Reform in China: He's right and he's right?

For those of you interested in U.S.-China relations, there's a very interesting debate in this week's Foreign Policy magazine between James Mann and David Lampton. (For those of you not interested in U.S.-China relations...don't you read the news??)

David Mann is the author of The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. His thesis: U.S. corporations, dependent on cheap (i.e. docile and repressed) Chinese labor for their profits, have successfully perpetuated the fantasy that trade with China will eventually make China switch to democracy. Actually, Mann says, that's a load of BS - despite our hundreds of billions of dollars in trade with that country, China is getting less free, not more.

David Lampton, a reknowned China scholar, makes two points in rebuttal. First, he says, even if we were to care more about Chinese democracy, there's precious little we could actually do about it:

[E]ven if democracy were to rank first among U.S. goals in dealing with Beijing, could the United States achieve or effectively promote it? Again, consider the dispiriting U.S. interventions in Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Or if it’s verbal condemnations of human rights abuse Mann prefers, consider Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Libya—all states that have blithely ignored the opprobrium of human rights advocates and U.S. politicians for decades.

That's a good point. Other countries - especially superpowers like China - don't exactly jump when the U.S. says jump.

Lampton's second point is that, while trade links with China won't bring about democracy in the short run, they will help to build up the civil society that will help democracy be stable if and when it does come about:

It takes time to build democratic political institutions such as competitive political parties and independent courts. For democracy to take root, societies need to pass through a sequence of stages: from building national identity, to constructing functioning state institutions, to assuring participation in those institutions, to distributing benefits more equitably. Moreover, it takes time for the democratic values and behaviors that support those institutions to develop; each society, including China, must be allowed to find its own path to more pluralistic, participatory, and humane governance. Move too quickly, and the likely result is disorder and backsliding on democracy and human rights, both of which we have seen in post-Communist Russia.

Another great point. Elections are pointless without institutions like a legal system, NGOs, private businesses, churches, independent universities, etc. Without those institutions, elections tend to produce either autocratic faux-populist strongmen (see: Venezuela, Russia) or tyrannical ethnic/tribal majority governments (see: Iraq, Algeria). Lampton is absolutely right that these institutions take time to build, and that our trade ties with China are helping to build them.

But Mann is also right. Multinational corporations make a great deal of money by using Chinese workers who have neither the ability to bargain for better pay or working conditions nor the political ability to elect leaders who could help them out. China's autocratic system helps the short-term bottom lines of U.S. multinationals, and that - not any concern for democracy - is why they lobby the U.S. government for more trade ties. U.S. companies know that speaking up about democracy, or even reamining silent when U.S. politicians do so, may cause them to lose their China privileges. So they shut up, and they encourage the U.S. government to shut up too.

Just because the U.S. can't bring democracy to China doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it. First, talking about democracy makes it clear to countries like Vietnam or Thailand or Indonesia that the U.S. model of government is different from - and better than - the Chinese model. It solidifies the U.S. role as the ideological champion of individual freedom, which - if we lived up to that role - would boost our prestige worldwide. And even gently encouraging China to go democratic may inspire future generations of Chinese leaders to think in that direction.

So, Lampton is right that trade ties are important, and Mann is right that democracy advocacy is important and that multinational corporations' motives are not to be trusted. The two men are basically talking past each other.