In Beijing: Freedoms

In Beijing: Freedoms

It is very hard to visit a "second world" country these days, that world having all but disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The P.R.C. is one of the few left. Cuba is another.

China (more precisely Beijing) does not feel second world, Cuba (Santiago, Barracoa) did. Beijing is so...up-to-date: airport modern, clean, and user-friendly; taxis omnipresent, modern and clean, inside and out; skyline crowded with robust glass and concrete office buildings. Beijing is efficient and well-organized. Beijing works.

Cuba was old, decaying, unpainted and held together with chewing gum and twine. Inefficient does not begin to describe Cuba. If "antithesis" is stronger than "synonymous," then Cuba was the antithesis of efficient. If there was an inefficient way of doing something that's how Cuba did it and if there wasn't one they invented it.

So many glass and concrete buildings-office buildings in Beijing, business buildings, banks. Banks in a Communist country? No banks worthy of the name in Cuba. China is now communist in government only. It is not communist economically. Capitalism is roaring here. There is petit capitalism, corporate capitalism, multi-national capitalism. If there's a capitalist way of doing things that's how Beijingers (that's what they call them) do it and if there isn't they will invent it.
Beijingers are busy. They work earnestly and hard. There is no work in Cuba and people are bored. There is real rush in Beijing's rush hour. Santiago de Cuba at 8 a.m. or 5:30 p.m. was the same as Santiago de Cuba at 8 p.m. or 5:30 a.m.

Beijingers work, not just some of them and not just those who work for the government. They work like they work in America, in businesses, the service industries, technology companies. They are smartly dressed, they're on their cell phones, they're hustling and bustling.

"The State" is no more visible in everyday life in Beijing than it is in Washington, D.C. There are no posters or billboards of Mao or of the Communist Party, none of those ominous and darkly humorous billboards trumpeting the glories of communism that were everywhere during the Cultural Revolution--people holding little red books aloft, eyes aglow looking to the bright future and Dentyne white smiles.

There is none of that in Beijing. There are billboards, for Lexus automobiles, Nike, McDonald's and KFC. In Cuba there were no commercial billboards, few billboards at all but those there were were of Fidel, Raul, or Che.

Read an article in Smithsonian magazine before leaving for China. It said there was dissatisfaction with the government and unrest just below the surface. Upon arrival my impression was the opposite. Then a day or two later read an article in the International Herald Tribune, a Pew poll showing that 80% of Chinese are happy with their government. Appears there's a lot to be happy with.

What does that say about democracy and our (America's) efforts to export it, indeed to demand it? During the Cold War, conservatives used to make a very plausible sounding distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government. The former, like Pinochet's Chile, were worthy of our support; capitalism could exist in authoritarian countries and those countries could easily transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Totalitarian forms of government like communism could do neither. Well, China is totalitarian politically but capitalist economically.

Then, after the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama wrote that history itself had ended with liberal democracy's triumph over it's last foe, communism. Democracy was a universal human condition. Where it didn't exist was abberational and temporal. Further, like the conservatives earlier, Fukuyama argued that by their natures democracy and capitalism go together, you can't have one without the other. Well, the Chinese are doing it.

I believe it was Samuel Huntington who rejoined to Fukuyama that America's liberal democracy/capitalism was not universal, it was unique. So should we be trying to plant it in all kinds of soil and climate? Should we be demanding human rights compliance of other countries? Are they "Human" rights, or American rights?

-Benjamin Harris