Last Saturday was May 4. Anyone conversant with modern Chinese history knows that date is associated with student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1919 challenging the world order and calling for modernisation in China. This was 70 years before the mass demonstrations of April-June 1989, which the communist dictatorship drowned in blood, but which it has airbrushed out of its history.
Given that we have a growing problem with China’s illiberalism and aggression, we should declare May 4 a global day of protest against neo-authoritarianism and of calls for a reframed liberal international order. We should make it May 4, because Xi’s China holds not the promise of a new order but the danger of the collapse of global order. We need to rethink China’s history and politics, because the way it is currently governed puts us on a collision course with it.
The students in Tiananmen Square on May 4, 1919 (about four thousand of them) called for a new China and a new world order. We need both now. But we have all too many students in our own universities championing the fascistic Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel. And we have too many people in this country defending Xi’s China, or simply asserting that its rise and hegemony are unstoppable. None of this works as a future we should want.
Liberal democratic institutions globally are under siege on various fronts, and their own histories and geopolitical stances are being attacked by mobs of deluded activists. Unless we rally and articulate a clear and robust case for liberal order in politics, trade and international law, we risk the global order regressing disastrously.
We might begin with a massive correction of the version of its own history propagated shamelessly by China’s Communist Party and swallowed uncritically by its fellow travellers. For Xi’s China, far more than Putin’s Russia or Khamenei’s Iran, to say nothing of that pugnacious, pygmy, totalitarian North Korea, is a very serious and growing threat to the international liberal order held together by the US and its system of alliances since 1945.
In the May 4 demonstrations of 1919, the cream of its rising generation called for a disintegrating China to embrace “Mr Science and Mr Democracy” and to become a modern country emulating the West. They were nationalistic and critical of the Versailles Treaty’s concessions to Japan, at China’s expense. But they read widely, thought freely and were not killed or imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
The Communist Party claims the May Fourth Movement prepared the way for its own formation, in 1921. But the May Fourth Movement was the very antithesis of a totalitarian propagandist stunt. China in 1919 and for 30 years afterwards had a very diverse range of political and cultural thinkers. Prominent among them was the brilliant liberal, Hu Shih (1891-1962), long a hero of mine, who deserves much wider recognition.
He lived and fostered the kind of civil life and political courage the Communist Party has stultified and suffocated throughout its history, even before 1949. Never more than now, when Xi Jinping Thought is being imposed across every stratum of Chinese society, with dire implications for the economic and social achievements of the decades prior to Xi’s assertion of one-man rule.
When people who are household names in this country – whether in business, politics or academia – lionise the party’s governance of China, they and their audiences need sharply to be reminded the party arrests, censors, tortures, disappears and executes dissidents and civil right activists. That is not a China the hegemony of which in Asia we should be in any way willing to accept.
Our difficulties with Beijing are rooted in this reality. The insistence by Beijing’s acolytes, fellow travellers and useful idiots that calling it out is “Cold War thinking” and risks taking the world down a dangerous path are seriously muddled. We are on a dangerous path because Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia are on a war footing and we have all been caught napping.
There was World War I and World War II, then Cold War I. We are now in the early stages of Cold War II. We must work hard to so constrain and deter the authoritarian powers and their fifth columns in our midst that Cold War II does not become World War III, which would be a catastrophe for us all.
To think our way through this situation, we require a robust strategy underpinned by a clear-eyed grasp of the history of China (and Russia, Iran and North Korea) and a vision for a better and more viable world on the other side. Right now, we seem barely to have a strategy at all and there is no sign of a coherent vision for a world order in which Putin and Xi are gone, Iran liberated from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs, or North Korea from the Kim mafia. We need that vision.
Given the Communist Party denounces any serious critical history writing as “historical nihilism”, we should take May 4 away from it, as an international day of reflection on the possibilities for a new, liberal international order on the far side of the dictators being seen off. Its hero should be Hu Shih, a participant in the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and a kind of Chinese John Dewey.
Diplomat, essayist, novelist, philosopher, political reformer, president of Peking University (Beida, as it is called today) and editor of the Free China Journal, Hu Shih was a critic of both nationalist and communist dictatorship and urged that the world adopt Western-style democracy. He contested Sun Yat-sen’s assertion that China was not ready for democratic government. He fled China for Taiwan in 1949. He would not have survived Mao.
Next time someone tells you China is well governed under Xi, tell them it would be better governed if Xi’s dictatorship was replaced by Hu Shih Thought – and the 21st century world a much safer place.
More Coverage
Free lunch troubles exposes Liberals’s experience problem
Peter Dutton’s frontbench has much more real world experience than the Labor Ministry, but there has been a swath cut through the ranks of Liberals with treasury and financial experience.
These tariffs aren’t about economics, they are about bargaining
Donald Trump sees his threat of tariffs as a powerful lever to use in negotiations with other countries. It’s all about parleying, not economics.