The Empire of Lies

The twenty-first century will not belong to China.

Guy Sorman shows us in this essay, that despite cosmetic changes on the surface, China is still in the grips of a hard leftist communist government and that it therefore suffers from all of the problems that are typical of such a brutal and oppressive regime. Indeed, reading this article, one is struck by the similarities to the old Soviet Union in terms both of lack of economic freedom as well as the overriding arrogance of the political elites who cling to power in China regardless of the dire consequences that affect most of the population Of course we must exclude those who are politically connected. As in the Soviet Union, the politically connected are a different class and thus gain what rewards are available under such a system. And as was the case in the Soviet Union, most of the regular population is exploited for the benefit of that few.

Hayek pointed out in his writings why this must be the inevitable result in a system which is not free politically or economically. In fact, there are a wealth of books by the major free market economists of the 19th and 20th century that go into great detail about the results that can be expected from socialist systems. It is no accident that not only have all of them failed, but that they follow the same pattern of failure. The very existence of such a pattern should be an indication to those on The Angry Left that there are immutable economic laws at work in our universe and that they can no more be ignored than can the laws of physics or chemistry.

But leftists are uninterested in the evidence provided by the history of the 20th century. Over one hundred million deaths can be attributed to socialist and communist systems in the last century. That should be ample evidence for anyone. But the left continues on without so much as taking a breath. They simply keep on repeating the same tired slogans over and over again as if doing so would somehow make them true. But the laws of reality do not change just because they are politically inconvenient.

I’ve been to many Chinese villages, and everywhere I have encountered the peasantry’s feelings of helplessness and anger when dealing with the Communist authorities. When in late 2006, I reached one village in the heart of the Shaanxi Province, after a 40-hour journey from Beijing by train, car, and tractor, I saw no trace of the uprising that had taken place a month earlier. Alerted by a text message sent from the village, the Hong Kong press had reported a violent clash between the peasants and the police, leaving people injured and missing—or even dead, with the authorities spiriting away the bodies. I stayed in the house of a taciturn widow, who kept feeding me fresh walnut kernels—ideal, she said, for those doing intellectual work. The kernel looks like the brain; traditional Chinese medicine bases itself on such morphological approximations.

I pieced together the very ordinary reasons that had provoked the uprising from bits of information divulged by the children rather than the adults. The village had a dilapidated school, without heating, chalk, or teacher. In principle, schooling is compulsory and free, but the Party secretary, the village kingpin, made parents pay for the heating and chalk. Then a teacher came from the city. He held that his government wages weren’t commensurate with his status and demanded extra money from the parents. Half of the parents, members of the most prosperous clan, agreed to pay; the other half, belonging to the poorer clan, refused. A skirmish erupted between the two clans, and the teacher fled. The Party secretary tried to intervene and was lynched, the Party office plundered. Then the police roared in with batons and guns. The school has reopened, the teacher replaced with a villager who knows how to read and write but “nothing more than that,” he admits.

The government puts the number of what it calls these “illegal” or “mass” incidents—and they’re occurring in the industrial suburbs, too—at 60,000 a year, doubtless underreporting them. Some experts think that the true figure is upward of 150,000 a year, and increasing.