Q: You have had personal experience with Chinese discrimination. Your wife, Hari, was Indian-Malaysian and she died nine years ago in a hospital in Hong Kong, having received what you felt was inferior treatment because her skin was darker than that of other patients.
A: Yes. She died as a result of Chinese racism in the hospital. Her death led to a long campaign which eventually resulted in the first anti-racist legislation ever in Hong Kong. That’s why I think about these questions a lot, because I’ve had to not just come to terms with the personal pain—the terrible loss—but I’ve had to try to understand it from my head rather than my heart. As a white person, I’d never had to think about race in my own country, because I’d never suffered discrimination. Certainly what happened to Hari sensitized me to the problem, and made me think about it in a way most writers are never forced to do.
Q: Why don’t these attitudes get talked about, inside or outside China?
A: Well, no society likes to talk about its own racism; this is a universal characteristic of the dominant races in countries. As for why it doesn’t get talked about outside China, well, the people who’ve written about China are mainly Westerners—and the Chinese, of course. Generally, Western academics are white, so it’s not something that they think about. There are a couple of black academics who have written about China, and they’ve engaged in discussion about race because they’re very conscious of how it moulds a society and how it structures human relations. The trouble is that the way in which countries behave has been interpreted in terms of diplomacy and international relations theory. International relations theory doesn’t talk about race.
Q: But we, as a Western civilization, have dedicated considerable energy—at least within the last three decades—to trying to address racism in our own countries.
A: I think there’s a much greater awareness. I mean, Obama’s election in America is a vivid illustration of how attitudes have changed. But the whole American behaviour with Guantánamo and their treatment of Iraqis during the war has had a powerful racial component to it. People don’t talk about it that way, but it is a racial component.
Q: Let’s switch to politics. You talk about China offering an alternative political model to developing countries—something different from the blend of democracy and free markets prescribed by the United States. What would that model be?
A: Well, for one thing, it takes a more favourable view of the state as a force in society and the economy. Unlike in Western societies, the state really has had no competitors in China for a thousand years. It didn’t have to negotiate with the church, or the merchant class, or the judiciary, or an elite. This reinforces its authority, and the Chinese state has had this ability to reconstruct itself and remake itself, such as in 1949, even again in 1978. I would argue that since 1978 it has undergone a particularly important reconstruction. I mean, this has been an absolutely brilliant economic strategy that has lifted Chinese fortunes since then. The guys that have been running this economic reform policy have been extraordinarily talented about the way they’ve done it. This is an example, I think, of the strength of Chinese statecraft, this ability to be able to elaborate and implement a strategy.
Q: You seem pretty comfortable with the idea that democracy isn’t as important as other issues facing the Chinese government just now. But if China really is going to be—for all intents and purposes—ruling the world, surely it should understand that political freedom is one of the most important things to Westerners, if not the most important thing.
A: What I wanted to try and explain in the book is that we shouldn’t simply see Western democracy as a universal. It needs to be considered in its proper historical and cultural context. No Western country was, by the standards that we use now, democratic when it went through its process of industrialization. Our Industrial Revolution in Britain started in about 1780 and lasted into the 1840s, and it was only much, much later that large numbers of people began to get the vote. As you know, women didn’t get the vote until well into the 20th century. This is a very important point. When we lecture other countries now on why they should be democratic—well, we weren’t when we were going through that same historical stage as they were. Now, this doesn’t mean that countries don’t become more open after their economies take off. China’s modernization will be accompanied—is being accompanied—by a process of growing openness, representativity, and much greater flows of information. You know, the Internet discussions, apart from a subject like the role of governance by the party and Taiwan, are open, hard-hitting debates. There aren’t many no-go areas.
Q: I’m not sure that view squares with the facts. China just announced that they want all of the personal computers sold in the country to have filtering software that makes it easier for the government to censor electronic information.
A: It’s certainly true that there’s all sorts of controls, but it’s a huge transformation from what it was, and [the Internet] is much freer than the press is.
Q: Still, if we’re talking about China setting an example for other countries, the prospects for democracy do not at this stage seem very promising, do they?
A: No. China, as it is at the moment, does not believe in the democratic model. It doesn’t strongly polemicize against it, but it certainly doesn’t advocate it. So this is going to introduce a very new dimension into global arguments, because this has been a very fundamental Western value. It’s important to note, though, that when China argues its position globally, its emphasis is not on democracy within societies but democracy between societies.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: China thinks the international system—from the WTO to institutions like the IMF—is extremely undemocratic because it’s dominated by a small minority of the world’s population—i.e. the West plus Japan. So it has a different agenda on these kind of questions, which also is a very influential agenda because the developing countries recognize and support these arguments. We’re moving into a world where former colonized countries like China and India will become the big players. This is going to shake up the global value system. So I’m not arguing personally against democracy, but I’m trying to imagine what the world’s going to be like when countries have different imperatives, different histories, and therefore different priorities.
