China’s future

It seems like China just can’t catch a break. Bloomington is in an uproar over the violence in Tibet, and Beijing won’t have the pleasure of Steven Spielberg’s company when it hosts the Olympic Games. What strikes me most, however, is the difference in tone from the news of a year ago, which was limited almost exclusively to sunny previews of China’s potentially glorious future. \nPolitical scientists seem to have invented a game of predicting when China will “overtake” us, with points going to who can throw out the most ludicrously imminent date, while speculating grimly about the inevitability of conflict. Moreover, pseudo-intellectuals in coffee shops everywhere are throwing America’s glory days a tearful funeral. We had a good run, they muse, but now our dominance is clearly over. And everything we thought was great about this country is now comparably terrible and second-rate. \nBut if you study history, things look different. A lot of people find the present situation reminiscent of when China was unified in 221 B.C., which came as a relief after more than a thousand years of civil war. A state in the west known as Qin galvanized its resources into action by passing a string of incredibly harsh laws, and the state progressed enough to conquer its rivals.\nQin was able to rule for about 15 years before people sick of living under draconian rule finally rebelled. It was a lesson. Pull out all the stops toward achieving one end, and the issues you neglected will eventually lead to your downfall. The present is no different.\nChina may have an impressive GDP and military capabilities, but it is woefully deficient in personal freedoms and civil liberties. Since no one technically “owns” land in China, but rather leases it from “the people,” a string of land-grabs has made farmers afraid to produce anything. Piracy has made people reluctant to invent things, and governmental crackdowns are influencing people to avoid politics rather than participate in them. Its health care system is still inadequate, and that’s a shame because pollution is terrible. Initial policies that systematically eliminated the middle class are only just beginning to allow for its existence, while the poor who now have no land are flooding major cities to panhandle, which worries the government because when people arrive to see the games this summer, they’ll be treated to a free expose on poverty. \nIt’s no coincidence that China’s loosening of its communist ideology came with its economic revival. Nothing does more to promote a country’s success than the freedom for people to seek it on their own. Now, China’s last vestiges of authoritarian rule are building up pressure that threatens to combust. And while people wonder about the future of American-Chinese relations, they somehow miss that a China comparable in power to the U.S. will have to be a vastly different China that accepts the direct relationship between wealth and liberty. We’re already seeing the problems with one-sided development, and for China’s sake, let’s hope they don’t get worse.