Mandelson in China: do the Chinese care about human rights?

So my Lord Mandelson is in China, making a speech to the Communist Party School on how China needs to get with the programme on human rights. Is this likely to do any good? Is it not just one of those things that both we and the Chinese know we have to do when we go there? Do the Chinese actually care at all? Should they even care at all?

On the face of it the Party School sounds like an unpromising place to start. In fact, as our Embassy will have told Mandelson, it is the designated place where serious thinking is encouraged, albeit under controlled conditions. Mandelson is assured of a genuinely interested audience. But how far up the ladder does that interest percolate?
Unfortunately we have rather led the Chinese to dig in on this point. Many of them think our mindset is too rigid: that we see a red star and automatically think Soviet Eastern Europe. And so on both sides there is sometimes a dialogue of the deaf.

In fact there is no real comparison. Countries like East Germany really did try to pry into every corner of one’s life. China’s secret police don’t give a damn what people think or chat about in cafés. Even twenty years ago I collected a compendium of ribald jokes about the leadership from locals.

It is only the association of large numbers of dissidents that worries them, and then they crack down hard. In Chinese parlance this is called “killing the chicken to frighten the monkeys”. In 1998 a group of activists were jailed for trying to found an independent political party; there is no record of their ever having been released. The fearsome persecution of the Falun Gong religious sect is an extended act of revenge for its achievement, in 1999, of gathering 10,000 demonstrators outside Party headquarters in Beijing without anybody realising in advance.

The key to this occasional severity, in tandem with strict controls on information, is the desire to maintain a unified public opinion. This is a significant element of public policy. Better to create a climate of no dissidence than to persecute dissidents. And it’s fortunate that the Party’s monomania sits so well with the idea inherent in most Asian cultures that collective rights trump individual ones. Anyone who has regular dealings with Chinese know how hard it is to influence their minds away from the state orthodoxy, which is all most of them have ever heard. Thus it is vital to exclude all heretical opinions from the public space, though everyone may know they exist in the shadows.

This is the dilemma: China knows that open access to information is vital for economic success, but does not want to loosen its grip on public opinion. They have genuinely moved on from Big Brother (ob. 9.9.1976, 33 years ago today); they now concede a high degree of individual freedom, but for the foreseeable future there will be lines you can’t cross. It’s easy to justify, after all: the maintenance of a system which ensures that 1.4 billion people get fed is more important than intellectuals mouthing off, isn’t it? The Soviet system was not only more oppressive, but didn’t actually feed its people.

Ultimately the Chinese will realise that freedom is more efficient as well as being, well, freer and more human. I can vouch for the fact that most of them do value the latter qualities. Perhaps Lord Mandelson is just the man to make the point.