I don’t think many people in Britain had heard of
Wuhan or Hubei province before the present outbreak of Covid-19 (Coronavirus).
The fifty largest Chinese cities each has a population greater than two
million, yet few of us could name more than two or three. Chongqing, for
example, was first settled in 316 BC and has a population of 30 million, but
how many of us could point it out on the map? The danger isn’t so much a virus
as our near complete and utter ignorance.
I only know one word in Chinese. I don’t know how to
say “hello” and I don’t know how to say “goodbye”, but I do know how to say
“little bottle” [小瓶,
Xiǎopíng]. It’s possibly the most
important word in modern Chinese history.
The Communist revolution in China was one of the
greatest catastrophes in human history. Between 1949 and Mao’s death in 1976
the Communist party directly or indirectly killed between fifty and one hundred
million people. Mao repeated the same mistakes that Stalin had made in the
1920s and 1930s, but with even worse results. The Great Famine caused by the
Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) starved forty-five million Chinese people.
Collectivisation in China did more damage even than in the Soviet Union.
One of the aims of the Great Leap Forward was for
China to overtake Britain’s industrial output in fifteen years. It seems
unimaginable today that China could have been behind run down Britain in 1958.
Now we depend on Huawei to build our telecommunications network and if the
Chinese economy contracts because of Covid-19 we will all catch a cold.
But China is where it is today, not so much because of
what happened before the death of Mao, but because of what happened afterwards.
China in 1976 was backward, poor and going nowhere. It was just another failed
communist state with inefficient industry. It sold almost nothing to Britain.
One person is more responsible for the rise of
present-day China than anyone else. Deng Xiaoping. His first name Xiaoping sounds
like the word for “little bottle”. He had rather a lot of bottle.
It was a miracle that Deng survived long enough to
introduce the reforms that changed China. He went through the Long March, the
Second World War and the Revolution. He was purged. He had to denounce himself
and publicly criticise himself in struggle sessions. He was exiled and made to
work in a factory in the provinces. But he survived. He took on and defeated
the original “Gang of Four” including the infamous Madame Mao (Jiang Qing),
responsible for many of the excesses of the Cultural revolution. Deng won and saw them
jailed.
Deng had one goal. He set out to make China a Great
power, strong and prosperous. He did this by doing what no other communist
succeeded in doing. He made communism work by getting rid of all those aspects
of communism (nearly all of it) that didn’t work.
China remains nominally communist, but what this means
in practice is that it kept only the totalitarian aspects of communism, one
party, a ruthless security service and intolerance of dissent. Everything else
was purged. The result was not so much socialism with a human face as
capitalism with a communist face.
Deng introduced market reforms and he set about
learning from the capitalist world. He learned about our technology and our
business methods and he set China on a wealth creation path that was simply
unimaginable in 1976.
The crisis came in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square
protests. Almost no one in the West understood what was really going on. It is
quite clear now that the prosperity of modern China and indeed the rest of the
world which depends on Chinese prosperity is due to the fact that these
protests did not succeed.
The revolutions of 1989-1991 did not always bring
democracy and prosperity. The Soviet Union did not become free, nor did its
population become wealthy. It ceased to exist and in most of its territory one
form of tyranny was replaced with another. Russia ceased to be a great power
and most of its people are worse off now than they were in 1991. Communism was replaced by criminality. The same most
likely would have happened to China.
China just as much as the Soviet Union is made up of
peoples who do not speak the same language and who frequently cannot understand
each other. It has a variety of peoples who are held together by force. If the
Tiananmen Square protests had succeeded there is no guarantee that the borders
of China would have remained intact, nor that the market reforms that Deng
introduced would have continued or succeeded. After all Gorbachev’s attempt to
reform the Soviet Union failed. Russia today is neither open nor restructured.
Deng’s repression of protest was therefore from his
own perspective necessary in order to achieve his goal of Chinese
greatness. We may condemn the repression
of democracy in China, but I wonder if with the benefit of hindsight, the
Chinese, including many of the 1989 protesters, might not prefer their present
situation to that of people in Russia.
The lesson of modern Chinese history is that the
combination of Mao’s authoritarianism and ruthlessness mixed with Deng’s
understanding of the reforms necessary for China to reach greatness has
succeeded beyond any possible expectation. China long ago surpassed Britain economically
and will in time surpass even the United States.
But China’s rise to greatness is not that of a
friendly power. It is mercantilist, exploitative and has no scruples
whatsoever. It will crush its own people if they try to rise up but will prefer
to keep them content with prosperity. It will do everything in its power to
overtake the West, because this is the goal that Deng set for China and the
path it has been on ever since.
The combination of tyranny and free markets is very powerful indeed, perhaps more powerful than democracy and free markets, because China can do what is unpopular, but necessary while we cannot.
But there is a contradiction at the heart of China,
which is demonstrated not merely by the Tiananmen Square protests, but also by
the more recent protests in Hong Kong. Free markets give rise to a desire for
democracy and genuine freedom and cannot properly function without them. The
limit to Chinese prosperity may be in the very attempt to combine authoritarianism with
free markets, which has up to now brought it such success. Free markets plus
tyranny may work so long as prosperity makes people forget their lack of
freedom. The same is the case in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. But what
happens if economic growth in the end depends on the freedom to innovate,
create and come up with new ideas? What if state control and tyranny limits and
curtails the ability of markets to create wealth. Chinese wealth creation may
just not have hit the buffers yet. The strain of trying to be both capitalist
and communist may cause a crisis in Chinese communism, capitalism or both.
Chinese people whether in Hong Kong or on the mainland
would be wise to be careful. Their protests will be crushed just as ruthlessly
as those of 1989. But at some point, China will have to face the contradiction
that Deng could not. That will require not a little bottle, but a great deal of
bottle, because anything could happen including lots of broken glass on the
streets. The danger is not so much a virus. We will require little of Deng's bravery to pass through this crisis safe and well. The danger is that China goes the way of the Soviet Union or worse, because that would infect us all.
