Recent Articles The American Prospect - articles by author en Organ Rejection <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n the film <i>John Q., </i> Denzel Washington plays a working-class dad who holds a hospital emergency room at gunpoint to get a heart transplant for his nine-year-old son. The film's critique of health care in the United States is hard to miss: The poor lack the funds and often the insurance coverage needed for organ transplants. But there's also the unspoken, murkier theme of race, which raises some unsettling questions about our ability to prolong life. The surgeons, hospital officials, and happy heart recipients depicted in <i>John Q. </i> are all white; the hero and his family, denied the benefits of transplantation, are black.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In real life, race and organ transplantation are seldom mentioned in the same breath, but actually a complex international history links the two. For starters, heart transplantation was born in the land of apartheid. In 1967, the surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant in South Africa. The following year, he transplanted the heart of a young man of mixed race into the body of an older white man from the professional class -- an operation for which Barnard is known as something of an anti-racist maverick.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But as anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes discovered in the 1990s while conducting fieldwork in South African morgues, blacks who lived under apartheid see Barnard's mixed-race operation as a terrifying precedent. Many of the black South Africans she interviewed told stories of young relatives who had died from poverty or violence under apartheid, and whose organs were transplanted into older, affluent whites without the donor family's consent. When Scheper-Hughes described modern transplant surgery to one elderly black woman, the informant drew a parallel to <i>muti</i> -- a form of witchcraft in which skulls, hearts, eyes, and genitals are taken from corpses to impart wealth, influence, or fertility. "These doctors," the woman said, "are witches just like our own."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Such fears would be preposterous in the United States, right? In fact, blacks and other minorities in this country display marked suspicion toward organ transplantation, and not just for the economic reasons John Q. encounters. Though witchcraft may seldom be the reason, religion often is. An extreme case is Louis Farrakhan, the minister of the black-nationalist group Nation of Islam, who has sometimes attributed white society's failure to stop black-on-black violence to the need for a steady supply of fresh organs. "When you're killing each other, they can't wait for you to die," Farrakhan asserted at a 1994 rally. "You've become good for parts."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Most black resistance to transplantation is less antagonistic than Farrakhan's. It can be genuinely spiritual, stemming from an African-American Christian belief that the body should remain whole after death. It also goes hand in hand with a general mistrust of the medical profession. Last summer, when the American Robert Tools received the world's first artificial heart, he was compelled to counter rumors that white doctors had used him as a guinea pig because he was black. "That's not true," Tools told <i>The New York Times. </i> "I came to them and I asked them to help me."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Clive O. Callender, one of a small number of black transplant surgeons in the United States and director of the Transplant Center at Howard University Hospital, has been working for decades to overcome reluctance on the part of blacks to donate and receive organs. He said, "They feel, if I am black and society has been discriminatory to me in life, why would it be any different in death?" For Callender, more transplantation is an indication of racial progress.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But now that blacks have begun to enter the transplantation mainstream, medical professionals -- who are mostly white -- are starting to question aspects of organ transplantation in a way that may vindicate some minority fears. For example, doctors are re-examining the medical and legal construct of "brain death" -- a concept that sanctioned Dr. Barnard's removal of a beating heart from a donor in 1967 and has underpinned much transplant surgery since. But Alan Shewmon, a neurologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who once approved of brain-death criteria, now thinks that the empirical evidence against them is clear: "Brain-dead patients are deeply comatose, very sick, and dying, but no more dead than many other patients who are severely disabled, very sick, and dying."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Renée Fox, a longtime expert in the social aspects of health care and a participant in the development of the artificial heart, shocked the field in the early 1990s by questioning the fairness of transplantation. "We have observed again and again," Fox wrote with her colleague Judith Swazey, "how specifically designated individuals have been privileged to obtain needed organs and funding for transplantation by wielding special emotional, media, political, and economic resources." For example, the public-relations skills of certain physicians have been shown to make a difference in securing access to organs, as has the affluence of recipients' families.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Indeed, the race to obtain organs in the United States is becoming increasingly competitive. Advocates for the outright buying and selling of organs have emerged; meanwhile, Pennsylvania recently became the first state to offer indirect monetary compensation for organ donation, and a bill has been floated in Utah that would provide a $10,000 tax credit to donors.<br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he experience of other countries can be both cautionary and instructive. After apartheid's end in South Africa, Nelson Mandela's government placed a moratorium on most heart transplants. The official rationale was that the operations squandered scarce medical resources. But given Scheper-Hughes's findings, it seems likely that black distrust of transplantation was a factor. In 1997, South Africa's Constitutional Court ruled against kidney transplants as well. But the result has been to shift organ transplantation primarily into the private sector, where only the wealthy can afford it.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Anxiety about transplantation remains widespread in many parts of the world besides South Africa. The harvesting of organs from executed criminals in Communist China may be the worst government-sanctioned abuse these days; but it's an issue in Brazil, too, where the state owns your corpse unless you've acquired a <i>non</i>-organ donor card. Poor people in India and the Philippines have sold kidneys to rich buyers from abroad.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>An especially interesting case is Japan -- one of the world's most technologically advanced countries, but one of the most cautious on transplantation. Margaret Lock, an anthropologist at McGill University, attributes Japan's historical resistance -- to heart transplantation in particular -- to a mistrust of the medical profession, as well as an ethical and spiritual rejection of the notion that a person with a beating heart could be dead.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In 1968, just months after Dr. Barnard's pioneering procedure in South Africa, a Japanese surgeon attempted a similar operation. At first the transplant was deemed a victory for Japanese medicine, but soon it was revealed that the donor may not even have been brain dead and that the recipient's heart had been tampered with. The surgeon narrowly escaped prosecution on charges of murder. In 1997, the Japanese Parliament finally passed a law enabling individuals to donate their hearts by allowing them, in consultation with their families, to waive any murder charges against the surgeon. The first legal heart transplant in Japan was performed just three years ago.<br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen the father in <i>John Q. </i> decides to commit suicide so he can give his heart to his son, he elicits two reactions. A wealthy white surgeon admits that the proposal is unethical but eggs the father on. A street-smart black man -- the film's spiritual conscience -- draws the line and counsels John Q., instead, to relinquish the suicidal quest and reconcile himself to God's will.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Most parents would probably give their own life to save their child's. But in the context of organ transplantation, the decision to fight against fate at all costs is not a purely personal decision; it has social consequences, too. The demand for organs has become so intense that doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have developed a less stringent definition of brain death in order to harvest more hearts while they're still beating.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In this light, John Q.'s threat to kill innocent hostages so his son can survive looks more than a little ironic, and the old-fashioned African-American suspicion of transplantation starts to sound downright wise. One solution might be to follow Japan's lead and allow donors and recipients to choose the definition of death that best matches their own level of skepticism or spiritual comfort. Of course, that could lead to fewer organs and more John Q.'s.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p> </div></div></div> Thu, 16 May 2002 14:29:37 +0000 142571 at Trevor Corson China: The Engaging Question <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p></p><table align="left" bgcolor="#dddddd" border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="150"> <b>Works Discussed in this Essay:</b> <p><i>The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms</i>, edited by Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar. Harvard University Press, 424 pages, $49.50.</p> <p><i>After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics and "Thought Work" in Reformed China</i>, by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford University Press, 424 pages, $49.50.</p> <p><i>About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton</i>, by James Mann. Alfred A. Knopf, 433 pages, $30.00.</p> <p></p><p><i>A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China, an Investigative History</i>, by Patrick Tyler. Perseus Books Group, 476 pages, $27.50.</p> <p></p><p><i>Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan</i>, by Robert P. Weller. Westview Press, 192 pages, $60.00.</p> <p></p><p><i>Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations</i>, by Yongnian Zheng. Cambridge University Press, 272 pages, $64.95.</p> </td> </tr></table><p>My friend Liu, a film instructor in his 40s at the Communist Party's elite People's University, appeared one crisp Beijing morning at 7:00 and asked if I wanted to watch a pornographic videotape. It wasn't only the early hour that startled me. The year was late 1987. After a decade of unprecedented economic reforms, China's Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television had just completed a four-month crackdown on "spiritually polluting" illegal videos.</p> <p>Liu had gotten an early start because it would take us all day. Traipsing<br /> surreptitiously across the city, we<br /> borrowed a television from a friendly party cadre at a factory, a VCR from a state-run TV studio, a jeep to carry the equipment courtesy of an acquaintance at a state-owned store, and the smuggled videotape from an aficionado<br /> of contraband. Hours of chummy<br /> haggling and banqueting finally culminated when our co-conspirators congregated in Liu's tiny room late in the evening. The door padlocked, our giddy group treated itself to a B-grade Japanese porn film from the 1970s.</p> <p>By defying the Chinese state, had we been subversive? Within the Communist apparatus, were Liu and his friends a cell for future democratic freedoms? The Chinese leadership would have thought so. Less than two years later, Liu and his friends were demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. Post-<br /> massacre, China's chief of propaganda launched a renewed crackdown on<br /> obscene videos, declaring that "sweeping away pornography is an integral component of the struggle against bourgeois liberalization."</p> <p>After another decade of economic reforms, questions about liberaliza-tion are more pressing than ever: Is technologynot just TVs and VCRs, but now faxes, e-mail, and the Internetenabling citizens to organize a democratic challenge to the Communist regime? Is a latent public sphere emerging independent of the state? Or is the new freedom of expression in China limited to crass consumerism and cheap thrills? Has the regime perhaps even tacitly<br /> employed pornographymore readily available in China than ever beforeas an opiate for<br /> the masses?</p> <p>Several new books examining Chinese society shed light on these questions. In addition, two major histories of America's relations with China have been published this year, against the backdrop of<br /> a vociferous debate in Washington over China policy. The conundrum: engagement or containment? By engaging China in trade and diplomacy, is the United States promoting the emergence of civil society and evolution<br /> toward a liberal polity? Or is containment, and even punishment, necessary to coerce an expansionist Chinese regime into backing off from oppression at home and aggression abroad?</p> <p>James Mann, foreign affairs columnist for The Los Angeles Times and the paper's former Beijing<br /> bureau chief, produced the first<br /> of this year's two studies of U.S.-China diplomatic relations: About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton. Mann was followed by Patrick Tyler,<br /> the former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, with A Great Wall:<br /> Six Presidents and China, an Investigative History.</p> <p>About Face and A Great Wall weave previously secret conversations and newly declassified documents, based on painstaking research, into a set of rich narratives. They expose the faults and foibles and, less often, the strengths of the personalities who have crafted our China policies. Where Mann tends to identify larger political impulses, Tyler zeroes in on character traits and oversized egos.</p> <p>No major American statesman, Democrat or Republican, comes across as especially astute on China in either of these books. The heroes of About Face and A Great Wall are not the strategic visionaries of one<br /> administration or another; they are the patient functionaries in every administration who actually knew something about China and tried to rein in the<br /> excesses of their superiors. Likewise, the real historical lesson to be gleaned from these books is not that containing communism worked better than engaging dictators or vice versa; it is that every administration since Nixon, Democratic and Republican, has for strategic reasons engaged China. Actual American policies toward China have never really been about human rights.</p> <p>After Tiananmen, a moralistic congressional crusade led by Democrats helped Bill Clinton defeat George Bush, but Clinton can hardly<br /> be accused of betraying a human rights-based China policy that never<br /> existed. And Clinton's secretaries of state have been less obsequious in Beijing than have China's "old friends"Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, and Bush, all of whom considered themselves hard-nosed strategists. Still, Clinton deserves the low marks he gets from both Mann and Tyler. "No president has done less," writes Tyler, "to prepare the American people for a new era in foreign policy." If the United States ought, indeed, to continue to engage Chinaeven after the disillusionment<br /> of Tiananmen and with Chinese chauvinism on the rise in the international arenathe Clinton administration has failed to show us why. For starters, Clinton's claim that trade promotes democracy turns out to be specious, as several other China books published this year reveal.</p> <p>In 1980 the Chinese government decided to install cable television systems in all new apartment buildings "so that the state could be assured of easy access to the minds of the citizenry," writes Daniel Lynch, a professor of international relations. Lynch's After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and "Thought Work" in Reformed China assays whether mass-media technology has helped China propagate official ideology. Happily, Lynch finds indisputable evidence that it has not. Capitalism is doing what it is supposed to; economic reform means media producers must now cater to customer demand. The state's mandatory TV systems, for example, have "evolved into semi-autonomous, program-<br /> originating cable networks" that "supply subscribers with [Rupert Murdoch's] STAR-TV, pornography, and other<br /> politically unacceptable items."</p> <p>Lest Clinton's engagement camp start celebrating, however, it should note that Lynch's research is cautionary. Chinese audiences are not demanding more political informationthey want entertainment. To be sure, there will be inadvertently subversive content. Bemused, Lynch cites the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television's incongruous choice of the Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive to kick off a new series of officially sanctioned "good" Western movies. Noting the message that Chinese viewers must have gleaned from the film, Lynch writes, "In the United States, the innocent man secures his freedom in the end, while in China the execution would have probably long since taken place." Such messages are likely to exert "a long-term impact," Lynch admits. But "nothing about it justifies asserting that a liberal, structured public sphere is in the process of emerging now." Lynch reaches similar conclusions about the Internetthrowing cold water on the idea that the communications revolution is inherently democratic.</p> <p></p><p>And yet, cheated of Orwellian surveillance technology by capitalism, China's hard-liners have turned to<br /> unorthodox means to reassert control. For example, the octogenarian revolutionary Peng Zhen complained to his fellow Communists in 1987: "Who<br /> supervises rural cadres? Can we supervise them? No, not even if we had 48 hours a day." Peng's solution, in evidence in rural China today, wasof all thingselections. Village-level democracy holds local officials accountableas detailed in another new book, the aptly titled Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms, edited by the distinguished Harvard-based team of Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar. The chapter on the elections that are Peng's brainchild is testament to how far China has come since Tiananmen. And yet the<br /> authors make clear that "behind Peng's desire to boost the nation's democratic consciousness lay a concern that worsening relations between cadres and farmers might cripple the Party's ability to rule." Before congratulating China's new democrats, we must remember that candidates from any party besides the Communist Party are more likely to be arrested than elected.</p> <p></p><p>The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms contains a similarly surprising chapter on the rise of the National People's Congress (NPC). Long dismissed as a weak-kneed, rubber-stamp legislature, the NPC is evolving into a real check on the kind of personal power responsible for the worst excesses of<br /> the Communists. Likewise, however, the NPC's increasing institutionalization does not mean that it will promote liberal policies, let alone that its members will be directly elected. The most forceful advocates for the NPC among its ranks, the author notes, are "several dozen Long March-veterans . . . seven ex-Politburo members, and dozens of former central department heads."<br /> Even in the business world, exciting new organizations are forming, but they remain dependent on the Communist Partyand more concerned with making money than promoting group interests, according to one contributor to this volume. The scope of change in China<br /> is clearly breathtaking; this book is an impressive achievement of far-reaching scholarship. Like Daniel Lynch, however, the book's editors remain sober. Summarizing the research of their 15 contributors, they write: "Although hundreds of supposedly nongovernmental associations have sprung up in the 1990s to deal with a wide range of social, environmental, and intellectual questions, they can survive only as long as they stay away from political issues. Chinese in the 1990s can change jobs, travel abroad, criticize the potholes in the street on talk radio, and vote their village leaders out of office, but they cannot express political criticism of the party-state or its leaders publicly. Those who do are put in prison."</p> <p></p><p>If an emerging civil society is not yet in evidence, and if commercial trade with the West is unlikely to promote American-style democracy, what then? Are there alternatives besides containment? Robert Weller, a specialist on Chinese society in the Anthropology Department at Boston University, thinks so. "There are more ways to achieve a 'democratic civility' than simple reproduction of the Western history of civil society," Weller writes in his new book Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan. Make no mistake: Weller is neither a moral relativist nor an apologist for "Asian values"the excuse employed by the likes of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew to justify authoritarianism. In Taiwan, Weller's sympathies lie with the populist environmental movement,<br /> the women's movement, and the labor movement that he so vividly describes. Indeed, it is his intimate knowledge of these Chinese social phenomena that leads Weller to some bold claims about modern Chinese history: "China was not behind the West on an evolutionary path toward civil society; it was its own world, to be taken on its own terms."</p> <p></p><p>The notion that Chinanot to<br /> mention the increasingly democratic Taiwanis not simply becoming "more like us" would be unwelcome news to most American statesmen, so deep<br /> runs our missionary zeal. Yet Weller makes a strong case, founded on two decades of research in the field, that Taiwanese democracy has evolved from social ties that "were nearly always based in particular localities and corporate identities of various kindsnever the autonomous individuals of an<br /> idealized West." Weller's implication<br /> is clear: Even without civil society as Westerners know it, and even if tied to the state, the informal social networks that scholars observe in China are the crucial groundwork for a future native form of Chinese democracy.</p> <p></p><p>Weller writes that despite periods<br /> of egregious top-down control, the<br /> authoritarian reach of the state has never managed to remain ubiquitous in either Taiwan or mainland China. Weller is more impressed by the creative strategies with which Chinese societies have combatted government intrusion on the local leveland with the similarities between Taiwan 20 or 30 years ago and China today. Weller notes that while the pre-democratic regime in Taiwan "maintained a smothering grip on politics, it allowed genuinely competitive village-level elections." And even the money-grubbing groupings of businessmen now coalescing in China, no matter how apolitical their aims, resemble for Weller the casual business clubs that emerged in Taiwangroups that later advanced the island's political transition toward a vibrant civil society.</p> <p></p><p>The most encouraging harbinger of democracy for Weller, however, is the<br /> explosion in China of social trends that most observers identify as decidedly<br /> uncivil: a renewed parochial reliance on blood ties and a resurgence of superstitious cults and religious rites. He<br /> dedicates long sections of his book to the kinship ties and religious sects that in pre-democracy Taiwan provided a safe realm where "social capital" could incubate away from the state. When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime<br /> finally backed away from authoritarian rule in the late 1980s, a mature civil<br /> society flourished in Taiwan almost<br /> immediately. As Weller notes, the contrast with the chaos of sudden liberalization in Russia and eastern Europe is striking. Today, large Buddhist sects have become the most respected,<br /> well-funded, and socially responsible civic associations in Taiwan. After reading Weller, one can see why Beijing fears the Falun Gong sect that only recently emerged into public viewand was quickly suppressed this fall.</p> <p></p><p>Unfortunately, unauthorized religions are likely to inspire the ire of<br /> the atheistic Communist state for<br /> some time to come. But Weller suggests a similar source of "social capital" in Taiwan that Beijing will be less able to oppose on the mainland: environmental activism. In Taiwan, grass-roots<br /> action against industrial pollution was a major precursor to democracy. With the extreme environmental degradation that is occurring in China, Beijing can ill afford to discourage popular concern for the environment. </p> <p></p><p>As China's reforms have given<br /> localities more control over economic and cultural decisions, the state and Communist Party have a harder time<br /> dealing with large-scale ills like the<br /> environment. This decentralization<br /> of power is a major theme of another recent book, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations by Yongnian Zheng. </p> <p></p><p>Just as strategists for America's containment school have argued, Zheng finds that Beijing is trying to reassert control with a dangerous new tool:<br /> nationalism. The reasons that Chinese<br /> nationalism is dangerous, however, turn out to be quite the opposite of what America's new Cold Warriors claim.</p> <p></p><p>Zheng, a Princeton-trained scholar based at the National University<br /> of Singapore, reveals himself as something of an apologist for the neo-<br /> nationalist intellectuals now ascendant in China. For just that reason, though, Zheng provides invaluable insight into the current mind-set of the leadership. Chinese popular nationalism is a<br /> menacing phenomenon, we learn, but far more so for Beijing than for Washington. Several recent incidents<br /> of nationalist outburst in China<br /> the 1996 dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands is a good example<br /> required dicey maneuvering by the government to appease demonstrators without letting the movement get out of hand. The worry of Deng Xiaoping and his cohorts is two-fold: nationalist protest could easily mushroom into broader<br /> revolt, and ill will toward a country like Japan could jeopardize foreign investment and trade. To be<br /> sure, nationalism affords the Communist Party a frighteningly effective device for the manipulation of public opinion. But its very potency discredits the notion that Beijing will stoke nationalism at all turns. The<br /> assumption that they will has fueled American fears over the supposed danger of Chinese expansionism.</p> <p></p><p>Even the toughest advocates of nationalist realpolitik in China rarely indulge<br /> in expansionist sentiment, Zheng contends. Keen to avoid interruptions in China's economic transformation, they are committed to achieving success for China within international normsa claim born out by the concessions China made on the terms of<br /> its World Trade Organization accession last spring, even as anti-Americanism reigned in Beijing over the Kosovo bombings. Zheng notes that the prominent hard-line Chinese strategist Yan Xuetong has "regarded 'avoiding conflicts with the United States' as one of the most important 'strategic interests' of China. According to Yan, a Sino-US confrontation would impose a major threat to China's strategic interests because<br /> it would lead the United States, first,<br /> to strengthen the US-Japan alliance to<br /> constrain China; second, to support Taiwan's separatist forces to block China's national reunification; and third, to form various forms of military<br /> alliances with China's neighbors to<br /> contain it."</p> <p></p><p>For many Chinese nationalists, of course, the United States appears to be on the brink of these actions anyway. And this leads to Zheng's most important point, for which he spends the rest of his book garnering evidence. The rise in the 1990s of what Zheng calls American "anti-China theories," and the attendant threat of Western militancy they carry, is the reason Chinese strategists have dug in behind nationalism in the first place.</p> <p></p><p>A gaping blind spot mars Zheng's narrative here<br /> his failure to trace these American "anti-China theories" to the atrocities of Tiananmen. Still, James Mann's About Face and Patrick Tyler's Great Wall both demonstrate that our naïve infatuation during the 1980s with Deng Xiaoping's China was partly our own fault. With this caveat, Zheng's analysis is edifying. The glimpse Zheng provides into the Chinese point of view leaves little doubt that American advocates of containment are in the reckless business of hawking self-fulfilling prophecies. </p> <p></p><p>"After centuries of humiliation," Zheng concludes, "the Chinese have<br /> desperately longed for international<br /> respect. . . . Nationalism arises when other great powers ignore China's<br /> national dignity in their dealings with it. The impact of China's nationalism on its international behavior therefore depends, to a great degree, on the ways other major powers deal with China." Skeptics will dismiss this as a manipulative guilt trip manufactured by the Communists. The long history of strident popular nationalism in China<br /> during the twentieth century proves otherwise. It is not China that must settle for American hegemony; it is America that must reconcile itself to China's natural maturation.</p> <p></p><p>The foremost concern of Chinese nationalism is,<br /> of course, Taiwan. And curiously it is tiny Taiwan around which the swirl of suggestions about<br /> engagement or containment comes to rest in these six China books. For the crux of the matter is this: America wants China to have what Taiwan has, without having Taiwan.</p> <p></p><p>Since a mature and widespread democratic opposition is not in evidence on the mainland, the only convincing<br /> rationale for America to threaten the regime in Beijing is to protect democracy in this admirable island nation. And here the lessons of Zheng's Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China, Mann's About Face, and especially Tyler's Great Wall present themselves for the brave thinker to ponder: America bears more responsibility for the dangerous, crisis-ridden stalemate over Taiwan than does China. "The United States," writes Tyler, "has reneged on the solemn promises of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. . . . [These] American presidents agreed to shift the emphasis away from supplying arms to Taiwan in favor of promoting the necessary dialogue and negotiation that would help reconcile mainland China and Taiwan. . . . America has failed to live up to these commitments." The result inside China, writes Zheng, has only been to strengthen the grip of military hard-liners on Chinese foreign policy.</p> <p></p><p>If trying to "contain" China is a bad idea, why is engagement any better?<br /> As we have seen, the Clinton administration's "commercial diplomacy" has its limits. The answer: Look to Taiwan. Of these six books, Weller's Alternate Civilities provides the spark of hope that a strategy of engagement will, at least, buy mainland Chinese society<br /> the time it needs to mature toward the unique democratic inclinations of<br /> its favorite "renegade province." And indeed, the bold reader of After the Propaganda State and The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms could conclude that "appeasement" of Beijing is not necessarily a bad word. It might well be in the interest of both the United States and future Chinese civil society to ensure that Beijing retains enough centralized power to complete its ambitious economic transformation. Without first establishing a social structure similar to that of Taiwan<br /> before democracy, China has little hope of following Taiwan to democracy. At the very least, condemning engagement as ineffective is premature. The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms and Alternate Civilities remind us that the Communist Party, its old-timers still dying off, is only now beginning to evolve from a revolutionary party to a ruling party.</p> <p></p><p>But the greatest impediment to<br /> engaging China today is not Communists abroad. It is Republicans<br /> at homealong with a handful of Democrats. America's mostly right-wing sentiment against engaging Chinese<br /> dictators makes for great fulminationbut it misses a most important point. In Taiwan, the Republican legacy is one of constructive engagement. When Ronald Reagan telephoned Nixon in 1971 to<br /> berate him for selling out Taiwan, the governor was voicing the adamant support of his party for a grand strategy of engagement with no less than one of the twentieth century's most unscrupulous Chinese dictators.</p> <p></p><p>Lest we forget about the regime of Chiang Kai-shekgreat friend not only to Reagan but also to the likes of Barry Goldwater and Patrick BuchananWeller's Alternate Civilities refreshes our memory. Before the lifting of<br /> martial law on Taiwan in 1987, "the Nationalist regime had been powerfully influenced by Leninist political and military organization ever since the United Front with the Communists,<br /> although Chiang later also used Nazi military models. The regime is generally recognized as having been largely corrupt, brutal, and ineffective. Voices outside the central authorities were channeled through corporatist institutions at best, and crushed at worst." And yet, during decades of interaction with the West, this brutal Leninist regime gradually evolved toward a<br /> native form of democracy.</p> <p></p><p>"Taiwan now has a civil society in the usual senses of the term," writes Weller. "This is a statement that neither I nor nearly any other observer would have predicted two decades ago as we watched yet another wave of dissidents being sentenced to long prison terms." If anyone, it is Republicans who have proven illustriously that engaging Chinese dictatorsnay, perhaps even coddling themwhile their people<br /> quietly take over might be the most subversive strategy that we have. </p> <!-- dhandler for print articles --> </div></div></div> Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:10:19 +0000 141089 at Trevor Corson Chinese Water Torture <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting articlebody"></font></p> <p> <font color="darkred" size="+2">M</font>y fourth-grade research project on dams lacked data from the field until I got a lucky break: An uncle had connections at the Conowingo Dam. (He was in the concrete business; Conowingo is 435,000 cubic yards of concrete.) We drove down U.S. 1 to the Susquehanna River in Maryland and took an official tour. Deep in the dam's innards, I stood over an enormous sluiceway, spellbound by the whirling shaft of a turbine as big as a house. Every 60 seconds--the guide shouted--38 million gallons of water pass through the dam, generating electricity for a million and a half residential customers.</p> <p> The Conowingo opened in 1928, a year before the Great Depression began. Soon afterward, President Roosevelt was flinging public-works projects at the landscape like thunderclouds of cash; flushed with successes like the Conowingo, dam boosters crusaded to build bigger and bigger, blocking rivers nationwide. </p> <p> The United States dispatched hydrological engineers to China, too. Their mission: to bestow expertise on a nation desperate to catch up with the West. Bursts of dam building followed, but no one attempted the Holy Grail--China's great Yangtze River. China's rulers finally announced the Three Gorges Dam project in 1992. Named for the picturesque scenery it would submerge, the dam would be the largest in the world: as tall as Hoover Dam (America's 1930s monument to the conquest of nature) and six times as wide, to be constructed over 15 years at a cost of $10 billion.</p> <p> Today, however, as 18,000 workers swarm the site and cost estimates spiral toward $70 billion, a growing number of environmentalists, scientists, and social activists in China and abroad are predicting disaster. </p> <p> <font color="darkred" size="+2">A</font>t the center of this controversy is a river," intones Martin Sheen in a voice crisp like a fortune cookie, over scenes of oozing brown water. "But it is not just any river. It is China's lifeline." The picture switches to peasant women washing laundry in an impossibly ferocious current, while the voice-over gushes on: "Throughout the centuries, the people who have made their lives along its banks have depended on it not just for their livelihoods, but for their <i>lives</i>."</p> <p> Sheen narrates a new PBS documentary on the Three Gorges Dam project called <i>Great Wall Across the Yangtze</i>, scheduled to air Tuesday, October 3, at 10:00 p.m. Since Sheen portrays the president of the United States on NBC's <i>The West Wing</i>, he's perfect for uttering platitudes, which mar this otherwise mostly competent program.</p> <p> Journalist Audrey Ronning-Topping, who grew up on the banks of the Yangtze and now decries its imminent strangulation, crafted the documentary's narrative. Though wide-ranging, the script showcases too much of Ronning-Topping's own sentimental attachment to the river and its ancient culture. Over historic black-and-white scenes of Yangtze traffic, she introduces her objections to the dam by recalling that her missionary grandparents became engaged on a Yangtze ferryboat (sweet), from the rail of which her grandfather admired the impoverished coolies who tugged river craft upstream (sick).</p> <p> What this means for the documentary is too much footage of condemned Confucian temples and dolphins in distress (although they're not even endangered because of the dam), and too little attention to the political and technical complexities of the Three Gorges project. But Ronning-Topping's romance with the river begs a question: Who are we anyway--technological crusaders during our own era of damming, but now righteous advocates for culture and the environment--to tell China and its impoverished multitudes what to do?</p> <p> <font color="darkred" size="+2">A</font>merican criticism of China often elicits the response that so backward and overcrowded a country can't afford Western luxuries--whether it's art for art's sake, a pristine environment, or human rights. Ronning-Topping's protective love for the Yangtze might seem a case in point. Yet there are compelling arguments for why the West ought to weigh in, particularly since China could avoid our mistakes. For starters, sound technical data dictate that the dam be scaled back; moreover, within China clear-headed opposition to the dam has emerged, particularly on behalf of the multitudes who will become<i> </i>impoverished by being displaced.</p> <p> <i>Great Wall Across the Yangtze</i> makes clear that the problems with the Three Gorges Dam are epic. The submerging of unexplored archeological sites and the danger to fish and fowl are unfortunate, but they begin to seem like drops in the bucket as Sheen rattles off statistics. Seven hundred million tons of sediment will land annually at the foot of the dam, and the government is relying on an untested system of sluiceways to keep it clear enough to produce the promised electricity. Meanwhile, 265 billion gallons of raw sewage will back up in the dam's reservoir every year, quite possibly bubbling into the streets of cities upstream, and toxic substances in the 1,600 factories and abandoned mines to be submerged will flow into farmland downstream. More alarmingly, Three Gorges could become a "Chinese Chernobyl," as one American expert interviewed in the program puts it, if the geologic fault line beneath it ever trembles enough to endanger the tens of millions of people in the watershed below. Though the documentary doesn't note this, some seismologists have even suggested that the weight of the huge reservoir itself could trigger the quake.</p> <p> The Chinese government claims its primary purpose for the dam is flood control. Over aerial scenes of submerged villages, Sheen reports that during the past 2,000 years the mighty Yangtze has unleashed a catastrophic flood about every 10 years, with a loss of 300,000 lives in the twentieth century alone. In 1998 massive flooding killed 4,000 and left 14 million homeless. The documentary's interview with a Three Gorges engineer leaves the impression that the new dam will prevent such flooding once it is completed in 2009.</p> <p> But engineers, hydrologists, and environmentalists around the world gleaned a very different lesson from the 1998 floods, which the documentary fails to note: Environmental destruction--including the soil erosion and elimination of natural reservoirs that the Three Gorges Dam itself would cause--exacerbates flooding. After the floods, China's Prime Minister Zhu Rongji adopted this environmentalist stance, then axed 100 dam officials for corruption and called for Western advisers to monitor the project. This crack in the government's wall was a blow to Zhu's chief political rival Li Peng, the strongest supporter of the dam. It was also a signal to the dam's detractors that the project could still be downsized.</p> <p> For years the government had suppressed all criticism of the Three Gorges project. The influential journalist Dai Qing--who is interviewed in the documentary--was even imprisoned in 1989 for her book on the subject. By 1998, though, opposition was trickling into public view. China's pre-eminent hydrologist Huang Wanli (trained in the United States in the 1930s) demanded that the government listen to what he and many experts had been arguing for decades: A series of smaller dams on tributaries upstream would achieve better results at far less cost. As <i>Great Wall Across the Yangtze</i> notes, however, this would defeat the real purpose of the dam. Li Peng and his technocratic entourage want a monument to China's greatness.</p> <p> Today we associate dam building less with progressives like Roosevelt and more with dictators like Stalin and Nasser. Many of China's leaders believe that awe-inspiring feats of engineering will counter political unrest by generating nationalistic fervor. But with Three Gorges, this strategy seems sure to backfire. More than any other problem with the project, the gargantuan task of relocating 1.5 million people in an already overcrowded country seems insurmountable. <i>Great Wall Across the Yangtze</i> combines pointed interviews with citizens and quiet scenes of their everyday life to paint a sad portrait of the 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,300 villages that will end up underwater. These displaced people will be a volatile floating population that could spark social unrest.</p> <p> <font color="darkred" size="+2"><i>G</i></font><i>reat Wall Across the Yangtze</i> includes a lot of footage of brown water, beige hills, and big piles of gray rock falling out of dump trucks. Aside from an unsatisfying computer-generated image of the completed dam, nowhere in the program does the overarching scale of the Three Gorges construction site come across visually. Still, if you've ever seen a dam, it's not hard to understand why China's obstinate technocrats love the idea of this one. They want to be able to gape in pride and awe as giant turbine shafts spin clean power off spilling sluiceways. They want to tame the murderous river dragon once and for all.</p> <p> They won't. The United States doesn't build mammoth dams at home anymore because they don't work. Hoover is a nightmare of silt and salinity that generates more ecological havoc than electricity. In 1996 the Conowingo Dam was almost torn to bits by a sudden winter thaw that rolled an eight-foot wall of water down the Susquehanna; the dam operators saved the residents below only by deliberately flooding their homes before the dam burst. Even China should know better--the documentary exposes a rash of dam collapses in 1975 that killed 200,000 people.</p> <p> But can anyone stop the Three Gorges project? The U.S. government crusaded for dam building in China 70 years ago; with the same zeal, we are now crusading against it. In 1994 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation withdrew technical assistance for Three Gorges, and by 1995 the White House was refusing to back American companies bidding on Three Gorges contracts. In 1996 the Export-Import Bank pulled out completely; a year later, so did the World Bank.</p> <p> Come hell or high water, though, China has persevered, securing private funding from American investment houses. "There is no way to stop the project," recites one project engineer in the documentary. "We are using American capital!" laughs another. But capitalism's cold calculations might just be the downfall of this dictator's dream, delivering China from a nightmare. The documentary ends with the Clinton administration commissioner who terminated American support for Three Gorges: "When the reality of the budgets of these projects hits home, people will become very creative in downsizing." ¤ </p> <p><br /></p> <p><br /></p> <hr size="1" /><center> <p align="center"><font face="verdana,geneva,arial" size="-2"></font> class="nonprinting"&gt;</p> <hr size="1" /></center></div></div></div> Thu, 08 Nov 2001 00:06:22 +0000 141813 at Trevor Corson Bush Got One Right <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p></p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he dramas in April over the downed U.S. reconnaissance plane and the sale of arms to Taiwan have revealed a burgeoning American hawkishness toward China. Centrists have joined conservatives in blaming America for being soft on the Communists and weak in supporting democratic Taiwan. But this growing fashion for fulmination is misguided, for two reasons: First, Beijing isn't being belligerent out of the blue; and second, selling Taiwan our highest-tech weapons is more likely to hurt Taiwan's democracy than to help it.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> According to the expanding chorus of China hard-liners in Washington, the Bush administration performed a craven cave-in to bullying by an increasingly dangerous China when the United States expressed regret over the spy plane collision. Furthermore, according to these hard-liners, the administration executed an abject betrayal of democracy when it opted not to sell Aegis-class destroyers to Taiwan.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In fact, however, both moves were smart. They were also defensible on liberal principle and in terms of protecting Taiwan. Ironically, it may be up to liberal Democrats to point out the wisdom of the Bush team's moderate approach. What's needed is a way forward on China-and-Taiwan policy that is based on a nuanced reading of recent events.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">B</span>oth sides in the 50-year China-Taiwan standoff are deeply entrenched. In 1949 the Chinese Nationalists (the KMT) lost the civil war against the Communists and retreated to the island of Taiwan. Since then, the KMT and the Communists have each aimed to complete the war by conquering the other's territory and creating "one China." For the KMT in Taiwan, retaking the Chinese mainland has become an increasingly unrealistic goal. For the Communists, taking Taiwan by force remains an option. The United States is rightly committed to ensuring that this option is never exercised.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> In the early 1990s, though, it was Taiwan that decided to reach out to China. KMT President Lee Teng-hui declared an official end to the war and sought dialogue with the Communists. China responded favorably, and in 1992 both sides agreed that at least the concept of "one China" was potentially valid. On that basis, semi-official talks between China and Taiwan began.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>On the Chinese side, Deng Xiaoping had set a less belligerent tone in the 1980s with his endorsement of economic liberalization. Although Tiananmen Square revealed that Deng had no qualms about the use of force at home, Deng also established a policy of avoiding conflict abroad as a requirement for China's internal stability. Despite his reputation as a militarist, Deng de-emphasized the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and reduced its budget.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>As Deng lay dying in 1995, his successor, President Jiang Zemin, lacked legitimacy with the PLA. To strengthen his own civilian rule by further sidelining the army, Jiang made a bid for peaceful progress on the Taiwan question, issuing an eight-point proposal for eventual reunification. Jiang's plan offered dialogue and wide-ranging social and economic exchanges, and he staked his credibility on the overture by publicizing it widely. Within months, Taiwan's Lee Teng-hui responded with a six-point proposal of his own and agreed to talks, though he demanded that China renounce the use of force against the island.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Negotiations would probably have followed, but the KMT's dictatorship in Taiwan was under increasing pressure from a native Taiwanese democracy movement. In particular, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) eschewed the KMT's dream of a reunified China, advocating Taiwanese independence instead. By 1995 the KMT was facing Taiwan's first presidential election. To win, Lee Teng-hui had to draw support away from the pro-independence DPP. So he dropped his "one China" reunification rhetoric and sought more recognition for Taiwan on the international stage. That led to Lee's unprecedented visit to the United States in May 1995, to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Because the United States had promised, as part of the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, to suspend all ties with Taiwan, China was caught off guard. Under pressure from the Taiwan lobby, the Clinton administration failed to prepare Beijing for the event or to offer concessions. Lee's visit indicated to Beijing that Washington supported Taiwan's new inclination toward independence rather than negotiations toward reunification.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In Beijing, Jiang's bid for progress through dialogue appeared to have failed badly. Having lost face, Jiang was forced to yield to hard-liners and the PLA on the Taiwan question--and a few weeks later, China began lobbing missiles into the sea near Taiwan. A month before Taiwan's presidential election in early 1996, China mobilized its military for massive war games and launched additional missiles.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The United States responded with a formidable show of force that highlighted the PLA's impotence, dispatching two aircraft-carrier battle groups to the waters around Taiwan. In the years that followed, the PLA armed itself to the teeth in the Taiwan Strait to preclude further humiliation. The Chinese military establishment, sidelined since the 1980s, had re-established itself.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">L</span>ast spring, shrugging off threats from China, Taiwan's voters went to the polls in their second presidential election and peacefully ended four decades of dictatorship by the KMT. DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian was elected president by a narrow margin. Beijing watched nervously: Chen's party had advocated independence, and it seemed that Chen might move Taiwan further away from reconciliation with the mainland, precipitating a crisis.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> But the result has been more complex. Since Chen's historic election, Taiwan's newly democratic culture has also evinced a subtler fiber: respect for public opinion. Chen has recognized that while popular sentiment favors a more assertive Taiwan, this sentiment does not extend to moves that would antagonize China. After his inauguration, Chen dropped his proindependence rhetoric and distanced himself from the more extreme elements of the DPP. Where the conservative KMT had adopted a measure of idealism about Taiwan's future by bucking Beijing, the more radical opposition discovered that, once in power, realism was required.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Despite China's continued belligerency, this change in Taiwan has brought a tentative return to a revised status quo, allowing both China and Taiwan to extend feelers for restarting reunification talks. Over the past 10 months, China and Taiwan have opened the first-ever shipping links between Taiwanese territory and the mainland; meanwhile, in exchanges that are often barbed but clearly exploratory, the two sides are engaged in a delicate dance to renegotiate the notion of "one China."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Last June, Chen indicated that the "one China" principle was not inherently a problem, and Beijing responded by offering a minute but conciliatory shift in the wording of its "one China" definition. On New Year's Eve, Chen went so far as to embrace implicitly the "one China" principle--with the caveat that it might apply in the future rather than in the present. More recently, Chen specifically offered to hold talks with Beijing on the question of unification.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>No one actually expects Taiwan to rejoin China any time soon, and ultimately a loose federation is more likely than reunification. But restarting the talks would have a chance of buying much-needed breathing space, as well as leading to new economic and social exchanges between Taiwan and the mainland, further reducing tension. One of the primary stumbling blocks to renewed talks was opposition by militant hard-liners in Beijing to the sale of American Aegis-class destroyers to Taiwan.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span class="dropcap">I</span>ronically, had the Bush administration decided to sell Taiwan the Aegis system with the intention of bolstering Taiwan's burgeoning democracy, the result might have been quite the opposite: to undermine that young democracy. Taiwan's military establishment, which initiates arms-procurement requests to the United States, has so far remained loyal to the KMT and its legacy of military dictatorship. Taiwan's top brass have treated the popular election of Chen Shui-bian and the DPP with disdain and have blocked reforms that would transfer policy making on defense matters to the civilian leadership, which is where decision making belongs in any proper democracy.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> For the moment, China seems to have been mollified by the Bush administration's relative moderation, and Taiwan has access to a considerable array of new American weaponry even without Aegis. The time is ripe to pursue peaceful negotiation by restarting the dialogue between China and Taiwan. Here liberal Democrats have an opportunity to seize the initiative from right-wing critics and their new allies by articulating the wisdom of a moderate approach. In championing prudence, Democrats would help to ensure the protection of Taiwan's democracy that hawkish fulminators so desire.<br /></p><p></p> </div></div></div> Tue, 29 May 2001 19:46:00 +0000 142071 at Trevor Corson