On Nov. 19, 45 of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy leaders, including ex-lawmakers and activists, were sentenced to 4-10 years in prison on charges of campaigning for subversion under Beijing’s National Security Law. It was the biggest, or most chilling, case under the new law.
The story revived my thoughts about the city bordering on Hong Kong, Shenzhen, where I lived in the 1980s. Shenzhen was the first so-called Special Economic Zones China launched in its new economic reform era. Market was allowed to play a role. Foreign capital, foreign technology, as well as joint ventures with foreign companies were enthusiastically embraced.
With the closeness of people, business, and goods between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, a daring question was asked among Shenzheners: “Would Shenzhen become more like Hong Kong or would Hong Kong become more like Shenzhen?”
Now we know. Shenzhen has become more like Hong Kong economically as a financial and technology hub, and also as home of the EV giant BYD. Hong Kong has gone the other way, losing free speech and independence.
Looking back, it may have been wishful thinking to expect Shenzhen becoming more like the once famously free Hong Kong, or about China’s moving to political reforms. All of which reminds me of a similar thinking that has existed in U.S. relations with China.
From American presidents, beginning with President Nixon and America’s China scholars and China hands, a long-held belief was that trade and engagement with China would not only benefit both countries, and it would also help China to go from economic liberalization to political liberalization.
President Clinton was perhaps the president who advanced most U.S. trade with China as well as the belief that economic freedom would lead to political freedom in China.
In March 2000, Clinton spoke about China’s accession to the WTO and how Congress should grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations so that the United States could share in the economic benefits of China joining the WTO He went further. By joining the WTO, Clinton said, China agreed not simply to import more of our products, it agreed to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom.
The WTO membership would not create a free society in China overnight, he added, but over time, it would move China faster and further in the right direction — and advance, he emphasized, the goals America worked for in China for the past three decades.
It was in this speech where President Clinton made the most memorable remark about how futile it would be for the Chinese government to crack down on the Internet: “Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.”
Well, China did nail Jello to the wall, and more, proving that China could become an economic world power, giving its population high speed trains, for instance, but not political freedom.
With its “Great Firewall” restricting access to the global Internet, the Chinese government can disappear from China’s “intranet” those who become a dissident, dead or alive — like the late Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo; or like a billionaire, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who criticized the government financial policy; or a downed official, Qin Gang, the former Chinese ambassador to the U.S. The new reality is that China can also vanish any unflattering news such as the recent mass killings, including by stabbing or a vehicle. It can also bury views of economists who differ from the official accounts. The same fate holds true for news about weak consumption, unemployment, “dispirited” youth, and about falling property prices.
As Kurt M. Campbell, current Deputy Secretary of State, and Ely Ratner wrote in their piece, “China Reckoning,” in Foreign Affairs in 2018 about how a bedrock of U.S. strategy being the assumption that deepening commercial, diplomatic, and cultural ties would transform China’s internal development and external behavior. “In each instance,” they continued, “Chinese realities upset American expectations.”
All around us is news of how China is upsetting the United States. China has banned the export of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the U.S. in response to new American restrictions on Chinese chip-making industry. China hacked AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers. China now fields the world’s largest navy, coast guard, army, and submarine-based strategic missile forces, and the largest aviation force in the Indo-Pacific.
Trump’s newly nominated ambassador to China and former Senator David Perdue, put it more starkly: China’s shipbuilding capacity is now 200 times that of the U.S. All U.S. rare-earth element processing has moved overseas, to China primarily, and we don’t even have a strategic reserve of rare-earth elements. The title of Perdue’s essay was broad: “China’s new war: America’s freedom depends on confronting the threat.”
On that, the former Republican senator agreed with Kurt Campbell, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Clinton Administration. About the dashed hope that as China grew, it would liberalize and join other countries to pursue peace and prosperity, Perdue continued, “It is now clear, however, what its true intentions have been all along: It wants to be the new hegemon, and it has to destroy capitalism and democracy to achieve that.”
All enough to make one wonder what former President Clinton would say now about his joke 24 years ago that it was impossible for China to “nail Jello to the wall.”
David Perdue should read your piece. Capitalism and democracy are different things. In fact, China is showing that markets and private property rights can coexist with authoritarianism. We may be following their model very soon.