In China, the Color of Individualism Is Stiflingly Drab

On the day I left China, after giving a series of lectures on international relations there, 31 criminals were executed in Peking Stadium. This was the largest mass execution since Deng Xiaoping set the country firmly on a course toward socialist modernization.

As executions in China go, the numbers were small. About 3 million landlords were executed between 1949 and 1951; 400,000 more persons were killed by mob violence during the tumultuous cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976.

But the numbers in Deng’s China are beginning to add up. Over the past two years more than 15,000 persons have been sentenced to capital punishment in the People’s Republic of China for crimes ranging from rape to petty theft. As a result, in part, Congress now is considering a solution that openly criticizes China for its restriction of “fundamental political and civil rights” and the heavy hand of the government as “the first arbiter of all cultural, social and moral questions.”

For the Chinese today, even the most personal of decisions--whether to have children and how many--is a matter of national policy. Those who deviate from the norm--which is to marry late and have only one child--are subjected to stiff economic sanctions, severe social ostracism and forced abortions.

The recent executions are a vivid reminder that concern about human rights in China is timely. For despite the official rhetoric about emancipating the human mind, seeking truth from facts rather than ideology, and the importance of learning from Western experience, China is a tightly controlled society in which the costs of deviation can be very high.

The liberal use of capital punishment is intended by the government not only as punishment for criminals but also as part of a policy, outlined earlier in the year, of “killing one to warn 100.” At that rate, millions would have to be executed to spread the message to China’s 1.3 billion people.

Government control in the workplace is equally heavy-handed and repressive. All work is assigned by the state through local labor bureaus, and it normally takes one to three years for young people (even those with university educations) to be assigned to their work units. In Peking I learned, in fact, that “job waiting” is now considered the No. 1 occupation in China. Promotion within the work unit is rare and generally unsought, because added responsibilities do not bring authority over most workers or an increase in the manager’s standard of living.

Transfer to other more appropriate work units also is rare, and this seems to be the major complaint of virtually all young people whom I met. No matter how good a guide’s English skills, for example, he or she could not hope to become a teacher (or vice versa) or aspire to foreign study. “The needs of the work unit come first,” one young doctor serving as an English-language tour guide said, “and we must serve the people in the ways we are assigned.”

What seems to be missing in China today is opportunity. And this is possibly the greatest drag on the government’s accelerating drive to become modern by the year 2000. As one university professor said, “It used to be that the people were dressed in clothes that made them look drab. But they are living lives that are drab no matter how bright the colors of their clothes.”

The new “individual-responsibility system” on which the modernization drive is based has made some people rich, especially farmers who can sell their produce as individuals in the hundreds of free markets sanctioned by the government. But it has not had the same effect on China’s factory work force. For the urban worker in particular, the quality of life is declining.

The riposte to all this is that China still doesn’t need capitalism with its emphasis on individual achievement and reward. The imperatives of feeding and housing a quarter of the inhabitants of this planet probably do overwhelm the argument that there are resources that should be spared to accommodate individual preferences or rehabilitate those who break the law.

But without individualism there can be no genius. And until its leaders recognize this essential fact, China will never harness the one resource that it has in abundance: the human mind.