MysteriousFaith

Totalitarianisms Revisited

China’s recent successful firing of an anti-satellite missile has brought back into the public light a number of concerns about the country’s militarization, most of which we all wish were not so powerfully reminiscent of the Cold War. Only weeks after the event itself, finding clarity on how to interpret the significance of the test is difficult. Much of the response from Western media and punditry has been eager to ascribe greater significance to the event than many believe necessary. Whether China is actually a military danger to the US is not clear, but it does provide a conventional military threat, a distinct and tangible force that can be understood, argued about, and positioned against. A public largely weary with defending the country against the diffuse threat of terrorism may be subconsciously attracted to China as a threat. Those who would belittle such thinking would do well to remember how much of the bluster and bravado behind invading Iraq was built upon a desire to see our military retaliate against a threat that could be met on the battlefield, not in an airliner.

This is an important realization, and one that should provide us with an incentive for caution lest our desire to fight a foe we can visualize, instead of one difficult to define, drive us into confrontations with China. Perhaps even more importantly, it would be a strategic mistake of the first-order to allow frustration with our efforts to manage a coherent war on terrorism cause us to sub-consciously seek out a threat which, while no where near the urgency as terrorist actors, a conventional threat and as such, one which we gravitate towards engaging.

At the moment, China holds the potential to become a beacon of insecurities for the West. Politicians aware of the underlying economic disquiet which colors their electorate, even now in times of relative stability, are likely to intensify the focus on China’s role in job loss and lowered standards of living once the issue with illegal immigration is no longer politically expedient. Similarly, the powerful community of ideologues who pen politician’s cue cards are growing aware that the threat of terrorism requires a state of constant vigilance which is poorly suited to most societies, America’s in particular. This realization is sub-consciously percolating through the group of think tanks within Washington, and will likely result in a desire for a coherent threat against which to secure American disquiet.

Unfortunately, China fills the bill in each of these cases all too well. China’s economic growth certainly owes much to the migration of labor intensive jobs to its shores. China also has the poor luck to be updating its military at a time when established military powers have more or less come to terms with American dominance; consequently, China’s recent military modernization has the potential to be perceived as hostile, when the bigger story would be a country of its size allowing its military to fall into further disrepair. This modernization process, which most people recognize as patriotism within their own shores, is typically perceived as a desire for regional hegemony (or worse) when it comes from a country outside theirs. None of this is to say that policy makers or China-watchers should overlook the actual actions and agendas of China’s military efforts, only that a bit of caution is essential given the significance of China’s foray into the developed world.

We too easily forget how much more is at stake with China. We see our own fears reflected back at us when we talk about China; our realization that too little attention has been paid to our own economic fundamentals, an uneven strategy for encouraging entrepreneurship, and an overlooked educational system which too rarely audits what it provides to students against what the country needs to ensure an ongoing economic renaissance. Each of these weighs on us, and has the potential to lure us into the illogic that our problems are caused by “them”, not our own mismanagement.
Is China important because of its role in being the world’s factory floor? Yes. Should we harbor concerns about how China intends to use its modernizing military? Certainly. Can we afford to overlook the fact that China allies itself with dictators and despots who happen to have raw materials essential to economic growth? No, although such certainty may be thrown back at us given our history of overlooking similar despotic tendencies in allies we found useful. But of all these reasons, one that is just as important – if not more so – is that China matters because it may be the modern world’s best opportunity to develop a rational response to totalitarianism; to understand how they die, and how to prevent a catastrophic collapse which takes them, their people, and surrounding countries, down with them.

Within the last twenty years, the world has seen three totalitarian regimes collapse. The first, the Soviet Union, was a moment in time when history recorded moments rich with all that is good: the oppressed found freedom, walls came down, prisons were opened, and liberty, with all its intoxicating vigor, reenergized us all. But the aftermath of this unprecedented totalitarian collapse found the world ill prepared to assist the transition from collectivism to personal freedom and the promise of the free market. Collectivization became kleptocracy faster than Soviet government institutions could adapt and evolve to. The result has been uneven – modern-day Russia has danced with democracy, but the extent of true reform are no clearer than the true weakness of its economy, a reality somewhat obscured because of Russia’s oil reserve exports.

Iraq provides yet another example of a totalitarian government collapsing. As opposed to the Soviet Union, where internal corruption, mismanagement, and the incoherence of communism caused an internal collapse, Iraq exploded due to outside pressure. Every totalitarian state breeds its own unique form of servile ineptness, and Iraq was no exception to this, as America is painfully discovering. Hussein’s iron fist kept a lid on the seething unresolved ethnic rivalries between Shia and Sunni. As with the Soviet Union, Hussein was no benevolent dictator; his insecurity and hubris led to a government accountable only to his perceptions as totalitarian dictator, absent external accountability systems of any sort. With the only means of accountability now gone, Iraqi government has been exposed for the artifice that it largely was. While at times it may prove necessary to forcefully destroy a totalitarian state such as Iraq and live with the aftermath, few would suggest this is the ideal mechanism the world should pursue.

Sadly, the struggles contained by the collapse of totalitarian systems in Iraq and the Soviet Union are infrequently compared to the quiet collapse of the totalitarian system in China. Only eighteen years after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China, the fear of that moment in time has been largely forgotten. Many ex-pats living in China during this fled the country, sure that this was the beginning of the end, a resurgence of the totalitarian impulses of a Chinese government still too infatuated with Mao. But quietly, yet surely, China has fought off these impulses and has managed to embrace portions of modernity.

This has been an uneven process with much that remains to be done, and it is still beset with much difficulty and no certain success; however, the China of today is too easily taken for granted. After Tiananmen, other paths forward existed: China could have closed its borders, it could have retracted backwards into the hyperbolic jingoism of communism, leading its country back into the cycle of poverty and insular destruction too common since Mao’s victory in 1948. But it did not. China opened, in its own peculiar way, to the changes Western thinking pressed upon it.

Many of the compromises the Chinese government has made between ideology and practice make no more sense then than they do now; however, paradoxes abound in every culture, and China is no exception to this. Yes, China matters because of its economic power. Yes, China is relevant because it holds the potential to become a regional power in Asia. But China matters most because it is the world’s best opportunity to nurse a totalitarian state out of its baser impulses without the use of external military conflict or a complete collapse of government. In hindsight, an understanding of how to bring totalitarian states out of rigor mortis and into a world of personal liberty, economic freedom and democracy may be China’s most important contribution to the world, it may very well be our best opportunity to constructively defuse the destructive power of totalitarianism.

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• Posted in Humanism, China, Politics
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• April 7, 2007

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