'..the vital necessity of holding powerholders and their friends in business to account through an independent judiciary, a free press, and a vigorous civil society.
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..when Xi Jinping came to power. He presented himself as the strong man who would stand up for the Leninist version of Marxism, and approved the internal 2013 Party directive known as “Document 9,” which condemned the core values and key institutions of liberal democracy.''Some years later I learned that Deng Xiaoping had said the regime would be willing to “kill 200,000 people in exchange for 20 years of stability.” In the event they killed several thousand and bought, until now, 32 years of stability. But as the years have passed, I have come to see that the true price that China has paid is not to be measured in corpses, but in moral degradation and political decay.
The Tiananmen Massacre destroyed whatever political and moral authority the Party still had before then. To rebuild the loyalty of the officials who were to rule in its name, the Party embarked on the greatest act of collective theft the world has ever seen. It took the assets owned by the state in the name of the people and transferred effective control of them into the hands of Party officials and their business cronies. This was the most extensive campaign of privatization in history. There was no legal clarity as to the identity of those who now controlled or owned the assets, and so it has remained. Corruption has been deliberately built into the economic system for a political purpose.
In 1990, I left the London Stock Exchange and set up my own company to advise countries that were embarking on a transition from the command economy to the market economy on how to develop their capital markets.
In every country in which I worked, I saw newly emerging elites professing their commitment to democracy and free markets, but shaping the new system to their own advantage, skewing regulations, or fighting for control of new institutions. In the 1990s, when I was working in Russia, hundreds of contract killings were carried out every year by rival groups competing for financial power. In Novosibirsk, where I spent two months one winter initiating the first international investment fund for Siberia, the heavy mob broke into my flat after I declined to pay them protection money. In Moscow, the chief executive of a stock exchange apologized for being late for our meeting, explaining that he had been attending the funeral of his counterpart in another city, who had been assassinated. Just after meeting the founder of an exchange who wanted us to work with him, I learned he had lost the services of his chauffeur, whose knees had been shot through on the orders of a rival exchange; I declined what could have been a lucrative contract.
How did this experience help me when in later years I turned back to the study of China? It taught me much about human wickedness. As a diplomat, one observes it, but diplomatic privilege shields one from direct exposure. Its realities strike home more forcefully when the heavy mob breaks into your apartment, you meet people for whom the threat of assassination is routine, or you learn that the minister of finance who received you with such courtesy a few months ago has been exposed as the mastermind of a highly lucrative Ponzi scheme. Such experiences prompted me to look behind the façade of respectability that powerholders carefully maintain. They drove home with full force the inseparability of politics and economics, and democracy and the rule of law. They showed me the vital necessity of holding powerholders and their friends in business to account through an independent judiciary, a free press, and a vigorous civil society.
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Deng Xiaoping is regarded by many, inside and outside China, as a political genius. His formula of launching a transition to the market economy without political reform certainly generated enough wealth to allow the Communist Party to prolong its monopoly of political power long after their Soviet counterparts had collapsed under the weight of economic (and moral) failure. But when I read Minxin Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition, it confirmed for me what I had begun to suspect: that the contradiction between economic reform and political paralysis inherent in it could not be resolved and would eventually prove fatal. Reading Zhao Ziyang’s scathing judgment, in the secret journal he composed while under house arrest, that “What China has now is the worst form of capitalism” reinforced my view. In reviewing Pei’s book, I condemned “the complacency of all who blithely assume that China’s economic progress will lead to a smooth democratic transition.” The regime had stopped the transition to the market economy because it feared that further economic liberalization would bring political change, by undermining its political monopoly. Therefore, it would never be resumed until there was a change of political system. That was in 2009.
The complacency I saw should have been dealt a death blow when Xi Jinping came to power. He presented himself as the strong man who would stand up for the Leninist version of Marxism, and approved the internal 2013 Party directive known as “
Document 9,” which condemned the core values and key institutions of liberal democracy.'
- Roger Garside,
‘China’s Search for a Modern Identity Has Entered a New and Perilous Phase’, September 23, 2021
Context'Americans are too naïve .. the CCP regime has always been a totalitarian, one-party dictatorship .. is the greatest threat to American security and world peace, and the CCP regime has no moral compass.' - Cai Xia'..a China firmly in the grip of totalitarian tyranny.'Spanish, English, Chinese) - The Values: 'You only have to read one book, "The History of Spain" by Father Juan de Mariana.' - Thomas Jefferson