大城市里“富裕的、啜饮星巴克、买公寓、开汽车的居民”不会是民主的先锋

“政权更迭”这个短语跟应用于伊拉克的预防性战争教条有关。但另一种政权更迭一直是自尼克松总统1972年对华开放三十五年以来，大部分时间里美国对华政策的关键。

自从1989年政治事件后，美国政策的目标一直是（而且常常被宣称是）稳步颠覆中国的政权。对共产主义的治疗应该是与资本主义世界通商：贸易可以把中国潜在的侵略性力量导入建设性的、和平的渠道。

这种以贸易力量驯服人类精神的信仰有着十九世纪的血统。格莱斯顿（William Gladstone）和其他人认为战争代价太大，因为它们会破坏贸易。在二十一实际，经济决定论（例如，十九世纪的马克思主义学说）被聚焦到马克思主义者建立的最后一个重要政权——中国。

十九世纪把历史变成一个专有名词——历史，一种有着自己的必然演变的生动事物。如今，许多人透过历史相对论的镜头（可能带有玫瑰色彩）看中国：

反对民主的中国领导人“站在历史错误的一边”，而且“如同柏林墙最终倒塌，我只是认为它是不可避免的”（比尔.克林顿）。“贸易不仅仅关乎金钱，还关乎道德。经济自由化缔造自由的习性。而自由的习性缔造民主的期待……。与中国自由地贸易，时代站在我们这一边”（乔治.W.布什）。在中国“有一种无法阻挡的势头”迈向民主（托尼.布莱尔）。

这种理论并不仅仅是一厢情愿的想法，它认为资本主义不可避免带来信息和决策前所未有的广泛的散布，并要求诚信的伦理和守诺的合法政权。那些赞同这个理论的人可以从中国最近加强私有财产保护的做法中略感安慰，此举给予个体一种个人权利，而他们对个人权利的胃口可能变成对人民民主的政治要求。

但料想事情并非如此。料想孟捷慕（James Mann）把所有这些称为平稳版本（Soothing Scenario）是对的。

孟捷慕是莫伊尼汉学派（Moynihan School）的，在他的新书《中国幻觉：我们的领袖如何解释中国的镇压》中，已故的莫伊尼汉尖刻地谈到，从中国回来的西方游客印象更深刻的是苍蝇的缺席，而不是自由的缺席。孟捷慕认为平稳版本的含义——即在中国做生意的美国投资银行家一定是自由斗士——有点太想当然了。

他也不相信剧变版本（Upheaval Scenario）。这种版本认为中国政权不会屈从于从列宁主义到民主的和平的、增量的滑翔，而会在经济紊乱和政治不满的痉挛中灭亡。他的第三种版本就是从现在开始的数十年里，现代化将让中国无限制地变富，而且因此在地缘政治上更夺目，但专制不会明显减少。

大企业和平稳版本的其他倡导者用孟捷慕的“不予考虑的词汇”来反驳像他那样的怀疑论者：怀疑论者在从事反映“冷战思维”的“修理中国（China bashing）”时是“煽动性的”。尽管这种理论是“接触”中国将改变中国，但孟捷慕不禁问：究竟谁在改变谁？

平稳版本认为，苛政要求民智封闭和公众觉悟的缺失，但在无线电话和互联网渗透的今天，这是不可能的。但孟捷慕认为像微软、谷歌、雅虎等公司和政府的审查和安全监督可以合作。

孟捷慕告诫“麦当劳必胜”的信念，这种信念认为，由于中国人吃的东西跟我们越来越像，他们就会越来越像我们。这跟“星巴克谬论”相关——认为随着中国人习惯选择多种咖啡，他们会要求多种政治选择。

他最令人不安的论点是：大城市里“富裕的、啜饮星巴克、买公寓、开汽车的居民”不会是民主的先锋，而会反对它。这样的居民可能有三亿，但还有十亿非常贫困的农村地区的中国人。在列宁主义体系下发家致富的少数人会认为多数人的统治符合他们的利益吗？

孟捷慕蔑视许多认为美国精英提供平稳版本的浮华经济动机论，他是对的。然而，在他论辩的情绪中，他很可能低估了当今商业文化的自主和改革力量。但是，仍然读他的书，作为监督2008年北京奥运媒体采访的指引，这是自1936年柏林奥运以来最有预示性的奥运。

来源：美国《华盛顿邮报》/ 作者 George F. Will


Real Change In China?

By George F. Will
Thursday, April 26, 2007; A29

The phrase regime change is associated with the doctrine of preventive war as applied to Iraq. But another sort of regime change has been the crux of U.S. policy toward China through most of the 35 years since President Richard Nixon\'s opening to that nation in 1972.

Since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the objective of U.S. policy has been -- and often has been proclaimed to be -- the steady subversion of China\'s repressive regime. The cure for communism is supposed to be commerce with the capitalist world: Trade can turn China\'s potentially aggressive energies into constructive, pacific channels.

This faith in the power of trade to tame humanity\'s animal spirits has a 19th-century pedigree. Think of William Gladstone and others who thought wars would become too costly to contemplate because they would disrupt trade. In the 21st century, economic determinism (e.g., Marxism, a 19th-century dogma) is being focused on the last important regime founded by Marxists -- China.

The 19th century turned history into a proper noun -- History, a living thing with its own unfolding inevitability. Today, many see China through (perhaps rose-tinted) lenses of historicism:

Chinese leaders who oppose democracy are on the wrong side of history and just as eventually the Berlin Wall fell, I just think it\'s inevitable (Bill Clinton). The case for trade is not just monetary, but moral. Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. . . . Trade freely with China, and time is on our side (George W. Bush). In China there is an unstoppable momentum toward democracy (Tony Blair).

The theory, which is more than wishful thinking, is that capitalism ineluctably brings about an ever-broader dispersal of information and decision-making, and requires an ethic of trust and a legal regime of promise-keeping (contracts). Those who subscribe to this theory can take some comfort from China\'s recent strengthening of protections of private property, which gives a sphere of sovereignty to individuals whose appetite for sovereignty, once whetted, might become a demand for a politics of popular sovereignty.

But suppose this is not so. Suppose James Mann is right to dismiss all this as the Soothing Scenario.

In his new book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression, Mann is of the Moynihan School: The late Pat Moynihan spoke acerbically of Western visitors who returned from China more impressed by the absence of flies than by the absence of freedom. Mann considers the Soothing Scenario\'s implication -- that American investment bankers doing business in China are necessarily freedom fighters -- a tad too convenient.

He also distrusts the Upheaval Scenario, which is that China\'s regime will not succumb to a peaceful, incremental glide from Leninism to democracy but rather will perish in a spasm of economic dysfunction and political discontent. His Third Scenario is that decades from now, modernization will have made China immeasurably wealthier, and hence more geopolitically imposing, but not significantly less authoritarian.

Big business and other advocates of the Soothing Scenario use what Mann calls the lexicon of dismissal to refute skeptics like him: Skeptics are being provocative when they engage in China bashing that reflects a Cold War mentality. But although the theory is that engagement with China will change China, Mann wonders: Who is changing whom?

The Soothing Scenario says: Tyranny requires intellectual autarky and the conion of the public\'s consciousness, which is impossible now that nations are porous to cellphones and the Internet. But Mann says companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are cooperating with the government\'s censorship and security monitoring.

Mann warns against McDonald\'s triumphalism, the belief that because the Chinese increasingly eat like us, they are becoming like us. That is related to the Starbucks fallacy -- the hope that as the Chinese become accustomed to many choices of coffee, they will demand more political choices.

His most disturbing thesis is that the newly enriched, Starbucks-sipping, apartment-buying, car-driving denizens of the large cities that American visitors to China see will be not the vanguard of democracy but the opposition to it. There may be 300 million such denizens, but there are 1 billion mostly rural and very poor Chinese. Will the minority prospering economically under a Leninist regime think majority rule is in their interest?

Mann is rightly disdainful of many meretricious and economically motivated arguments that American elites offer for the Soothing Scenario. In his polemical mood, however, he probably underestimates the autonomous and transformative power of today\'s commercial culture. Still, read his book as a guide for monitoring media coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the most portentous Games since those in 1936, in Berlin.

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