Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW The
third way for China The
China Fantasy by James Mann
Reviewed by Benjamin A Shobert
Children are raised to believe that no one
likes a tattle-tale. As adults, this ingrained
lesson subconsciously morphs into frustration with
people who point out the difficulties and
disconnects with ideas we find useful. As the
stakes get greater, it becomes increasingly
awkward for an outside observer to suggest
problems with commonly accepted tactics and
strategies. Nowhere is this more complicated than
in geopolitical
realms where economic
incentives and social values collide; once-noble
motives may be compromised as financial and
political considerations take over.
James
Mann, longtime analyst of Sino-US relations, has
written a new book, The China Fantasy: How Our
Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, in
which he plays the role of an observer attempting to prick
our collective conscience and ask whether the US
is committing an error in judgment through its
policy of engagement with China.
Mann's
book, short though it is, will not be found
lacking for its ability to upset many people's
apple carts. The assertion of his book is more a
question than a point, and in walking the fine
line between the two, he is able to avoid the
predictable assertions about China's imminent
economic rise, or its inevitable collapse, or its
democratic future. Mann wants us to ask ourselves
the following question: "What if China manages to
continue on its current economic path, yet its
political system does not change in any
fundamental way? ... What if, in other words,
China becomes fully integrated into the world's
economy, yet it remains also entirely
undemocratic?" (p 10).
Mann identifies
three possible scenarios for China's development:
the Soothing Scenario, the Upheaval Scenario, and
a Third Scenario. The last is obviously of primary
interest to Mann, the scenario he wants US
policymakers and the public in general to wrestle
with. Regardless of which scenario Mann's readers
might be predisposed to, he wants us to engage
less China itself, and more our ideas and
conceptions about the country. The book "is about
the language, images, hidden assumptions, and
questionable logic that powerful people -
politicians, business executives, scholars, and
diplomats - use when they discuss modern-day
China" (p ix).
For many, the most easily
recognizable scenario from Mann's book will be the
Soothing Scenario. The argument from this is that
China's economic growth will inevitably lead to
positive changes in its political system, possibly
toward democracy itself. This general idea may
have been best presented by the late economist and
Nobel laureate W Arthur Lewis, who said, "The
advantage of economic growth is not that wealth
increases happiness, but that it increases the
range of human choice ... The case for economic
growth is that it gives man greater control over
his environment, and thereby increases his
freedom."
The Soothing Scenario is the
modern incarnation of the belief that economic
growth sparks political liberty. As Mann points
out, this position has largely characterized the
China policy of every US president since Richard
Nixon. The current president, a man who prides
himself on the role democratization plays in his
foreign policy, most clearly acknowledged the
Soothing Scenario in November 1999 when he said,
"The case for trade is not just monetary, but
moral ... Economic freedom creates habits of
liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations
of democracy ... Trade freely with China, and time
is on our side" (p 2).
This scenario owes
its popularity in no small part to its
convenience. It is probably the most easily
accessible and commonly experienced justification
and conceptualization of what is going on in
China. Business executives who find themselves
jetting to China's burgeoning cities such as
Beijing and Shanghai see a country growing at
seeming light-speed. These same business people
engage their Chinese counterparts who, while
struggling to modernize their business practices
or update their factories, are very much
interested in profit and revenue growth.
Admittedly, these interests are
inconsistent with China's past Maoist thinking and
deserve to be accentuated and encouraged as signs
of China's change. Americans leave China impressed
at the speed with which Chinese business people
are adapting to new ways of doing things and the
overall transition their society is going through.
As a result, most Americans return home and
project China's economic ascendancy and political
change as all but certain.
The allure of
this idea is our belief that "they" want what "we"
want, hence "they" will become just like "us".
This is partially the flat world envisaged most
successfully by New York Times columnist Tom
Friedman, a world where Chinese buy McDonald's
hamburgers and Starbucks coffee in a short-term
effort to approximate the American way of life
until their longer-term desires to have the
political freedoms and economic opportunities we
have become realized. Mann calls this the
"Starbucks Fallacy": "Once people are eating at
McDonald's or wearing clothes from The Gap,
American writers rush to proclaim that they are
becoming like us and that their political system
is therefore becoming like ours" (pp 49-50).
In response to this argument, Mann urges
two things: caution and education. Aware that many
allude to Asian success stories such as South
Korea, Singapore or Taiwan when making the
argument that democratization of China is
imminent, Mann wants us to make use of this
assumption cautiously, and do so only after we
educate ourselves on how China is different than
the oft-referenced Asian examples.
Sheer
size differences between China and other Asian
democratic success stories are one important
distinction, as is China's autonomy from the
protecting embrace of the US military from
regional threats. But the predominant difference
Mann draws out is the role the Chinese middle
class may play in preventing democratization: "The
old rural-urban ratio for China, in the era of Mao
Zedong, was roughly 4:1: four peasants for every
one urban resident.
"Now that rural-urban
ratio is significantly less, roughly 2:1,
primarily because of the movement of peasants to
the cities. But the underlying significance of
this huge imbalance is still the same. If China
were to have nationwide elections, and if peasants
were to vote their own interests, separate from
those of the Starbucks sippers in the cities, then
the urban middle class would lose. The margin
would not be close, like the red-state, blue-state
divide of recent American elections. On an
electoral map of China, the biggest cities like
Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Guangzhou
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attempting to prick
our collective conscience and ask whether the US
is committing an error in judgment through its
policy of engagement with China. 
