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Democracy and Peace Pushed
Farther
Away
By Michael Barone
Jan 03, 2014
In
1793, the envoy Lord Macartney
appeared before the Qianlong emperor in Beijing and asked for British
trading
rights in China. "Our ways have no resemblance to yours, and even were
your envoy competent to acquire some rudiments of them, he could not
transport
them to your barbarous land," the long-reigning (1736-96) emperor
replied
in a letter to King George III.
"We
possess all things,"
he went on. "I set no value on strange objects and have no use for your
country's manufactures."
The
emperor had a point. China at
that time, according to economic historian Angus Maddison, had about
one-third
of world population and accounted for about one-third of world economic
production.
Today's
China, of course, has a
different attitude toward trade. Since Deng Xiaoping's market reforms
started
in 1978, it has had enormous growth based on manufacturing exports.
In
between Qianlong and Deng, China
went through tough times. The Taiping rebellion (1849-64), decades
Western
domination, the Chinese revolution (1911-27), the War with Japan
(1931-45) and
Mao Zedong's Communist policies (1949-76) each resulted in the deaths
of
millions.
The
Chinese ruling party and,
apparently, the Chinese people see the economic growth of the last 35
years as
a restoration of China's rightful central place in the world. And note
that
that period is longer than the 27 years of Mao's rule.
American
supporters of engagement
with China, including the architect of the policy, Henry Kissinger,
agree and
have expressed the hope that an increasingly prosperous China will move
toward
democracy and peaceful coexistence.
Those
hopes, as James Mann argued
in his 2007 book "The China Fantasy," have not been and seem unlikely
to be realized.
Other
China scholars such as Arthur
Waldron and Gordon Chang have predicted that China's Communist party
rulers
will be swept from power.
That
nearly happened, many say, in
June 1989, when protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, the
universally
recognized center of the nation. But Deng sharply overruled those who
urged
propitiation and ordered the massacre of unknown numbers...
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
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