Chris Patten, you can’t set foot on China after writing this article, if your legal arguments regarding HK’s national security law are true. Thanks for the sacrifize, although I suspect you have been on Beijing’s undesirables list for a long time now.
Speaking of which, Charles Chaplin, a good man and among Hollywood’s founding fathers, had the exact same problem with Washington, and couldn’t visit his former California home for 30 years. The same happenned to Garcia Marquez, a man whose genius and good heart can best be understood by reading his Nobel acceptance speech, a masterpiece of decency as much as literature.
Indeed Beijing’s word is worthless: they promised not to militarize the South China Sea islands they occupied by sheer reason of their strength disregarding the court won rights of all other claimants. Very true, but it is aslo true and far more consequential that Washington and the Five Eyes compact promised, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not to advance NATO military positions towards Russia. Guess what: they included all of Eastern Europe in NATO, even the Baltic states, and there is talk of including Ukraine and Georgia, Zimmerman-telegram like, as soon as the relative positions of strength allow it.
Beijing is killing Democracy in Hong Kong. It is, they don’t want the example of a different and probably better way of organizing a society to spread and diminish their control over 1,300 million Chinese. I would add the not unimportant footnote that when HK was a British Colony, you could have introduced universal suffrage and built a truly vibrant democracy there, that would have been far more difficult to extinguish now. You settled for transferring to China a city state with no real Democracy at the voting booth but where many other civil rights were respected. But you know fully well that by denying the most fundamental right, the right to vote, all other rights are just government concessions, granted by a ruler, not exercised by a sovereign populace. In HK, Beijing is doing today what London did a few decades ago, after WWII, when White Hall mandarins had a set of ideas not dissimilar to that of the real mandarins of today’s Zhongnanhai.
As for discouraging the example of competing worldviews from spreading, two million Vietnamese, one million Indonesians and untold millions in South East Asia, Latin America and other continents the enumeration of which would be rather long, have paid with their lives the price to organize themselves in ways discouraged by brute force by Washington and London. Some won anyway, after unimaginable suffering, like Vietnam. Most did not, and are still purposefully and eternally failed governments, such as almost all of Latin America. The rape of Central Asian tribes by Beijing is just another drop in a sea of injustice and oppression of the weak by the strong, and you, dear Patten, have been born, lived and worked for the power circles of the latter, not the former.
In sum, Beijing is slowly starting to do today what London and Washington have previously done with abandoned profusion. All three did or do it because they can.
It is the instinct of all well-intentioned, freedom loving people, yourself perhaps to whatever degree included, to build a better future world in which nobody can force others into submission.
Now, China has a population equal to thrice that of the anglosphere, IQ levels 5 points ahead and access to the contiguous natural resources of most of Asia, including the lands of the former Soviet Union, practically all of which supports China just for geo-balancing reasons. Even if China is blockaded by sea, a risky proposition, they can shelter in their large Asian hinterland and keep on growing in technology and power and nobody, short of nuclear Armageddon, can do anything about it. The day China arrives at the relatively modest level of income per capita in nominal dollars its estranged province of Taiwan has, its GDP will be equal to that of the USA and the EU combined. That is nominal. PPP China’s economy is already 37% larger than America’s and it shows in many tangibles: China produces 25 times more cement than the US and 247 times more than the UK; 11 times more steel than the US…China is still a developing nation with nominal GDP per capita around $10,000, the world average, but the way it has been growing the last decade it will catch up with Taiwan in twenty years. By that time, China’s GDP PPP will be equal to that of the USA, the EU, Japan, India, Russia and Brazil combined. A unipolar moment if there ever was one.
London abused its imperial power until the mid- XX century, Washington abused even more its imperial power afterwards, perhaps simply because evolving technology allowed for stronger degrees of coercion; China, today a deliverer of the Third World much to the dismay of the receding anglosphere, will in due time be as harsh or harsher a master than the previous hegemons were, since technological “advances” will yet again allow for ever increasing powers of the few over the many, as we are all seeing even in the relatively unconnected, legacy world of today, A.D. 2020. A truly nightmarish mixture or 1984 and A Brave New World with Chinese characteristics awaits us, unless we start building a better future right now, and it won’t come easy even under the best scenarios.
The solution offered by the rulers of today, of which Patten has been one until just yesterday, is to fight under the command of today’s hegemon against the rise of the hegemon of tomorrow. That is historically suicidal, for the poor souls who buy such propaganda as well as for humankind as a whole. One doesn’t need to be Arnold Toynbee to see that the current Hegemon will eventually decay from the inside and fall as all previous Empires have, and just a glance at the Trump-Biden debate of two days ago in the fight to sleep on the bed once occupied by FDR, Lincoln or Jefferson, proves the point sufficiently. And vice-versa, rising Hegemons have a life of their own: Spain rose in the XV and XVI century and there was nothing the Turks, France or the at the time second-tier England could do to stop such a rise. When the English rose in the XIX century at the hands of the industrial revolution, there was nothing imperial China or Mogul India could do to prevent them. Then came the time to play “if you can’t beat them, join them” as London saw that the small American plantations had bloomed into the greatest Hegemon of today, but naturally not the last in human history.
The Foreign office tried to contain Berlin since the 1890s. Look at the result: after two World Wars and plenty of terrible upheavals, the Germans today have an economy and population far larger than Britain’s, and they are the leaders, sought or unsought, of Europe (and well behaved at that), while the UK is sneaking out to live on the margins of the Continent to which it belongs, after playing that swan’s song of an Opera Buffa called Brexit.
Nations rise and fall; to prevent them from doing so is probably as beyond our powers as stopping growth and aging in our bodies or reversing entropy. China is a bona fide rising nation right now: it is not only its phenomenal rags to riches story, but the way they are sending out their people to learn from the world and use it for their own ends. If the Soviets had allowed the kind of open borders and international student trips China has today, millions would have left never to return. Not the case with China now. Great growing nations see their best go out to conquer the world on their own, militarily or economically. It was the case of the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistardors; Clive, Rhodes and the British Industrialists; the American businessmen and inventors of the XX century, and now, rising by the year, the Chinese builders and traders.
If the US, “allied” with some misguided followers, tries to “isolate” China, all it will accomplish is for China to keep on rising within its gigantic East Asian sphere of influence, and on current socio-economic and technological arrangements, China will simply completely catch up first and then surpass in probably unwelcomed and paradigmatic-changing ways both the US and Europe. Finally they will come out of their cocoon ready to devour the planet, or at least abuse it one order of magnitude above what the Americans did, who were themselves far more powerful and abusive than the British, who were worse than the Spanish, all not solely owing to characteristics of their inner souls, but mostly because of the increasingly phenomenal technological advances at their disposal.
I see one way to preempt this debacle. I understand many in Washington and London will not like it, but things are what they are. The current world hierarchy is, as has often been the case, based on who “owns” the technological ecosystems capable of producing eh….to be continued
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Article source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-xi-jinping-regime-cannot-be-trusted-by-chris-patten-2020-09