From my outpost in Hong Kong I’m watching history unfold.
I spent two years living in the States. Today a majority of Americans have voted to reclaim the best of what I saw there – passion, energy, generosity, vision. They’ve voted to do more than correct the vicious extremism of the Bush-Cheney years, they’ve taken a historic step that no one could have predicted, expanding and strengthening their democracy and voting for social inclusion and justice. Given the reality of American power, this is an event which spells hope for all of us. But – and this is the history – black people, men and women, have been leaving the polls in tears. Obama has given a voice to the millions who felt that they were disenfranchised.
Which of course brings me to China. When China has, for years, been the biggest economic success story in the world, and when the standards of living for many Chinese are improving, when polling suggests that a vast majority of people are optimistic, why do people like me harp on about political reform? What’s wrong with a dictatorship, as long as it responds – as this one increasingly does – to popular grievance?
Well, step back a bit and you see that China is going through its own extremist swing towards a ruthless capitalism that could be termed devil take the hindmost. Certainly the central government is trying to address issues like healthcare because they understand that it is potentially explosive, but the statistics are absolutely dire. One article in a state-run newspaper last week suggested that only 10% of cases of childhood leukaemia can be treated, because the vast majority of parents cannot afford to pay even to attempt to save their child. This in a country which owns much of America’s debt, which has an active space programme, and which is on paper committed social justice. America’s record on healthcare is atrocious, but there’s no Medicare here.
Step back a bit further, and you see that China’s history since 1949 has been a series of swings – some of which, like the extreme leftist Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, have left millions dead. The present swing to a corrupt right will leave its own death toll. From a purely pragmatic point of view, democracy, with the constant challenge of an active opposition, the pressure to find consensus, along with the necessary accompaniment of a free press and independent courts seems to me to represent the best (but never perfect) corrective to extremism.
Beyond this, I believe that political impotence is potentially toxic. Today what we are frequently seeing in China is that the disenfranchised are driven to extreme measures. Often these are self-destructive – the suicide rate is high. Sometimes they are vengeful. Recently, a man called Yang Jia murdered six police officers in Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, he has been sentenced to death. What has been astounding has been the outpouring of displeasure on the internet about the sentence. It seems that he was beaten up by the police and, unable to get anyone to listen to his complaint, he turned to murder. The revenge of course was totally out of all proportion to the grievance suffered. Nevertheless, people on the internet said they wanted to know the whole story and questioned whether Yang Jia should be held entirely accountable when the system offered him no outlet for his grievance. This is not an isolated incident. Democracy – and by this I mean the press, the courts as well as the polling booth – even when it is flawed, as it is everywhere it exists – provides an absolutely necessary outlet for potentially explosive buildups of grievance.
Beyond even that, I believe there is a profound but unmeasurable effect on the individual who feels she or he has a voice. The Chinese I meet are under no illusion that they have any impact on the future governance of their country. But many of them seek a voice. The internet is the clearest indication of that – it is full of debate, much of which is silenced, some of which is not. At the moment, China has side-stepped the ballot box and is practicing the populism of the internet forum. An economic boom is one thing, a healthy country is quite another.