It often seems as if it would be easier for everyone if China’s dissidents in exile just went away. Easier for Western governments, which want to do business in China without being made to feel guilty about appeasing an oppressive regime. Easier for the educated elite in China’s bustling urban enclaves, who want to get rich without being reminded of the compromises they’ve made. And easier, of course, for the Chinese government, which doesn’t like to see its abuses of human and political rights advertised around the world.
The problem, however, for Chinese dissidents abroad is what plagues all political exiles: their chronic lack of influence. For all the reasons cited above, it suits everyone to dismiss them as irrelevant extremists, out of touch with the country they left, or, to be more precise, were forced to leave. Even if they were not dismissed by others, their voices would still be muted by being so far from home.
China, of course, has no shortage of people willing to voice their political disagreements in private, and to a limited degree on Web sites and in academic journals. But this is not the clamoring criticism of a true dissident community. While allowing more individual freedoms, the communist government has been fabulously successful at snuffing out any organized dissent. It’s impossible to start a political party, a trade union or even a think tank that is free of government control. The Falun Gong is an exception, which is why it came as such a shock to the Chinese government, even though it is a religious rather than political organization.
It is as if the Chinese Communist Party has drawn up a contract with the educated urban elite–precisely the kind of people who supported the student demonstrators in 1989 and might have been receptive to subversive ideas from abroad. The deal has nothing to do with communist orthodoxy, which nobody really believes in anymore. Instead what the educated classes are offered is stability, order and the chance to make money, in return for political obedience. This has worked in Singapore, and the party hopes it will work in China, too.
Undoubtedly, most educated people in Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou have a far better life now than 10 or 15 years ago. Not only can they marry whom they like, go dancing in discos, eat in fancy restaurants, travel abroad and buy the latest consumer goods, including decent books in well-stocked stores, but they can say more or less what they like. All this is possible now, as long as they don’t translate their critical views into political action.
China today is, in a way, an efficient variation of the paternalistic Confucianist state with all sorts of technology at its disposal to crush disobedience. But the Confucianist state was not just based on the promise of wealth. It had a system of ethics, too. The modern one-party state, stripped of communist dogma, has nothing more to offer than the dream of prosperity. This makes it vulnerable to economic crises. What if the government cannot keep its side of the bargain, and people suddenly get poorer?
Unemployed workers and peasants, squeezed by corrupt officials, are already rioting in many parts of China. The specter of more widespread violence is perhaps why the increasingly prosperous middle class is likely to stick to the government bargain and not push for political reforms. For after a century of brutal upheavals, the educated elite are as fearful of social disorder as the party bosses. But harsh oppression is a poor way to control the dispossessed, for in the long run it provokes precisely the kind of turbulence that the middle class fears. The vicious circle of Chinese history–tyranny followed by revolt–has yet to be broken. Some hope for slow, incremental change, but there is no reason for the party to give up its monopoly on power, which now protects business as well as political privileges.
The establishment of a liberal democracy in China is not impossible. Taiwan, India, South Korea, Thailand and other Asian countries have already shown the way. But it would take a coalition of forces that the party has so far been able to divide. The urban middle class, the poor, the dispossessed and the dissidents abroad would have to make common cause. It is hard to see this happening soon, but until it does, the opposition in exile must be supported, for they keep the flame of hope alive. It is all they can do, and this is no reason to dismiss them–even if it would make life easier for everyone else.
