Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

All of the Asian capitalist developmental states have been characterized by what I call “soft authoritarian” governments. 6Democracy—understood as a political system in which the force of public opinion makes a difference, a balance of powers exists within the government (what Americans call the “separation of powers”), and free elections can actually remove unsatisfactory officials—exists only partially in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, thanks to the pervasive, potent influence of unelected bureaucrats. In none of the three has an independent judiciary or the rule of law ever fully developed. In South Korea and Taiwan, movements for democratic reform have in recent years finally succeeded in bringing formerly “hard” authoritarian governments under more popular controls. In Japan, public opinion exerts a powerful influence over the government, but mainly through informal and traditional channels rather than the formal institutions of parliament and the courts.

If the government of Japan and its emulator states—South Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore—can be characterized as soft authoritarian, at least during their decades of high-speed economic growth, then China may be an example of “soft totalitarianism,” on a par with governments like Suharto’s in Indonesia or Chiang Kai-shek’s in Taiwan, and considerably softer than the truly totalitarian worlds of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

A soft totalitarian regime directly restricts freedoms of speech and the press, thereby curbing the effect of public opinion on the government. Under soft authoritarianism (as in Japan, for example), such freedoms exist on paper but are attenuated in part by cartelization of the news media—press clubs in Japan can impose collective or individual penalties on journalists who report news that irritates the state—and also by narrow channels of access to advertising, state-owned broadcasting, and state licensing of school textbooks. The public is better informed in soft authoritarian countries because there are always ways around press clubs and cartels, but public opinion remains only a mild constraint on the government. Whereas a soft totalitarian state will employ direct suppression of offending books, imprisonment of authors, state control of Internet servers, and dismissal or imprisonment of dissidents, soft authoritarianism achieves its ends through peer pressure, bullying, fear of ostracism, giving priority to group norms, and eliciting conformity through social sanctions of various kinds. Under both types of regimes, elections are usually to one degree or another only formalities, behind which permanent state officialdoms actually govern.

An ideological shift from an all-embracing communism to an all-embracing nationalism has also helped to hold Chinese society together, giving it a certain intellectual and emotional energy and stability under the intense pressures of economic transformation. One of the weaknesses of communism was its quasi-religious claim to scientific truth, which, once exposed as fraudulent, undermined the values and ideological cement of the regimes that had embraced it. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, the Chinese Communist Party has tried to foster a consensus among mainland and overseas Chinese based not on scientific but on historical claims to power, prestige, and wealth—as well as on a belief that China is once again destined to reclaim its position as the preeminent civilization in Asia and become a global superpower. The People’s Republic of China used to proudly call itself Communist China. Today, the term commonly used is just China, and this new “China” borrows endlessly from its past glories but also plays powerfully on its century-long experience of humiliation at the hands of European, American, and Japanese imperialists. Present-day China is clearly in transit toward some new self-concept, not to speak of a new system of relationships with other countries; it is not yet clear, however, what form or forms these will take.

To be sure, there are factors that could derail China’s emergence as a major power, the most obvious of which are inadequate education and uneven development within the country. In the Republic of China on Taiwan during the 1990s, for example, the president, premier, and half the cabinet had doctoral degrees. In fact, its impressive record in producing a college-educated populace is one explanation for Taiwan’s increasingly successful transition to democracy in a context of high, reasonably equitable per capita income distribution and huge reserves of foreign currency. Such educational achievements—close to 40 percent of Taiwanese aged eighteen to twenty-one are enrolled in institutions of higher learning—are almost unimaginable on the mainland. China, with a total population of 1.2 billion, has the staggeringly low total of about 7 million college graduates to help run a massive and massively modernizing economy and society. There are a total of 1,065 institutions of higher learning in China today, with about 2.5 million students. 7

China also sends thousands of students abroad for advanced degrees, but many of them do not come home. This means China has no access to the sort of meritocratic officialdom with which Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have managed their systems of privately owned but publicly guided enterprises. The Communist Party itself currently has a total of about fifty million members, but only some two million of them are college educated. It can compensate for this educational weakness to some extent by tapping into the talents of overseas Chinese and of interested foreign investors, but such a lack of widespread technical competence may in the long run prove a serious and potentially catastrophic constraint.

Uneven development is a potentially explosive problem. Although in times of dynastic decline or internal weakness China has been prey to strong centrifugal forces, warlordism, and regional movements for independence, this is unlikely to be a major concern in the foreseeable future. A wealthy province like Guangdong, adjacent to thriving Hong Kong, for example, has nothing to gain and much to lose in the civil war that would undoubtedly result from any attempt to separate itself from the rest of the country. The issue of the present moment is not so much keeping wealthy provinces in line as keeping poor provinces quiet and functional with not much more in the way of compensation than the promise that sooner or later the wealth of the country is bound to begin to trickle down to them.

An estimated one hundred million people, more than the entire population of Mexico, are now adrift in China, largely migrants from the interior looking for work in rich coastal areas. They represent what “trickle down” there may be for the poorest rural areas, remitting part of their meager earnings to the interior. The vast and controversial Three Rivers Dam under construction on the Yangtze River will aid interior areas more than any other part of the country by providing cheap electric power to them; for the time being, however, the migrants tend to evade taxes and ignore the country’s draconian one-family, one-child policy. There is also the danger, from the ruling party’s point of view, that they might organize. This would not only reduce their value as an ultra-cheap labor force contributing to the present export-driven boom but also raise the possibility that migrant groups could grow into a Chinese version of Solidarity, the union movement that largely dismantled communism in Poland. This would be the regime’s worst nightmare and is the primary reason for the sometimes harsh application of its otherwise soft totalitarian policies to political dissidents of all sorts, but to union organizers and religious movements in particular. Part of the unholy alliance between China’s domestic autocrats and its foreign investors is that both hate unions and any movement toward workers’ rights, even if for different reasons.