Big Red Lies

Big Red Lies
In communist China, it's still 1984.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, July 12, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

It was on a flight to Siberia, nine years ago, that an American businessman gave me the best advice I ever got on navigating the wreckage of communism. "Don't trust the labels," he told me. "Just because they call it a bank doesn't mean it's a bank. Just because they say it's a hospital doesn't mean it's a hospital." Just about everything was askew, he said, even the staircases; if you made the innocent American assumption that the steps were built even and straight, you were heading for a fall.

He was talking about Russia, just after the Soviet collapse--and while living there over the next 3½ years, I found he was richly right. Communist systems were meant to re-engineer the basic nature of mankind, a project grounded so deep in unreality that it encouraged, and often required, dishonesty at almost every level. Recall such old Soviet jokes as, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Remember the wise arguments of George Orwell, that repression feeds on the corruption of meaning, that in the land of Big Brother, "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength."

Nor does such stuff fade easily. When a society's basic institutions have been bent for generations, or built crooked, it can take many years to develop straight and sturdy ones--if that happens at all. In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank to defend Russia's reforms, it was an ennobling moment, marking a deep change in course. But 10 years later, for all the foreign blueprints and billions of dollars meant to help, Russia's government still has very far to go in the way of providing basic rule of law, or anything we might reasonably call a just society or secure democracy.

Lately, there have been plenty of reminders that the warning about Russia applies even more thoroughly to one of the U.S.S.R.'s original star pupils, communist China--which has yet to achieve even that Yeltsin moment. Sure, textbook communism has waned greatly since the times of Mao. But the warped political institutions, and the lies, carry on. The subject came up during a telephone chat Tuesday with University of Pennsylvania sinologist Arthur Waldron. We were speaking of one of the U.S. citizens jailed in China, Li Shaomin. I mentioned Mr. Li's trial, due to start on Saturday.

"We shouldn't call it a 'trial,' " said Mr. Waldron. "This is an 'administrative procedure.' " He added that it is a misnomer to talk about China's Ministry of Justice, because justice is not what's administered. The more accurate label, he suggested, would be "Ministry of Punishment."

All of which leads me to the suggestion that the West might find itself less frequently frustrated and surprised by China if we took a hint from Mr. Waldron and tried describing the doings there not as habit dictates, but as truth deserves. Even the Central Intelligence Agency, it turns out, has taken an overly cheerful view of China's progress, according to a commission of outside experts, including Mr. Waldron, who recently reviewed some of the agency's analyses. Under the Clintonian label of building a "strategic partnership," it got a lot easier to overlook the fact that while we may have dealings with China, Beijing's current regime is not configured to perform as a viable "partner" for any modern democracy.

Take, for example, the notion of "reform," a word we hear so often in relation to China that an American might be forgiven for believing the place had long ago become simply a less boring Canada. Since Deng Xiaoping began decollectivizing the farms back in the early 1980s, (with a brief pause in 1989 while Western TV audiences took in Tiananmen Square), hardly a week has gone by without a story about China "opening" and "reforming" and "changing."

What's missing from these words is some sense of scale. For the most part, these shifts in Chinese policy might better be labeled "extremely small steps aimed at increasing wealth without jeopardizing one-party rule." That sort of description might better prepare us for those jarring moments when the reforming, opening, changing China turns out, in its basic mechanisms, to still be a state where the Ministry of Punishment doles out administrative procedures in the name of "state security"--by which the ruling party actually means not the public good, but its own interests.

Then there's the matter of China's "stability," which the ruling party likes to stress as its big success, and which foreign businessmen tend to compare favorably with places such as Russia. The usual "advantage" cited about doing business in China is that there, at least you know whom to bribe. That might sound more like the danger it really is if instead of the term "stability" we used more accurate phrases such as, "the ability of the Party, through ruthless, selective repression to keep a lid on massive unrest"--such as the recurrent riots in western China, or the protests in which 12,000 coal miners, unpaid for 30 months, have this week been blocking the rail lines in northeastern China.

Of course, straight talk is unlikely in politics, or even in the press. In America, where "Big Brother" to most folks means a TV game show, the truth about China may even come across as too weird to sound real. It's so much easier to speak in terms of what we know--to use the shorthand of "trials" and "justice" and "partnership" and "stability." Maybe there's no way around it. But watch out for those crooked stairs.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."