Issue: 30 April 2005

New Hampshire

Did you see that picture in the paper this week? It was the same day as the announcement that Sir Elton John was to wed Mr David Furnish, and just above it was a touching portrait of an obviously smitten younger man gazing soulfully into the eyes of a portly bespectacled older man as they strolled hand in hand through a field of blooming bluebonnets. Unfortunately for my blood pressure, the spooning couple were not Sir Elton and his betrothed but Crown Prince Abdullah and George W. Bush. The Saudi strongman was yet again visiting the Bush ranch at Crawford, which is bad enough, but this time the President couldn’t keep his hands off him. The guy had barely touched down and Bush was purring, ‘Hey, what say we step into the yard and shoot the big love scene for Michael Moore’s next crockumentary?’

At such moments, it’s like September 12 over again. It’s at least three years since I first argued that ranch breaks should be reserved for America’s real friends — Tony Blair, John Howard — and not for a regime which has very successfully exported its civil war to the rest of the world. The Saudis are under a lot more pressure than they were back then — hence Abdullah’s feints towards faux ‘reform’. Nonetheless, only the other day the chief justice and big Abdullah sidekick was captured on video urging Saudi men to go to Iraq and fight the Americans — and still the Crown Prince gets ranch privileges from Bush. Someday his prince won’t come, I hope. When I called for the President to give the Saudi royals the finger, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Notwithstanding the take-my-hand-I’m-a-stranger-in-paradise stuff, it certainly isn’t September 12. Buried deep in the papers, way past the Bush-Abdullah lovefest, was another story: ‘Syria Ends 29-Year Presence In Lebanon’. Really. Complete withdrawal, including the secret police types. Yawn. Who cares? Baby Assad may linger on for a bit in Damascus but, as a trained ophthalmologist, he can see the writing on the wall. The Guardian’s Richard Gott and other columnar eminences may regard Blair as ‘a war criminal’ who should be locked up, but frankly they sound a bit like those Japs still holed up in the jungle 40 years after the war ended. It’s over. The Iraqi people have moved on, and to one degree or another the rest of the region is starting to follow.

I don’t know how happily all these experiments in freedom will work out. As the old rustics tell motorists seeking directions, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ If the end point is an advanced pluralist democracy with economic liberty, I wouldn’t want the starting point to be present-day Saudi Arabia. But what’s happening around the world these days makes it very hard to pull up the drawbridge, unless you’re already fenced off, starving and sitting in the dark, like North Korea.

On our letters page last week, Jonathan Mirsky chided me for my praise of China. To be honest, I didn’t think I was praising China so much as simply stating the reality of the situation. Mr Mirsky is quite right that the People’s Republic is a tyranny with some particularly repellent aspects. Obviously, as a fully paid-up North Country gun nut, I wouldn’t personally want to trade rural New Hampshire for rural China. Nor am I entirely happy that Western consumers have helped the ChiComs develop the world’s first economically viable form of communism. But these are the facts on the ground, and I can’t do anything about them. One ignores reality at one’s peril, especially with China: the only reason the Politburo has a Security Council seat is because in 1945 Chiang Kai-shek’s Washington patrons persisted in the delusion that he was in control of China. France shouldn’t have been given a Security Council seat either, but, in fairness to de Gaulle, he at least was in charge of the territory he claimed to represent.

So the problem now is trying to figure out how China is likely to look a decade or two down the line. One certainty is that its future is a lot brighter than that of the other communist colossus. In his state-of-the-union address this week, Vladimir Putin, as befits an old KGB hand, was waxing nostalgic. ‘The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,’ he declared. ‘For the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.’

Well, why don’t they come home? If there’s one thing Russia could use, it’s more Russians. The country is midway through its transition from ‘superpower’ to ghost town. Russian men already have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis — not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list. By mid-century, vast empty Russia will have a smaller population than tiny Yemen. The decline in male longevity is unprecedented for a (relatively) advanced nation not at war. Russia has extraordinary rates of drug-fuelled Aids, hepatitis C, heart disease and TB, all of which are mere symptoms of an entire people unable to pull themselves out of self-destruction.

Immediately after his retirement, the now forgotten Canadian swinger Pierre Trudeau took his sons to Siberia because that was ‘where the future is being built’. Any future being built in the outlying parts of Russia belongs to Muslims and Chinese in need of Lebensraum, and drug cartels and terrorist networks eager to take advantage of remote areas in a state lacking sufficient reliable manpower to police its borders. That’s why, even as an unimaginative apparatchik pining for the old days, President Putin is nevertheless very cautious about offending the Americans. Since 9/11 the US has established military bases throughout once-Soviet Central Asia, sometimes (as in Kyrgyzstan) virtually side by side with Russian bases. Officially, the Yank operations are just there to facilitate the Afghan campaign, but Moscow seems in no hurry to see them pack up, figuring that a US military presence is more likely than their own to deter Chinese expansionism.

That’s the least of their worries. They couldn’t hold on to Eastern Europe. They couldn’t hold on to Central Asia. Why would they fare any better with the Russian ‘Federation’? Heard of a place called Bashkortostan? It’s The Spectator’s Stan of the Week — a formerly autonomous Russian Muslim republic whose direct elections were abolished by Putin as part of his recent centralisation of power. The capital city of Ufa has been racked by protests from something called the People’s Front of Bashkortostan. Be honest, if you’re Vlad, that’s the last thing you need right now. After all, it’s his court the Bashkorti are bashing — if indeed ‘Bashkorti’ is what you call the people of Bashkortostan. Whoops, I see they’re called ‘Bashkir’. Anyway, if you’re an ‘energy-rich formerly autonomous Muslim republic’, what’s the point of going down the express garbage chute of history with Russia? If the Bashkir have a future, it’s not with Moscow.

The Chinese must look at Russia’s diseased kleptocracy and think, ‘There but for the grace of Whoever....’ So far, Beijing’s strategy of economic liberalisation without political liberalisation is working out a lot better than the Moscow model. Instead of all this guff about the blessings of liberty, Deng Xiaoping cut to the chase and announced: ‘To get rich is glorious.’ And, for city dwellers whose income increased 14-fold in the two decades after Deng told ’em to go for it, things have worked out swell.

I’d say the Chinese are doing it the right way round: historically, economic liberty has preceded political liberty. At this point, the Politburo would rise up as one and say, whoa, man, hold up, who said anything about political liberty? But realistically how much longer can they hold it at bay? Do you remember Sars? Big disease a couple of years ago. It started in rural China, leaping from livestock to people, because farm animals are highly valued and often sleep in the house. When a totalitarian regime has a crisis on its hands, its first reaction is to lie about it. So that’s what the People’s Republic did — denying there was any problem for the first three months, thereafter downplaying the extent of it, and only coming clean — or marginally less unclean — about the scale of the disease after it had wriggled free of China’s borders and infected and killed people all around the world, including an awful lot in my home town of Toronto. The World Health Organisation, unduly deferential to dictatorships as UN agencies always are, issued various advice on travelling to China. But what about within China? Sars spread to the cities because some rural dweller came up to town for the day, and before you knew it it had reached Hong Kong, where the infected lobby, elevators and other public areas brought the international clientele of the Metropole Hotel into contact with the disease.

That’s a metaphor for the present-day People’s Republic. China can make your radio. But they can’t make a plausible press release to read on it. Are the internal contradictions of commie-capitalism sustainable for that much longer? With Sars, the booming modern coastal cities were infected by a vast rural hinterland where the pig sleeps in the front room. Given the ever-widening income gap between these areas, how much longer can they co-exist in the same state? Jonathan Mirsky chides me for using the word ‘Chinaman’, which I do only because I find its obsolescence aurally pleasing, in the same way I prefer ‘Bulgar’ to ‘Bulgarian’. But of more relevance surely is the way we carelessly apply the word ‘China’ not just to the People’s Republic, but to territory it’s swallowed up (Hong Kong and Macao) and to territory it plans to swallow up (Taiwan). Calling it all ‘China’ sounds nice and homogenous, but it’s a China that has never previously existed in any functioning way; as a centralised nation state it’s as artificial an entity as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. A lot of lefties are pinning their hopes on the emergence of some grand new Chinese superpower, but China will not advance to the First World with its present borders intact.

For one thing, if getting rich is glorious, the best way to get rich is to get small: of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations bigger than one million — the US (296 million), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4.5 million) and Singapore (3 million). The Americans are the exception that proves the rule: they’re a highly decentralised federation. As Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore observe in The Size Of Nations, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would have bust up decades ago.

It may be that China has found an even more audacious exception to the rule. But the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations suggest otherwise. Let’s take it as read that they’re a fraud — a government-licensed racket to deflect the Japanese criticism that might otherwise be focused closer to home, in the same way that Mubarak and the other Arab dictators license anti-Americanism as a safety valve for their own societal pressures. Even to make that comparison suggests that something’s coming loose in China. And unfortunately Beijing doesn’t seem able to fake mass protests as easily as it used to; in some cities the anti-Japan riots had to be cancelled for lack of interest.

The stability fetishists, having assured us that nothing can ever change in the Middle East, are now making the same confident guarantees for the rest of the planet. In his magnificently loopy Guardian column about Blair the ‘war criminal’, Richard Gott says that instead of siding with ‘the evil empire’ (America) Britain should have joined ‘a coalition of the unwilling that would include the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese’. America could yet implode, I suppose: nothing is impossible. But the structural defects of the EU, Russia and China are all far more advanced. Boy Assad will be gone before the end of Bush’s presidency; Crown Prince Abdullah will be lucky to ride out even his faux reforms; but even the naysayers have begun to accept that the Middle East is going Bush’s way. The real foreign-policy challenges in the immediate future are the stagnant EU, poor doomed Russia and China’s incoherent market-communism. If you were betting on only one happy ending, I’d take China.