CONTEMPORARY CHINA'S MIRROR IMAGE: IMPERIAL GERMANY

Original article by KirkRogers 04/25/2010 

China has emerged as the bad boy on the global scene, pushing around executives at Rio Tinto, attacking Google, and humiliating Barack Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Talks. Speculation is growing about China’s rising power and the country’s leaders are displaying a discouraging sense of hubris. There is growing fear that the autocratic Middle Kingdom will soon dominate the world. 

These fears have parallels with another rising power of a century ago: Imperial Germany. Both emerged quickly on the global scene and did so with an enormous chip on their shoulders. Like China today, Germany was a little late coming to the industrial revolution, though its cultural contribution to European civilization and in turn to American civilization was enormous (Ralph Waldo Emerson was passionate student of Goethe). Only after its final unification and triumph over the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 could Otto von Bismarck, the great 19th century pragmatist, force Germany’s sundry states into union. 

Again like China, once united and in control of its own destiny, Germany grew quickly, harboring ever more delusions about its place in the sun. In the years leading to the First World War Wilhelm I, the competent Bismarck confidant, died of cancer. This allowed vainglorious Wilhelm II to assume the mantle of the state in 1888. Prussian militarism by then was backed by a massive industrial machine operating in complete fealty to the state. Germany’s new Emperor and his clique felt that it had something to prove. 

China, once the most advanced nation on earth, similarly has a passel of historical resentments ranging from the Opium War to the complete denigration of its standing in the world. Like Germany, China has viewed itself as an advanced culture whose time had now arrived. Like Germany in the late 19th Century, it has incorporated technologies from others about as fast as it could get its hands on them. 

When Deng Zhao Ping awoke China from its Maoist/Stalinist nightmare that ripped through the country under the guise of the Cultural Revolution, they were confronted with the disintegration of communist governments around the world. Chinese leaders knew that the only way to for them to hold power was to have their economy grow. This approach parallels the economic pragmatism in late Imperial Germany under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, who pushed economic growth as a means of promoting social welfare while simultaneously doing all they can to consolidate power in their hands. Bismarck created the first social security system not out of a deep seated concern for the proletariat but to emasculate the socialist party. 

China by the same token has not adopted capitalism because they want to move the country towards rule of law and greater democracy but as a means of justifying their continued presence at the country’s helm. China, much like Imperial Germany, has witnessed unbelievable growth because of these centralized policies. 

On the eve of WWI, Germany was the second largest economy in the world after shooting ahead of Britain and trailing America. China just accomplished a similar feat in an even shorter time frame. China passed contemporary Germany a couple of years ago and is poised to do so with Japan in the coming year. China is cultivating a modern-style imperial presence in Iran, Africa and Latin America in an effort to secure the natural resources that the country lacks much like Germany did. Ironically, China is doing more to raise living standards in Africa than any western aid program has been able to do. 

German industrial bosses were elites, most bore the titles of nobility. China’s bosses have been compared to the Emperor’s corrupt courtesans. The vast wealth of the Thyssen and Krupp steel dynasties can still be seen today in the massive industrial museums lining the Ruhr Valley. As in Imperial Germany, the military dominates large swaths of the economy. Germany in the late 19th and early twentieth century used its coal and iron resources to build the munitions factories that lined the despoiled Ruhr and Rhine. Holding even tighter on the reigns, China has developed an a strong state-dominated economy, forcing, for example, foreign firms to enter a joint venture with a state-owned corporation, which will quickly steal what it can of the western company’s intellectual property. 

The two governments bear disturbing similarities. Germany also had a vast bureaucracy attempting to tamp down any sedition amongst its masses. China is doing much the same. The most interesting parallel however is the rampant nationalism propagated in both Imperial Germany then and contemporary China. 

Of course, there are also some significant differences. China, for example, is much larger than Germany ever was. China is also not necessarily as instinctively expansionist . But it is extremely sensitive when it comes to Taiwan. The kerfuffle over arms sales to Taiwan last month provides more than enough evidence of this. Germany also had territories that it got very sensitive about as well. China’s attitude towards Taiwan and Tibet echoes the Kaiser’s sentiment towards occupying Strasbourg along the French border. 

Is China going to attack its neighbors and plunge the Pacific Rim into World War Three? It seems highly unlikely. China still has a lot of growing left to do. Large swaths of the peasantry are still stumbling along at poverty levels. China is also well aware of the US military’s ability to project force should it try to attack Taiwan. 

China may want to occupy Taiwan and there is none of the rhetoric among the leadership cadre about the need for Lebensraum that dominated conversations in German salons before the Great War. China’s leadership also appears far more competent than that of late Imperial Germany. But this may have to do with dumb luck. The Hohenzollerns up until Wilhelm II were all competent leaders. Could China be so unlucky as well? Could one idiot weasel his way up through the CP ranks? Who knows? 

China has serious problems with restive minorities and a growingly arrogant and repressive regime. It has industrial might, a massive resentment of western powers and a desire to get its own place in the sun. It does not have the same geographical pressures that Germany had and it is still not in any position to take on the US in the military theater and its rulers realize that. Though its economy is inflating, much of the population living below the poverty line. 

So far the technocrats over the last thirty years have been freakishly capable and have generally done a good job. The real trial of China’s claim to its place in the sun will be when a blustering fool like Kaiser Wilhelm weasels his way into the party chairmanship. Just as Germany was powerless to dispose of its ill-suited leader, China may very well be as well. If that happens, God help us all. 

Excerpts of "The Black Book of Communism"

 

Pertinent quotes from the best-selling book 

"The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression":

[by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois]

“To be sure, the [communistic] model was applied differently in different cultural settings. As Margolin points out, the chief agent of repression in Russia was a specially created political police, the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-KGB, while in China it was the People's Liberation Army, and in Cambodia it was gun-toting adolescents from the countryside: thus popular ideological mobilization went deeper in Asia than in Russia.

Still, everywhere the aim was to repress "enemies of the people" — "like noxious insects," as Lenin said early on, thus inaugurating Communism's "animalization" of its adversaries. Moreover, the line of inheritance from Stalin, to Mao, to Ho, to  Kim II Sung, to Pol Pot was quite clear, with each new leader receiving both material aid and ideological inspiration from his predecessor.”

[Editor Stéphane Courtois asserts that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". He cites a death toll which totals 94 million, not counting the "excess deaths"

(decrease of the population due to lower than-expected birth rates). Deaths given by Courtois is as follows]

“It is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes: 

Deaths due to Communism Country Name Number of Deaths U.S.S.R. 20 million China 65 million Vietnam 1 million North Korea 2 million Cambodia 2 million Eastern Europe 1 million Latin America 150,000 Africa 1.7 million Afghanistan 1.5 million

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths.

The total approaches 100 million people killed.

The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country's total population.

However, China's experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and "politically correct" mass slaughter.”

“And the less familiar figures in Margolin's chapter in "China: A Long March into Night" are even more staggering: at a minimum, 10 million "direct victims"; probably 20 million deaths out of the multitudes that passed through China's "hidden Gulag," the laogai; more than 20 million deaths from the "political famine" of the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961, the largest famine in history.”

“During Mao's Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings — of men, women, and children?”

"The book's second point is that there never was a benign, initial phase of Communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track."

[The Black Book of Communism received praise in a number of publications in the United States and Britain, including the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard   ]

The Truth about infamous Tiananmen Square Incident

There are so many obstacles and versions about the Tiananmen Square Incident, mostly coming from the Chinese government that we feel behooved to ask,

"Is it at all possible to ever know the truth about the Tiananmen Square Incident (massacre)?"

Presently the truth has been made inaccessible and hazy, and it is far less likely that the reality will come to light until there is a real democratic system in China.

The Tiananmen Square Incident what started as a pro-democracy movement in 1989, after nearly two months deadlock, it eventually ended up being a tragedy in  which a number of people needlessly died.

To a certain extent, the government's immediate reaction was aimed to distort the fact.

"The state did give its own version of events immediately after the violence in 1989. Chinese television showed ragged protesters with black arm bands throwing Molotov cocktails and army vehicles set on fire." (Beam C 2009). 

This shows that the Chinese government wants to make people to believe that there was a rebellion.

(similar to how they handled the ramifications of 23rd July, 2011 train crash by enacting a virtual media blackout on the disaster except for positive stories)

They not only wanted to fabricate an alternate set of truth for Chinese people, they also tried to block the flow of information.

"...Some foreign journalists were subjected to an inquiry, their electronic equipment was also examined by the CPLA..." (Forney M 2001).

The COMMUNIST PARTY'S immediate reaction to this event show that their aim is to prevent the truth to come to light which also justified them to have further repression and censorship on ordinary Chinese people.

For example, they confiscated the freedom of rights to those people who want to tell the truth. "(and still continue to do so with self-righteous gusto). Free expression activist Liu Xiaobo, one of the leading figures of the 1989 movement, was recently re-arrested.

Several journalists, including Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending an email about the Tiananmen Square anniversary in 2004, are still in prison for referring to the massacre." (RSF 2009). This, without a doubt, proves that the government less interested in allowing the spread of the facts from the inside.

In short, They don't want to disclose the facts.

Helpless, stupefied citizens showing bullets and shells to news reporters

Now, we all know (right? don't we?) that China's communist rulers (dictators) have distorted and denied the truth about what happened 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square. But they aren't the only ones. In an equally disturbing betrayal of history, Western human rights activists and liberal commentators have also twisted the sad story of the events of that fatal day, creating a fairytale version of events that bears little relation to what happened in those bloody days of June 1989.

Twenty years on, the Communist Party of China (CPC) still continues to play down or deny the seriousness of the protests and massacre. It insultingly refers to the events as the "4 June Incident" (as though something trivial or nothing had happened). It claims that "only" 241 people died, including soldiers, much to their dismay, some other reports (who?) put the number of deaths in between 1,500 and 3000.

Tiananmen Square, and the area of Chang'an Boulevard in front of it, became an army camp after more than 100 tanks came into the city overnight.

Ten armed soldiers beating a protester to death in during the massacre

Chinese Communist Party denies its citizens access to information about the events: search for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on the internet in China and you'll be told: "This page cannot be found." The truth telling pages are being put down or censored.

Tanks and a dead body on Tiananmen Square at dawn of June 4th

Western human rights groups have not indulged in such denialism, but they have employed much mythmaking of their own, airbrushing from history what they consider to be inconvenient facts and creating a neat but terribly skewed morality tale about June 1989.

The main victims were workers in Beijing suburbs - now forgotten by the West Thanks to the images propagated by groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, most Westerners think the Tiananmen Square Massacre involved Chinese soldiers shooting pro-democracy students in the central square of Beijing.

Famous "students vs tanks" Image

The most famous image from the protests - that of a student standing in front of tanks - strengthens the idea that was a simple Students vs Soldiers story. This is unforgivably  inaccurate.

It is of course true that in May and June 1989 many students set up camp in Tiananmen, where they demanded democratic and economic reforms, and that some of them suffered when the CPC launched its military clampdown on 3 and 4 June. Yet there were uprisings across Beijing, and in other parts of China, and the main victims of the unspeakable violence - now largely forgotten thanks to Western human rights activism - were not students in the square, but ordinary workers miles away in the suburbs of Beijing.

The Chinese authorities sent their tanks to crush a workers' rebellion. In their fascinating book Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy Movement, human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro wrote:

"What took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary workers and residents - precisely the target that the Chinese government had intended."

Black and Munro point out that the workers of Beijing, whose lives had become harsher as a result of Premier Deng Xiaoping's introduction of crude market reforms from the late 1970s onwards,  had "much more to be angry about than the students", and the CPC's aim was to "crush them".

The fact of the matter is that the worst state violence occurred miles away from Tiananmen Square in the western suburbs of Beijing, where, as China expert Jonathan Fenby puts it, there was a "far bigger massacre of non-students". Hundreds of workers were gunned down in the streets, which is why some people, including many Chinese dissidents, refer to the events as "the Beijing massacre" rather than the "Tiananmen Square massacre".

Military personnel cleaning up the mess

Indeed, just as the CPC's use of the term "4 June Incident"  for referring to that incident and the derogatory term "ruffians" or "rioter" for referring to the victims, gives the impression that this was a minor event, so the Western-created name of "Tiananmen Square massacre" depicts a serious city-wide uprising as a small-scale, one-square clash.

Jay Mathews, former Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post, says Western journalists have spread irresponsible stories about a square-based massacre:

"Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passers-by, did die that night", he says, "but in a different place [to the square] and under different circumstances".

Yet if you question Western representations of June 1989, says Mathews, you'll be looked upon as a pedant or worse, a Tiananmen denier. Tell journalists they have given misleading accounts and they will say:

"So what? The Chinese army killed many innocent people that night. Who cares exactly where the atrocities took place?"

In China, debate about June 1989 is curtailed by censorship - in the West it is discouraged by those who have propagated the simplistic Square story.

Perhaps feeling they have more in common with the students in the square - who, unlike many of the rioting workers, were peaceful and erudite - Western observers have made the students the central focus of the June 1989 story. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they have pushed from public view the key victims of the Beijing Massacre.

They have also, in a terrible irony, done the Chinese authorities a favor, helping to represent what was a state-shaking uprising by thousands of workers, residents and students in Beijing and beyond as a relatively small, polite, Amnesty-style protest for "reform".

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