
China's ambitions
THE CHINESE offer for the
The future for many of the 1.3 billion Chinese looks infinitely brighter than it did when Nixon first met with Chairman Mao Zedong. The Chinese, then still mired in the Cultural Revolution and isolated from the rest of the world, could look forward only to government oppression, constricted lives, and a throttling of economic potential.
Now Chinese cities throb with activity. In place of the monochromatic Mao suit, the Chinese dress in colorful garb from their low-cost factories or fancy import shops. Automobiles clog city streets instead of bicycles. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese go abroad for pleasure or study. One hundred million Chinese use the Internet. The changes wrought by Mao's successors have unlocked the dynamism of the most populous society on earth.
The United States can take much credit for its beneficent role in encouraging China to change. Relations steadily improved after Nixon's visit, and in 1979 the United States formally recognized the Beijing government, instead of the one on Taiwan, as the true ruler of China. Two decades later, it actively moved China into the World Trade Organization. The United States accepts nearly $200 billion worth of Chinese imports a year. The major sticking point has been America's support for Taiwan, but the United States and China have both finessed the issue of whether that island will ever return to the control of the Beijing government.
Internal divisions
The transformation has also exposed deep contradictions within Chinese society. The cities have advanced with the help of massive government investment, but the countryside, where two-thirds of Chinese live, lags in deep poverty. The decline of Maoism has caused a hunger for alternative spiritual beliefs, yet the government crushes any sect that seem too independent or unpredictable. The government employs thousands to sanitize the Internet of any messages it opposes. It encourages more dissent than Mao would tolerate yet squashes any attempt to establish a political force outside Communist Party control.
China needs democratic institutions that can mediate fairly among the economic forces within society. Without free institutions, peasants have no choice but to riot when the government, which owns all land, grabs some farming acreage for industrial development. Without democracy and the rule of law, urban dwellers are disempowered if a city destroys neighborhoods to build revenue-producing developments. Without democracy, parents have difficulty seeking redress when school authorities impose fees to educate children at public schools.
President Hu Jintao, Mao's latest heir, said last year: ''History indicates that indiscriminately copying Western political systems is a blind alley for China." China needs to borrow with care, but reliance on Mao's top-down communist system is an invitation to corruption and outbursts of popular discontent.
An interest in Unocal
The bid for Unocal offers another Chinese inconsistency. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or
The CNOOC bid is intended to trump a $16.5 billion offer by Chevron, and Unocal stockholders may just accept the lower bid simply because it is easier than having to undergo the US government scrutiny that acceptance of the CNOOC bid would involve. US law requires a review on national security grounds, and some congressmen are grumbling that Washington must not let any energy company fall into Chinese hands. But Unocal is only the ninth-largest oil and gas concern in the nation. US energy security hardly depends on this one company, and if the deal passes muster from the stockholders, the US government should allow it to go through.
With the Summer Olympics scheduled to be held in Beijing in 2008, the organizing committee just announced its slogan for the Games, the seemingly uncontroversial ''One World, One Dream."
Visitors from the West, however, will experience a culture far different from their own -- teeming with people and cars; air that seems almost chewy from pollutants; cities rebuilding themselves overnight in chaotic fashion; a rambunctious, pushy population whose dreams and ambitions and needs are far from unified.
China has come far from the Spartan uniformity enforced by Chairman Mao, yet the rulers get their authority and model their rule on his autocratic revolution. There's no harm in China buying an American oil company to learn the lessons of energy exploration. It needs to copy the best of the American democratic political system as well.