Today is a tense moment in relations between China and the West, because of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. The issue at the heart of the matter is the pace at which China develops from its old Maoist Communism into a freer more open society. The West believes that democracy is the cure of all evils and that freedom of speech is a prize above all others.
This Blog does not agree with all of this posture. Its very existence is owed to free speech, yet I would gladly trade that right in return for a narrowing by a quantum of the gap between rich and poor in the U.K., the elevation of the underclass to full participation in the economy, the reduction in housing costs so that everybody could afford to live decently without excessive debt, full employment, education free and world class for all from kindergarten to university, an efficient, caring, timely, and world class health service rather than the target riddled, patient unfriendly leviathan we have at present in which patients spend far more time waiting than being treated and so on and so on.
The point I make is that democracy is a means to an end it is not an end in itself. If it cannot deliver, and its record across the world is very uneven, it is just as bad a form of government as those more autocratic regimes it asserts to trump. It is not the best form of government; as Churchill said, it is the least worst.
The Chinese, who are one of the oldest continuous civilisations in the world, take the view that there is a better way which they are gradually developing as each year goes by. It is a mixture of capitalism and communism, yet is neither one nor the other. The progress made in modernising their country and its economic strides, makes the Chinese government one of the most efficient in the world. It has a way to go yet, but it is getting there at a pace. It is not a democracy, but it governs to rules and with broad consent. Do not suppose it would last for five minutes if even a quarter of its population took to the streets to bring it down.
In the West we need to begin to take on board that our approach of lecturing, demanding, isolating and sanctioning, backed up with actual or threats of military action is getting nowhere in the modern world and has failed to solve a single problem. Cuba, the Palestinians and Israel, Burma, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, all simmer on the brink unresolved. China favours engagement and the building of mutual interests. This is how it has used the West’s markets to build the second largest and cash richest, economy, which will before long overtake the U.S. The transformation since the cultural revolution, with Red Guards running amok reciting from Mao’s Little Red Book are truly remarkable.
In the end the Chinese government will have to allow itself to be open to criticism and to be more accountable, otherwise its increasingly better off and better educated population will grow restive. It will do this in its own way, not to our western model. Just as it looked at the stagnated and collapsing Soviet economy and compared it with the vibrant and working economies led by the U.S. and came up with a hybrid of its own, so China’s version of democracy will be unique. I suspect it will involve democracy and accountability within the communist party, rather than multiple parties.
Meanwhile the Ceremony in Oslo has concluded; the Medal placed on the empty chair that neither the Laureate nor his representative was able to occupy. One third of the countries invited to send representatives to this prestigious ceremony stayed away, in deference to, if not support of, China. The Nobel Committee is an independent organisation and is free to award its prizes to whomever it judges worthy. If next time it chooses to award the prize to Julian Assange, it will be interesting to see who stays away then. It is not difficult to be a criminal in one country and a hero in another.