„We're changing the country right now“
former Bundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt talking with young Chinese intellectuals (from Die Zeit 11/04):
For four years a round of young Chinese intellectuals have been meeting with Helmut Schmidt on initiative of Die Zeit. From secret dissidents to enlightened proponents of the government, the complete spectrum of political thinking in the People's Republic is represented. The discussions, lasting for hours and quite entertaining, are by now so hard-going, that Chinese participants do not want to see each other any longer. But Helmut Schmidt brings them together again and again.
Die Zeit: During your China journey in December 2000 you, Helmut Schmidt, saw a certain hope for an amalgam of modern Konfuzianism and democracy – as a possibility, that would fill the mental vacuum of the post-communist times.
Helmut Schmidt: I believe that in China there'll come to a rejuvenation of confucianistic values. China is a country without a common religion and thus different from the majority of countries in the world. Just for this reason China needs a philosophy. For it the Confucius laid down the foundation stones.
Xu Xing: The government side tries to develop the patriotism – and not the Confucianism – as the replacement for the missing value system in China. For me it's a horror. Patriotism has its own terrible sides too
Schmidt: If Xu Xing were proven right, then the danger of the patriotism, transformed into a nationalism, can not be ignored.
Cui Jian: Whoever speaks about the structure of the new system of values in China, must, as a condition, admit to the renouncement of communism as the dominant ideology. Without this radical renouncement the public moral will stand further in the way of a renewal .
Schmidt: But whatever is called communism in China, has gone through enormous changes in the last 25 years.
Cui: Correct, but as an artist I feel the continuation of structures, which still suffocate creativity and cause anxieties in everyone of us. In China we still miss the free spaces, that would allow us to create new values. But it's an artist first of all who can not wait for the country to find a better system down the road. His creation is supposed to see the daylight today.
Schmidt: In the last 20 years the world has seen one-party systems, which were worse than the still surviving communist dictatorships. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is just one example for it. At the same time there has been this enormous economic upswing in China. And one just needs to imagine, what would have happened, had China had five parties as is the case in Germany, which need to face each other in elections quarter after quarter for years. So the fact, that China has fared well from the economic point of view, similarly as before Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, is closely linked to the fact that here there was no democracy in the western sense.
Die Zeit: What about the question of democracy in China today?
Mian Mian: Does not interest me. I always think about my next book and about why the government is allowed to forbid it. Freedom, not democracy, is what's most important for me. We must succeed to express what we think and feel. For me it means: let's not talk about politics, but rather do something to get ahead in the world. That's for me what I would call the Chinese style: There's much in our culture, that you can not express, but we can do it nevertheless. That's the way it goes also with my book: I can not have it published, but I can still print it via Internet. So instead of bitching and moaning about the politics I do it this way.
Charles Zhang Chaoyang: Because China lived for centuries in poverty, the most urgent and most important task for the leaders of the country still is to nourish the people, to provide them with warm cloths for the winter and with a roof over the head. Everything else is secondary to it. But to achieve this goal, the leaders have allowed the emergence of a free-market economy and are now confronted with the consequences. Because where there's a market, there's also rich people, who want to spend their money on art and literature. Therefore there's writers, who write no more for the party, but for their new readership. With the economic miracle you get the commercialization. Out of it, however, cultural liberation inevitably follows. Already today creativity and pluralism in the media are greater than ever before.
Mian Mian: You have your own Internet enterprise, Charles Zhang, but you would never publish my forbidden novel there.
Zhang: Of course I would. However, where exactly on our web page the text would stand, would depend on how many surfers would click on it.
Mian Mian: I do not believe it, because after all it still is too dangerous. In China we can do a lot nowadays, but we cannot legalize things. So people buy illegal DVDs, buy my novel as a pirated edition and think, that the cultural development is progressing. But the masses remain stupid. Recently I had to talk to students. One could cry over how irrelevant and stupid it all was. But that's because of the education by schools, media and government. Only persons, who like Charles Zhang studied in America and learned there to think, can see everything in China in such a positive light today.
Schmidt: For me the existence of a functioning national authority seems to be of a great importance. It should not be created by the military, but when a large party stands behind it, then it is a possibility. There is no developing country in the world that has advanced without a strong national authority. It applies specially to China: what does a country, with its three thousand years of history without democracy, think about democracy? For three thousand year the emperor and his Mandarins decided about what is good and what is bad for the people. The history of the cultural evolution of China also suggests a continuity as far as the present.
Zhang: I am sure me that some day China from the point of view of a modern system of government will need democracy. However, to get there, to switch from an authoritarian, controlled society to a market system and the democracy, China needs a strong government, that will succeed in the transition. If the democracy were suddenly to appear, it would be doomed to failure.
The Chinese economic miracle is partially the work of a strong central government, which acts in the confucianistic sense for the good of the country. However at the same time this government is pressured by the whole world and thereby educated . It is part of a society, which today resembles an enormous learning organization, absorbing the most progressive ideas from all world. All this happens in agreement with Confucius, for whom learning never stopped. The deeper reason for of China progress in the last 20 years lies in the fact that all Chinese, from the high government official over the young entrepreneur down to the simple farmer, have recognized, how backward the country is. And that it was the west, which in the last few hundred years has achieved greatness. Thus each Chinese is focussed on learning. Thus however also the system learns and improves itself. We learn, how to debate different topics and that decision making must be a process, in which many persons participate. Whether today one calls the system still communist, is rather unimportant.
China resembles more and more a advanced society, which adsorbs the best achievements of the mankind. The basic values do not change: The sense of responsibility for the family, the sacrifice of parents for their children, the loyalty to the enterprise or an organization, the non-confrontational was of solving problems – that's what remains, it is confucianistic values. And this does not contradict my prognosis that China will have a multiple party system with free elections in 20 years.
Schmidt: We thus agree, that China is on the way to develop slowly into a democracy....
see the rest at
textnart.de
or original at
zeit.de
Regards
dj |
