The reality of the Chinese "model"

No one would argue that the Chinese are materially better off than before market reforms. However, being well fed and able to buy as much toilet paper as you need doesn’t make up for lack of freedom. The Communist regime in China continues to maintain tight control on its citizens, and as in Cuba, dissidents walk a very thin line, subject to arbitrary arrest and prison sentence.

Ellen Bork recently traveled to China to meet with some dissidents, and writes about the experience for the Weekly Standard, an excerpt:

The dissidents in China walk a tightrope. The Communist party allows certain things, but draws the line at others. The dissidents I am writing about here communicate fairly easily with each other and with the outside world. When they are careful, there is a kind of modus vivendi with the authorities. But there are some things they know they cannot do without serious consequences.

The case of my guide in Beijing, the scientist Jiang Qisheng, is a good example. The party refuses to reverse the official position that the demonstrations of 1989, joined by protesters in cities throughout China, were the work of a "small handful" of counterrevolutionaries. To commemorate Tiananmen as a tragedy and question the official position is to challenge the party's legitimacy. In 1999, Jiang wrote an open letter encouraging Chinese people to remember and honor the victims of Tiananmen. Then he talked about it on Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-funded service that broadcasts into China in Mandarin. He was promptly arrested and sent to jail for four years. "What I did, what landed me in prison, was really quite simple," he wrote in the New York Review of Books after he was released in 2003. "I just said in public what my fellow citizens were saying" in those "nooks in China where ordinary people have determined that they can speak their minds without incurring disaster." The party cannot tolerate any call to the Chinese people on an issue as sensitive as Tiananmen; speaking directly to the nation on Radio Free Asia--as opposed to writing for a mainly American audience--crossed a line.

One problem is knowing where the line is. Another is deciding whether you are willing to cross it.

Read Let a Hundred Flowers Be Crushed: The precarious lives of China's dissidents via Stefania, here.

Posted by Ziva at January 5, 2008 02:12 PM

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