From Tiananmen to Hong Kong via Timisoara

 

July 10, 2020

First, as a responsible major country, China stands upright with honour. We never strong-arm others, never seek supremacy, never withdraw from commitments, never bully others, and never complain. The word ‘coercion’ has nothing to do with China.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, October 2019

If anyone cares to listen to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s vehement reaction against any country objecting to what is currently happening in Hong Kong, they will notice that Chinese authorities are basing their rebuttals on the principle of non interference in China’s internal affairs.

For seven decades, the affirmation of non interference in a country’s internal affairs has been one of the pillars of China’s foreign policy. Look closer, however, and the much-trumpeted principle means that other nations are forbidden to comment on Chinese internal policies, but Chinese officials on the other hand feel free to intervene in other countries’ internal affairs, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Starting with 1964, Zhou Enlai prodded socialist leaders from the Soviet bloc to rise in revolt against Moscow’s territorial grab after World War II. Ceausescu fell for it and started claiming back Bessarabia, which Romania had lost in 1940 before the communists came to power.

Also during the sixties, the CCP tried to force Albania to enter into an anti-Soviet, pro-Chinese alliance together with Yugoslavia and Romania, according to the memoirs of the late Enver Hoxha, Albania’s former Stalinist leader.

In 1971, taking advantage of the uncalled for visit to Beijing of Australia’s Labor leader of the opposition, the same Zhou Enlai swiftly used the unhoped-for opportunity in order to attack Australia’s alliance with the United States, which he compared to China’s alliance with the USSR. The ANZUS Treaty has been under attack by the Chinese ever since.

As we all know , communism was foreign to the political traditions of Central and Eastern European countries. After WWII the communist regimes came to power there under the occupation of Red Army troops. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbatchev was intelligent enough to recognise that such a political arrangement was no longer desirable or sustainable. Accordingly, after he ordered the Red Army troops to withdraw, the communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe were toppled one after another by pro-democracy movements.

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe emboldened pro-democracy forces in China to occupy Tiananmen Square and ask, in their turn, for the democratization of political life. After a few weeks of indecision, the Chinese communist leadership asked the PLA to crush the demonstrators, killing hundreds in the process.

Thus from June to December 1989, China was the only communist state that dared to use the army against its own people. To be sure, this was a very unenviable position to be in. This is the reason why the Chinese leadership decided to grossly interfere in Romanian internal affairs, attempting to prop up the Ceausescu regime. At the end of November 1989, a Chinese Politburo member touched down in Bucharest, offering support and military aid to the Romanian dictator.Consequently the Romanian revolution was the only one in Europe where the army was used against the demonstrators, Tiananmen-style. The bloody events led to the execution of the presidential couple. (At the time, the couple’s execution in Romania was extremely well received by Chinese protesters and students )

In truth, no amount of police repression, book burnings or imprisonment of pro-democracy dissidents can make democratic aspirations go away. Such aspirations are, indeed, truly universal and no nation who refuses to democratize could be considered civilized, regardless of its economic status or number of boots on the ground. By resisting democratic reforms, the Chinese leadership is in fact keeping their country outside the ranks of civilized nations, and in a league with other dictatorships from Africa or Asia. This is the reason why the only respectable people in China these days are the pro-democracy dissidents and militants.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that Chinese authorities’ meddling in other countries’ internal affairs has diminished in intensity. To give but one example, since 2012 they have created a 16+1 group from ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe plus a few from the Western Balkans. (This is the political component of the Belt and Road infrastructure project.) Eleven countries from the group are full EU members and China’s diplomatic initiative is a grave interference in the Union’s internal affairs. As the 1989 Timisoara repression proves, we can safely assume that Beijing is prone to extend its support to radical nationalistic and anti-democratic political parties within this group of countries.

This is one of the many reasons why EU officialdom is more than entitled to act in support of Hong Kong dissidents and the Uighur minority, in accordance with the fundamental values the European Union was built upon. In future, they should make it clear to China’s henchmen that they are fully expected to respect the democratic aspirations of the Chinese people, for the benefit of China and the international community as a whole. Any lesser reaction to the current events in Hong Kong can be construed as kowtowing to China in exchange for elusive economic gains.

EU Diplomacy's Munich 2.0 Moment

 

May 9, 2020

European diplomatic traditions, which are some of the most illustrious in the world, have not prevented the External Action Service from writing one of the most inept letters I have ever read. After months of China’s diplomatic bullying, aimed at changing the pandemic narrative in its favour, is this ill-conceived message addressed to the Chinese leadership all that the best diplomatic experts within the EU have been able to come up with ? To add insult to injury, the EU officials have even accepted the letter to be censored by Beijing before its publication, deleting any reference to the fact that the pandemic started in China.

Diplomatic intimidation was not invented by the Chinese. The Nazis used it before them. Just before the start of the second world war, this type of bullying made Neville Chamberlain bow to Hitler’s demands in order to achieve – in his view – “peace with honour”.

Pushing back against Chinese bullying, however, is the only reasonable course of action of any country and self-respecting diplomatic establishment. From my personal experience working for Chinese bosses, I also happen to know that taking a firm stand against their bullying is the only way to deal with the representatives of a nation that has recently achieved economic success, but is still haunted by a huge inferiority complex. Trying to appease Chinese bullying or to ignore it will not make it go away, but will only lead to more serious bullying in the future.

To give but one example, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for an international inquiry into the origins and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His initiative has prompted a furious attack by the Chinese ambassador to Canberra, who by now is used to treating Australia like a de-facto Chinese colony. He used the media to threaten that Chinese consumers could stop importing Australian beef and wine. This type of threat echoes the Davos speech of a Chinese official this year, who claimed that the United States will not do anything to counter China’s recent belligerence because his country is the biggest market for American hamburgers outside the USA.

“If you give China an inch, they will take a mile. And if you succumb to bullying and intimidation, you can expect only one more thing: more bullying and intimidation. It’s going to be a question not simply of what is Australia saying about what’s happening in China: it’s about China trying to dictate what’s happening in Australia.” (Dr Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the UN Security Council, in Financial Review, November 2019)

The Chinese amhassador’s assertion that his country’s consumers might decide not to buy Australian beef in the future is also directed against the Chinese middle class. These are the biggest consumers of beef in the country, and if the communist party decides for some reason to stop importing it, they will have to revert to a more traditional, pork-based diet. In other words, the communist party seems as displeased with Australia as they are with the restless Chinese middle class, who have nevertheless made the fatal error of putting their future prosperity into the hands of the communist officials.

The EU , on the other hand, is China’s biggest export market and this fact alone gives it a lot of clout, a temporary disruption in supply chains notwithstanding.

This is why appeasing China’s offensive diplomatic behaviour makes so little sense.

Instead, EU diplomats should intensify calls for an independent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic and declare at least a few Chinese diplomats in Europe persona non grata after their unwarranted offensive behaviour in Paris or Stockholm. Anything else will be construed by the communst regime in Beijing as proof of Western democracies’ inherent weakness. Indeed, like the Nazis before them, their entire propaganda machinery rests on proving to the population how strong China’s communist government is and how weak Western democratic governments are by comparison.

Naturally, no European country wishes to confront China, which is fair enough. However, by appeasing its diplomats’ bullying and ignoring its shameless propaganda, the EU is making a huge error, one which is already being put to good use by the continent’s “ideological competitor”.

Liberal Democracy as a Dictatorship of Minorities

 Making sense of the direction of the evolution of societies has always been a challenge among philosophers and social scientists alike. Before tackling the subject of liberal democracy, viewed here as a dictatorship of minorities, it is fair to say that so far, we do not possess a clear understanding of where societies are heading. 

In the 19th century, German philosopher Hegel proclaimed the "end of history". Closer to our time, Francis Fukuyama announced his own "end of history", which he believed to be characterized by the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy .

Although after 1989 the number of democracies surpassed other types of political systems (authoritarian, communist) for the first time in history, the fact is that today the majority of them are not liberal, but electoral democracies, as Dani Rodrik has pointed out in a recent study.

For any democracy - whether liberal or electoral - to function, however, a compromise between its players should be reached, that protects the rights of minorities, as well as those of the majority.

As opposed to electoral democracies, which are biased towards protecting the political rights of the majority of their citizens, liberal democracies are biased towards protecting and enlarging the rights of minorities within a given society. 

Rare as they are, liberal democracies appeared in the West in a specific context in which the owners of capital - or "the rich" - had succeeded in gaining or retaining political power with the support of a limited number of voters. Thus in 19th century France, after 2 revolutions (1789 and 1830) only citizens who earned a certain amount of money were allowed to vote. They made up about 1 percent of the country's population. The rest of the citizens, as advised by prime minister Guizot at the time, had "to get rich first" if they wanted to participate in the political life of the country. 

By restricting the right to vote through a variety of methods, the nascent elites of Western liberal democracies were thus able to deny political rights to the many for a long time, as well as to avoid any responsibility for the social havoc that capitalist development played during the first century or so of its existence.

Gradually, especially after the first world war, liberal elites were forced to concede voting rights and participation in political decisionmaking to the majority of the population, including women.

For a few decades after the second world war, the balance of power inside most Western nations shifted in favour of majorities, whose working and living conditions improved dramatically. Politicians representing voter majorities were then able to impose heavy taxes on the profits of the rich, sometimes as high as 90 percent, where there were none at the beginning of the 20th century.

The rich minorities' reaction was slow in coming but, through its consequences, it had devastating effects on the living standards of the majority of voters in Western nations. Through the adoption and promotion of neoliberal economic policies pioneered by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, the "1 percent" minority in society were able to reverse earlier policies of high taxation and, during the following decades, to diminish taxes back to levels unseen since the early 1900s.

It is fair to say at this point that if such a trend continues unchecked, Western business elites will end up paying no tax at all.
To achieve such an objective, the rich minority employed a variety of electoral tactics as well. First and foremost, they coopted all the leaders of mainstream (or majority) political parties and turned them against their own constituents (Clinton and Blair are the first to spring to mind here).

Second, they have all but destroyed the trade union movement in the West, which was the backbone of the political parties of the left and instrumental in obtaining favourable compensation for labour from the owners of capital.

The third and most peculiar way of advancing the political agenda of the rich minority has been by joining forces with leaders of other minorities, who had hitherto faced discrimination by majorities. Think here the LGBT community, some albeit not all ethnic minorities, and women.

If towards the end of the 20th century the rich minority exercised its control and promoted its agenda via the outright purchase of mainstream politicians on both sides of the political isle, over the last decades we observe a tendency to promote to power leaders who are either childless (think here Merkel or Juncker); who belong to the LGBT community (like in Serbia or Luxemburg); members of the billionnaire elite (Berlusconi, Trump); or selected members of ethnic minorities. Together, these minorities can display signs of becoming quite dictatorial when their agenda is challenged by majorities, prompting some to call this phase in the evolution of liberal democracies "totalitarian capitalism".

In hindsight, it should be admitted that majoritary democracies have historically been less than tolerant of the rich or the LGBT minority. Until a few decades ago, homosexuality was shunned in most Western countries and on occasion, its members were under threat of being prosecuted and imprisoned. Similarly, the heavy burden of taxation imposed on the rich minority during the '50s, 60s and 70s could be construed as more of a penalty of being wealthy than as a truly fair level of taxation. No wonder such policies bonded the members of these minorities together and determined them to use any means at their disposal - primarily money - to keep majorities in check and out of power.

The fight between these minorities and the majority has now spilled out into the streets, as the main institutions in our democracies, including parliaments, have ceased to work as they were supposed to. Far from liberal democracy  becoming the norm in the world, what we are witnessing these days is the withering away of established liberal democracies. Even in the West, the latter  are being replaced, one after the other, by electoral democracies catering to the rights of the majority. Repeatedly labeled "populists" or "illiberal" , the new breed of politicians spearheading this movement is here to stay and to expand both influence and power.

This time around as society evolves however, majorities should strike the right balance. As they restart making gains in prominence and power, they should avoid imposing punitive taxation levels on the rich, or promote anti-LGBT legislation, cater to racists and so on. After all, the rise of the neoliberal breed of leaders was a consequence of the errors made in the past by the politicians representing the majority of voters in Western societies.