A post-release message for Communist China’s leaders

(Washington, D.C.): Now that America’s twenty-four hostages in China are poised to be released, the Bush Administration can focus on the policy course it will pursue towards the Communist government in Beijing. Specifically, it should abandon the course followed by its predecessors — a course characterized by an abject determination to enhance the legitimacy of the odious Communist regime in Beijing, irrespective of its brutality at home and its increasingly aggressive behavior abroad.

Instead, the United States should adopt a determined, long-term strategy toward the PRC’s government akin to that employed by President Ronald Reagan to destroy another monstrous Communist regime — that of the Soviet Union. For starters, this requires, among other things, calling such criminal enterprises what they are: evil empires.

The needed effort to delegitimate the Communist government of China needs to be accompanied and reinforced by steps like those recommended by Joshua Muravchik in an excellent op.ed. article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. As Muravchik argues, helping the Chinese people — who are becoming increasingly restive under the Communists’ misrule — to bring about an early end to the brutal repression they have experienced for so long may be the only way to avoid the sort of conflict with the United States that their current leaders say is "inevitable."

The Truth Will Set China Free

By Joshua Muravchik

The Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2001

The Pentagon is said to be in the midst of a strategic review that will reconfigure U.S. forces away from a model designed for conflict in Europe — where the putative adversary was the Soviet Union — to one designed for conflict in Asia, where the presumptive adversary is China. The current standoff over a U.S. reconnaissance airplane and its crew certainly provides more fodder for those who view China as America’s No. 1 threat.

Given Beijing’s belligerence, it is reassuring that our best military minds are focused on what it will take to win any future confrontation with China. One wishes, however, that some comparable attention were being given to obviating the danger of such a clash through the transformation of that Communist-ruled state into a true "people’s republic," in other words, a democracy.

National Interests

Undoubtedly, as China continues to grow wealthier and more powerful, it will assert a greater role in Asian affairs. But this will not necessarily make it a threat to world peace. China’s national interests are not inherently antagonistic to those of its neighbors, or of the U.S. The most consistent pattern of international relations that political science has been able to discover is that countries that are democracies virtually never go to war with one another. If China grows democratic, it is unlikely to engage in conflict with such other democracies as Japan, India, the U.S., or even Taiwan.

But a rising China, ruled coercively by a Communist oligarchy struggling to retain legitimacy, could be a menace. In the latest incident, a Chinese fighter appears to have caused the collision over international waters. China’s controlled media misrepresents the events, and then Chinese officials tell American reporters that their government has little room for accommodation because, as one put it, "the leadership is concerned about the reactions of ordinary Chinese and their anger about the incident."

Sensitivity to public opinion is a welcome change on the part of China’s rulers, but the Chinese people wouldn’t be so angry at the U.S. if their government were not lying to them about what transpired. But stoking nationalist passions is central to the Communists’ strategy for retaining power. Originally, the party’s dictatorship was justified on the grounds that it needed to suppress the bourgeoisie in order to bring the people benefits of socialism. Such reasoning sounds antique in today’s China, where one of the party’s slogans is "to get rich is glorious." Instead, the rulers promote the image of a hostile outside world in the hopes of encouraging the people to rally round the regime.

The model for this strategy was set by Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, the first Communist ruler to refashion himself as a nationalist. The Yugoslav example offers an answer to those who believe that China will inevitably assert itself in destructive ways. Under Mr. Milosevic, Yugoslavia started four wars in less than a decade, but with the triumph of democracy just a few months ago, that same country is making strong efforts to reintegrate itself into the international community.

The immediate crisis with China shows the importance of diluting Beijing’s monopoly on the information that its citizens receive. For the longer term, encouraging a free flow of information will be key to fostering democratic change in China.

Of course, such activities already exist. Voice of America and Radio Free Asia each broadcast 12 hours a day in Mandarin, China’s principal language, and lesser periods in the other tongues spoken there. The broadcasts include unbiased news reports, call-in shows, English lessons, music, commentary on Chinese affairs and feature programs on everything from health and family matters to economics and the American way of life. VOA also does five hours a week of television broadcasting. But is this enough?

Add together all the broadcasting, throw in exchange programs and the efforts of the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. is spending a few tens of millions of dollars a year for a more open China, or about two to three cents for each Chinese. Last year, when Congress adopted permanent normal trade status for China, it authorized an additional $99 million on such programs to show that it was not turning its back on human rights, but the appropriators soon reduced that to a mere $5 million.

What more can be done? VOA and Radio Free Asia are both jammed by Beijing. Additional transmitting facilities would make possible a much stronger signal that would reach many more listeners. This could be achieved either by spending the money to build facilities on U.S. Asian possessions, or by persuading friendly Asian countries to allow us the use of transmitters that they currently deny us due to pressure from Beijing.

VOA currently has a reporter but no bureau in Taipei. Is there any more important story to get across to the mainland Chinese than the exemplary democratic transition that has occurred on the other side of the Taiwan Straits? The National Endowment for Democracy’s efforts to support Chinese democrats could easily be multiplied several times over without running to fat.

It is not just a matter of budgets. We also need to encourage thinking about facilitating information flows. Internet access is growing exponentially in China. According to official figures, it quadrupled last year to 25 million users. The political power of this medium was demonstrated dramatically earlier this year when Premier Zhu Rongji issued an almost unprecedented public apology for having lied about the explosion that killed 38 students in a Jiangxi elementary school. What forced Mr. Zhu off his original story that a mad bomber had killed the youngsters was a blizzard of e-mail messages from enraged relatives and villagers that spread the true story across China — namely that the students had been required by authorities to spend part of their school day at the dangerous job of assembling fireworks.

Western News

Beijing currently blocks Internet access to most Western news organizations and whatever else it fears will be subversive. The blocking can be circumvented by the computer-savvy by means of "proxy" and "mirror" sites, but less sophisticated surfers are at its mercy. One wonders if the U.S. could take a handful of juvenile delinquent hackers off the streets with a contract to devise cyber techniques to make it easier for more Chinese to evade the blocking.

In the current crisis, voices are raised for punishing China by cutting trade or exchanges; but our best strategy is to maximize intercourse in order to encourage change. Taiwan’s example proves that Chinese people are perfectly capable of governing themselves democratically. A wealth of evidence from the mainland — from the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, to the publication recently of "The Tiananmen Papers," smuggled out of China by one of the many highly placed officials who secretly identify with the demonstrators’ aspirations — tells us that this is precisely what they would like to do. The question we must ask, for our sake as well as theirs, is whether we are doing everything in our power to help make that happen.

Mr. Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is completing a book on the rise and fall of socialism.