Visitor from a strange land

By Oh Kongdan

Last week Washington was abuzz with news of the state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao, although the popular mood was pessimistic. President Hu held a summit meeting with President Obama, had dinner with Vice President Biden, and found time to meet with business executives, the press, and congressional leaders before leaving for Chicago, and then home.

President Hu seemed like a nice guy: gregarious, gracious, even witty at times. He wasn’t as animated as the last state visitor from China, Jiang Zemin, but he tried to put a human face on the Chinese government. Unfortunately, his visit, which was viewed with skepticism by most Americans, failed to break through the veil of suspicion that separates two of the world’s most powerful countries.

President Obama decided to make human rights one of the major issues of discussion, and human rights is not China’s strong suit. In reporting on their president’s Washington visit, the Chinese media completely ignored that aspect of the summit. President Hu wished he could do the same, but when he was cornered by two American reporters at a press conference, he had the good sense to admit that ``a lot still needs to be done in China, in terms of human rights,” although he gave no indication that his government has any specific plans to respect those rights.

About 20 years ago, on a research trip to China, I and my American colleagues had a series of meetings with top Chinese policy analysts. The meetings were sometimes tense and sometimes humorous. Some meetings provided insights and others wasted our time. My strongest memory is of a brief discourse on Chinese history given to us by a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who outlined what he called China’s ``four revolutions.”

He said the first revolution, launched by Sun Yatsen, moved China from a dynastic kingdom to a republic, but as he saw it, the only notable changes were in fashion and hairstyle, so he dubbed this a fashion revolution. From the viewpoint of today’s Chinese communists, perhaps that’s all it was. The second revolution, according to this scholar, was Mao’s peasant revolution, in which the communists eliminated all other political groups and formed the People’s Republic of China. This was China’s political revolution.

The third revolution, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was also Mao’s. This was not, however, the young Mao who fought to free the Chinese peasants from warlords, but the old Mao who had fallen victim to his own cult of personality. Rather than wiping out bureaucratic ``mannerism,” the Cultural Revolution ended up killing millions of Chinese and alienating the population from their government. The fourth and most recent revolution was presided over by Deng Xiaoping, who realized that the government needed to give back to people some responsibility for their economic lives, and thus permitted a measure of capitalism.

The fourth revolution has continued, but it is mostly an economic revolution. The political revolution that Mao started in the 1920s and finished in 1949 never moved beyond communist dictatorship, and in that sense it is little better, politically, than the Chinese empires or the warlord regimes. Under the communists, Chinese politics became frozen, even while the economy was permitted to develop.

And so today China has become an economically powerful country (although millions of Chinese are still dirt poor) because it allowed its economy to evolve according to the needs and desires of the people. Politics, on the other hand, is for the elite, not the masses. As a consequence, today China’s rulers remain hidden behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, just as they did in imperial times when the emperors lived in the adjacent Forbidden Palace.

China is home to over a billion Chinese who are friendly and eager to share their opinions with foreigners. But when Chinese represent their government and the Chinese Communist Party, they become strangers who parrot the Party line. There can be no true dialogue with China because the Party is not willing to admit that it is sometimes wrong. Hence the low expectations that Americans had for President Hu’s visit.

It is no easier for Koreans to deal with the Chinese than it is for Americans. Doing business with China is one thing ― Koreans, like Americans, do a lot of business. But on political matters there is no talking to the Chinese. On the subject of North Korea’s uranium facility, the Chinese say, ``We have not seen it.” On the subject of the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong, China ``strongly urges the DPRK and ROK sides to maintain calm and restrained.”

China will not take its place as a truly great power until it has undergone another revolution. That revolution will open the government to the people, who will be able to debate political matters among themselves and speak openly to foreigners. Only then will the rule of law triumph over the privileges of the political elite. And only then will the Communist Party mask be taken off and the true face of China appears. China will then no longer be a stranger.

Oh Kongdan is a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She is an expert on Asian affairs. Her recent publications include the report, ``Moving the U.S.-ROK Alliance into the 21st Century" and the book ``The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom." She can be reached at kohassig@ida.org.