CHINA: THE TROUBLE WITH ONE-PARTY AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT

China can be a most heartless, cruel culture, despite its vaunted art, the product of the dynasties, ancient and more recent.  The West can be heartless and cruel, as witness the treatment of its minorities by Nazi Germany.  It took a world war to rid the world of the Hitler regime.  China had a revolution that succeeded in overthrowing the last imperial dynasty, the Chin or Manchu (Qing) in 1912, in which Sun Yat-sen played a leading role, followed by years of warlordism, invasion by the Japanese, World War II, civil war, and finally the victory of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party over Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, which fled to Taiwan in 1949.  Mao's reign was marked by insane movements (the Great Leap Forward, which produced famine killing 30-40 million Chinese (1958-1961 + ) and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976 when Mao died), which killed 2 million more and destroyed two generation of teachers and people who would have been students but for the insane class warfare.  Mao loved chaos so long as he could profit by gaining power from it and had no regard for people.  We have so many, was his attitude, what difference did it make if some died.  A revolution, perpetual in his view, was not a dinner party, he famously said, with power coming from the barrel of a gun.  He was the leading tyrant of the 20th century, ahead of two amazing monsters, Stalin and Hitler.

So China is a rough place to have to survive despite the current Reform & Opening promulgated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, after Mao, but not Maoism, was more or less safely dead.

Today China is experiencing yet another self-created disaster in which its major manufacturers of milk products used in baby formula and ice cream have been caught watering the product and covering it up by adding poison, in the form of melamine.  Several Chinese babies have died and some 53,000 have been poisoned, developing kidney stones in two-year olds.  Foreign importers have cut off further use of Chinese dairy product.  A year or two ago a similar problem arose when melamine was added to pet food, poisoning cats and dogs wherever Chinese animal feed was used.

What kind of a people, a culture, a civilization produces such barbarity?  China, after all, sees itself as the Middle Kingdom, existing between Heaven and Earth, whose leadership enjoys the Mandate of Heaven itself, whose top man saw himself as the Son of Heaven.  Peope who lived outside the wall were barbarian.  Those inside were civilized, in the Chinese view of themselves.

The evidence fails to make the case.  Or to put it another way, the counter-evidence gives the lie to the myth.

China's remaining unsolved problem is political.  As it deals with all of the preexisting problems, it remains an authoritarian one-party system that is essentially unanswerable to the people it nominally serves, because the demands of serving itself and the perpetuation of its own power take precedence over the welfare of its people.  As a result when abuses come to light, there is nothing that the people can do.  The last time they tried the result was the Tiananmen Square massacre and the end of the Student Democracy Movement on June 4, 1989.

Not having any recourse in a free press or free elections or a powerful opposition party, there is little that the Chinese have to force their latest ruler to respond to their legitimate needs.  There's no sense in criticizing the leadership because this only invites repressive crackdown through the one-party system where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls the government, just as Lenin, after whom it is modeled, had in mind.

Viewed from this perspective it is no wonder that China's motto is not "Serve the people," but "Every man for himself, as Jen Lin-liu observes in her delicious book "Serve the People" (Harcourt, 2008).

Agence France-Press reports on the China melamine baby poisoning scandal in the article reprinted below from which the following excerpt diagnoses the national problem.  China fears instability more than it fears abuse of power and maladministration.  In light of its bloody past, can you blame them for fearing more mass movements taken over by hard-liners to the point where opposition insanity confronts governmental insanity?  See Jonathan Fenby's "Modern China" for an account of the June 4th incident, as Tiananmen Square is known in China.

It is part of China's culture not to criticise the political elite but also reflects lack of choice over the leadership, said Joseph Cheng, a China watcher at City University of Hong Kong.

"In China, you never blame the emperor, you always blame the courtiers around the emperor. It's a kind of self-censorship," he said.

"In the West, when something like this happens, the government may resign, you have a general election, and perhaps the opposition moves in. But in China, there is no credible alternative to the government."