Or the triumph of hope over experience?
Tacitus’ Guest Blogger* Bird Dog has a post up about this WaPo article:China Amends Constitution to Guarantee Human Rights. Good news, right?
BEIJING, March 14 — China amended its constitution Sunday to include formal guarantees of human rights and private property, laying down a new marker in the nation’s swift march away from the doctrinaire Communism of its founders.
Alas, the first sentence giveth and the next taketh away.
Although both steps were pushed by the ruling Communist Party, their effect on the lives of Chinese people still depends on how they are carried out by what remains an authoritarian, one-party government that allows no challenge to its rule.
Granted, I was raised in the Cold War era, and I retain a certain inherent distrust of the PRC’s government, to say nothing of its short- and long-term objectives. No doubt the sort of attitude I bring to the table about this is immoral, unethical, certainly not condusive to getting me invited to the best parties and possibly even fattening. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that ‘freedoms’ granted by a one-party state aren’t freedoms at all: they’re privileges whose availability would be inversely proportional to the inconvenience of granting them. If the PRC government really wants to promote freedom and progress, it should break all ties between the Party and the state; remove and encourage the creation of opposition parties; hold free, fair and contested elections in all levels of the government; and make arrangements for the peaceful transfer of power, whenever (not if) it proves necessary.
Then I’ll believe that this was something besides a bunch of unelected bureaucrats trying to scam world opinion.
Moe
PS: Mad props to ya, Bird Dog.
I almost didn’t write the post, Moe, because the Chinese don’t have a good history of abiding by their constitutions. However, Hong Kong is right next door and they’re rich and relatively free. Mainland Chinese have to know what’s going on, and I don’t think the politburo would want to see a billion Chinese with pitchforks and torches demanding change. That’s why I think the Chinese leadership is serious about the new freedoms.
“That’s why I think the Chinese leadership is serious about the new freedoms.”
OK, point on the billion pitchforks thing, but I’m still a bit skeptical about it all.
I hope you’re right, BD, but I’m not very confident. First because total domination of the media gives the Chinese government an enormous amount of control over the heads behind the pitchforks, and second because a billion people never do anything spontaneously (except hate the Yankees). It takes some spark and a critical mass of solidarity, and the Chinese have proven effective at snuffing sparks in the past.
I pretty much disagreed with you, but wanted to observe that I don’t think the Chinese care much of a tinker’s damn about “scamming world opinion.”
This is all about a) continuing to try to construct a workable economic system; b) trying to appear to their people to be trying to construct a workable economic system; c) trying to make their people think they care about them. Not necessarily in that order.
The Chinese leadership is rightfuly immensely worried about the instabilities in their system, and their loose hold on “legitimacy” in the eyes of their people. They desperately need to make various economic and legal, and, really, yes, ultimately, political, changes to fight against the vast inequity they’ve created,resulting in vast social resentments, resulting in political instability.
I’ll interupt what’s become the start of a lecture here, but my point is that Chinese acts, save in the strictly foreign affairs area, and sometimes even then, are pretty much always about the Chinese. They could give a rats ass what the rest of the world thinks, save, to some degree, when it affects their trade balance or other major economic affairs.
(This gives them something in common with parts of the Bush administration, for different reasons. I think they’re different reasons; I may be wrong.)
Except for Taiwan.
“I pretty much disagreed with you….”
Arrggh! “I pretty much agree with you” is what I wrote, before those goddam ASCII kidnappers swiped the type and added their own! Bastards!