X.D. Hu
April 30, 2017
In 1994, two strangers, a man and a woman, knocked the door of our house and asked for borrowing a vacuum to clean up their rented apartment. The man introduced himself as Xiaokai Yang, a visiting scholar of University of Louisville. We gave what we had and invited them for a dinner. I did not think too much about it and quickly forgot what we talked until much later when I leant that he was the forerunner of the China democracy movement and penned the influential treatise “Whither China” when he was seventeen. I had regretted since that I did not keep contact with him, not for his legacy that he read and memorized the entire three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital during his 10 year captive life in communist government’s anti-revolutionist prison nor for his fame in economic analysis (twice Nobel Economics nominee). It was out of my curiosity why he gave up his political pursuing of a democratic China instead he devoted his life in neoclassic economic research. Yang Xiaokai died of lung cancer in Melbourne as a lecturer in Monash University in 2004. However, the answer was partially given by Steven Cheung, another world’s preeminent economist, in his tribute to Yang, Cheung points out that Yang, as a thinker; succeed as an economist by exploiting his mathematic skills but neglecting his gift in ideology in the end.
This personal anecdote raises a question as to the priority of pursuing basic human rights among many choices and directions of life goals. Maybe, most of down-to-the–earth human being (like myself) do not see liberty as relevant or as urgent as material needs in life. Chinese propaganda machines famously refuted the accusation of its bad human rights records by saying “human survival takes precedence of human right”. It may be true to majority of people in China today who seemingly as happy as people in more democratic countries although China is widely considered as an authoritarian society and freedom of press is in general absent. To ordinary people throughout the modern Chinese history, setting a goal of fighting for democracy always appears a little hypocritical. It reminds of another acclaimed democracy advocator, Dr. Hu Shih, the Chinese ambassador to US during the WWII. His reputation is near to sainthood (if there is one) in China. He perhaps was among very few in 1949 who foresaw the coming sufferings inflicted by loss of freedom and democracy. Right before the communist overtook the country, he persuaded then-Nationalist government to send a chartered aircraft to pick up some of the best scholars in the country to Taiwan from the cities that would fall into the hands of the communist army. He had expectations that most of the scholars on the list, as intellectuals or as personal friends, would take his advice to flee from the communist’s liberation army. Dr. Hu waited in the airport for days. He cried when he saw that very few of them emerged from the plane door. At that time, even as smart as those top intellectuals did not sense what was coming. Sadly, most of them were repudiated, jailed, tortured, executed or committed suicide including his son in next 15 years. They were all labeled as the common enemies of people when they tried to voice the faint oppositions or displeasure to the government.
As the world witnessed the great leap forward in material necessities of average Chinese last 40 years, to many suffered and died during that dark period, the justice has not been served. The orthodox communism teaching still views that western style democracy won’t never ever be applicable to the Chinese society. It is a luxury for a lucky few at the best and prone to cause chaos and societal meltdown at the worse. The ideas of liberty ad democracy cannot replace the daily necessities such as clothing, food and accommodation and transportation. Across the Pacific Ocean, Americans watch the changed China with envies and admiration. Some of them start to doubt usefulness of liberal democracy and incline for authoritarian capitalism. According to Pew’s country image survey in 2015, 78% of Americans said China does not respect personal freedom of its people and only 14% of American disagreed. In the same survey, only 55% of American showed unfavorable views and 35% of Americans however have overall favorable view of China. The survey shows that majority of American still see personal freedom and democracy a critical factor to differentiate good from bad. However, it also implies that approximately 20% of surveyed Americans do not view bad human right record as a big deal.
In my circle of social connections in US where I lived last thirty years, I can roughly group the “anti-Trump and “pro-Trump” based on their life philosophies. The “anti-Trump” group tends to care more about universal human decency and founding father’s ideals while people in “pro-Trump” group generally more concern about already worsen daily life or potential erosion of the material entitlements. It is understandable that most of people born in US take liberty for granted for they never experience living under cruel and suppressive tyranny. To some of those, they are worry about making the ends meet more than making the democracy triumph. “It makes sense. Not having a job is stressful, and not having enough money to live on is even more so. As the manufacturing center of the industrial Midwest has hollowed out, the white working class has lost both its economic security and the stable home and family life that comes with it”, as pointed out by the author of “Hillbilly Elegy”. This observation appears to confirm the preaching of Chinese communist party.
Even to majority of people living in other forms of governments around the world, is fighting for liberal democracy their priority? In a starry night in spring of 2016, I walked along the manmade lake next to the Dubai Mall. People of different ethnical background started screaming and cheering when the entire Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building were lit up. All people sang alone with Sarah Brightman’s music “It’s time to say goodbye” Do they want democracy? I cannot help musing. In China, every shopping mall is swamped by the laughing young people. I sat together with them two weeks ago to see the debut of “LaLa Land”. Do they need more democracy? I am not sure. It may be because they never experienced the life in a fully democratic society. They do not know anything better just like most of Americans have no ideas of what if lacking of it.
Or it needs to be explained by the psychologists who study the mass psychology and society of happiness. Admittedly, feeling of a society is subjected to manipulation and propaganda as it is the cases in German’s Third Reich and China’s Culture Revolution. One of the most enduring subjects of the studies associated with the history of the Third Reich is the myth of why mass of German society felt generally happy and was indifferent to the atrocity of Hitler government during most period of the WWII. Dr. Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate in medicine and a refugee from Vienna to New York during the war, wrote in “In Search of Memory” that “I struggled to understand that political and culture context in which those calamitous events had accrued, how a people who loved art and music at one moment could in the very next moment commit the most barbaric ad cruel acts”. One reason can be attributed to the prevailing propaganda and limited access to the information. As an instance, Hitler redefined the happiness by saying “in the chase after their own happiness men fall from heaven into a real hell. Yes, even posterity forgets the men who have only served their own advantage and praises the heroes who have renounced own happiness” (Mein Kampf). The same was true for those Chinse living through the Culture Revolution. Except for the 5% “bad elements”, the majority did not feel particularly traumatized or misery. Many of them now at the age of 50–70 years are even reminiscent of the simplicity but purity of “life in the hell”. Will people forgive the unspeakable crimes and will history forgets the unserved justice? The history teaches us that human are very short-sighted and they never learnt anything from history. Sad, as Trump often sighed.
Back to the current affair, we should never lose sight on progress of human civilization: liberty and democracy will eventually triumph when the basic human dignity is temporally on retreat and the civilization is on reverse. There are hopes as long as we still have freedom of expression. There are hopes as long as we are still able to read the “FAKE NEWS’ from the main stream media. The day of victory of “the enemies of people” will come. One thing I feel good about is that what happened on November 9 in 1938 in Vienna in the infamous “Crystal Night” did not happen anywhere in US after Trump’s inauguration on January 20 in 2017. America is still a land of freedom after all. When Dr. Eric Kandel was asked about his first impression of arriving US, he said “I had an immense sense of freedom almost from the beginning…”
I hope that thing will stay in that way.
