eastofethan

Chang gets it exactly right.

About six years ago, when I was in the middle of writing “Losing the New China,” my friend Terry Halsey called me and asked how I was doing. “Slow” I said. “I’m a slow writer. And when I’m done, no one will care. It’s about China, Terry. Americans like to read books about themselves.”

In fact, Terry doesn’t really like to read about China either. He’s a typical trendy New Yorker (with an atypically large brain, one that is always chafing against the conventional cage that he has erected for himself—which his large brain tells him it is futile to resist). Anyway, Terry had a high-tech promotion idea. We would place webcam cameras all over my house, in the backwoods mountains of Vermont—and the video would stream into a website called “THE MAKING OF Losing the New China.”

I told Terry that all it would capture was me padding around in a bathrobe, scratching myself, smoking, and then going into the badly lit kitchen to make myself a snack. What a freaking stupid idea.

This blog is an admission that Terry was, in some way, right.

No writer is as simple, or as focused as the book he writes. At the same time, if we are writing about a serious topic, as I am now, I feel the weight of dead bodies on my shoulders. I cannot ignore that weight or throw it off. Nor can I inject myself—too much—into a story that is not my own.

The book that I am writing is about the history of the clash between Falun Gong and the Chinese state. It’s a terrible, terrible story, a mini-genocide redeemed only through the blind stubbornness—or perhaps, some would say heroism—of the Falun Gong practitioners themselves. The problem is that the type of person who can resist torture often isn’t a good storyteller.

I’m a decent storyteller, and I have a responsibility, as a non-practitioner who has been given an unparalleled look behind the curtain, to say what I saw. To make it useful, I have to tell the story objectively: the reader has to be able to judge Falun Gong and the Chinese state by their actions, not by my words, not by my opinions. I have to both guide the reader in and then get out of the way. I believe in this approach. It took me several years to grasp that this was the only way to do it.

Well, I told you I was slow.

Yet I am also some other things: an activist, a satirist, a lover of things, a hater of things. This blog is a chance to express all that publicly, while still preserving the vision of the book. In addition, I have research notes, little points that don’t fit in to the book, but are still worth saying. This blog will be a combination of those things: my point of view, particularly regarding China policy, some research points on Falun Gong’s struggle with the Chinese Communist Party, and the occasional wildly off-topic diatribe. 

For those flipping through the web for straight partisan ballast: move along, nothing to see here. As the only person who can claim to have worked at both the Brookings Institution and the Free Congress Foundation, I insinctively sense both sides of an argument. Yet what actually interests me are facts that challenge conventional wisdom. So stay if you like, but you might want to slow down–way down–and consider.

I don’t offer a comprehensive site with all the major news items of the day—shamefully, I don’t truly care about all the little news items of the day. I offer a voice, a hybrid of passion and irreverence. That voice will be shrill from time to time, pissed-off, reckless, but if you call me on it, I’ll listen.

So let’s begin.

Yesterday was Purim, and appropriately enough for the conspiracy-minded, Chas Freeman resigned as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

If you want a quick post-mortem (I don’t want to dwell on this either), check out the WP editorial. The China human rights crowd may have actually done the lion’s share of the work here. I haven’t looked at the Newsweek piece that the WP references–something about Pelosi being “incensed” by Freeman’s statements on Tiananmen–but perhaps there’s some life in Pelosi yet? And did the Obama admin reveal their China card too early?

UPDATE: I should mention that my own miniscule contribution to the Freeman pile-on was published in this week’s Weekly Standard.  It’s worth reading anyway because my point was much wider than one man: The Obama adminstration has sent clear signals to the Chinese leadership that they are no longer interested in human rights and democracy in China. The consequences will be truly horrific.

So of course, Freeman’s resignation does not solve the problem, but, as I stated above, it may help. Particularly if it has begun the process of galvanizing congressional opposition.

FURTHER UPDATE: Also see Michael Golfarb’s excellent summary on the Weekly Standard Blog: The Liberal Cabal. Michael has been at the forefront of the Freeman investigation/take down; he reinforces the evidence that the China-critics were actually a greater factor than the Israel lobby in Freeman’s untenable position.

ONE MORE UPDATE: D.J. McGuire makes a good case that I am being too pessimistic and his comparison with the Soviet dissident movement’s predicament under Carter is inspired.

REALLY FINAL THOUGHTS:

OK, I do want to dwell on this just a little longer. Starting with an excerpt from “Losing the New China”:

“I admired Laurence because he was not using one or two, but all three of the strategies of a friend of China. He not only towed the Party Line, he was a credible spokesman for it. He brought gifts; he had assisted major American corporations with market entry and relentlessly encouraged China investment. And he did not neglect flattery – the Red Capital empire, indeed, his entire lifestyle, was a totemic expression of confidence in the once and future dominance of Chinese culture. One night, after too many drinks at the Red Capital Club, I asked him what drove him. Was it, I asked quietly, the aesthetics of Chinese totalitarianism? Yes, he replied, smiling. Since I had a kind of voyeuristic fascination with Chinese fascist iconography myself, that made two of us, I thought. Except that Brahm was actually creating the stuff.”

When I was a business consultant in Beijing, I worked with many Friends of China. The one I’m describing above, Laurence Brahm, was an extreme example, but Freeman fits the general profile. Freeman backed the Party line-in private correspondence to influential China policy-hands in Washington, and in public by describing the Tibetan uprising last year as a “race-riot.” As an advisor to CNOOC (the state-owned Chinese oil company that attempted to buy Unocal) Freeman tried to bring gifts to the Chinese leadership, even if some of them didn’t work out. But it’s the third strategy, flattery, that really counts.

Flattery of Chinese Communist officials is part of doing business in China. It’s ritualized, for example, in the American Chamber of Commerce’s annual “Government Appreciation Dinner.” My old boss described the dinner (privately of course, and using his trademark old-school  British-imperial accent to full effect) to me this way: Government Officials! Trousers down!!-Gentlemen! Commence kissing!!

But ultimately prostitutes chafe. Like most of us, Chinese officials want real passion.

Friends of China will be familiar with the gist of Freeman’s argument on Tiananmen, that it is unacceptable “for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be.” As I pointed out in the Weekly Standard, that particular trope was originally laid down by Henry Kissinger. Even today, many American expats will blurt out something similar when they feel cornered by a visiting countryman at a Beijing cocktail party. The only difference here is that Freeman took the argument all the way: If the student demonstration is unacceptable, shouldn’t the Chinese government have intervened, in force, earlier? Freeman’s appointment as Chairman of the National Intelligence was scuttled because Freeman not only meant it, he said it publicly.  

That’s the expat dilemma. If you really want to be successful in China, it helps to really believe–to exult in China’s rise, in the Chinese leadership, and in the Party itself. If the submission becomes an act of free will, one is no longer a prostitute. Unquestioning acceptance of the existing power structure-or better yet, the inevitable power structure of the future-facilitates submission and exultation, a liberation from weak, feminine, attachments to human rights and worrying about how the little people will vote and other such sissified concerns–concerns that have nothing to do with actual power.

Of course, you are not supposed to show any of this submission, exultation, passion and so on, publicly. Not in the West. Foreign policy realism can provide a rational cover to defend the Party without looking like you have gone balmy. But Freeman didn’t care. He showed his passion. That took guts. 

So let’s acknowledge Freeman’s courage. But let’s also acknowledge how strange it is that a man with such a polymorphous attraction to fascism found himself that close to the President.