‘Chinese Gulag’ in Tibet

It is particularly ironic that as we enter the final year of Ronald Reagan’s long tenure in office members of Congress and the press should suddenly become interested in the question of human rights--more specifically human rights in China. How quickly we forget that poor Jimmy Carter was drummed out of office at least in part for the unrealistic priority he gave to the attainment of human rights in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy.

Having just returned from four months in China as a visiting professor in the Department of International Politics at Peking University, I found your editorial on the “Chinese Gulag” to be disturbing on a number of counts.

There is no doubt that China is a “totalistic” society in the sense that the Western-liberal distinction between private and public life is frequently missing. This does make it difficult to know what is going on in China--especially if you try to do so from afar and from the Western press. This also means that individuals are circumspect in their conversations and activities. Frankly, my sense is that this has far more to do with China’s self-inflicted wounds of the so-called Cultural Revolution than with its current form of Chinese socialism. However, these qualities do not add up to a Chinese gulag in the sense that Solzhenitsyn applied it to the Soviet Union. Serious political discussion and criticism abounds in China’s universities and academic institutes--at least in the ones I visited.

The Chinese are sensitive about the Tibetan issue, but not because they are worried about losing a population which they might otherwise gratuitously and “routinely torture.” Rather, they are sensitive because of Tibet’s enormous geopolitical significance, i.e., it separates the “middle earth” from the historically unfriendly nation of India. In addition, the Tibetans are only one of 54 different Chinese ethnic minorities which are held together very delicately.

I am in heated agreement with one point in this editorial--regarding the absence of a Reagan human rights policy. But given Reagan’s campaign lambasting of Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 about the lack of realism in their foreign policy, should we really have expected a Reagan human rights policy?

Politics and economics are changing rapidly in China--especially for a society deeply wedded to its feudal past. Many believe that the results of the 13th Party Congress held in October show positive movement in both arenas. China’s new venture through the “primary stage of socialism” is a sign that economic innovation and political reform will not only be possible but encouraged.

China has taken some significant steps to move away from the doctrinaire following of Marxist-Leninist thought. This shows promise and may bring with it an unprecedented experience in the last 4,000 years of Chinese history--a truly open society.

MARK P. PETRACCA

Assistant Professor

of Political Science

UC Irvine