MCLC: reading Hayek in Beijing

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: reading Hayek in Beijing
***********************************************************

Source: WSJ (5/24/13):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578501492191072734.h
tml

Reading Hayek in Beijing
A chronicler of Mao's depredations finds much to worry about in modern
China.
Yang Jisheng 
By BRET STEPHENS 

In the spring of 1959, Yang Jisheng, then an 18-year-old scholarship
student at a boarding school in China's Hubei Province, got an unexpected
visit from a childhood friend. "Your father is starving to death!" the
friend told him. "Hurry back, and take some rice if you can."

Granted leave from his school, Mr. Yang rushed to his family farm. "The
elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk," he
recalled, "and even its roots had been dug up." Entering his home, he
found his father "half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless,
his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid . . . I was shocked with the
realization that the term skin and bones referred to something so horrible
and cruel."

Mr. Yang's father would die within three days. Yet it would take years
before Mr. Yang learned that what happened to his father was not an
isolated incident. He was one of the 36 million Chinese who succumbed to
famine between 1958 and 1962.

It would take years more for him to realize that the source of all the
suffering was not nature: There were no major droughts or floods in China
in the famine years. Rather, the cause was man, and one man in particular:
Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, whose visage still stares down on
Beijing's Tiananmen Square from atop the gates of the Forbidden City.

Mr. Yang went on to make his career, first as a journalist and senior
editor with the Xinhua News Agency, then as a historian whose unflinching
scholarship has brought him into increasing conflict with the Communist
Party—of which he nonetheless remains a member. Now 72 and a resident of
Beijing, he's in New York this month to receive the Manhattan Institute's
Hayek Prize for "Tombstone," his painstakingly researched, definitive
history of the famine. On a visit to the Journal's headquarters, his
affinity for the prize's namesake becomes clear.

"This book had a huge impact on me," he says, holding up his dog-eared
Chinese translation of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom." Hayek's
book, he explains, was originally translated into Chinese in 1962 as "an
'internal reference' for top leaders," meaning it was forbidden fruit to
everyone else. Only in 1997 was a redacted translation made publicly
available, complete with an editor's preface denouncing Hayek as "not in
line with the facts," and "conceptually mixed up."

Mr. Yang quickly saw that in Hayek's warnings about the dangers of
economic centralization lay both the ultimate explanation for the
tragedies of his youth—and the predicaments of China's present. "In a
country where the sole employer is the state," Hayek had observed,
"opposition means death by slow starvation."

So it was in 1958 as Mao initiated his Great Leap Forward, demanding huge
increases in grain and steel production. Peasants were forced to work
intolerable hours to meet impossible grain quotas, often employing
disastrous agricultural methods inspired by the quack Soviet agronomist
Trofim Lysenko. The grain that was produced was shipped to the cities, and
even exported abroad, with no allowances made to feed the peasants
adequately. Starving peasants were prevented from fleeing their districts
to find food. Cannibalism, including parents eating their own children,
became commonplace.

"Mao's powers expanded from the people's minds to their stomachs," Mr.
Yang says. "Whatever the Chinese people's brains were thinking and what
their stomachs were receiving were all under the control of Mao. . . . His
powers extended to every inch of the field, and every factory, every
workroom of a factory, every family in China."

All the while, sympathetic Western journalists—America's Edgar Snow and
Britain's Felix Greene in particular—were invited on carefully
orchestrated tours so they could "refute" rumors of mass starvation. To
this day, few people realize that Mao's forced famine was the single
greatest atrocity of the 20th century, exceeding by orders of magnitude
the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian Killing Fields and the Holocaust.

The power of Mr. Yang's book lies in its hauntingly precise descriptions
of the cruelty of party officials, the suffering of the peasants, the
pervasive dread of being called "a right deviationist" for telling the
truth that quotas weren't being met and that millions were being starved
to death, and the toadyism of Mao lieutenants.

Yet the book is more than a history of a uniquely cruel regime at a
receding moment in time. It is also a warning of what lies at the end of
the road for nations that substitute individualism with any form of
collectivism, no matter what the motives. Which brings Mr. Yang to the
present day.

"China's economy is not what [Party leaders] claim as the
'socialist-market economy,' " he says. "It's a 'power-market' economy."

What does that mean?

"It means the market is controlled by the power. . . . For example, the
land: Any permit to enter any sector, to do any business has to be
approved by the government. Even local government, down to the county
level. So every county operates like an enterprise, a company. The party
secretary of the county is the CEO, the president."

Put another way, the conventional notion that the modern Chinese system
combines political authoritarianism with economic liberalism is mistaken:
A more accurate description of the recipe is dictatorship and cronyism,
with the results showing up in rampant corruption, environmental
degradation and wide inequalities between the politically well-connected
and everyone else. "There are two major forms of hatred" in China today,
Mr. Yang explains. "Hatred toward the rich; hatred toward the powerful,
the officials." As often as not they are one and the same.

Yet isn't China a vastly freer place than it was in the days of Mr. Yang's
youth? He allows that the party's top priority in the post-Mao era has
been to improve the lot of the peasantry, "to deal with how to fill the
stomach."

He also acknowledges that there's more intellectual freedom. "I would have
been executed if I had this book published 40 years ago," he notes. "I
would have been imprisoned if this book was out 30 years ago. Now the
result is that I'm not allowed to get any articles published in the
mainstream media." The Chinese-language version of "Tombstone" was
published in Hong Kong but is banned on the mainland.

There is, of course, a rational reason why the regime tolerates Mr. Yang.
To survive, the regime needs to censor vast amounts of information—what
Mr. Yang calls "the ruling technique" of Chinese leaders across the
centuries. Yet censorship isn't enough: It also needs a certain number of
people who understand the full truth about the Maoist system so that the
party will never repeat its mistakes, even as it keeps the cult of Mao
alive in order to preserve its political legitimacy. That's especially
true today as China is being swept by a wave of Maoist nostalgia among
people who, Mr. Yang says, "abstract Mao as this symbol of social
justice," and then use that abstraction to criticize the current regime.

"Ten million workers get laid off in the state-owned enterprise reforms,"
he explains. "So many people are dissatisfied with the reforms. Then they
become nostalgic and think the Mao era was much better. Because they never
experienced the Mao era!" One of the leaders of that revival,
incidentally, was Bo Xilai, the powerful former Chongqing party chief,
brought down in a murder scandal last year.

But there's a more sinister reason why Mr. Yang is tolerated. Put simply,
the regime needs some people to have a degree of intellectual freedom, in
order to more perfectly maintain its dictatorship over everyone else.

"Once I gave a lecture to leaders at a government bureau," Mr. Yang
recalls. "I told them it's a dangerous job, you guys, being officials,
because you have too much power. I said you guys have to be careful
because those who want approval from you to get certain land and projects,
who bribe you, these are like bullets, ammunition, coated in sugar, to
fire at you. So today you may be a top official, tomorrow you may be a
prisoner."

How did the officials react to that one?

"They said, 'Professor Yang, what you said, we should pay attention.' "

So they should. As Hayek wrote in his famous essay on "The Use of
Knowledge in a Society," the fundamental problem of any planned system is
that "knowledge of circumstances of which we must make use never exists in
concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of
incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate
individuals possess."

The Great Leap Forward was an extreme example of what happens when a
coercive state, operating on the conceit of perfect knowledge, attempts to
achieve some end. Even today the regime seems to think it's possible to
know everything—one reason they devote so many resources to monitoring
domestic websites and hacking into the servers of Western companies. But
the problem of incomplete knowledge can't be solved in an authoritarian
system that refuses to cede power to the separate people who possess that
knowledge.

"For the last 20 years, the Chinese government has been saying they have
to change the growth mode of the economy," Mr. Yang notes. "So they've
been saying, rather than just merely expanding the economy they should do
internal changes, meaning more value-added services and high tech. They've
been shouting such slogans for 20 years, and not many results. Why haven't
we seen many changes? Because it's the problem that lies in the very
system, because it's a power-market economy. . . . If the politics isn't
changed, the growth mode cannot be changed."

That suggests China will never become a mature power until it becomes a
democratic one. As to whether that will happen anytime soon, Mr. Yang
seems doubtful: The one opinion widely shared by rulers and ruled alike in
China is that without the Communist Party's leadership, "China will be
thrown into chaos."

Still, Mr. Yang hardly seems to have given up hope that he can play a role
in raising his country's prospects. In particular, he's keen to reclaim
two ideas at risk of being lost in today's China.

The first is the meaning of rights. A saying attributed to the philosopher
Lao Tzu, he says, has it that a ruler should fill the people's stomachs
and empty their heads. The gambit of China's current rulers is that they
can stay in power forever by applying that maxim. Mr. Yang hopes they're
wrong.

"People have more needs than just eating!" he insists. "In China, human
rights means the right to survive, and I argue with these people. This is
not human rights, it's animal rights. People have all sorts of needs.
Spiritual needs, the need to be free, the freedoms."

The second is the obligation of memory. China today is a country galloping
into a century many people believe it will define, one way or the other.
Yet the past, Mr. Yang insists, also has its claims.

"If a people cannot face their history, these people won't have a future.
That was one of the purposes for me to write this book. I wrote a lot of
hard facts, tragedies. I wanted people to learn a lesson, so we can be far
away from the darkness, far away from tragedies, and won't repeat them."
Hayek would have understood both points well.

Mr. Stephens writes "Global View," the Journal's foreign-affairs column.