Shadows of Berlin loom

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: August 8, 2008

A splash of fireworks illumined the night in Beijing but could not penetrate the darkness. The Olympics opened Friday, signaling the ostensible successes of decades of efforts to nudge China away from totalitarianism but also showcasing their failures.
Bearing a tyrant’s ordinary sensitivity to bad press, the Chinese have rounded up dissidents within and closed entry to those without. The Games are perceived as an indicator of China’s edging declension from Marxism. They instead are proof of something less sanguine: That subversive capitalism, that is, the use of McDonald’s to transform, cannot change the world after all.
Putting truth to hegemonic lies about the West’s dreams of nibbling away at communism until consuming it, the United States since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 has sought to topple China’s dictatorial regime principally by way of free-market incursion. The thinking is that once exposed to capitalism’s allure – economic, cultural and political – China eventually will recognize communism’s folly and abandon it, perhaps at the behest of an increasingly free people chafing at authoritarian shackles.
Thus have sprung from within the shadows of Beijing skyscrapers the familiar glow of golden arches. These are the product of a theory that author James Mann refers to as “McDonald’s triumphalism.” Mann explains in “The China Fantasy”: “America’s current China policy amounts to an unstated bargain: We have abandoned any serious attempt to challenge China’s one-party state, and we have gotten in exchange the right to unfettered commerce with China.”
This has wrought some change beyond the arrival of the Big Mac. Principally, the Chinese regime is less brutal than it was a generation ago. This, of course, is akin to rejoicing over the lesser sting of a scorpion. It is not the sting but the toxic venom that kills.
Along with Russia and Algeria, China opposed tighter United Nations Security Council measures aimed at halting mass genocide in Darfur. China leads the world in executions at 10,000 a year, more than the rest of the world combined and the result of the death penalty being mandated for 68 crimes, according to Human Rights Watch. Dissidents are thrown in jail or held in house arrest.
Mann wonders whether U.S. policy is weakening Marxism or enabling it. “Beijing has shown dictators that they don’t have to choose between power and profit; they can have both” he wrote last year for the Washington Post. After Tinanmen, Mann observed, “Western pundits predicted that the Chinese government had one foot on the banana peel. … Instead, China’s economy expanded by a factor of nine, and the Communist Party remains firmly in control.”
A cynic might suggest that American capitalists – a group whose ethics, such as they are, frequently can be purchased cheaply – have been considerably more focused on economic opportunity in China than on the political implications of expanded markets. We believe firmly in the power of America’s free-market system. But we believe equally in the necessity of ensuring our national security.
Allusions to Berlin and the 1936 Olympics have been common in recent weeks. One may recall that in the 1930s, American capitalists dealt freely with Nazi Germany, some willfully deluded about the severity of fascism’s threat. In seeking to weaken China by way of trade, the U.S. has accomplished the opposite and might one day discover that an error with grave implications has been repeated.