Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE - The Dissenters

  The man who isn’t afraid to tell the truth

  The Tiananmen survivor

  Our memory is short-lived

  Feng Lanrui, a veteran of democracy

  The new generation: between Jesus and Tocqueville

  The Party is scared of mice

  CHAPTER TWO - Wild Grass

  Gao against the “blood heads”

  The moral generation is taking over

  Yan: a lone journalist fighting the censors

  Pan against sexual hypocrisy

  Liu Xia, a Jew against fascism

  CHAPTER THREE - The Mystics

  American-Chinese Christians

  The myth of an atheist China: a Jesuit invention

  Daoism, the religion of subversion

  No, communism is not Confucian

  How anticlericalism ravaged China

  The gods are tired

  The grand return of the sects

  Falun Gong, an antiparty

  Quantifying Chinese faith

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Dispossessed

  The craze for highways

  East to West: a journey in time

  Eight hundred million condemned to lifelong poverty

  How the young are forced to leave their villages

  The migrant, a second-zone citizen

  Out-of-bounds for villagers

  Mao Zedong: the Great Helmsman still

  The time of mutinies and repression

  The Party is always right

  Will the communists become socialists?

  The impossibility of reforming the Party

  CHAPTER FIVE - The Downtrodden

  The real authors of the success story

  The precedent of the Industrial Revolution

  A competitor hardly to be feared as yet

  No innovation, only imitation

  Shanghai: a failure in comparison with Hong Kong

  Investing in China?

  CHAPTER SIX - Skewed Development

  What economic miracle?

  Twenty percent unemployed

  Chinese banks: ticking time bombs

  The elusive middle class

  Transition: a convenient explanation

  China and India: a comparison

  China as seen from India

  India as seen from China

  Democracy makes all the difference

  Out to conquer the world

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Shadows of Democracy

  Tibetans: electoral puppets

  No, the Party is not moving toward democracy

  Drops in the ocean

  Reformism, the small-step theory

  When the Chinese voted supergirl

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Savage State

  Ding Zilin, undaunted by the executioners

  Family planning, another name for state intimidation

  The solitude of the abolitionist

  Corruption: crucial to the Party’s survival

  The Voice of Big Brother

  A chronicle of everyday repression

  CHAPTER NINE - The End of the Party

  The art of mastering jargon

  How to make a career in the Party

  How the Party is getting Americanized

  The Party in search of a lost legitimacy

  The invention of nationalism

  Looking for a scapegoat: Japan

  Neo-Confucianism is not an alternative for the Communist Party

  The nostalgia for Maoism

  The last days of the Communist Party

  Sinomania: a French ideology

  CHAPTER TEN - The Republicans

  A woman, free and Chinese

  Is Taiwan really Chinese?

  Religion in democracy

  How a democracy is born

  How dictatorships come to an end: the Taiwanese precedent

  Asian values: a myth

  Will the Republic of China fade away?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - A Moral

  Wolves and dragons: two chinese totems

  Which way will China go? Four scenarios, from revolution to status quo

  Human rights: what the West must do

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Guy Sorman

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Foreword to the American Edition

  The Western press is full of stories these days on China’s arrival as a superpower, some even heralding, or warning, that the future may belong to it. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident of China’s economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China’s new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

  But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of its subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.

  The Party’s primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development. It expends extraordinary energy in suppressing Chinese freedoms—the media operate under suffocating censorship, and political opposition can result in expulsion or prison—even as it tries to seduce the West, which has conferred greater legitimacy on it than do the Chinese themselves.

  The West’s tendency to misread China dates back to the seventeenth century, when French and Italian Jesuit travelers formed stereotypes that clutter our minds even today. We learned then—or thought we learned—that the Chinese were not like us. They had no religion, and the notion of freedom was alien to them. They naturally gravitated toward enlightened despotism, as embodied by the philosopher-emperor. Such misconceptions link up across time: Voltaire sang the praises of the mandarins, wishing a similar elite class could rule Europe; leftist intellectuals in the Sixties and Seventies celebrated the heroism of Mao Zedong; and today’s business elites happily go along with the Communist propaganda that democracy and free speech are contrary to the Chinese ethos.

  Yet with enough patience and will, one can plunge into the real China. Since 1967, I have visited the country regularly, and I spent all of 2005, part of 2006—the Year of the Rooster1—and then part of 2007 traveling through its teeming cities as well as its innermost recesses, where few Westerners go. I make no claim to know China fully, an impossibly ambitious task. I merely want to record the words and impressions of some exceptional Chinese men and women, who mostly suffer in silence, raising when they can the demand for a free nation—a “normal” nation.

  Before the totalitarian reign of Mao Zedong and his immediate successors, never before had an entire nation experienced such intense surveillance. The Chinese not only had to speak alike; they had to think alike with the Communist Party regulating every aspect of private life. Millions were imprisoned and killed.

  Things have obviously changed, much for the better. China is no longer totalitarian. Yet the 60-million-member Communist Party, if subtler, remains cruel and omnipresent. I have visited Henan Province, for example, where thousands of families in far-flung villages have died of AIDS. The Party does not merely leave them to perish. It initially denied the epidemic. It arrests Beijing students trying to bring food and medicine to the affected villagers, and accuses them of being enemies of the state. One of these—Hu Jia, a thirty-four-year-old human rights activist�
��was illegally sentenced to house arrest for 300 days in 2006 and 2007 for daring to distribute medicine to Henan’s suffering villages. Now that the Party finally acknowledges the plague, it claims that it is under control, which unfortunately is far from the truth.

  I also managed to visit the city of Linyi in Shandong Province. In 2005, government agents responsible for enforcing China’s family-planning laws kidnapped 12,000 women from the area, forcing abortions on those who were pregnant—in some cases, immersing seven-to eight-month-old fetuses in boiling water—and sterilizing those who weren’t. Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught blind lawyer, has been languishing in solitary confinement since 2006 because he protested legally against this atrocity. Such acts of cruelty take place throughout the country, especially in the rural areas, where 800 million Chinese live. If the regime works as well as it claims, I often wonder, why does it need to resort to so much violence?

  From the point of view of its members, of course, the Communist Party has been successful. It has maintained its grip over China, initiated economic growth, won legitimacy for the country, and lined its members’ pockets; why should it undertake the risky business of permitting political debate or democratization? Instead it keeps a close watch on any attempt to change its perfect system, brutally suppressing peasant and worker rebellions and imprisoning political bloggers—or branding them terrorists and executing them. The real purpose of family planning is not so much to limit the number of children as to keep the rural population on a tight leash. Besides, it provides easy income for officials willing to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing for a consideration. Corruption is rampant at all levels; peasant and entrepreneur alike indulge in it. Every Chinese has to endure some form of extortion.

  Whenever I meet a Communist official, I never fail to point this out. The standard reply: “We are in a period of transition.” Transition to what? Treated as second-class citizens, those living in the rural areas have little hope of escaping their plight. Currently, the economy generates no more than 20 million jobs a year, which means that it will require forty years to restore some dignity to the countryside. Schools and health care could improve the lot of the villagers substantially, but little is being done. The government makes all the right noises about removing injustice and promoting social development, but its deeds don’t match its words. Social harmony, the new buzz-word of the Communist Party, remains nothing more than a slogan.

  The fact is that in the absence of democracy, there is no compulsion for the Party to help the three-quarters of China’s population living in its rural villages. Will the new urban middle class press for democracy the way the Koreans and the Taiwanese did? It seems unlikely: city dwellers are wary of peasants, fearing that they would seize power under a democratic government. Will the peasants revolt? Uprisings take place all over the country, but they are sporadic, spontaneous outbursts against corrupt officials, lacking coordination, leadership, and a political agenda. The Party’s special police force is ruthlessly efficient in quelling these protests and has no qualms about killing their leaders. The revival of religion in China, Westerners often say, will bring about change: many Chinese human-rights activists are either Buddhist or Christian, and students who convert to evangelical denominations usually get involved in humanitarian activities. But to imagine that their isolated actions will bring about major political change is wishful thinking.

  Two things could threaten the regime: a downturn in the global economy or an uncontrolled epidemic. The regime’s legitimacy is closely linked to China’s growth rate, which in turn is pegged to world consumption, especially U.S. consumption. If for any reason Americans began to consume less, the Communist Party would lurch into disarray, and the new middle class might want a regime change—but not necessarily a democracy. A pandemic more devastating than the SARS outbreak of 2003 is also quite possible, given the lack of proper health-care facilities in rural China and the country’s massive internal migration, and history suggests that it could take several months for the central authorities and the international community to learn of it and respond.

  None of this is to suggest that the West boycott China. In fact, we must continue to engage with it not only through trade but also through cultural exchange. China’s renaissance, however imperfect, is good news. Hundreds of millions of people are shaking off the yoke of poverty; the process is slow and chaotic, but it is better than totalitarianism and hunger. Importing Chinese goods also helps the economies of the West, for it forces us to raise our productivity and offers our consumers cheaper goods. Of course, there is the other side of the coin—cheap Chinese goods hasten the destruction of some Western low-tech industries—but doesn’t creative destruction drive the free market? China is still a poor country. Its economy can hardly be called sophisticated, and the possibility of it overtaking the U.S., Europe, or Japan is remote. Neither is there any threat from China in the international arena yet: its army is still lagging, and its diplomatic clout is limited. We need not fear it, though we must continue to innovate to stay ahead.

  We also would do well to back pro-democracy and human rights activists in China, as we did in the erstwhile Soviet Union. In the Seventies and Eighties, the West continued to trade with the USSR while supporting dissidents there. There is no reason to treat China differently. We must not be swayed by the Communist leadership’s claims that China has a distinct cultural ethos and that its people are not committed to freedom. Our course will compel the Chinese leadership, desperately seeking international legitimacy, to listen. And they will listen, since their economy would collapse if our consumers and investors abandoned them.

  The Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, helped by a plethora of public-relations consultants and politically articulate emissaries, does all it can to woo foreign critics. The ham-handed methods of Maoist China are a thing of the past. After my year in China, when I returned to Paris and published my views, I spoke with Yan Yfan (a pseudonym)—a scholar on the payroll of a Beijing foundation, an extension of the Party, who had been assigned my case. “Do you dare deny China’s success story, its social stability, economic growth, cultural renaissance, and international restraint?” he asked me. I responded that political and religious oppression, censorship, entrenched rural poverty, family-planning excesses, and rampant corruption were just as real as economic growth in today’s China. “What you are saying is true but affects only a minority yet to benefit from reforms,” he asserted.

  Yet nothing guarantees that this so-called minority—a billion people! —will integrate with modern China. It is just as possible that the “minority” will remain poor, since it has no say in determining its fate, even as Party members get richer. Yan Yfan underscores my fundamental error: “You don’t have any confidence in the Party’s ability to resolve the pertinent issues you have raised.” He’s right; I don’t.

  I think it is time we listened to other voices than the Party’s strident one—those of the humble, the poor, the meek, and the oppressed. To give voice to the voiceless: this, in all humility, is what I have set out to do in The Empire of Lies. The book explores individual destinies and then discusses the ongoing debate on the nature of the Chinese regime, attempting to disprove the theory, put forth by Eastern and Western scholars, that China is a class apart. I refuse to accept that the Party is China. I have visited the country frequently for long stretches and have always been struck by the fact that the Chinese, like us, desire prosperity and freedom. Their supposed proclivity for an enlightened Communist Party is an ideological artifact.

  The Chinese leadership would like the world to believe that they have found an alternative to Western liberal democracy, a balance between a free market and enlightened despotism—a view shared by those in the West who prize economic efficiency above political freedom. Unfortunately, this claim does not stand up to scrutiny. The Chinese economy has only succeeded when the basic principles of the free market were applied: entrepreneurship, competition, free trade, and a stable currency. Th
ese principles are universal, not just Chinese. Whenever China has not adhered to them, it has had to pay the price. A behemoth public sector is dragging down its economy, and unsound banks are issuing bad loans and promoting unhealthy speculation. In the absence of the rule of law, corruption is rampant, and the scant respect for intellectual property is hampering innovation. The so-called Chinese characteristics of the market economy are neither Chinese nor progressive: they are merely symptomatic of the transition from socialism to the market economy.

  There is nothing innovative about China’s political institutions. Though the Communist Party has 60 million members, it can hardly claim to represent the Chinese people as a whole: it recruits only educated men from the cities, and it has very few women and virtually no peasants or workers on its rolls. The educated technocracy, the backbone of the Party, thinks that it knows what is best for the people and does not think it fit to ask them what they want. It is perhaps for this reason that countless decisions made at the top, without consultation at the grassroots, have failed to yield results. The Party prefers grandiose political gestures and high-sounding rhetoric to actual implementation. Though they use a Marxist vocabulary, China’s leaders tend to identify more and more with the ancient mandarin class. They are as arrogant and corrupt as the mandarins before 1911, when the Republican revolution put an end to their dominance.

  As things stand, rebellion is the only recourse left for people to express their discontent. What is even more worrisome is the question of succession. So far, Mao’s successors, beginning with Deng Xiaoping, have—despite Tiananmen—behaved rationally. But even if the Party has succeeded in generating four relatively enlightened despots, its process of choosing a leader remains obscure. There is no telling what the next one will be like. Internecine factionalism will make the outcome unpredictable. Without elections, China can only count on luck for an orderly succession.