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WALL STREET JOURNAL
Exporting Authoritarianism
For decades, the expectation has been that capitalism would make China more like the West. Something like the reverse is happening. By Richard Bernstein
Tiananmen Redux
By Johan Lagerkvist
One of the great ironies of recent history is that China would almost surely be more democratic and amenable to Western values if the massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 had never taken place—or, at least, if the demonstrators had gone back to their classrooms before the Communist leaders crushed their movement with tanks and automatic rifles. The failure to do that led directly to the fall of the most boldly liberal-minded leader ever to occupy the top position in the Chinese Communist hierarchy, party general secretary Zhao Ziyang. He was placed under house arrest and the possibility of democratic reform was locked up with him. The day of the crackdown, June 4, 1989, in this sense marked a decisive moment in China’s long history. But the Swedish Sinologist Johan Lagerkvist goes further in “Tiananmen Redux: The Hard Truth about the Expanded Neoliberal World Order.” For Mr. Lagerkvist, Tiananmen was not just a watershed in Chinese history but a watershed for the world, more important in its permanent impact than such near contemporaneous occurrences as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. His argument is essentially this: The violent denouement of the Tiananmen demonstrations brought about something more than the definitive eradication of any opposition to the authority of the one-party state. It also released paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to accelerate China’s transformation from a poverty-stricken Maoist country to a rich and powerful capitalist one. What is most important in Mr. Lagerkvist’s scheme is that Tiananmen allowed the 84-year-old Deng to press on his reluctant co-elders in the party a neoliberal economic agenda, by which he means a kind of savage capitalism, with low wages, reduced social welfare benefits and yawning gaps between the rich and the poor. All the well-publicized ills of globalization thus originate in China’s decision to go for rapid economic growth no matter the costs. This produced another irony. For decades, the widespread hope and expectation outside of China was that capitalism would make the country more like us. As Mr. Lagerkvist gloomily points out, something like the reverse has actually happened. Rather than China being Westernized, the West is being Sinicized. “It would be imprudent,” he writes, “to ignore the fact that the world may indeed become more authoritarian and parochially nationalistic despite, or precisely because of, the effects of neoliberal globalisation.” It would be hard to imagine a more alarming and pessimistic vision, but is it valid? And did all this happen because of the tragedy at Tiananmen? Half of Mr. Lagerkvist’s book consists of an informed and impassioned history of the 1989 events that will leave readers with a haunting sense of what might have been. The student leaders of the protest failed to understand that their refusal to end the movement before the tanks arrived played into the hands of the hard-liners and worked fatally against Zhao. And the party secretary himself was outmaneuvered by Premier Li Peng, who emerges here as the manipulative, mendacious villain behind the crackdown. The consequences were grave and Leninist in nature. While the West waited for China to become more open and democratic, an Orwellian state was being forged in China, including what the writer Louisa Lim has aptly called the “People’s Republic of Amnesia”—the suppression of public memory of Tiananmen itself, the Great Firewall, the eradication of the notion of a truth existing outside party control. Any yearning for individual freedom was forcefully diverted into a yearning for individual riches. “Freedom,” Mr. Lagerkvist says, “seemed attainable only through the consumption of exclusive imported goods.” Mr. Lagerkvist takes the seminal importance of Tiananmen as a matter of faith, stating it and restating it in a book that badly suffers from repetitiveness—as well as from a meandering quality to go along with a good deal of syntactical clunkiness and some very poor proofreading. Not all the facts necessarily fit with what is actually a theory. Mr. Lagerkvist refers, for example, to the opposition of some of the party’s elders to Deng’s reform program and asserts that Tiananmen both made that opposition possible and enabled Deng to overcome it—but there is no proof for either assertion. Indeed, it seems just as possible that Deng would have adopted a “neoliberal” approach even without the seismic shock of Tiananmen, because that was what was going to produce what he wanted, which was the most explosive economic expansion in world history. Similar questions can be raised when Mr. Lagerkvist comes to the effect of all this on the West, especially his argument that Western liberalism has taken an authoritarian turn because of the massacre of 1989 in China. That the West has taken any such turn is itself debatable, that it’s due to Tiananmen even more so. Mr. Lagerkvist cites the NSA’s surveillance of American citizens’ phone records to illustrate how “Western countries are now guilty of the same offenses as the dictatorships whose values they reject.” He’s entitled to that radical opinion, but he doesn’t provide convincing reasons to believe that the NSA’s program has much at all to do with the nefarious effects of “the expanded neoliberal world order.” Yet Mr. Lagerkvist is correct that “an authoritarian wind is blowing across the world,” and that it originates in China. The West is not as imperiled as he seems to think, but its institutions have yielded to Chinese political demands—whether it’s European leaders refusing to meet the Dalai Lama or Yahoo turning over information about bloggers to the Chinese authorities. The China challenge is not only about things like expansion in the South China Sea or its relations with North Korea. It is also a challenge to liberal-democratic values and practices, to freedom itself, and Mr. Lagerkvist is to be commended for forcefully and urgently pointing this out. Mr. Bernstein is the author, most recently, of “China 1945: Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice.”
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