Mandate of Heaven

Do the Chinese hope for the freedoms sought by other peoples all over the world? Do they want to live under the rule of law, free from arbitrary government? Do they want to be free to speak out when their leaders err, when they encounter corrupt officials? Do they want to be free to worship as they please? Of course they do, but even some would-be reformers are not sure that democracy is the answer.

In “Bad Elements,” Ian Buruma has written a wonderful book about brave people, some more sympathetic and more appealing than others. Most of them risked their lives and many of them suffered horribly because they spoke out against three despotic Chinese governments: that of the Communist Party ruling mainland China since 1949; that of the Chiang family’s Kuomintang government on Taiwan from the end of World War II until Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, opened the door to an opposition movement in the 1980s; and, not least, that of Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party, or PAP, which has dominated Singapore since 1963.

Lee is, of course, the foremost articulator of the nonsensical “Asian values” rationale for denying various human rights. Its advocates insist that Asians value community and state above individual freedom and do not want democracy. South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung, dismissed such claptrap long ago, as have the people of South Korea and Thailand and the Chinese of Taiwan and Hong Kong who struggled for democracy. Buruma has had conversations with scores of Chinese dissidents from Los Angeles to Beijing and deftly lets them demonstrate, through the stories of their lives, just how much the Chinese crave freedom.

Communist Party leaders in China, like those who ruled the country for centuries before them, reject the concept of a loyal opposition. Any group offering an alternative to the party line of the moment is perceived as a threat: the tiny democracy movement, labor advocates, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians or Falun Gong. Buruma notes that the party disguises politics as culture: to dissent is to be “un-Chinese” as well as unpatriotic.

Key to the survival of the Communist Party has been its success in exploiting divisions in the opposition, nurturing intellectuals’ traditional mistrust of peasants and workers and fostering conservative reformers’ suspicion of the more radical opponents of the regime. Many Chinese intellectuals fear democracy, however willing they are as individuals to reject party dogma. Buruma spoke frequently with Dai Qing, a courageous woman who has been relentless in her criticism of the environment-wrecking, potentially catastrophic Three Gorges dam project along the Yangtze River. Dai insists on her freedom to speak but is skeptical about whether democracy can work in China. She is a classic conservative reformer, apparently still dreaming of some form of benevolent authoritarianism, a variation on the virtuous leader that Confucians have always sought.

But much as Buruma enjoyed his conversations with Dai, he found the churlish Wei Jingsheng most persuasive about what is needed in China. He is not put off by Wei’s chain-smoking and badgering in-your-face personality. This is the man who in 1978 demanded that Deng Xiaoping grant China democracy--and spent 18 years being tortured in prison without yielding an inch. For Wei the term “virtuous leader” is an oxymoron. Men with power have to be kept in check by democratic institutions. Wherever he can find an audience, he insists that the Chinese people are ready now.

Singapore is a particularly sad story. No one has ever doubted that Cambridge-educated Lee is brilliant. But intelligence never inoculated anyone against arrogance, ruthlessness or stupid behavior. Buruma recalls the old description of Singapore as a “Disneyland with capital punishment.” Lee’s imagined Chinese community is a Potemkin democracy where everyone is happy, the streets are spotless and nobody dares spit. Archly, Buruma asks why, despite intimidation, more than a third of the people voted against Lee’s PAP in 1997. And the world wonders why Lee has found it necessary to hound, imprison and torture his critics. “The fact that dissidents are called Communists in Singapore and counterrevolutionaries in China is incidental; the underlying sentiments of the rulers are the same.”

The Chinese found the winning approach in Taiwan in 1978. There, in the southern city of Kaohsiung, opposition to the Kuomintang dictatorship came together, radicals and reformists, intellectuals and workers, and they provoked a savage encounter with the ruling party. There was no immediate victory for People’s Power, as when Filipinos rid themselves of Ferdinand Marcos or Indonesians brought down Suharto. But working together over the years, they were able to wear down resistance to democracy and win a series of political reforms, ultimately including free elections. In the 2000 presidential election, they forced the Kuomintang to surrender power. Today Taiwan is a democracy whose people live under the rule of law and enjoy institutions that guarantee their freedom, not least the freedom to change their government when it fails them.

Buruma notes that several of the dissidents have turned to Christianity and that most Tibetans cling to their faith in Buddhism, but he acknowledges that the spirit never seized him. He sees faith in Jesus and the Dalai Lama as alternatives to Maoism, not as harbingers of democracy. He is no more enamored of the faith in science espoused by physicist Fang Lizhi. The Chinese must question all dogma and settle for nothing less than freedom of expression. They must follow Czech President Vaclav Havel’s dictum and “live in truth.”

Elegantly written, this collection of interviews and piercing insights demonstrates that the Chinese, wherever they may reside, are as eager to be free as any people anywhere and reminds us of the oppression under which too many of them have lived for too long.

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From ‘Bad Elements’

We will never know how many people were killed during that sticky night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4, 1989. A stink of burning vehicles, gunfire, and stale sweat hung heavily on Tiananmen Square; thousands of tired bodies huddled in fear around the Monument to the People’s Heroes ....Tracer bullets and flaming cars lit up the sky in bursts of pale orange. Loudspeakers barked orders to leave the square immediately, or else. Spotlights were switched off and then on again. And over the din of machine-gun fire, breaking glass, stamping army boots, screaming people, wailing sirens, and rumbling APCs, young voices, hoarse from exhaustion, sang the ‘Internationale,’ followed by the patriotic hit song of the year, ‘Descendants of the Dragon’:

In the ancient East

there is a dragon;

China is its name ....