FREEDOM AND PEACE IN CHINA
[This is the text of a speech I delivered at Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, December 22, 2005.]
I flew here today from Singapore. As we were flying over the South China Sea, I looked down and saw these beautiful islands – jewels of green and turquoise and white in an ocean of blue. They looked like paradise – but these, I recognized, were the Spratly Islands, claimed by China, even though they are much closer to the Philippines.
In fact, if you had an official PRC government map of China, you would see that China claims the entire South China Sea as its territory, from the coasts of the Philippines and Vietnam all the way to Indonesia. 80% by value of the world’s shipping goes through the South China Sea. The countries of Asia cannot afford to let China seize this vital waterway and build military bases in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. China has no legitimate claim on the South China Sea whatever – yet China is risking war with its neighbors because of this totally absurd claim.
Then the plane this morning reached the southern coast of Taiwan, and we flew along the entire length of the island to reach Taipei. As I looked down at the farmlands, the factories, the homes, villages, towns, and cities of Taiwan passing beneath me, I could not help thinking: the Communist rulers of China want to destroy all this, ruin these people’s lives, enslave them to their rule – and for what? Because all these people want is to be left alone.
There is no possible way the 22 million people of Taiwan are a threat to the 1.3 billion people of China, any more there is no possible way China legally owns the entire South China Sea – yet China is willing to risk war merely because the people of Taiwan do not want their lives controlled and enslaved by the rulers of Beijing.
This threat of war, the gigantic threat of China to Taiwan and all of China’s neighbors, has got to come to an end. And tonight we are going to talk about how to do it.
To start, I’d like to ask you to imagine that you had a sheet of paper in your hand – actually several sheets – that listed every single war fought anywhere in the world in the last 100 years. You can imagine it would be a very long list. As you looked down this list, the most amazing fact would jump out at you: on this entire list of hundreds and hundreds of wars big and small, you would not find one – not one! – fought between two democracies.
It is always – always – tyrannies, dictatorships, ruling parties with a monopoly of power, that start wars. Democracy is an inherently peaceful form of political existence. Democracies, whatever their disagreements, solve problems between them peacefully.
Let’s use our imagination again, and suppose the European Euro currency fails and Germany among other European countries starts issuing its own currency again. What would you think if Germany decided to put the image of Adolph Hitler on a new 100-mark bill?
What would you think if the German government then decided to convert the children’s playground at 77 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin – the site of Hitler’s underground bunker where he and Eva Braun committed suicide — into a mausoleum and monument to Hitler?
Would you become quite afraid that the odds of war with Germany’s neighbors had suddenly and drastically increased?
Why then would any rational person not have the same fear regarding a country that places the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity on their currency [Mao on the 100 Yuan note], revering him as a demi-god enshrined in a massive museum in its capital city?
The Guinness Book of World Records, under the listing “Crime: Mass Killings,” lists Mao Zedong as history’s greatest murderer, responsible for the slaughter of 26.3 million Chinese – not foreigners but his fellow Chinese – between 1949 and 1965.
Guinness records that Adolph Hitler’s Endlösung or Final Solution, what history knows as the Holocaust, killed 5.8 million Jews between April 1941 and May 1945. Mao killed 4 ½ times as many Chinese as Hitler killed Jews.
Germany today is a peaceful democracy and no threat whatever to its neighbors because it has repudiated its monstrous history. China, the PRC, remains a dictatorship and a threat to its neighbors because it has not.
It cannot repudiate its history because, unlike Germany, the regime which committed Mao’s atrocities is the same regime ruling China today. To take responsibility for them would mean the current rulers of China would have to relinquish power.
For such responsibility is not confined to atrocities of the past, but to the dictatorship of the present. As we gather here today, China has no democratic freedoms. As we gather here today, thousands of political prisoners who did no more than ask for these freedoms are languishing unjustly in the Laogai concentration camps of the Chinese Gulag.
It is one of the great world tragedies of our day that China has not progressed politically as she has economically, that China’s extraordinary economic achievements have not been matched by similar political achievements.
I remember what China used to look like. The first time I went to China was in January 1979. Those were the days of the Blue Ants, a society so robotic it was terrifying. Yet when I saw Democracy Wall in Beijing, I realized that there was a hunger for freedom hidden underneath all the robot appearance of the Blue Ants.
I hope I am not too presumptuous to speculate that I may have traveled more through China than anyone in this room: Overland from Beijing to Kathmandu, Nepal, crossing Tibet north to south; overland from Kunming in Yunnan to Kashgar in Xinjiang or East Turkestan, crossing Tibet from east to west; overland from Shanghai to Ulan Bator, Mongolia; trekking across the mountain ranges separating the Salween, the Mekong, and the Yangtze river gorges in northern Yunnan; visiting so many magical places like Dali, Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Guelin, Xian, and so many others.
I know this only scratches the surface of all there is in China. But it has allowed me to witness the unbelievable explosion and creation of prosperity in China over the last quarter-century. Lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of the direst poverty is clearly the most impressive, the most astonishing economic achievement of modern times.
It was done, of course, by repudiating Marxism, the economic theory embraced by Mao. It was accomplished by China’s leaders allowing economic freedom, which is another term for capitalism.
What China’s leaders have not allowed is political freedom, which is another term for democracy. They have repudiated economic Marxism but not political Marxism. And that is why one to two thousand demonstrations, many of them violent, are taking place throughout China now every week. The recent violent protests over the Dongzhou power plant, where the protestors used explosives and the police shot as many as 20 people to death, are going to become commonplace.
The excuse that China’s leaders give for not allowing more political freedom is that it will lead to chaos and make China ungovernable. But the truth is that China is right now becoming more ungovernable by the day. It is China’s lack of democracy that will lead to chaos.
The Democracy=Chaos argument was the one used by the KMT to maintain its dictatorship in Taiwan until the late 1980s. “People only care about their pocketbooks,” the KMT said. The KMT allowed economic freedom and suppressed political freedom. Through the efforts of a courageous democratic opposition, and the wisdom of such KMT leaders as Lee Teng-hui, the Taiwanese have achieved the first Chinese democracy in 5,000 years of Chinese history.
This is a magnificent achievement, one which all the people of Taiwan can be proud, one which lights the path to the future of Mainland China. For the most magnificent and heroic aspect of this achievement is that it was done peacefully, and not through bloody violent revolution.
It was, in Chinese, a ning jing ge ming, a calm revolution, a he ping ge ming, a no-war revolution. This is what China, and China’s leaders should aspire to today.
For the alternative is a nightmare.
And not just a nightmare for China, but for the world. For just as the lack of political freedom is leading to chaos in China, so it will lead to war with China’s neighbors.
As former Soviet dissident Anatoly Sharansky describes in his famous book, The Case for Democracy, a non-democratic government such as China’s stays in power through repression – and this repression is justified by manufacturing external enemies, foreign devils. The mechanics of democracy make democracies inherently peaceful, the mechanics of tyrannies make non-democracies like China inherently belligerent.
So China’s unelected leaders, when faced with internal protest, will pick a fight with a neighbor, and suddenly there will be huge demonstrations against Japan over obscure rocks in the ocean, or threatening war with Taiwan, or declaring America is China’s “main enemy” and that war with America is “inevitable,” as many generals of the PLA have said.
The day is very fast approaching when China’s unelected leaders must choose between prosperity and power, for they cannot have both. They cannot continue to expand China’s economy and continue to maintain their power for very much longer.
Proof that their rule is increasingly illegitimate in the eyes of the Chinese people is the millions of recent resignations from the Communist Party of China. The publication of The Nine Commentaries by the Epoch Times, which revealed the terrifying history of Communist tyranny in China, has been the trigger that set off these mass resignations.
The Epoch Times is to be applauded for its heroic efforts to educate the people of China about the foreign disaster of Communism and the horror the Communist Party has inflicted upon the Chinese people since the establishment of its dictatorship in 1949.
The Nine Commentaries, in persuading six million people to resign from the CCP, has made an extraordinary contribution to freedom in the world.
But the underlying cause of these millions of resignations is very ancient, an event that has occurred many times before in Chinese history. It is that the Chinese Communist Party has lost T’ien ming, the Mandate of Heaven.
In times before, this has meant chaos and bloody violence. But it does not have to mean this in China today. In a democracy, such as in Taiwan or India or Sweden or America, when a government loses the Mandate of Heaven it means it lost an election. There is peaceful transfer of power to an opposing party or parties. It is a disaster only for those party officials who have to find an honest job in the real world. It is not a disaster for the whole society – it is, rather, what keeps a free society healthy.
Thus it is critically important to explain to China’s unelected rulers that losing power, losing t’ien ming in a ning jing ge ming only means they will lose their monopoly of power. They will not lose their lives, and they can compete for power in the future in elections.
Thus it is critically important that advocates of democracy in Hong Kong, such as the many thousands who peacefully demonstrated on December 4, advocate democracy not just for Hong Kong as a tiny democratic island in a nondemocratic Chinese sea, but for all of China. True peace and democracy for Hong Kong can only be safely achieved if Mainland China transforms itself into a democratic nation.
Peace for Taiwan can only be achieved through the democratization of China. Peace between China and all its neighbors can only be achieved through the democratization of China.
Thus it must be clearly understood by all of China’s neighbors: The democratization of China is the most important cause for peace in the world today.
As American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who many people in America believe will be the next President of the United States, has said: “Stability without democracy is a false stability.” It is an illusion. An illusion that will lead to war, civil war within China, China going to war with its neighbors.
Ning jing ge ming, calm revolution, he ping ge ming, no-war revolution, for democracy and freedom in China is the only solution for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, for the people of Asia, and for the people of the world.