Chinese decisions to allow aid, limited workers, and especially the foreign press put it in a different position that may cause the country to open up in ways and at a rate its leaders were not counting on. In a sense this is its own fault since the foreign press had been invited into the country in an apparent effort to ensure that coverage of the country prior to and during the Olympics was favorable.
The comes the earthquake. There's some bad timing for you. Thirty years ago, there would have been measures of tremors, official denials of severe damage and spotty reports of widespread damage. The reasons is obvious, no government wants to seem weak because that makes you vulnerable. This only works if a regime wishes to be isolated. Now that China wants to act on the world stage, the dynamic changes and can create problems for the continuance of the regime.
This is the subject of a worthwhile read in today's NYT:
A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic state.
Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on him like a heat-seeking missile.
Now China’s leaders are playing with the same volatile political chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation’s southwest regions. The rulers of cyclone-battered Myanmar, by contrast, are sticking with the authoritarian playbook, limiting access and even aid to the stricken delta region where tens of thousands of people were killed by the storm.
While China’s response to its natural catastrophe is certainly more humane, and is only a small step toward openness, it could set in motion political forces that might, over time, be unsettling. That’s especially true in an age of instant communications, even in a nation like China, which tries to control Internet access.
“When you start opening up and loosen controls, it becomes a slippery slope,” Jack F. Matlock Jr., the American ambassador to Moscow during much of the Gorbachev period, said last week as he watched the events in China. “You quickly become a target for everyone with a grievance and before long people go after the whole system.”
The author compares China's current situation with Russia's 23 years ago:
Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out of control.
As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union under Mr. Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet empire and dissolution of the Communist Party were not exactly what he had in mind when he took power in 1985 and launched his twin policies of glasnost (greater openness) and perestroika (political reform).
As events unfolded, it was like watching a scientist start a nuclear chain reaction that races out of control, eventually consuming him and all those around him.
Mr. Gorbachev realized his country was rotting from within, paralyzed by repression and ideological rigidity, a backward economy and a deep cynicism among Russians about their government. “We can’t go on living like this,” he told his wife, Raisa, hours before he was named Soviet leader, he recalled in his 1995 memoirs.
But he clearly had no inkling of where his initiatives were headed when, shortly after taking office, he broke new ground for a Kremlin leader by mingling with citizens in Leningrad and giving unscripted interviews.
In those early days of glasnost, it was hard to tell whether the changes were purely superficial or the start of something more profound.
He suggests that a tipping point was the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl when the regime first downplayed the event, then was forced to reveal what had happened over time. The forces that allowed a small degree of openness were then forced by outside pressures to allow more, which they could not control. This was exacerbated, ironically, with a second tipping point precipitated by an earthquake:
A striking moment of glasnost [openess] came with the killer earthquake in Armenia in December 1988. Faced with the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet citizens, and desperate for outside aid, the Kremlin lifted restrictions on travel to Armenia. Western reporters in Moscow were stunned to discover that they could just go to the airport and catch a flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, no advance government approval required. Foreign relief flights, including American military planes carrying food, water and medical supplies, were welcomed in Yerevan.
Sounds a lot like China today.
As the old regime frayed, Mr. Gorbachev wasn’t prepared for the assault of long-repressed political forces let loose by his reforms. The most potent was nationalism, the fierce pride in nationhood that Stalin and his successors had tried to suffocate in places like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; Armenia and Georgia; and throughout Eastern Europe.
Once uncorked, nationalism essentially overwhelmed Mr. Gorbachev, who, to his credit, choose not to try to hold together the Soviet empire by force.
He was rewarded for his efforts with the clumsy but wrenching coup attempt in August 1991 that gravely weakened him and empowered Boris Yelstin, who had broken with Mr. Gorbachev in 1987. Within months, the Soviet Union dissolved and Mr. Gorbachev was out of work.
Russia today, despite the restoration of authoritarian rule by Vladimir Putin, enjoys a degree of freedom that was inconceivable at the height of Communist rule. Glasnost helped make it that way.
China’s leaders may not take comfort in that thought.
As Mr. Matlock said last week, “If you remove the power of repressive state organs while stirring up a nation with many problems, you will get a process you can’t control.”
We will see, and it may be sooner than later. China has a history of brutal repression, but it has placed itself in a position where such repression will no longer by tolerated internally or externally.
Free market economists, notably Milton Friedman, have long held that economic freedom precedes political freedom. Some of this is due to the political strength given to those made rich by economic freedom and their increased ability to lobby for change. Some also has to do with the McDonald's rule we've discussed in class. A certain level of economic prosperity leads one to oppose military solutions to social problems that can compromise quality of life.
