China Law Blog

Perhaps Bush's nuanced approach toward China is partially as a consequence of the time he spent there during his father's position as Ambassador in China (during the 80s I believe)?

I agree with you; I enjoy seeing this side of US President Bush. :)

The opinion of a single Chinese attorney educated in Australia and working for a multinational company in Shanghai is by no means representative of Chinese people's views on Bush, but during a lunch time discussion on politics my colleague said that he was under the impression Bush had been good to China. A good insight into what makes a good US president in the eyes of the world. Also, despite my deep misgivings for W. Bush and his administration, it felt oddly nice hearing someone share a nice word for the guy.

Thanks for the shout out, Dan. I have personally been disappointed with the Bush Administration since the decision to invade Iraq. But I think we can all learn from his success in dealing with China.

BTW, agree with your assessment of WSJ China Journal & Sky Canaves as an exceptional blogger.

@elliottng

chinacomment,

Actually, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Oh, correction to myself. It was 1974 when Bush Sr. was ambassador to china:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002/02/19/usat-prescott-bush.htm

"The college-age George W. Bush spent two months in China visiting his parents during his father's two-year stint."

The rest of the article is a quite interesting read.

Yes, I too thought Bush's recent speech on China was balanced and well thought out.

Moreover, reportedly, Bush is the first sitting American president to attend an Olympic opening ceremony outside of America, which in and of itself is a gesture of goodwill, given the importance of the 2008 games to China.

And apparently, China's current foreign minister, Yang Jeichi, earlier on in his diplomatic career, was the translator for Bush senior when he was America's ambassador to China.

Of course, Bush is an American statesman and politician, so he is expected to advance America's interests and values. Nonetheless, he did so in his speech in the least confrontational way.

"Thousands of years ago, the Chinese people developed a common language and unified a great nation. China became the center for art and literature, commerce and philosophy."

And then the authoritarian Emperor Qin burned all the books and buried the intellectuals alive.

It's interesting that the authoritarians always hide behind the cultural accomplishments of the liberal anti-authoritarians.

Why is everyone giving George W. credit for this? It's clear he was just reading a speech that was prepared for him. He didn't come up with this. People fed it to him, advised him to deliver it, and he said 'ok'.

His father, on the other hand, does in fact have well-informed opinions on China.

Excellent post. I'm glad others have noticed. I'm a non-American, but I have been extolling Bush's China policy for as long as I can remember. It is spot on.

While I agree with most of Bush's message, I fundamentally disagree with the view that the Chinese government has nothing to fear from giving its own people more freedom.

Many Americans think that the general trend is in favor of freedom for all peoples, and given the choice, they would develop into something which would, while different from the American system of democracy, would at least be recognizably open.

In China's long history, this has never been the case. The opposite of a strong center in China is not a democratic society, it is what the Chinese call 动乱. The best translation for this is chaos, and is most frequently embodied in what in Chinese history has been known as peasant rebellions or 农民起义. In China, these peasant rebellions have always been extremely bloody, with the population taking dramatic drops of 80-90% within a 20-30 year period. What happened to the people? Simple: It was nothing short of mass murder on a grand scale. In the 1600s, Zhang Xianzhong murdered the citizens of Chengdu in Sichuan province, bringing the population of the city down from 3 million to 20, and the population of the whole province down to 50,000!

This has happened 13 times in Chinese history. The reason we know about the scale of the murder is because China has had very complete census records going back more than 2,000 years.

The US has never had anything like this. The closest it got to mass murder on this scale was the Civil War, in which some 600,000 Americans were killed.

The question the party faces is how to prevent these very bloody episodes from happening again in China's history, since the Communist dynasty would undoubtedly become a victim if this happened. They believe that it can be done by educating the people and drastically urbanizing China in a short time. The problem is that the party has 70M party members, and because it has absolute control over money and resources, many of its ranks are corrupt and frankly, pretty low-quality.

So, will laws and institutions be the answer? No, I don't think so. The party simply doesn't have the people it needs to push through this kind of policy on such a grand scale.

The more I look at the law in both the US and China, the more I realize that it isn't the law which protects people. Instead, it is the conscience of key people at key moments who make all the difference.

Every time China's population has reached a high point and started to burst at the seams, the regime became corrupt and rebellions broke out all over the country. In some cases, a new dynasty would be formed, then use force to bring order and control to all under heaven. This is the cycle of Chinese history.

Can some kind of representative government break this cycle? I don't think so. This is because representative government is based on a few axioms, most importantly equal rights for each individual. Then this needs to be translated into action on the social and government levels.

To put it bluntly, the conditions do not yet exist in China and I do not believe that this party has the ability to make the needed changes.

Paul,

It seems that's been the norm around the world since history's been recorded, what with the swings of power and the mass murder. English history is full of sons waging wars against fathers. We even get to witness it today. Avoiding this is the chief purpose of representative government. Representative government with fair elections is supposed to avoid armed conflict by legitimizing the new government with the will of the people. A state is only democratic if it elects a second government without a coup or armed power struggle. States that have done the democracy thing properly, pretty much limited to the US and Western Europe, have enjoyed tremendous stability. But, no state is ripe for democracy until certain internal conditions have been met, and it decides for itself that it should be democratic.

"It is difficult enough for me to credit President Bush with having done something right on foreign policy, but my entire world view would have to shift were I to believe Condi Rice capable of doing anything right on foreign policy. Probably the best thing about the upcoming presidential election is that no matter who wins, Condi Rice will be gone and we will have a better Secretary of State."

Couldn't agree more with you!

Yes, as much as I despise Bush and almost everything he has done over the last 8 years, I think the stuff he has been saying concerning China is just about perfect. Have you seen the interview with Bob Costas in Beijing? Again, it's of the same caliber.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that the press has the tendency to overstate certain aspects of quotes and statements rather than let people who are watching or reading a transcript judge them for themselves. I don't have a specific example in front of me, but when Bush talks about human rights or religious freedom, for example, the press seems to press the idea that Bush is being "confrontational" or "aggressive" or "bold". Bush may be acting boldly in some sense here, though there is a sense of humility in this boldness, and I don't think it's aggressive or confrontational. Mainly he is speaking in such a way that reasonable people might be expected to listen.