From The Wall Street Journal, via A Glimpse of the World:
Before and after each Sino-American summit, Beijing offers a triple spin: China is an equal of the U.S., the U.S. needs China even more than China needs the U.S., and the two powers are fundamentally like-minded. Left out are a few points. Chinese come to the U.S. and read scathing criticisms of President Bush in American newspapers. Americans go to China and never read a word of criticism of President Hu Jintao in “China Daily.” The Chinese state creates a lock-step view of events within China and the world that is completely different from our own marketplace of ideas.
Asymmetry marks access and availability of information in the U.S. and China: 100,000 Chinese students are on our campuses (enormously more than the Americans on Chinese campuses), and they have extraordinary access to information, whereas many sensitive materials are withheld from Americans in China. Hundreds of prominent Americans who know a lot about China are pro-Beijing and are publicly critical of U.S. policy toward China. That is their right. But there is no equivalent community of specialists in China that is pro-American and criticizes Beijing’s policy toward the U.S. ” nor could there be.
……. The average life span of the European Leninist regimes that collapsed between 1989 and 1991 was only a few decades; the Chinese communist regime is now 57 years old, 17 years short of the Soviet Union, the longest running authoritarian regime of modern times. Democracies sound raucous, but the U.S. and Australia, to take two, have been stable for a period that runs into centuries. The oxygen of freedom prevents many evils. Our quarrel over the manipulation of news and views is not with Chinese culture or people, but with the Communist Party state. It manipulates because that was its political upbringing. It strokes the feathers of sycophants and ditches independent spirits because that has been the Leninist way in every country where a Communist Party has held a monopoly of power.
Political systems do matter. Washington and Beijing could hardly be more different on the fundamental issue of freedom.
