When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  In 1979, the Chinese government introduced a centralised family planning programme that limited parents to a single child. The impetus had come from a visit by a senior Chinese official, Song Jian, to Europe in 1979, where he had read The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the think-tank the Club of Rome, a pessimistic study of the human capacity for adaptation. Taking his opportunity to commit an error on a vast scale, Song employed Chinese mathematicians to calculate that the optimal population for China, given projected resources, was precisely 700 million people. A plan was duly concocted to reduce China’s population of 940 million people to the desired level by 2080.

  These calculations inspired the Family Planning Policy of 1979. Enforcement was never total: there were complex provincial exemptions and permissions for a second child if the first was a daughter. But even at the plan’s most relaxed, more than a third of the Chinese population was subject to a strict one-child policy. A vast apparatus of registration and inspection was constructed. The invasion of privacy was literal in the case of the Chinese women compelled to have a contraceptive intrauterine device surgically installed after their first child. Those rare women who had a second child were sterilised by tubal ligation. Over 400 million Chinese women have been subject to one or the other of these two procedures. Failure to comply with the regulations could result in a fine, the loss of state employment or the loss of education and health services.

  An error of this kind cannot spread so easily in a democracy, although it can easily be made. In India in 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a temporary state of emergency and a suspension of democracy. She placed her son Sanjay in charge of a sterilisation programme. Some of the tactics used to ‘persuade’ people to comply were the banning of people with three or more children from government employment unless they had been sterilised, the withholding of irrigation water from the recalcitrant, or the loss of a month’s salary or even food rations. There were even reports of the police rounding men up for sterilisation. Between June 1975 and March 1977 there were 11 million sterilisations in India. It was disgraceful and indefensible. It also could not last. There was a flurry of lawsuits for wrongful death after some people contracted infections from unhygienic procedures. There were violent riots in protest. The prime minister called a halt to the state of emergency in March 1977, and the electorate voted her out of office that very month in an election she had called in the expectation that her rule would be vindicated.

  In China there was no possibility of lawsuits, protest and popular regulation through the ballot box, so the policy lasted decades. The consequences are now visible. China has too few children to pay the pension liability of their parents. By 2050, one-third of Chinese people will be over sixty years of age, but China’s population peaked in 2012. China has too many men, and too many old men in particular. In October 2015, the Communist Party of China declared an end to the one-child policy, but the damage has been done.

  The ratio of children and pensioners to those in work is rising in China. The same ratio is falling in India. The fact that India’s mean age is twenty-five and China’s is thirty-four might offer a clue to the most intriguing rivalry of the twenty-first century. The world is currently conducting a laboratory experiment in which an authoritarian society, China, is pitted against a democracy, India, in a race for economic supremacy. The early indications have all been that the rapid decision-making of China’s authoritarian capitalism will prevail over the time and value-consuming conversations of a democracy. Between 1990 and 2014 India grew from 4 per cent of US GDP to 11 per cent. In the same period China leapt from 9 to 60 per cent.

  It would be wrong, though, to suppose that this signals the virtue of political command and control. China’s superior economic performance is actually owed to the fact that the provisional liberalisation of its economy occurred earlier than India’s. In 1958 Mao unwound collective farming in favour of a system of household responsibility and permitted the use of foreign capital, but Chinese growth really took off after the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping twenty years later. India during the same period was weighed down by the business regulation that its Congress Party had inherited from British Fabian socialists. The state-owned airlines, railways, water, electricity, post and telephone services were sclerotic. The Industries Act 1951 required all businesses to get a licence from the government before they could launch, expand or change products. Foreign investment dried up and India came to accept what was known as the ‘Hindutva’ rate of growth, between 3 and 4 per cent a year. Eventually foreign reserves fell to a crisis level and India accepted help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in exchange for necessary liberalisation, which began in 1991 under the finance minister and later prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh. The medicine worked. Adjust the data for the fact that India’s liberal reforms began thirteen years after China’s and their respective GDP growth rates are close to identical. India’s GDP per capita all but doubled between 2007 and 2016, when India overtook China to be the fastest-growing economy in the world.

  It may well be the case that India’s democratic institutions, so often derided, not least within India itself, as a restraint on growth, are its greatest comparative advantage. Historically, democracy and prosperity have always been companions. The only durable exceptions have been the oil-rich countries, which went straight from poverty to wealth via natural abundance. There are good reasons to suppose that democracies are better hosts for enterprise than autocracies. Prosperity produces a substantial middle class which demands recognition and political rights that the autocracy cannot satisfy. A democracy, in which all have a stake, is better at managing the many conflicting interests generated by capitalism. China today has many such problems and it is not obvious that its political system will be able to manage them. Corporate debt is too high and there are too many inefficient state-owned companies, clustered in yesterday’s industries of steel, coal, shipbuilding and heavy machinery. There has been too much poor investment, in the wrong places; exactly the sort of allocation error you would expect in a command economy.

  China is seeking to become a rich country in a unique way, without granting any concomitant political freedoms. It is the most potent challenge the world has seen to the argument that the open society is better, because more productive, than all its competitors. But China is yet to exhibit the ingenuity that will be necessary to maintain its progress. The errors of foolish men, thinking they can move mountains on their own, may cost them eventually.

  Not that the superiority of India over China relies on victory in the economic race. It is not because of the dry number of GDP per capita that we should prefer India. Even if the fissiparous politics of China do hold during its economic odyssey, freedom has a value of its own. In Development and Freedom Amartya Sen argued that any measure of progress must include the degree of liberty that people enjoy. Freedom is, argues Sen, an instrumental cause of growth but it is also a political virtue of the first order and an answer to a human need. On that basis, it would be preferable to live in an India with a lower growth rate than in a China with a higher one. India is a better society because it is a more open society. It is a nation in which argument is encouraged and in which the rebel can exercise the right to free speech. The Chinese government sees the media as tribunes of authority rather than the place for critical voices. In 2016 there were thirty-eight journalists in prison in China. India, by contrast, has 500 television channels and more newspaper readers than any nation on earth.

  The Indian novelist Vikram Seth abandoned his doctoral thesis on the demography of China because he wanted to write. His book Three Chinese Poets includes a translation of Li Bai’s ‘The Hard Road’: ‘Travelling is hard! So many forks in the road. Which one to take?’ There was only one road in China. Mao thought he could rid China of contradiction in a rectification programme, but the truth about mistakes is that they cannot be reliably defined in advance, by a supreme leader in a speech. The only way to define an error for sure is to m
ake one and to devise a political system that can cope with the consequences. Good politics has the two virtues to which Mao, in ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’ and ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’, made fraudulent claim. It is a cacophony of dissenting voices and it moves mountains gradually. Mao’s speech about a hundred flowers blooming ended in repression. His speech about the foolish old man concluded with the angels descending to move the mountain. But there are no angels. There are only, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, the better angels of our nature, and it is only in a democracy that the angels take wing.

  The Grand Inquisitor

  It is extraordinary that, during the 1960s, it was easy to find Western intellectuals to argue that the cultural revolution taking place in China was an intriguing challenge to the liberal democracies. The tendency for Western intellectuals to pour scorn on the societies in which they exercise their right to a voice is dispiriting. The Mao apologists were the counterparts of those comfortably naive utopians in the 1930s who managed to pass through Stalin’s Russia without ever seeing anything untoward. Two notoriously uncritical pilgrims were the British Fabians Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, the man who drafted the 1918 constitution of the Labour Party. In 1941 the Webbs published a book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, which was pure Soviet propaganda in effect even if not in intent. In later editions, the question mark, the only accurate thing in the title, was dropped. The same sentiment is now common on the far left of politics where it is always easy to find critics who will decry Western life as, variously, corrupt, shallow, tawdry and materialistic, immorally self-regarding but, above all, capitalist.

  There is also a temptation in Western societies, a tendency more usually associated with the political Right, to submit to the authority that poses as a superior wisdom. In their different ways Robespierre, Hitler and Castro promote themselves as the fount of authority. They all claim, as Lenin and Stalin did in Russia and Mao in China, that history is on their side. They disdain freedom and the imperfection of a liberal society in the pursuit and promise of something higher. The tragedy is that the revolution, unless it is done in the name of liberty, is always ultimately a prison cell. It is not by chance that so many of the speakers in this book – Nehru, Mandela, Suu Kyi, La Pasionaria, Pankhurst, Havel and Wiesel – spent time in jail. Words in defence of individual freedom and the virtues of politics are dangerous and the authorities are always wary of them and wish them silenced.

  One of the greatest of speeches in fiction is a brilliant essay on this topic, and it takes place in a prison cell. There are some magnificent soliloquies competing for the prize of best fictional address. Shakespeare has a claim to be the greatest speechwriter the world has ever seen. Cassius’s speech to Brutus and Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar, Henry V’s address to his troops before the battle of Agincourt and John of Gaunt’s description of England in Richard II are political speeches of the highest order. Milton gives the devil all the best lines in Paradise Lost. Winston Churchill’s obscure Savrola is a roman-à-clef in which the main character is a prime minister who makes some compelling speeches. But no fictional address is more pertinent to the public crimes of the modern era than that scripted by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.

  ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ is a long speech relayed by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha, but given by the cardinal of Seville to Christ. It is the story of Christ’s return to earth, to Seville at the time of the Inquisition. When Christ performs a series of miracles, to the great acclaim of the people, he is arrested by the Holy Guard of the Grand Inquisitor and sentenced to be burnt to death. On the eve of the auto-da-fé the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell to explain to him the reason why he must be sacrificed. The cardinal delivers a speech devoted to dismissing the notion that freedom can lead to happiness: ‘Man is constituted as a mutineer; can mutineers ever be happy?’

  Since the departure of Christ, he goes on, man has conquered freedom and has done so in order to win contentment. The Grand Inquisitor claims the credit for the stability and order he has imposed, ‘for nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom!’ Men will follow those who turn stones into bread, as the devil tried to tempt Christ to do, because the bread of the earthly kind is more important than freedom, the bread of heaven. ‘Feed them, and then ask virtue of them!’ as the Grand Inquisitor puts it, which is essentially the bargain that China is offering.

  The Grand Inquisitor’s speech is an encapsulation of the promise of every utopian, every populist and every tyrant. Tyranny begins with a revolution that goes awry, with the arrogant assumption that human satisfaction will be most quickly and fully realised by the concentration of power with an elite who understand the wellsprings of human motivation. The one false step in Orwell’s prophetic Nineteen Eighty-Four is O’Brien’s terrifying speech in which he explains that ‘the party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power’. This is, and Orwell intended it to be, the very depths of human decline. But most politics, even tyrannical politics, is not like that. It is clothed in a justification that there is a greater good disclosed only to the initiated. This is what Robespierre and Hitler promise. It is what Castro really believes he is doing.

  The Grand Inquisitor goes to great pains to see off the rebellion promised by Christ. He absolutely thinks he is in the right. ‘We corrected your great deed’, he says, ‘and founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And people were glad that they had been brought together into a flock and that at last from their hearts had been removed such a terrible gift.’ The veneer always cracks, though. As he closes his long disquisition the Grand Inquisitor is himself tempted to be candid: ‘Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom for us and submit to us. And what does it matter whether we are right or whether we are telling a lie? They themselves will be persuaded we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom has brought them.’ The speech of the Grand Inquisitor is a paean to a world without error, a mythical world of total security and complete safety. The trouble is that this always leads to the Committee of Public Safety with a Robespierre at its head. As the Grand Inquisitor puts it, the universal question of all politics is ‘before whom should one bow down?’ The answer of the rebel, granted the freedom of speech in a democracy, the answer given by Havel and Wiesel, is that one should never bow down.

  We need to pay heed to the inspirational figures who refused to bow down. One tragic consolation of twentieth-century tyranny is that it sent three of the finest thinkers to Britain and the United States to teach us the value of what we have. Karl Popper left Vienna in 1937, the year before the Nazi tanks rolled in and forced through the Anschluss. He went first to New Zealand, where he wrote one of the great works in defence of liberal freedom, The Open Society and Its Enemies. The formative moment in civilisation, says Popper, echoing Pericles, is the moment that a closed society gave way to an open society. Leszek Kołakowski was convinced that Marxism was disgraceful on his first trip to Russia from his native Poland and so began an intellectual journey towards truth that culminated in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism, a book of sparkling honesty which is nothing like as dull as its title would suggest and which makes the essential point that the cruelty of Stalinism is not the exception but the rule. Isaiah Berlin witnessed both the February and the October revolutions in 1917 as a young boy in Petrograd. His family fled anti-Semitic abuse to England where, in Oxford, Berlin insisted in Two Concepts of Liberty that civilisation rested on a plurality of voices only possible within a polity that respects the liberty of the individual. ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes’, he wrote, ‘is almost always the road to inhumanity.’

  They were all three fugitives from the tyrannies of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. Their work carves
out distinctions that are cast-iron, between freedom and unfreedom, between fear and hope. They were not afraid to take sides, largely because they had seen the other side in action. Their combined and collected works are a reminder that the achievement of the open society is not to be taken for granted. Not the least of its virtues is that an open society took them in and housed them for long enough and safely enough for them to be able to write their accounts of why this is the only type of society in which human beings will consent to live for long. They all three lived into old age and died quietly, to be mourned by those around them. It does not take much gruesome imagination to wonder what might have happened had they all stayed at home. The open society would be every bit as desirable, but we would lack the language in which to say so.

  To those giants of freedom we can add the name of one more rebel, one more magnificent public speaker. That name is Charles Spencer Chaplin. By 1939 the two best candidates for the title of the most famous man in the world were Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. They were in direct confrontation. In 1931, on a world publicity tour, Chaplin had been greeted with acclamation in Berlin, a fact that the Nazi hierarchy resented. The visit led to the publication, in 1934, of a book for German children called The Jews Are Looking at You in which Chaplin was depicted as a ‘disgusting Jewish acrobat’. Chaplin happened not to be Jewish, but he was offended by the book and resolved to retaliate.

  It took an intervention from President Roosevelt to ensure that The Great Dictator, which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, starred in and scored in 1940, ever got made. Chaplin was worried that the film would not be shown in England for fear of offending the Germans and that American non-interventionists and pro-Nazi groups would get the film banned in the United States. The president gave a personal guarantee that the film would be released. It is a good thing it was, because The Great Dictator ends with one of the great rhetorical expressions of the superiority of liberal democracy over tyranny. Chaplin’s first sound production was also inspired by his viewing of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which he found uproariously funny and ripe for satire. Filming began as war loomed in September 1939.