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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
Mao Zedong once wrote, "If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself." 1 In recent years Americans have come to know China through trade, investment, travel, cultural exchange, and political contacts. These interactions have effected substantial change in China. A large Chinese middle class consumes American-brand goods; the legal system has shaped itself to the needs of international investment and trade; ideas of economic freedom and rule of law guide Chinese reform.
But influence also returns. China supplies many of the products we use and buys a good share of what we produce. Chinese students are a major presence on our campuses and Chinese movies in our theaters. Issues relating to China play a growing role in foreign-policy debates and politics. Interests in China have grown sufficiently large to generate influential lobbies in Washington. Beijing has joined other Asian countries in criticizing American values and practices, moving us occasionally to reflection and less often to change. So the pear bites back.
And sometimes one learns not just from biting but from being bitten. Such an experience began for me in February 1995, when an open letter appeared in the pages of a Chinese-language newspaper in Queens, New York, called the Asian American Times . The letter attacked The Private Life of Chairman Mao , 2 a memoir by Mao Zedong's personal physician, Li Zhisui, to which I had contributed the Foreword. Its text appears in chapter 3 of the present book so I will not summarize it here, except to say that it argued for the significance of Mao's personality as a key to understanding his dictatorship.
The thirty-odd signers were identified as Chinese scholars, writers, and activists residing in the U.S. and Taiwan. "Andrew J. Nathan's Foreword," they wrote, "is seriously anti-China text, full of the stereotypical prejudices of the American humanities and social sciences toward the Chinese race and Chinese society, and fully exposing the cultural imperialists' contempt for the Chinese people." Referring to a project I was involved in at Columbia, the writers charged, "Nathan surrounds himself with a group of so-called democracy movement elites to work on his 'constitutionalism project.' In his eyes the billion-strong Chinese people may work to build their country, but only he can pass historical judgment on their enterprise. And based on the doctor's smears, he completely negates the road the Chinese people have taken." 3
Before long a second open letter appeared in the same newspaper and was reprinted in Chinese media elsewhere. It was signed by more than a hundred senior personalities who were close to Mao during his lifetime, including his chief of guards Wang Dongxing, bodyguards Li Yinqiao and Ye Zilong, the Russian translator Shi Zhe, the playwright Cao Yu, and ideologists He Jingzhi, Chen Yong, and Liu Shaotang. The letter writers commended the signers of the first letter for their patriotism and endorsed their attack on Dr. Li's veracity. Their language bore the earmarks of Chinese communist discourse, mixing violence and cliché in a blend at once frightening and farcical.
Truly it is not Mao Zedong who is exposed in [Dr. Li's] book but, just as the writers of the first open letter say, "the degenerate and dirty methods of Li Zhisui and Andrew J. Nathan. . . ." How true! The publication of this book involved both those appearing on the public stage and those scheming in the background, ranging from the author, translator, and publisher through critics and persons acknowledged by name as participants and supporters. In the history of political struggles at home or abroad there have rarely been seen such sordid methods, such wicked motives and vulgarity of writing style, or such enormous forces mobilized by back-stage bosses on such a vast scale in the publishing world, the news world, and the academic world.
How low the lackeys of imperialism have fallen! Afraid of theoretical dispute and devoid of factual evidence, they can only resort to base and shameless ad hominem attacks and rumor-mongering. . . . Their despicable political purpose is not merely to drag through the mud a leader of the Chinese people and of the world communist movement, or to blacken socialist new China, but gravely to insult the Chinese race! . . . The honor of our race, of our fatherland, of our people's revolution, are not to be violated. We must counterattack all those treacherous wolves in people's skin at home or abroad who act like thieving rats and dogs. 4
In the fall of 1995 the pro-Beijing press in Hong Kong heralded a third attack--a book by three of Mao's former attendants, Lin Ke, an English secretary; Xu Tao, a doctor; and Wu Xujun, a nurse. On the basis of their privileged access to party documents and personnel, the authors questioned whether Dr. Li had served as Mao's doctor since 1954 or only since 1957, whether he was present at certain events that he claimed to have witnessed, whether his readings of Mao's motives were correct, whether Mao had had a prostate exam, whether he had venereal disease, and so on. They did not contest that Dr. Li was Mao's physician from at least 1957 onward, that he had been present at most of the events he claimed to have witnessed, and that Mao said and did most of the things Dr. Li reported him as saying and doing.
The three authors elaborated the theory of a political plot put forward in the open letters. "The Foreword," they charged, "is a summary of the entire memoir, the eyeball on the dragon [the final touch that gives life to an undertaking]. It says the things that Li Zhisui himself cannot conveniently say. Put otherwise, the memoir was written according to the intent which is revealed in the Foreword."
There were actually 26 persons who participated in the book in differing degrees, as shown in the English language acknowledgments. [Dr. Li thanked, among others, translators, a research assistant, a librarian, his publisher and agent, and scholars who had reviewed parts of the manuscript.] . . . The name list reveals the participants and planners of this memoir, and shows how the original draft passed through the hands of many persons over the course of two or three years before it was processed into a finished work. These persons believed that . . . through Li Zhisui's mouth, they could produce for readers who knew nothing of the truth a completely distorted and uglified Mao Zedong, and from there achieve their planned, step by step goal of uglification of the Chinese Communist Party and of fundamentally shaking the Chinese people's confidence in the CCP and in the socialist system. 5
The attacks on Dr. Li's book were part of a reactive nationalism that I describe in chapter 14. In 1996 three young writers published China Can Say No , a breathless survey of American offenses toward China. The book devotes a chapter to the designs of the Central Intelligence Agency, in which the authors embroider the theme of a political plot behind Dr. Li's book.
"A man with the experience and abilities of Li Zhisui could never have written a book like this," they charged, paying a kind of back-handed tribute.
The fact is that a certain number of ghostwriters with dark backgrounds shrouded themselves in Dr. Li's identity to design, arrange, and implement the entire 'package.' . . . The ideas and style are not those of Li Zhisui; they are the product of ghost-writing by long-time anti-communists working for Taiwan's military propaganda apparatus. To pick this choice propaganda item out of its basket, the CIA had to search for the right person for nearly a decade. After they found their man, they placed some of their dispersed agents directly into the writing group that produced the book, and so played a major role in the book's publication and promotion from start to finish. 6
In this way, the Foreword "put the eye on the dragon" of my own dossier. For some years I had been writing about Chinese democracy and human rights, helping dissident Chinese intellectuals, and assisting human rights organizations concerned with China. These activities were occasionally reported in the Chinese-language press in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, or in the mainland neibu (classified) press. The "constitutionalism project" referred to in the first open letter was a three-year Columbia research and teaching program to explore the idea of constitutionalism in China, further described in chapter 16. Some of the participants were pro-democracy scholars in exile; others were legal personnel from the PRC.
Every so often we glimpse ourselves through the eyes of others as a figure familiar yet strange. My modest human rights work and academic musings were now transmuted into monstrous intentions and sinister powers, leaving me both impressed and repelled by my new self. Some Chinese friends suggested that I send correspondence concerning academic exchanges over names other than mine. A scholar I visited in China asked me to use a name card without my Chinese name so his colleagues would not recognize who I was. Around this time when an American scholar proposed marriage to a Chinese woman, her father asked, "This man is not Li Anyou [my Chinese name], is he?"
Safe in America, I sustained little harm. The second open letter and the book aroused some controversy in Hong Kong, requiring me to respond to a few interviews. In the fall of 1995 I was denied a visa to participate in a dialogue delegation visiting China, the sponsors on the Chinese side citing the foreword as the chief reason. Well-meaning Chinese in the U.S. and China reminded me that the Party is always willing to welcome reprobates back to the fold: I could get the ban lifted by publishing a recantation. At home, some colleagues acted as if I was tainted by controversies over Mao and human rights, as if a more serious scholar would have stuck to safer subjects.
This was not the first time I had observed Chinese shunning and its domestic shadow at close quarters. In the late 1970s my then wife, Roxane Witke, was punished for having published a biography of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, after Mao's death and Jiang's fall from power. 7 In China, Roxane was portrayed in wall cartoons as a vampish CIA agent with a tape recorder. In New York, she was informed by a Chinese official that she could no longer visit China because she had offended the Chinese people. Americans quietly excluded her from a number of events to avoid embarrassing Chinese guests. Similar things had happened earlier to my mentor, the late John K. Fairbank; more recently they have happened to other China scholars and writers.
Episodes like this illuminate the gap between Chinese Communist and Western liberal norms of dialogue. They encourage reflection on challenges faced daily in cross-cultural studies, and on the risks and responsibilities of the kind of scholarship that touches politics.
The most interesting issues raised by Dr. Li's critics, I felt, were not the factual ones. Every fact about a world-historical figure is important, and should be gotten straight. During the Cultural Revolution Dr. Li had burned his diaries for fear of being discovered, and he had written his book from memory. Relating a career of more than twenty years without access to documents or interviews, he may have erred in places. Since he died of a heart attack in Chicago shortly after his book was published, we will never know his answers to the critics' questions. But judging by the attacks, his mistakes were not major. After searching the archives and conducting interviews, the critics left the bulk of his story uncontradicted, countering his picture of Mao with an icon of such improbable saintliness as to leave no plausible alternative to Dr. Li's Mao.
More instructive was the form and manner of the critics' attacks. The critics condemned Dr. Li for having exposed Mao to a foreign public, and rebuked me for presuming as a foreigner to pass judgment on the leader of a people other than my own. Yet their actions showed why an honest discussion of Mao cannot yet take place in China. Dr. Li's book was banned there, even though the Chinese translation published in Taiwan circulated widely, at some risk to booksellers who could be jailed for selling it. Even the loyalists' attacks, except for the brief reference in China Can Say No , had to be published in New York and Hong Kong.
The critics claimed to be responding to a political assault that I organized, giving as evidence the list of names in the acknowledgments and the book's positive reception in the West. Yet their unanimity of viewpoint, use of shared language, and access to data denied others betrayed the coordination behind their own attacks.
The critics impugned Dr. Li's honor as a physician and my integrity as a scholar for discussing a leader's sex life. Yet their injured denial that Mao's personal life was a valid subject for history demonstrated how important Mao's image was for the Deng regime's legitimacy. They claimed to be defending scholarship from the taint of bodily functions, yet failed to honor scholarly practices of debate. Mao's good students had learned the master's lessons well: labeling, isolating, and scapegoating enemies; invoking anti-foreignism; and arguing by appeal to authority.
The power to classify others as "enemies of the people" or as "a certain kind of person" has had large consequences in history. As I suggest in chapter 2, just this kind of power made possible explosions of otherwise inexplicable cruelty in Chinese history, and in the histories of other countries. Under Mao the Great Leap Forward famine killed an estimated 30 million people. 8 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a ten-year orgy of injustice that imposed great suffering on tens of millions. Even though Deng Xiaoping's regime ended mass political persecutions and raised standards of living, human rights violations remained extensive, including political repression, appalling prison conditions, forced labor, coerced abortions, and in at least one documented instance state abuse of orphans. 9 Such events in China and elsewhere yield universal lessons. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen says in his study of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, "For people to kill another large group of people, the ethical and emotional constraints that normally inhibit them from adopting such a radical measure must be lifted." 10 And, the Chinese example suggests, not only the ethical constraints but also the institutional constraints must be lifted, which in most legal and political systems prevent people from acting on their promptings of rage.
Who lifts these constraints? Different times and places yield different answers, but those with ideological and political power always bear the major responsibility. Daniel Chirot observes, "[T]here is no indication whatsoever that it is difficult to find plenty of jailers and killers around. . . . What stands out in the history of Hitlerism and Stalinism, as in some other cases of modern ideological tyranny, is that such behavior was organized, sanctioned, and furthered by deliberate policy on behalf of a specific ideological goal. Only when it is a matter of policy can so many be killed in this way." 11 In China, Mao Zedong did not work alone and his power was not absolute. Yet it was he who set down the theories of class nature and revolutionary struggle that turned people into enemies of the people, and who exalted the ends of revolutionary transformation over the means of human suffering. The story of China's modern tragedy has to begin in Mao's mind, his court, and--as I argued in the foreword reprinted in chapter 3--in his bed. The chapter also explores some insights gained from recent writings about how dehumanization at Mao's court started at the top.
Yet so far as we know Mao personally killed, beat, or jailed no one. He was able to extend his way of treating people from intimate relations to society at large through the institutional system he and his colleagues built. Chapter 4 explains how institutions designed for idealistic purposes, to bring order to society and to mobilize its resources for development, at the same time created scapegoat classes and deprived citizens of the right to think for themselves. This created the situation in which so many had no choice but to persecute fellow citizens. Such conditions were ameliorated under Deng Xiaoping, as the chapter also shows. But Mao's legacy survives in the repressive political apparatus and the delegitimation of dissent.
Contemplating such events raises an enduring issue of cross-cultural studies: To what extent are such events determined by culture? My reading of recent Chinese history is that culture, and the institutions that put culture into practice and in return shape culture, do not make an iron box. 12 People reflect on their circumstances; even against the wishes of their leaders they come up with new ideas. Chapter 5 describes a series of democratic experiments from the late Qing provincial assemblies of 1909 to the PRC people's congress system, asking why each failed. Many answers contribute to the explanation, but none supports the conventional conclusion that China is culturally unsuited for democracy. Rather, the analysis emphasizes how political choices, especially those made by leaders, shape culture and institutions and the uses to which they are put, as much as or more than the reverse.
China's democratic prospect reached its modern-day high and low points at once in the spring and early summer of 1989. Chapter 6 explores Chinese ideas of democracy as they stood around the time of the Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4, 1989, Beijing massacre. In their speeches and writings the activists displayed the universal yearning for political freedom and accountable government, together with a particular Chinese romanticism about democracy. Many Chinese democratic thinkers are ex-scientists. They attribute to democracy a quality of universal rightness that its proponents in the West do not claim. Viewing democracy as a search for truth rather than a clash of interests, they paid little attention to institutional design (which is one reason why colleagues and I thought a constitutionalism project was a good use of Chinese scholars' time).
The idea that culture is not determinative and historical choice is open is supported by the experience of another culturally Chinese society, Taiwan. Since 1986 this political system has undergone a transition to democracy. In chapter 7 Helena Ho and I explore the foreign and domestic policy circumstances that made political reform an attractive risk for Taiwan's president Chiang Ching-kuo, when he started the process. Circumstances did not dictate the outcome: a commitment to democracy had to be made and honored jointly by Chiang, the opposition movement, and Taiwan's residents. Compared to mainland China, Taiwan is richer, smaller, and more Westernized, with a more educated population and more experience with liberty, so its experience cannot be mechanically emulated by the PRC. But the lesson remains that Chinese history does not bar a democratic transition when leaders and citizens decide that they want it.
Taiwan's transition moved forward in the dramatic 1992 election for seats in the Legislative Yuan (parliament), which is described in chapter 8. This was the first full-fledged competitive national-level election in Chinese history. It brought into the highest elected body opposition leaders who had been in prison or exile a few years earlier, and solidified a tacit pact of peaceful competition between the former authoritarian ruling party and the former anti-system opposition movement. After years of struggle the opposition gained legitimacy in the political system and accepted the legitimacy of the system. The process of transition continued for several years until 1996, when Chiang Ching-kuo's successor Lee Teng-hui won reelection to the presidency in the first direct election of a chief of state in Chinese history. That election marked the consolidation of Taiwan's democracy. It did not please mainland China, which greeted it with missile exercises across the Taiwan Strait designed to remind Taiwan that it should not declare independence.
Beijing saw a similar threat in developments in another Chinese society, Hong Kong, whose story is reviewed in Chapter 9. Here partial democratization came as a late and ambiguous gift from British colonial rulers on the eve of the territory's reversion to the PRC. When they opened Hong Kong's Legislative Council to popular election, the British handed Beijing a Trojan horse. China reacted by dissolving the democratically elected council and replacing it with an appointed provisional council. Even so, democracy had proved its suitability to Hong Kong's way of life.
Although culture does not determine politics or history, it has an influence. A fascination with culture is what draws many students to study China in the first place. Yet culture is hard to describe and measure, partly because it is multilayered and internally diversified. Such problems raise another issue in cross-cultural studies: How may one think about the distinctiveness of and differences among cultures? The comparative study of culture is grounded in a methodological paradox, which is explored in chapter 10. To compare cultures, one must identify attributes or variables that are capable of being assessed in all the cultures being compared. Such attributes are by definition common, not unique, or they could be measured in only one culture and not others. In this sense some degree of cultural sameness is preordained by the method of comparison. Yet cultural difference too is preordained by the method, because no two societies display the same distributions of any important cultural attribute even if their histories and social structures are similar.
It falls to the investigator to determine how much difference counts to make a culture distinctive. How one draws this line affects what one can say about how culture affects behavior and institutions. The essay ends with a challenge to students of culture to state their claims more precisely, to specify what they mean when they say that Chinese culture is distinctive so that they can also say more clearly how they think culture influences the way in which China develops--how, for example, it constrains the development of Chinese democracy, as many commentators claim that it does, and to what extent.
Part of the reason for the vagueness about culture is that we usually study it through texts, interviews, fieldwork, and the interpretive reconstruction of historical action. 13 Not until the late 1980s did it become possible to study Chinese political culture in all its disparateness and ambiguity through the modern empirical technique of survey research, which disaggregates culture into operationally defined components and assesses their distribution across the geographic and socioeconomic landscapes. If based on a proper random sample, survey research provides a measure of culture not as a general pattern but as a variant distribution of attitudes, values, and beliefs among a population. Although the method was developed in the West from the 1920s onward, China was until recently either too chaotic or too closed to apply it. Survey research in China on political science topics was pioneered by Tianjian Shi, who co-authored two of the essays in this volume. Professor Shi's Columbia Ph.D. dissertation was based on a 1988 survey of political culture and political participation in Beijing. 14 In 1990 he conducted the first nation-wide random sample survey in China on political attitudes and behavior. He and I report some of the findings in chapters 11 and 12.
Although statistical findings smack of iron laws, survey research actually portrays culture as a realm of freedom rather than determination. For example, in chapter 11 we show that no Chinese subgroup (much less the entire aggregate of the Chinese people) is composed wholly of persons who are tolerant or intolerant. Despite differences in tolerance among groups with different levels of education, some of the least-educated are as tolerant as some of the most-educated and vice versa. Likewise, in chapter 12, even the most powerful variables (education, sex, age, urban and rural residence, and others) taken together explain only twenty or thirty percent of the variance in people's attitudes toward policy issues or democracy. Findings of this size are common in social research in all societies. People in each social category show great individual variation in what they think and do.
Surveys give concreteness to our impression of the interactions between attitudes and institutions. Political efficacy, for example--the belief in one's ability to influence politics--is an attitude formed not in isolation, but on the basis of information about how the political system works for people in particular situations. As we suggest in chapter 11, people are more likely to believe themselves efficacious when they are. To take another example, in chapter 12 we show that people's decisions to be concerned about certain political issues reflect the way these issues affect them, given where they are situated in the matrix of social interests.
Surveys show how Chinese political culture is both the same as and different from other cultures. For example, education affects political attitudes everywhere, but only in China, so far as we know, does increased education produce a reduced expectation of fair treatment from the government. This distinctive pattern has a practical explanation: the repression of intellectuals under Mao. To push such analyses further, in 1993 Tianjian Shi and I joined seven other scholars to conduct surveys in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong using a common core questionnaire. We hope the data will permit us to offer fuller analyses of the relations between culture and institutions, by comparing patterns of belief and behavior in three culturally similar but institutionally distinct Chinese societies.
The technique of survey research is linked to an interest in democracy. The link is partly methodological. Surveys are rarely done in authoritarian societies because researchers can rarely gain access; in this regard our China surveys were unusual. But it is also substantive: why else would one care about the values held by ordinary citizens? So the method is scientific without being in all respects value-neutral. This raises a third issue about cross-cultural studies: Can scholarship avoid value judgments, and should it do so? It is a classic question in the social sciences, but it emerges more sharply when members of one culture undertake studies of another culture. Studies of democracy are a major theme in American political science--perhaps the major theme--but that seems less problematic when the political system itself is democratic. But to raise questions about the sources and prospects of democracy in a nondemocratic country may seem biased, an imposition of one's own blueprint on another society.
Chapter 13 presents some thoughts on these questions. Values perform at least two roles in social science scholarship. They help identify what subjects are important, and help suggest what statements of belief and preference made by actors are plausible. If only for these reasons, there is no way for a social scientist to navigate without an evaluational point of view. Besides, I argue, making reasoned value judgments is as valid an undertaking in doing social science about other societies as it is in working on one's own. History and social science would be less interesting if they always stopped at the brink of important value questions. Values should not affect methods or distort findings, but they must be part of meaningful social science. Against the counsels of one kind of cultural relativism, I suggest that the only values that can guide one's scholarship are those in which one believes, not the putative values of those one is studying. And in view of the diversity of culture, I reject the notion that basic values popular in the West find no support in China, and I challenge the pessimistic argument that the differences among cultures prohibit dialogue.
Value commitments also shape the questions we ask about the future. At the end of a previous book of essays, China's Crisis , 15 published shortly after Tiananmen, I suggested that China might work its way out of its political, social, and economic crises by undertaking a democratic transition guided from the top down along the lines of Taiwan's experience. Instead the regime surprised me and many other observers by accelerating economic growth, reducing inflation, and repressing dissent without undertaking political reform. It has internationalized its economy while fostering nationalism; expanded economic freedoms while violating political rights; and decentralized bureaucratic power while rolling back a nascent civil society. So far the leaders have maintained a common front over what many outsiders believe is an internal power struggle.
Chapter 14 describes problems that nonetheless continue to grow--rapid social change, polarization of wealth, lack of legitimacy, stagnation of state enterprises, power divisions at the top, and the need for political consolidation after Deng. Power has gravitated into networks of elites, giving rise to what some scholars call "local corporatism," a form of rule operating by personal influence and corruption. The regime relies on personal connections and political interventions instead of a consolidated legal system to protect entrepreneurs.
The public's response to these mixed trends has been complex. Seventy percent of respondents in our 1993 survey agreed with the proposition, "The Center's decisions are generally correct." Yet 60% agreed that "Government officials don't care much about what people like me think." And 73% held, "It is now very necessary to expand democracy in our country." Even when people are dissatisfied with the officials they encounter in everyday life, many still support the regime. Economic success has enabled the regime to separate the public's evaluation of the political system from that of the bureaucracy.
China remains in transition, but its political direction no longer seems as clear as it did in 1990. As Maurice Meisner reminds us, the rise of a middle class does not necessarily lead to democracy. When the entrepreneurial class is part of the ruling network, the bourgeois revolution is as liable to result in fascism as democracy. China's bourgeoisie today is not only dependent on the state but also lacks a grounding in legally secure private property from which to grow toward an independent status in the foreseeable future. If this continues to be the case, China's modernization may turn out to be "a late-twentieth-century variant of what Barrington Moore termed 'conservative modernization' "--a new Bismarckian Germany or Meiji Japan. 16
What is interesting about a failed but informed prediction is not so much that it was wrong, as that historical actors chose to act differently 13from ways that appeared probable at the time. When social science can explain only 20 to 30 percent of the variance in individual attitudes, it is no wonder that it cannot predict future events with any greater degree of accuracy. 17 Yet attempts to peer into the future remain valuable, partly because historical actors themselves continue to function with an eye to the future.
In chapter 15 I return to the task, unrepentant. This time my somewhat similar prediction is based on the seminar discussions and papers of the Columbia constitutionalism project. Discussions about constitutional reform in China center on the idea of working within China's existing constitution to enlarge the role of the National People's Congress and reduce the arbitrary power of the Chinese Communist Party. Democracy, no matter how remote, remains part of the Chinese discourse, not a foreign imposition, and a real option in China's future.
That this should be so reflects an interaction between forces of internal development and foreign influences. Many China specialists hold that it is hopeless to try to "change China." 18 My reading of the record suggests otherwise. Although economic development will not do our political work for us, there are forces in the intelligentsia, professions, and the administrative bureaucracy working for human rights and a Chinese form of democracy. Chapter 16 summarizes evidence on how Western human rights pressure has worked together with domestic forces to promote change. 19 The essay's main point, however, is to lay out the strategic interests the rest of the world has in improving human rights in China. Without rule of law founded on respect for human rights China may repeat its earlier pattern of foreign policy disruptions and developmental disasters. 20
If there is a motif in the work represented in this book, it is admiration for the human striving for autonomy. My brush with Chinese reality enhanced my own ability to imagine the circumstances under which hundreds of millions of Chinese lived during the Mao years, and under which politically active, independently thinking Chinese live today. It led me to appreciate anew the courage of those Chinese exiles who suffer isolation, culture shock, and poverty, while putting their lives together and continuing peaceful dissent in the face of their government's mockery. And it reaffirmed my conviction that China needs human rights for its stability and smooth development.
Human rights deprivations are grounded in the dehumanization of the victims. The process often starts with the simple, even childish, act of isolating those who differ. The power of shunning, strong enough in any society including our own, is all the more formidable when organized and enforced by the state. One of the most valuable assets in our own community is the acceptance of one another's good faith as partners in debate. So this seems a good time to thank the institution where I have worked for twenty-six years--Columbia University and its East Asian Institute and Political Science Department--for sustaining an environment of freedom, and to acknowledge the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and other foundations, publications, colleagues, and students who have encouraged my intellectual journey. In presenting this collection of explorations and arguments, I salute those in China and the West who have resisted the forces, both hostile and benign, that try to deter or discourage dialogue on hard questions.
Note 1: "On Practice" (1937), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung , Vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 300. Back.
Note 2: New York: Random House, 1994. Back.
Note 3: YaMei shibao , February 18, 1995, pp. 1-2. Back.
Note 4: Dongxiang (Hong Kong), August 1995, p. 47. Back.
Note 5: Lin Ke, Xu Tao, and Wu Xujun, Lishi de zhenshi: Mao Zedong shenbian gongzuo renyuan de zhengyan (The truth of history: the testimony of personnel who worked by Mao Zedong's side) (Hong Kong: Liwen chubanshe, 1995), pp. 110-114. Back.
Note 6: Song Qiang, Zhang Zangzang, and Qiao Bian, Zhongguo keyi shuo bu: Lengzhanhou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan jueze (China can say no: political and emotional choices in the post-Cold War era) (Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe, 1996), pp. 146-147. Back.
Note 7: Comrade Chiang Ch'ing (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). Back.
Note 8: Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1997). Back.
Note 9: Human Rights Watch/Asia, Death By Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages (New York: HRW/A, January 7, 1996). Back.
Note 10: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 414. Because I agree with this view, I regret that The New Republic inappositely titled my review essay "A Culture of Cruelty." Back.
Note 11: Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 156. Back.
Note 12: A theoretical discussion of the relationship between culture and institutions is contained in Andrew J. Nathan and Kellee S. Tsai, "Factionalism: A New Institutionalist Restatement," The China Journal 34 ( July 1995), pp. 157-192. Back.
Note 13: As I have done in Peking Politics, 1918-1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1985). Back.
Note 14: Forthcoming as Political Participation in Beijing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Back.
Note 15: New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Back.
Note 16: Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 343. Back.
Note 17: Hubert M. Blalock, Jr., Basic Dilemmas in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984), pp. 90-95. Back.
Note 18: This lesson is often cited from Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620-1960 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969). Back.
Note 19: The full argument is contained in "Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Policy," The China Quarterly 139 (September 1994), pp. 622-643. Back.
Note 20: On China's foreign policy, see Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security (New York: Norton, 1997). Back.
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