Modern life offers many happy moments, but I’m particularly indebted to the People’s Republic of China for censoring the latest issue of the Far East Economic Review, which featured an article of mine on the cover. As Rowan Scarborough was kind enough to point out, the folks at FEER had asked me to update an old think piece, in which I had argued that contemporary China is difficult for us to understand, because it is something we haven’t seen before: the world’s first mature fascist state. And I did that, as you can read here.
One of the points I made is that the regime in Beijing is hypersensitive to criticism, and their reaction to my essay seems to prove that abundantly. The entire issue was seized, both subcriber copies and newstand copies. As I told Scarborough, one could hardly ask for more dramatic confirmation of my main thesis, and he was good enough to describe me as someone with “a penchant for tweating repressive regimes.”
I’d like to put that line on my front door.
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8 Comments
Anthony (Los Angeles):If a man is judged by his enemies, you’ve done very well, indeed.
May 31, 2008 - 7:09 pm Michael Ledeen:thanks anthony; love your blog, hope everyone here is aware of it, irishspy…
May 31, 2008 - 7:24 pm 11B40:Greetings:
What about “Banned in Beijing” for your front door?
May 31, 2008 - 7:33 pm Howard Richman:Michael,
I found your piece so thoughtful and interesting that I quoted from it in our Trade-Wars blog. I also compared it with Senator Obama’s and Senator McCain’s perceptions of China.
Senator Obama has stated that he is pleased that United States trade policy is stabilizing this fascist regime. Specifically, here is a selection from his remarks when he spoke to the Alliance for American manufacturing in Pittsburgh on April 14 2008 (www.barackobama.com/2008/04/14/remarks_for_senator_barack_oba_5.php):
“Seeing the living standards of the Chinese people improve is a good thing - good because we want a stable China, and good because China can be a powerful market for American exports. But too often, China has been competing in ways that are tilting the playing field.”
ML:
Thanks, I’m delighted to have stimulated your frontal lobes; that’s the whole point. I hope I’ve posted the right version…let me know otherwise.
Senator McCain was more realistic about China’s fascist government in a column that he wrote with Senator Lieberman on May 27 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121183670827020887.html?mod=googlenews_wsj). They wrote:
“China’s rapid military modernization,
mercantilist economic practices, lack of political freedom and close relations with regimes like Sudan and Burma undermine the very international system on which its rise depends. The next American president must build on the areas of overlapping interest to forge a more durable U.S.-China relationship. Doing so will require strong alliances with other Asian nations and a readiness to speak openly with Beijing when it fails to behave as a responsible stakeholder.”
Howard
Jun 1, 2008 - 1:49 pm Anthony (Los Angeles):Michael, you wrote that China has been “rehabilitating” or glorifying it’s imperial past. Harking back to an ideal past is a hallmark of fascism (whereas the communist flavor looks to an ideal future), but I don’t recall specific examples, not that I’ve been looking that closely. Have they been doing this as part of the propaganda effort for the Olympics?
Jun 1, 2008 - 6:45 pm M.E.:I have read with the maximum attention your article (“Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism”). It is possible discuss in what sense and measure China is a fascist State (the problem of Fascism’s definition is discussed by S.G. Payne) but I think that the main intention of your article is to indicate the peculiarity of the Chinese system. The passage from the Marxist ideology to the hypernationalism was the principal trait of Stalin’s version of Leninism. So it is possible to speak about fascist’s transformation of the Russian communism. Someone defined Stalinism as “red fascism”.
Jun 2, 2008 - 10:24 am dakelv:I would prefer to speak about China not as “a mature fascist state” but “something we have never seen before”. There are many things that we have never seen before. Now we have a paradoxical situation: not only great China but also little Iran claims a dominant role in the World’s politics. In some point the Soviet expansion met its limit in the Chinese pretensions. Is Napoleon’s prophecy about China as a sleeping giant coming true? And now this giant wakes up and makes paces that shake all the Earth.
I am not sure that Chinese rulers “know that Mikhail Gorbachev fell when he tried to control the economy while giving political freedom”, and therefore “they are attempting the opposite, keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise.” Russia followed its own logic. Gorbachev was dragged by events. I was in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989. It was another country that I remembered in 1973: no respect for authorities was seen, the police was almost invisible; the centre of the city was full of private commercial activity. What is Russia now? Some one defined the Russian political system as corporative capitalism. We can observe the clear tendency to restrain the political freedom. It explains the Russian support (patent or not patent) to the Islamic dictatorships.
I think that China must see the democratic sphere’s extending as a danger for its political system, but also the increasing influence of the Islamism. In China there are 20 million Muslims or more. I read in an Italian edition (Io sto con Oriana) about a turmoil of Muslims in a Chinese city that was suppressed with the help of military force (exact data I don’t remember). Some new interesting conflicts seem to prospect. As a Russian poet said, “we are only dreaming peace”.
I believe the U.S. fits the fascist profile you created better than China does, judged by its military spending (in proportion to population and GDP) and its unjustified invasions of several foreign countries.
Jun 3, 2008 - 5:37 pm Yaacov Ben Moshe:Michael
Jun 3, 2008 - 9:33 pmCongratulations! in the old days a writer was honored if he stopped the presses so that his breaking news could be printed for the earliest possible edition. You have the eternal honor of stopping the delivery trucks because you described something too accurately. Also, I just have to express my amusement with the comment by dakelv above. It may seem, on the face of it, that his remark and its ultimate implication are so trivial and typify such pernicious, axe-grinding and its writer so uneducable that it would be a waste of time and energy to respond at all. However, I’d like to indulge it for a moment because there something to learned from it. It is, actually, a rather perfect, haiku-like portrait of what Richard Landes and I call demopathy. Demopathy. Of course this is just the sort of (the either cynical or unwitting use of the openness, laws, ideals and language of democratic societies to attempt to compromise, malign, damage or even overthrow that democratic society. An analogy: to imply that the U.S. is, in any way, more similar to the template of a fascist state than is China is a misunderstanding of the taxonomy so complete as to resemble looking at a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a triceratops and a modern man and say that the tyrannosaur and the man are the most alike because they are both bipedal.
Best,
YBM