A True Believer

Usually, I don’t read the newspaper President Bush recently called “disgraceful.” But when one of its columnists went to China last month and filed five columns from there, I made an exception. I’m happy to report that the paper never fails to live up to its reputation as the nation’s no. 1 left-wing broadsheet.Nicholas Kristof went to Beijing trying to cover the secret trial of his colleague Zhao Yan, a researcher at the Beijing bureau of the New York Times who was accused of revealing state secret to the paper. Mr. Kristof made a sharp observation in his first column. China today is like the courthouse he saw — a dazzling building with lavish facilities, but empty in every sense. “It’s all infrastructure, no software,” he wrote. And he admitted that “it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Mr. Zhao will be sent to prison for a long sentence.”Amazingly, Mr. Kristof still could characterize China as “one of the great successes on the world scene.” “I’m still a believer in China, partly because Mr. Hu and his aides have managed the economy so well,” he praised the Chinese Communist Party secretary general. Mr. Kristof gave one example of Mr. Hu’s achievement: canceling the agriculture tax and taking other measures to try to address the destabilizing income gaps in China. For decades under the Communist Party misrule, the Chinese didn’t have to worry about income gaps as most didn’t have much income in the first place. The last thing China needs is more government interventions. But to Mr. Kristof, who dismissively noted that in China, “1 percent of the population now controls 60 percent of the wealth, whereas in the U.S., 5 percent controls 60 percent of the wealth,” narrowing the income gaps, a socialist priority, always tops creating more wealth, a capitalist goal.Having succeeded in creating two critical Chinese blogs temporarily before they were finally shut down by Beijing, Mr. Kristof, in his second column, sounded even more bullish than Bill Clinton about the role of the Internet in bringing positive changes to China. “With the Internet, China is developing for the first time in 4,000 years of history a powerful independent institution that offers checks and balances on the emperors,” Mr. Kristof asserted. Without mentioning the shameful roles Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have been playing in helping Beijing to control the Internet, Mr. Kristof concluded “I don’t see how the Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet, at a time when a single blog can start a prairie fire.” Good luck.In his third column, talking about underground churches flourishing in China, Mr. Kristof claimed that “persecution is the exception in a country where tens of millions of people worship pretty openly and usually without any penalty.” This could be true only if one accepts that the official Catholic church, the one that defies the Pope and ordains its own bishops, and the official non-denominational Protestant church — run by an atheist regime — are real churches.“We need to learn from China,” Mr. Kristof told his readers at the end of the fourth column in which he found “many young Chinese in cities like Shanghai or Beijing get a better elementary and high school education than Americans do.” He believed “kids in the good schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust,” especially in math and science. It’s entirely wrong for Mr. Kristof, however, to cite one greener tree to contend that the whole forest is healthy. The price for the Chinese to have better math and science skills is a “pressured childhood” which the columnist admitted he didn’t want for his own children. It reminds me of something the dean of American sinologists, the late John Fairbank, had said: “I was committed to viewing ‘communism’ as bad in America but good in China, which I was convinced was true.” Take a look at the products of this supposedly superior system (schooling, not education, I must add) Mr. Kristof recommended: young people who know nothing of all the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communists took to the streets to protest violently against Japan for not being straight about history in spring 2005. You decide whether you want your children to be like them.Mr. Kristof concluded his fantasy trip with this declaration: “I’m a believer in China, and I think it will end this century as the most important country in the world — after a wild ride.” I remain highly skeptical of this prediction because I question the columnist’s overall judgment. Mr. Kristof began the final column by saying “In the 17 years since the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement, China has enjoyed an economic miracle and remarkable political stability.” In fact, it’s neither miraculous nor stable. China is a Frankenstein created by American businessmen who have been trading like no tomorrow. And the people have learned to keep their heads further down to make money instead amid tightening repression. It’s silence under the gun, not stability.I agree with Mr. Kristof about one thing. The long calm since Tiananmen may be coming to an end and China is set for a wild ride. The outcome, however, is more likely to be what the eminent China scholar Simon Leys predicted after the Tiananmen Massacre: “Unfortunately, its poison might outlast the beast itself. The legacy of such a regime can be even more evil than its rule… with a population brutalized by four decades of relentless political terror, worse horrors may follow.”As a speaker at the funeral of A.M. Rosenthal, Mr. Kristof, who inherited the office space from the late great newspaperman, spoke of almost feeling the strong emotion of Mr. Rosenthal against injustice and human rights violations when he’s now writing in the room. Perhaps. But Mr. Kristof certainly hasn’t inherited the harsher, and to me, truer, viewpoint towards China of Mr. Rosenthal.I expect more from someone who had covered the Tiananmen Massacre. That’s why I’m disappointed at Mr. Kristof.Mr. Liu, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and general manager of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, is a Washington-based columnist.

A True Believer

A True Believer

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