AS I WAS SAYING
Let us hope that Deng's death will mean a new dawn for despotism in that vast country
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Hopes that China might now travel down the path of freedom seem to me not only idle — because they have no chance of being fulfilled — but also undesirable, because it would be hell on earth if they were fulfilled. It is bad enough to have 250 million or so Americans all claiming the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- piness, all doing their own thing and letting it all hang out, each creating his own ethical code and religion, without also adding to that already dangerously large hotchpotch of individualisms 1.2 billion more Chinese doing the same. One human rights- obsessed superpower determined to trans- form mankind in that image is quite enough. Two would be too much of a good thing.
Ideally, therefore, the American super- power needs to be balanced by another upholding different ideas of human advance, based not so much on rights as on duties, believing not so much in the impor- tance of freedom as in the even greater importance of order. For order has just as much to contribute to civilisation as free- dom. Sadly that truth has been rendered incredible in the 20th century by two coun- tries, Germany and Russia, whose bar- barous tyrannies brought it into disrepute. China to date has done no better. But what a blessing it would be if in the 21st century China emerged as a civilised despotism, thereby making it credible again. Surely that should be our hope, not that China renounces totalitarianism and embraces democracy but that she transforms total- itarianism, under the shadow of which civil- isation withers, into authoritarianism, under which, as often as not, it prospers mightily.
Foolishly, however, many in the West hope for more than that. They hope that China will replace Marx with John Stuart Mill, one Western transplant for another, the consequences of which, in a country of China's immense size and population, would almost certainly be to fall out of a repressive frying-pan into an anarchic fire. My hope is that her rulers will look for guidance instead to the philosophy of their country's own Confucius, whose conserva- tive teachings did so much to civilise the old imperial autocracy, not by challenging it but by inculcating in its officials a gentle- manly code of conduct. A civilised polity, he taught, depends less on the quality of the autocrat who gives the orders than on the quality of those charged with responsi- bility for carrying them out. First take care of the imperial civil servants (i.e. man- darins) and the emperor will take care of himself. That was the central tenet of the Confucian creed: autocracy tempered by a politics of good manners and honourable behaviour.
Not a bad way forward for China today. The post-Marxist Communist Party para- mount chief would remain in charge in Bei- jing — as the emperor had done before him — but the regional Communist officials would slowly but surely start adapting his centralised commands to local conditions, to the state of public opinion on the spot, as the imperial officials used to do in the old days. Travelling in rural China 18 months ago, I was struck by the extent to which this is already happening. Whereas on an earlier visit, just after the Cultural Revolution, Communist offieials had treat- ed the peasants with lordly disdain, and been treated in return with cowering defer- ence, this time their relationship was incomparably more egalitarian. Driving through a market town, for example, our official car knocked over a vegetable stall. But instead of driving on — as would have happened on my previous visit — the Com- munist officials got out and helped to clear up the mess with their own hands. And at the subsequent lunch there seemed a gen- uine discussion between officials and peas- ants, unlike the stilted exchanges on the earlier trip. No chance, certainly, of the party commissars having been transformed into elected representatives of the people. But a real chance, at least in my mind, of them having transformed themselves into civilised mandarins, which may well sum China rather better.
The West must understand that well within living memory, during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party did lose control, with horrific results. Encouraged by Mao, teenage Red Guards went on a prolonged murderous rampage. With good reason, therefore, the fear of anarchy in China is still acutely real. What the Communist Party has been doing, of course, is to grant the merchant class their economic freedom to make money, while retaining the reins of political power in its own hands. As it happens, this is what the British aristocracy, in spite of universal suf- frage, succeeded in doing, using the Tory Party as its governing instrument, almost until the Thatcherite era. Under this divi- sion of labour — one class for governing and another for wealth creation — Britain prospered mightily both at home and abroad, and in trying to do something rather similar China should have, if not our blessing, at least our understanding.
Not all the Bridgewater Four were innocent men. At least two were guilty of armed robbery, in the course of which they terrorised an 85-year-old retired farmer and his three equally elderly sisters with a sawn-off shotgun. Carrying a gun in such circumstances at least suggests a willingness to use it. In other words they were potential murderers.
So far as I am concerned this does make a difference. At least our police don't go around framing truly innocent men. You won't have a murder charge levelled against you unless you have already done something pretty dreadful. No, this does not excuse the police. But it does seem to me to make some of the extreme concern expressed about their behaviour look a bit far-fetched. The criminal fraternity d° indeed have good cause to fear the worst, but not, on the evidence so far, anybody else. Surely an important distinction needs to be made between a criminal justice system careless of the rights of known serious criminals and one careless of the rights of everybody. The danger, of course, is that the one, if not checked in time, will topple over into the other. But there is no reason to think that this has yet happened.
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