Peter Hitchens

The danger of China

Peter Hitchens says that the miraculous new Chinese economy is not all that it seems

The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere in the world, until it is too late to learn from them.

As I recall, it was quite difficult to persuade our cultural establishment to worry about the Gulag when it still existed, because it was so unwilling to believe that the USSR was as wicked and nasty as it was. Now that it has gone, and the radical Left has forgotten that it ever had any connection with the old evil empire, we have a minor industry engaged in revealing to astonished bien pensants that the USSR was a bad place and Stalin a bad man.

But we face a different problem with China. The apologists for Mao are discredited or forgotten. It is easy and safe to recognise, among fashionable people and in publishing houses, that Mao’s regime was a murderous horror and Mao himself an unlovely monster. Today’s apologists for China are not naive old communists but naive young capitalists.

They look at the shining towers of Shanghai and at China’s new passion for consumption and production, and they think that liberty will arrive alongside prosperity. In many cases, they believe this because they have made the same mistake about the West, imagining that free markets are automatically connected with liberty in general, and that democracy is a matter of form rather than content. The Reagan-Thatcher development of a new populist conservatism made a god of the market and ignored the great moral and cultural issues, such as defence of the family and opposition to the cultural Marxism known as political correctness.

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