A rchive Date
[ 04-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ China ]
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[http://www.tnr.com/032700/wright032700.html
Why China will get democracy too
Same Difference
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Issue date: 03.27.00
Post date: 03.16.00
"By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values - economic freedom.... We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China." - Bill Clinton
"Perhaps some day we can drop the idealistic blather and admit that trade with China is not about democracy; it's about trade." - Robert Kagan
Let's grant Robert Kagan - a conservative columnist who opposes President Clinton's policy of engagement - his wish. Let's stipulate that much of the political muscle behind the drive to normalize trade relations with China comes from those who profit from trade, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
And, while we're at it, let's stipulate that much of the political muscle against normalized trade relations also comes from those with a financial stake in the issue: labor unions. Just as the first group disingenuously claims that normalized trade would help democracy and human rights in China, the second group disingenuously claims that normalized trade would hurt democracy and human rights in China.
Now we can get on to the big question: Which side's "idealistic blather" is right?
Will granting China permanent most-favored-nation status and letting it into the World Trade Organization aid or impede human rights and democracy? Lurking beneath this question is a deeper one - usually unspoken - about whether the Chinese are, well, different. Some
Chinese officials themselves say "Western values" are alien to Asian society; they act as if they could import economic freedom without importing its Western corollary, political freedom.
And some opponents of engagement seem to believe them. They think China can remain authoritarian indefinitely while opening its economy to information technology - like the Internet - that has had sharply pluralizing effects in the West. And the "China is different" school can point to what looks like compelling historical evidence.
China has, for most of two millennia, preserved vast, centralized rule. It seemed to sleep through Europe's Enlightenment and industrial revolution. Its core spiritual tradition, Confucianism, has long emphasized authority and social order. And so on. Such themes have in recent years been marshaled - by the political scientist Samuel Huntington, the historian David Landes, and others - to paint a picture of Chinese culture as deeply distinctive. In the current context, one oft-cited historical difference seems particularly ominous.
The printing press, an early analogue of the Internet, greatly dispersed power in Europe, yet it had no such dramatic effect in China.
But a closer look shows that this difference is not rooted in anything special about "the Chinese" and for the most part isn't rooted in "Chinese culture" per se. Understanding what it is rooted in helps explain why, this time around, the information technology revolution that is liberalizing the West will, at least in the long run, liberalize China as well.
The upshot of Gutenberg's movable-type printing press is fairly well-known. By making mass communication cheap, the press empowered splinter groups. One noted splinter group was led by Martin Luther. In 1517, the press circulated his 95 Theses. The rest is history.
The press was a challenge not just for big religions but for big empires. It helped Calvinists in the Netherlands rebel against Hapsburg rule and Protestants in various German states agitate against the Holy Roman Emperor. As the centuries rolled by, life grew only more perilous for multinational empires, and one big reason was the printing press.
The press helped crystallize and fortify nationalism in several ways.
First, it tamped down the dialectical differences of the Middle Ages. By standardizing language across broad swaths of land, it created, in the words of political scientist Benedict Anderson, "unified fields of exchange and communication."
Second, the press let news travel so fast within those fields that national groups came to be collectively self-conscious - "imagined communities," in Anderson's phrase.
Third, it allowed those communities to rapidly mobilize.
The Internet is in some ways the printing press in spades. It does what the press did - lower the cost of processing information, thus easing the organization of interest groups - only more so.
It can work silently and suddenly. When members of the Falun Gong spiritual sect magically materialized in Beijing to protest oppression, they were there courtesy of the Net. In theory, as the Internet penetrates more and more of Chinese society, it should spawn more and more pluralism.
But, if China is indeed susceptible to such shake-ups, why didn't the printing press shake up the country in the first place? Moveable type was invented in China centuries before it appeared in Europe. But there was no great rift within Confucianism like the rift within Christianity. There was no upheaval comparable to Europe's nationalist revolts. The monolithic rule of a vast land - which the age of print made impractical in Europe - continued in China. Why?
One reason was a vestige of an earlier technological threshold - the evolution of writing.
To a large extent, the Chinese script is ideographic: characters typically stand for concepts, not sounds. So in China's "age of print" - a millennium ago, during the Sung dynasty - printers had to compose a page of text from a menu of thousands of characters, as opposed to the hundred or so that European printers would later use. This was so cumbersome that many printers preferred to use woodblocks, getting one freshly carved for each page of text.
In other words, the economics of printing in China weren't fully Gutenbergian; it took a large printing to justify the high fixed cost of a print run. It is debatable whether the first phase of Luther's rebellion - when printers in several cities took it upon themselves to do small printings of his 95 Theses - would have made economic sense if German script were ideographic. Of course, you would still expect the widespread use of the printing press in Sung China to have pluralistic tendencies - but not as pluralistic as in Europe centuries later.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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