Regime Watch: Beijing

In the journal World Affairs, P.J. O’Rourke has a lengthy and interesting first hand account of, as P.J. puts it, “what Chinese think of politics when politics isn’t what they’re thinking of.”

From the piece:

For years I’ve been active in Freedom House, the oldest of the private organizations advocating for international freedom and democracy. We’ve seen progress, especially since 1989. We’ve seen backsliding. And we’ve seen stasis, notably 1.3-billion-persons’-worth of stasis in China. Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.

Yet we at Freedom House cannot be exactly right. A mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

One strong indicator of how much a society values freedom is the relative ability of individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. So how does this work in China…where the economy has been at least partially unshackled from the wretchedness of communism, but where all the other good stuff (think life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) is still tightly controlled by a thuggish Chinese Communist Party.

Here’s a hint:

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it. We need to listen to what they don’t say.

If that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, keep in mind that O’Rourke is not just an astute political writer, but a humorist as well. Read the whole thing and you’ll see what he means.