Oh if Chairman Mao could see them now! Remember back when the images coming out of China consisted of a sea of humanity all wearing the same dark blue parkas, waving copies of the little red book, and hoisting signs with wonderful slogans like, "Death to the running dog lackeys of imperialist war mongers," and "Death to the corporate stooges of the decadent bourgeois elite?" Back then, the only glimpse of life in China came to us in snippets of state controlled propaganda film of small children singing patriotic songs celebrating the life of Mao, or wave after wave of Red Army soldiers marching in perfect order with bayonetted rifles glistening in the sun. For those of you too young to remember this, you have probably seen it, albeit in a scaled down version, coming out of Kim Jung Il's North Korea. How funny is it that so much of American foreign policy, as well as financial resources, was directed at protecting us from Chinese hordes of the Cold War years? And now, when China poses a real threat to our national security, we are bending over backwards to aid them in their quest to dominate the world economies.
Beyond the nonsensical and paranoid rhetoric of the 50s and 60s, we were told that communism would ultimately fail in both China and the Soviet Union, because state controlled economies could not succeed. Further, the current wisdom of the day preached, capitalism and consumer values would eventually take hold, inevitably leading to democratic political institutions. There was just no way that free markets could be compatible with totalitarian political systems, so we were told.
So let's see. . . the USSR, which stubbornly held to its failing model of a collectivist economy within the confines of a dictatorial state, finally did itself in in the late 1980s. With all due respect to the Gipper, what killed off the USSR was its inability to deliver consumer goods to its growingly acquisitive population. Levi Strauss and his denim blue jeans had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, than the threat of an unrealistic nuclear weapons shield around the United States. Reagan's "Star Wars" anti-missile proposals were aptly named, as only a politician reared in Hollywood would believe that such a system was even remotely possible. Instead, the average Soviet citizen found himself exposed to the economic opulence available in the free west, and the allure of endless five year plans and collective farms was no longer capable of moving the masses to strive on for the workers' society. In a few brief months in 1989, Soviet-style communism died in an almost bloodless revolt. The USSR disappeared, and Russia was born. Gucci had replaced the Gulag!
Watching all this with great interest were the Communist Chinese. As China was pressing, like the Soviet Union once had, to become a legitimate player on the world scene, there must have been some trepidation on the part of the Central Committee concerning contamination of their Revolution by western economic values. For decades, the Chinese, like Kim's North Korea, had brutally enforced a ban on all outside contact. That worked really well in preserving Chairman Mao's social and political model, but if China was going to grow economically, some changes were going to have to be adopted. Who could have guessed that the answer would be found in marrying Karl Marx to Adam Smith?
The Communist hierarchy in China bet their lives that they could create a successful economic model by dumping a rigidly enforced command economy and embracing a hyper-capitalist one instead. With breathtaking speed, the Chinese trashed all their five year plans and started building shopping malls. Capitalism was unleashed and the Chinese people embraced it with open arms. Here in the West, this decision was greeted with enthusiasm and celebration. The other great communist power was now admitting that scientific socialism did not actually work, and soon, as in Russia, the Chinese people would be demanding democratic political changes too. After all, as the current wisdom suggested, free enterprise must lead to free politics, right? Wrong!
Remember Tiananmen Square in 1989? Remember Tank Man? That was going to be the spark that would bring down communism in China, like Boris Yeltsin's followers did in Moscow. But when the smoke cleared, the commies were still in power and the young Chinese revolutionaries were running for their lives. Instead of igniting a nation-wide revolt, the Tiananmen Square event angered the new Chinese middle class because they could not go shopping that day. Hey, democracy might be nice, but BMWs and Mocha Lattes were, well, better. In less than five years, not one of those puffy quilted blue Maoist jackets could be seen anywhere, and all those red star festooned caps were gone too. The big gamble paid off, and continues to pay off.
So here we are twenty one years later, deeply in debt to the billionaires in China who bank roll our national deficit. Without firing a shot in anger, China has partnered with the likes of Walmart and other big box retailers to destroy main street USA. The largest internet company in the world, whose motto is some blather about doing good, is not only doing business with the world's most repressive regime, but actually helping it track down its domestic dissidents. And in 2008 we turned a blind eye to the brutal crackdown on earthquake survivors in China so we would not offend the Chinese government during the Summer Olympics. Hey America, guess what? It looks like they won. The inheritors of Chairman Mao's 1949 Revolution discovered that their most potent weapon was not a stockpile of nuclear weapons, but rather a fat checkbook. They didn't have to blow us up, they simply bought us. And now if they want any concessions from the US government, they don't need to rattle any sabers, like the Soviets used to, they just suggest that they might not want to buy anymore of our Treasury bonds.
What do you know, capitalism and brutal dictatorships work really well together. If only Marie Antoinette had actually had some cake to give to the masses, the French might still have a king!
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