Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Some Sinophobes are constantly dinning into the ears of the American
and Western publics that war between China and the United States is
inevitable, but in this they are not necessarily any more accurate than
all of the Cold War prophets of doom who insisted that a great and
final war between the Soviet Union and the free world was a future
certainty. There are very few if any certainties in history and in human
experience, other than the mortality of us all. War with China does not
have to happen, in spite of what they fear. Perhaps China will, like the
Soviet Union before it, eventually collapse. Perhaps China and the
United States will learn to tolerate each other, if not have a great deal
of affection for each other. Perhaps something else entirely, which we
cannot fully imagine now, will happen. The twenty-first century in
China will be interesting.
PROSPECTS FOR CHINESE DEMOCRACY
The Chinese government claims that China is democratic already,
but this is largely untrue. The Chinese people have little direct say in
how they are governed, especially at the national level, and there are
no meaningful elections in the country. The Chinese word for “democ-
racy,” minzhu, means literally “people as sovereign.” But today the
Party, and not the people, is sovereign in China. It could be said in
Chinese that China today is a dangzhu (“Party as sovereign”) society,
not a democratic society. (The Chinese people have never yet been fully
sovereign over their own country.) Just as the emperors of imperial
times were sovereign over China and ruled with Neo-Confucian ideol-
ogy, so the Chinese Communists today are sovereign over China and
rule with their own state orthodoxy. And they, like the emperors of yore,
brook no serious challenges to either their rule or their ideology.
Like their predecessors the emperors of imperial China, the Chinese
Communists today insist that ideology trumps democracy. That is,
they maintain that politically correct ideological assessment of the
basic needs and desires of the people obviates the need for national
elections and parliamentary democracy. For the emperors of the late
imperial age, this ideology or state orthodoxy was Confucian thought
as interpreted and annotated by the Southern Song Neo-Confucian
thinker Zhu Xi (1130-1200). For the Chinese Communists, state ortho-
doxy today is a convoluted comingling of thought systems that might
be called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as refined by Deng
Xiaoping, focused by Jiang Zemin, and maybe even tweaked a bit by
Hu Jintao. But it is often simply called “socialism with Chinese
