It is hard to recall the last time a senior political figure spoke to the press with the candour shown by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Ottawa earlier this week. Responding to a question directed at Canadian foreign minister, Stephane Dion, about China’s human rights record, Mr Wang’s short-tempered remarks indicated how little the mindset of China’s rulers has changed since the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
Speaking through a translator, Wang dismissed the reporter’s question – which had been asked on behalf of a pool of journalists – as “unacceptable” and “full of prejudice and arrogance.” He also asked other journalists to refrain from “groundless or unwarranted speculations.” With evident anger he countered that “Other people don’t know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it is the Chinese people who are in the best situation, in the best position to have a say about China’s human rights situation.”
Wang’s subsequent appeals to the country’s economic record – “China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty”– and its constitution – “China has written protection and promotion of human rights into our constitution” – were equally revealing. Although they point in slightly different directions, both are from a familiar playbook. The first implicitly concedes that while there may have been a loss of freedom it has been offset by economic progress; the second response protests, perhaps a little too much, that China’s human rights safeguards are perfectly adequate and need no interference from the West. Ironically, this argument closely resembles those set out in Charter 08, the human rights manifesto drafted by imprisoned Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo among others. Among its many memorable lines one finds the following: “The constitution must be the highest law in the land, beyond violation by any individual, group, or political party.”
China’s rulers fear being held to the standard of their own constitution. They remain particularly sensitive to dissent that comes from within because it calls their bluff on this point. Charter 08, for instance, notes that: “The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.”
Intolerance has reached new levels under President Xi Jinping. Since March 2013 his administration has consistently tightened its grip on public opinion, Internet use and, according to Human Rights Watch, it has “detained and imprisoned hundreds of activists in successive waves of arrests”, “targeted for prosecution public opinion leaders and liberal thinkers” and “aggressively promoted the ‘correct ideology’ of Party supremacy.”
None of this has done anything to diminish the power of the Tiananmen Square protests which took place twenty-seven years ago today. In fact China’s determined repression of attempts to commemorate Tiananmen have redoubled its significance. While formerly repressive states like Myanmar and Taiwan move, tentatively, towards accountability for the past, Beijing’s stubborn defiance of criticism, both foreign and domestic, comes over as increasingly fearful and shortsighted.
The world has changed since 1989 but China’s leaders seem determined to resist the change. Mr Wang’s gaffe is an embarrassing example of Beijing’s surreal ignorance of this new reality, and a worrying reminder of just how far the ruling party’s internal culture has to evolve if China is ever to fulfil its enormous political potential. As many other countries have learned since the end of the Cold War, governments that refuse to come to terms with a repressive history almost inevitably condemn themselves to living within its shadow.
