today, in the face of a newly autocratic and aggressive China, Taiwan remains a sturdy democracy.
As for China itself, the ideal of a more open society governed by law would not be fanned back to life until after Mao’s death in 1976. When Deng Xiaoping issued a clarion call for a new agenda of “reform and opening” and “the liberation of thought” in 1978, many in the West were tempted to hope that China might now get back on track to evolve just as Sun had imagined.
For me, an American who had come to know China firsthand during the Cultural Revolution under Mao, that era was like walking through the looking glass, with the revolution of the Great Helmsman suddenly being turned on its head. The press in particular was a riot of surprises. One article in the China Daily, the party’s own mouthpiece, was headlined “Don’t Be Afraid of Democracy.” It declared that China was now “opening its door wider to the outside” and must “try to communicate with the world in a language that not only contains the word ‘revolution’ but also many others like ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘human rights.’ ”
The powerful Politburo member Hu Qili appeared at the China Writers’ Association and said, remarkably, “The writer must be able to think for himself with his own head, have full freedom to choose subjects, themes and modes of artistic expression, and have full freedom to express his or her own thoughts and feelings.” Vice Premier Wan Li proclaimed that it was now necessary to create a “political environment marked by democracy, equality and consultation.”
Nor was the democratic effusion just at the elite level. In late 1978, a lowly electrician from the Beijing Zoo named Wei Jingsheng became a driving force behind what became known as “Democracy Wall,” when ordinary Chinese spontaneously began putting up wall posters and holding political discussions along an unprepossessing wall around a bus lot in the capital.
People gather in front of the Democracy Wall to read posters, Beijing, Jan. 6, 1979. PHOTO: NEAL ULEVICH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Everyone in China knows that the Chinese social system is not democratic and that its lack of democracy has severely stunted every aspect of the country’s social development over the past 30 years,” wrote Wei. “Does Deng Xiaoping want democracy? No, he does not. He is unwilling to contemplate the misery of the common people.”
“Let the people say what they think,” responded Deng insouciantly. “A range of opinions is good for a revolutionary party leading the government.”
In 1984, Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and vice president of the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China, began to initiate a pathbreaking series of democratic educational reforms. To everyone’s astonishment, the People’s Daily praised him as acting in accord “with the directions of Party Central regarding the ‘practical application of democratization to every aspect of social life.’ ”
Fang next went on an unprecedented tear across the country, speaking out on university campuses with an honesty and boldness that would have been unthinkable only a few years before…or now. At Shanghai’s Tongji University, he said, “I am here to tell you that the socialist movement from Marx and Lenin to Stalin and Mao Zedong has been a failure.” Real democracy, he declared, was not “performed by superiors on inferiors,” as the party seemed to think. “Our government does not give us democracy simply by loosening our bonds a bit,” he complained. “This gives us only enough freedom to writhe a little.”
Chinese astrophysicist and human-rights activist Fang Lizhi, 1989. PHOTO: FORREST ANDERSON/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Students had never heard a senior academic speak so frankly in public, and Fang’s influence spread virally, touching many other intellectuals. One of these was Liu Xiaobo, a writer, critic, professor and gadfly who has been a political prisoner in China since 2009 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
This crescendo of free speech and democratic protest culminated, of course, in the massive demonstrations that paralyzed Beijing for seven weeks in the spring of 1989. I was there and watched in amazement as millions of Chinese from every walk of life marched into Tiananmen Square, under the gaze of a giant statue of the Goddess of Democracy, waving banners proclaiming such things as “I’d Rather Die Than Go Without Democracy.” How, everyone wondered, would Deng and the party ever regain control?
In Tiananmen Square, a portrait of Mao Zedong faces off with a statue that student protestors dubbed ‘the Goddess of Democracy,’ Beijing, May 30, 1989. The sculpture was modeled after the Statue of Liberty in New York City. PHOTO: JEFF WIDENER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The answer, tragically, was bloody suppression. Deng had thought he could manage the wild current of democratic excitement that his reforms had catalyzed, but surrendering to a more open political system was, finally, out of the question for him and other hard-liners. Even now, a quarter-century later, the party does not permit public discussion of the brutal crackdown that ended China’s epic moment of democratic aspiration. Liberalizing impulses were quickly diverted into politically safer channels, as Deng and his heirs focused on opening markets and launching a period of astounding economic growth.
‘For Xi Jinping, the imperative to avoid another 1989 is fundamental.’
For Xi Jinping, who assumed office in 2012, the imperative to avoid another 1989 is fundamental. His “rejuvenation” has thus emphasized stronger leadership, tighter party discipline and heavier state controls. Having refined this one-party model of development “with Chinese characteristics,” he has made clear his impatience with sermonizing from abroad about democracy and universal rights. Many ordinary Chinese are, in fact, beguiled by the “China dream” that he has outlined and the promise of a wealthier, more dynamic and more powerful country, and he has allowed them to continue enjoying a degree of personal (if not political) discretion that their parents could hardly have imagined.
But just because prospects for another political revolution are difficult to see right now, we should not assume that China has reached an end point in its development. Though democracy has not been the dominant theme of the country’s recent evolution, it has been an abiding presence over the past century, and leaders of very different stripes have sought to use these democratic impulses.
The challenge ahead for Beijing is perhaps best seen as avoiding the violent lurches from one extreme to another that have marked its past. As Sun Yat-sen recognized a century ago, the key is to find a flexible way forward, a phased mix of centralized control and democracy that fits the country’s ever-changing circumstances.
Those of us who spent time in China under Mao remember only too well how absolute and irreversible his revolution then seemed. But, of course, it was neither. The present period of reaction under Mr. Xi is no more likely to be a final historical resting place.
No nation—and especially one as proud, prone to xenophobia and fixated on avoiding loss of face as China—takes well to being scolded by an imperious adversary. Paradoxically, with the new U.S. president seemingly disinclined to exert public pressure on Beijing about democracy and the rule of law, the Chinese themselves may be better able to find their own voice on these issues.
Whatever happens in Florida next week, there is no reason to despair of the possibility of a more democratic China, and even of better relations with the U.S., in the decades ahead. Like recessive genes that can skip a generation before expressing themselves again, China’s liberal traits are sure to well up before too long, just as they have so insistently done throughout its modern history.
Mr. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and the co-author, with John Delury, of “Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century.”
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