In Beijing: Hu-bris

In Beijing: Hu-bris

As this is being written, in an internet cafe southeast of Tianamen Square, Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher, is awaiting a verdict on bogus leak charges because the Chinese communist government and President Hu Jintao didn't like his reporting on unrest in the countryside.

Times op-ed writer Nicholas D. Kristoff reported on Zhao's "trial" yesterday, the same day that I posted a positive--and accurate, as I saw it--series of impressions on Beijing. That post concluded with a series of questions: Should America be exporting liberal democracy and capitalism? Are the rights which we take to be "self-evident," universal human rights, or just universal American rights?

Walking back to the hotel last night I thought, as I always do in a foreign country, of--to me--the most nettlesome of the costs of the freedoms that we enjoy in America, violent crime. People are more safe, far more safe, in Beijing than in Washington or New York. You can feel it as you walk the streets. Likewise in Cuba. Because of energy shortages Cuba is without lights after dark. Still you feel safe.

When I got back to my hotel room a copy of The International Herald Tribune was at my doorstep and I read Mr. Kristoff's op-ed piece. He properly criticized China and President Hu for recent crackdowns on religious expression, press censorship, as exemplified by Zhao's plight and the lack of a right to a fair trial, as exemplified by Zhao's plight.

However the answers to the questions posed at the end of my previous post remained, for me, unclear. Let's clear the ground of the underbrush of shibboleths, straw men, and scarecrows. With Mr. Kristoff I share these self-evident wishes:

(1) the wish that Mr. Zhao were not imprisoned
(2) the wish that he and all others in China could get a fair criminal trial
(3) the wish that there was greater freedom of speech and religion in China

These areas of agreement do not go very far in answering the questions posed yesterday.

Economists use a standard "basket of goods" as an effective, easy-to-understand measure of a country's economic welfare, and to facilitate comparisons among countries.

A similar, clearly less precise (but that's the point) basket of human desiderata can be created. The American constitution fills our basket up pretty high with the "rights" family of products- speech, religion, presumption of innocence, vote-and the result is, in my personal opinion, the greatest society on earth and the greatest society that ever was.

However it simply is not true that these are the rights and in their proportion that every society and every human being in those societies would put in their basket of human desiderata.

There is also no, or not much, flexibility in the American rights. I have them, and to their fullest extent, and you have them and to their fullest extent. So I can write a lot of hurtful things about you and there's almost nothing that you can do about it.

To continue the economic analogy, Gresham's law, that bad money drives out good money, roughly applies to America's rights as well. I own no television or radio because there's so much "bad currency" there. I have voluntarily diminished my right to that speech.

A lot of Americans, myself included, would be open to the diminution of some of our rights in return for more of some others, like greater freedom from violent crime. A much repeated quote from one of the Founding Fathers has it that "it is better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted." Several years ago The New Yorker published a cartoon of two middle-aged white men walking down the street, conversing. The caption read "Better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted? Who the hell came up with that nonsense!"
American society would not be diminished if I were prohibited from publishing this blog. It would be if I, or anyone else, were murdered.

Americans joke that our basket of freedoms include the right to be poor, homeless, and jobless, and mugged. These negative "rights" are not mutually exclusive with the positive rights but some do tend to run counter to the enjoyment of others. There are hard trade-offs.

A couple of things that Mr. Kristoff wrote were particularly grating from the perspective of this American. He wrote that,

"China now imprisons 32 journalists...And yes, [Zhao's case] is personal."

There is hubris there, that imprisoning innocent journalists is worse than imprisoning innocent coal miners, factory workers or anybody else. There is a belief among some Americans, including this one, that some in the American press are arrogant, self-important and put one freedom, the one that pays their bills, ahead of all the others.

It is also hubris that Zhao's case is "personal" to Mr. Kristoff, as if whether it's personal to him has greater significance than it not being personal to someone else.

"Most Chinese...Are fed up with corruption and lies, with being blocked from Google and Wikipedia..."

Being blocked from Google and Wikipedia??? Oh yeah, I bet those are front-burner issues for "most Chinese." That statement by Mr. Kristoff is Gresham's law at work. There is absolutely no basis for it. Just a week ago Mr. Kristoff's newspaper published the results of a Pew survey on the attitudes of peoples of different countries toward their governments. Eighty percent of Chinese people were reported satisfied with their government. I don't know for an absolute certainty but I would wager a lot that that satisfaction has to do with China's astonishing economic expansion in the last 25 years, a performance that Mr. Kristoff acknowledges and gives President Hu his share of credit for.

I do not believe that Mr. Zhao's case is personal to very many Chinese people, the few who have heard of him, and what's personal to them is at least as important as what's personal to Nicholas D. Kristoff. I would bet that what's personal to the Chinese people is the better economic life that President Hu and the Chinese government have provided them in the last 30 years and the hope of a better life for their children. I would bet that that economic growth which has lifted 250 million Chinese out of a total of 1.3 billion out of poverty in that time period is what is personal to them.*

There is hubris, too much hubris, to Mr. Kristoff and there is too much hubris in America today. Americans have always had a becoming streak of modesty in their national character. We don't claim we're always right, we don't claim we are better than others, we don't claim that we're some god's, "chosen people," we didn't invent ludicrously sweeping philosophies like communism or socialism, and rejected attempts to plant them in our soil.

Let's keep that modest, self-concious streak in our national personality alive. Is our way the best way? Works for me. Is it the "Universal" way? Whoa there man, I just work here. Let's just keep the conversation going about whether it works for everybody else. This is Public Occurrences.

*Smaller Real Regional Income Gap than Nominal Income Gap: A Price-adjusted Study, Xiaojuan Jiang, Hui Li, in China & World Economy, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Volume 14 No. 3, May-June 2006.