by Bruce Page
The ‘Establishment’ concept might usefully be dispensed with as it approaches its sixtieth birthday. It has produced enough of the hallucinations likely to occur when a potentially clear term, ‘ruling class’, is replaced by one inherently deceptive. As we must deal with the amazing privileges our financial rulers have awarded themselves, it might be timely once more to speak frankly about the realities of social status and advantage.
Murdoch’s kitsch-ideology is unusual in attributing general influence to conspiracy inside democracy. (The view has few scholarly exponents, though the economist Vilfredo Pareto was one.) But conspiracy can be considered as the form the authoritarian principle assumes in a free society – as against a society where it can operate untrammelled. This is implicit in the maxim that force and fraud are equivalent. If you believe one authoritarian manifestation can work, you will presumably think likewise of the other.
But much rests on what ‘working’ means. At the end of 2002, Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times investigated the appalling results of China’s determination to deal with its AIDS epidemic by authoritarian means – that is, keeping it quiet – and drew a sad historical comparison.
Thirteen years ago I watched the Chinese Army turn its machine guns on prodemocracy protesters, killing hundreds and outraging the world. I couldn’t imagine the Chinese government doing anything worse. But here in Henan, it looks like a slow-motion slaughter on an even more horrifying scale.
What is the story of Newscorp’s connection with Chinese social and political experiments?
Two circumstances pervade it. First, it opened when Newscorp’s libertarianism was triumphal. Murdoch and his followers reckoned they had fought ‘shoulder to shoulder’ (as one put it) to vanquish the USSR and other tyrannies. In this sense the Victory’s parrot fought at Trafalgar – but anyway Newscorp was feisty. ‘Bring on the Chinese’ seems to have been the mood. Second is the condition just then of the Chinese nation and its government. It was the aftermath of Tiananmen, an event like Peterloo or Bloody Sunday, intensely revealing as domestic political massacre is bound to be – though, allowing for population size, Tiananmen was about three times more lethal than Peterloo.
Among individuals, the taboo against killing fails most often among those entangled with each other both emotionally and legally. Such ordinary murderers rarely harm people unconnected with them. Governments, of course, are different. They usually kill foreigners, not their own legal connections. Disorientation is natural when these norms collapse. People may prefer not to think about governments which are murderous in the domestic sphere, for their motivations are paradoxical. Inhibitions against homicide fail only when overwhelming emotions are present – or none, as in the psychopathic serial killer. But between government and citizen there should be no passion sufficient to dissolve taboos. Citizens are not lovers, the great conservative Michael Oakeshott tells us, ‘and civil association is not a relationship of love’. This makes it a reliable bar to homicide. Moreover, in civil society the general attributes of the lethal psychopath bar their carrier from power. Thus a government which kills its own must be one where the psychopath’s emotional blankness is well represented, and civil association absent. Convenience may restrain its actions, but little else. Consistent with this we can understand settled democracies having developed some halting concern about their own rulers’ use of lethal force against foreigners. And, of course, the fact that a homicidal government has no legitimacy.
For China, the problem of legitimacy applies with special power. No one really knows which was the ‘worst’ of the great genocides, but the Nazi and Soviet examples at least exist historically. Russian terror between 1917 and the 1990s sought to erase memory and ‘engineer the soul’. But the engineers were up against writers remarkable even as successors to Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova and others still.
Akhmatova’s dedication to the famous poem Requiem says that when Leningrad ‘swung like a useless appendage … from its prisons’ she spent seventeen months in prison queues.
One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me … there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.
‘Requiem’, 200 lines of crystalline understatement, is the description the woman wanted. It works, says the poet’s translator D. M. Thomas, by means opposite to the piled detail of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, but both are works of invincible recall. Of the inhabitants of the prison queues and gulags, Akhmatova says simply: ‘I have woven for them a great shroud.’
In China this cannot happen, as even the need for a descriptive shroud is unmentionable: history is contraband. To be sure, the Party can’t wholly hide the epic mortality of Mao’s era. But the Helmsman made ‘mistakes’; let them fade away as such. The peoples of the former USSR may slip back into the simulated order and deadly chaos of the past, but not in ignorance of its nature. Khrushchev in his first account called Stalin’s actions ‘crimes’, and Russians do not confuse them with errors any more than do Germans in the case of Hitler.
Where does this connect with the trade of newspaper and television offices? First, Akhmatova’s account should inter the myth of the detached reporter. The writer’s task, at any time, is not detachment; it is to engage without being consumed, and describe what calls for description. At Akhmatova’s level it demands nerve hard to imagine. Requiem was made in a society swamped by mania, of which she and her family were victims (‘son in irons and husband clay’). Too dangerous for paper, over seventeen years it existed only in the memory of Akhmatova and certain friends.
Second, commonplace reporting exists to reduce the call for feats which so outshine it. While news media and politics remain transparent, a society may avoid such lethal spirals as need a Requiem, and an Akhmatova, to unwind them. We shouldn’t ask it to be done again.
It’s often reckoned (if not out loud) that flaws in the civil liberties of foreigners don’t impact on us. Certainly, wealthy democracies have often done business with despotic regimes – selling them weapons, indeed, until they (allegedly) point them at us and need taking out. Though there is high language at such moments, the liberties of the liberated do not seem indispensable.
China challenges such comfy notions. Changing the Beijing regime by physical force is hardly an option. But the way in which China solves the complicated difficulties it faces – or fails to solve them – may well decide how much freedom our own societies will maintain in the twenty-first century. This is because of the stupendous scale of those problems, and the extent to which they have been homegrown and artificial. Edward O. Wilson, widely considered the greatest of practising biologists, has written that however much progress the other nations make in moderating human impact on the world’s ecology China, as an ‘unsteady giant’, may helplessly cancel out all of it.
Westerners once imagined China as equable, a ‘perfect instance (in de Tocqueville’s words) of that species of well-being which a highly centralised administration may furnish … The condition of society there is always tolerable, never excellent.’ Reality rather was tolerable intervals in a turbulent penury. For generations the huge, rich, temperate land failed to generate a satisfactory life for its people. Subsistence agriculture under a thin web of bureaucracy was maybe an inevitable dead-end. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t Chinese DNA, since Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore (in its harsh way) are rich.
Ancient notions of environmental harmony did exist. But Mao replaced them with a violent assault on nature – originating a pollution syndrome which is now desperate, and shattering a brilliant generation of Chinese scholars and technologists who resisted his dogmatism. Chapter 9 (‘Virtually Normal’) suggested that modern states are built on statisti
cal techniques – Quetelet’s ‘advance enumeration of births and deaths’. All such science Mao brushed aside: the Great Leap Forward consequently was an insane vault into famine. When Ma Yinchu, president of Beijing University, computed the impending demographic disaster, he was denounced and dismissed. The famine the Party made took thirty, perhaps fifty million lives in 1959-61, amid cannibalism and infanticide ghastly evidence for Amartya Sen’s thesis that repression and secrecy are famine’s essential allies. Those knowing the truth at the time may have been as few as 300, for no realistic news media existed. ‘Writing about the bright side’ was safe, ‘writing about the dark side’ a delinquency.
Abuse both of individuals and of resources – particularly water – runs through the Party’s half-century in command. After the hydraulic engineer Huang Wanli was arrested for refusing to approve the Sanmenxia dam, Mao personally asked him to retract, and was told that ‘stifling of views … was China’s real problem’. Huang was sent to hard labour on Sanmenxia itself – admitted eventually to be useless. But even after attention from the Red Guards he declined the Party’s request for some emollient words on its technological record. ‘The earth,’ he said, ‘will always circle the sun … This will not change because of anything you have to say.’ When almost ninety, he told Judith Shapiro, author of Mao’s War against Nature, that ‘Mao was the greatest criminal in history … ‘
China’s secret history is filled with the recollections of men and women who won’t accept euphemisms about ‘error’, and whose evidence proves that the Party’s authoritarian actions have consistently generated catastrophes with no substantial cause, and intensified those arising naturally. Mao’s successors fear, rightly, that their present argument – it says the Party’s power monopoly is essential to China’s survival – would not survive the nation’s reconnection to its past.
China is a state which carefully limits accusations, but licenses itself to use calumnies freely. There is widespread mental stress, some of it officially manipulated, and some of it giving motivation to mystic cults such as Falun Gong. It is also very poor, with a very inequitably-distributed percapita GNP of £2,677, below South Africa (£4,435) and Russia (£6,360). Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s slogan ‘To Get Rich Is Glorious’ gave new, astonishing form to the socio-ecological pressures inherited from the Cultural Revolution. Trashing most of the Party’s corroded philosophy, Deng began the present charge for industrial growth.
It is the shift from agrarian to industrial life on a China-wide scale that makes Wilson’s ‘unsteady giant’. Though it now ranks beside America as the largest of grain producers, China is close to using more than it can grow. By 2030 annual imports of 200 million tons are likely to be wanted, roughly the world’s export total today. Getting rich now is crucial. Output must meet consumer demand, plus import bills – doing so within the capacity of a re-engineered but over-stressed water supply.
Eminent as Wilson is, many would challenge his details. But few would doubt his judgment that no simplicities apply. Paradoxically: grain shortage might be best met by moving China’s effort into fruit and vegetables (huge labour resources giving export advantage, though at high cost in social reconstruction). Certainly: industrialists, growers and consumers will have to achieve amazing waterefficiency. Generally: stress, clashes of interest and income-volatility will confront dress designers, subsistence farmers, cops, doctors, soldiers. Nothing says it’s impossible. Everything points to vast forces, unguessed effects and outrageous fortune intervening freely.
And this vast programme is to be accomplished without the open discourse free nations have required to moderate situations that were never as complex. Rather, the secretive authority which has serially betrayed China is serially awarding itself more – and more – chances. The Party _ maintains the tactics implicit in its last threadbare ideas – bribing consumers, denouncing ‘split-ists’ – because its record compels it to treat the people as political dead weight, devoid of reason and constancy, incapable of using free news media. It is the obvious course for satraps with no alternative. Less obvious is that a libertarian newspaperman – as Murdoch calls himself – should offer them comfort (‘objective support’).
The Tiananmen demonstrations were the climax to an increasingly manifest discontent with the elite’s indifference to its own offences. The Party chiefs knew that, however intemperate, the students intended no challenge to the state. There was a challenge to monopoly over the state, and the Party chose murder to deflect it – expelling colleagues who had the humanity to demur. For some years rigorous leftists had been admiring a replacement USSR, and Western democrats had hoped for cautious progress towards pluralism. Guns in the square made clear it was not so easy.
Murdoch, when entering this situation four years later, was coming, professedly, from the direction of a liberator. Something additional to commerce was involved in Newscorp’s payment of £525 million, in July 1993, for 63.6 per cent of a company called Satellite Television Asia Region (Star T-V), with large satellite cover on the Chinese mainland (it was based in Hong Kong, where British colonialism was expiring). Satellite television, Murdoch maintained, was a means to improve the world, just as subsidising the New York Post was about enabling tabloid journalism to make the world ‘a better place’. His stance offered nothing to compromise. It was that of the man of conscience, one of the last century’s important, overworked figures, converse of totalitarianism’s limp allies – the ‘fellow travellers’ and ‘useful idiots’.
Fellow travellers, of course, sometimes have excuses. Liberals such as Maynard Keynes saw through the Bolsheviks immediately, but for years afterwards eminent British intellectuals were fooled by the facade of the Moscow trials. Many businessmen traversed apartheid South Africa blind to the repression delineated by James Cameron, Anthony Sampson, Ruth First and others. But it isn’t compulsory to have the intuition of Keynes, or even the tradecraft of a trainee reporter. Aptitude, instruction and disappointment usually go into learning that cabbies and barmen at the smart end of town don’t model political conditions reliably; shrewd businessmen may be simpletons in such matters, and even admit it.
Rupert might cast himself as a simpleton, unskilled in complex truths certainly, the recreator of the New York Post could plead that his improvements to the world don’t run mainly to such things. But he insistently volunteers expertise in international causes – as when deciding that Harry Evans was not a man of conscience, or of enough conscience, and needed to be replaced at The Times by someone properly matched with the cause of Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn. And Evans’ deficiency was merely scepticism about plans for prompt social implosion in the Soviet territory (see Chapter 10 above). Like many life-long anticommunists at the time, conservatives and liberals, Evans was tinged with gradualism to that extent. Not so Murdoch. Freedom to him was one shaft, and he was its spearhead; the causes of totalitarianism destroyed, of unregulated (largely tabloid) television, of union-free workplaces and innovative finance were not divisible. Revelations since Russia’s advance towards freedom suggest that grand Western chest-drumming probably stiffened communism’s resistance somewhat. But passion might excuse it. It is hard not to think the anti-compromisers had a point, for the Soviet case teaches lessons on political monopoly that even idiots should have been able get in a single pass.
Murdoch also had liberation cred from an image that seemed macho to both admirers and detractors. The right-hand version could come out of Ayn Rand – the prose-poet of ‘objective individualism’, whose novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) depict titans eliminating collectivist foes of human excellence. In Murdoch’s case these would be ‘elitist’ and ‘snobbish’ editors (of his own and other papers), Luddite unions and the ubiquitous agents of something he has called ‘liberal totalitarianism’.
That usage is not unusual among right-wing voices, but Murdoch applies it particularly to rules and institutions involved with news and entertainment. Totalitarians of this kind permeate the Australian Broadcasting Comm
ission, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (and its successors), the Office of Fair Trading, the BBC and the staff of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Oddly enough, outfits like these are rarely caught lending a hand to the vanilla totalitarians who run prison camps or have people shot in the neck by secret policemen. The BBC and ABC indeed are among those who ‘drive them nuts’ (in Rupert Murdoch’s disapproving phrase) most regularly. Still, Murdoch’s typology has found supporters. We have seen the FCC’s political masters accepting Murdoch as freedom’s partisan, with happy results for Newscorp.
On the left hand are critics alleged to ‘demonise’ him, and perhaps they do. Michael Foot’s description, ‘an evil genius’, has been influential, and sounds something like a demon – macho, surely, ex officio. Numerous enemies credit him with demonic skill in exploiting the popular lust for his output (seeming almost as keen as he is to to exaggerate it). Some judge the machismo invincible, and Newscorp so demonically logical an expression of capitalism that only replacement of the entire system will change anything; meanwhile, realists might as well join the payroll. This, a snug fit with establishment theory, is another happy result for Newscorp.