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Dignity

Once upon a time, a friend and I were debating the relative merits of Cuban Socialism. He said to me “ Well, at least these people who you call “oppressed” have the best health care in the Western Hemisphere, that’s something not even you have in this country”.

To which I shockingly responded, “ You know the folks in Attica State Prison get free health care, but I don’t see anyone crawling over the wire and past the guard towers to get in to get it, do you?”

And that pretty much sums up how I think of Socialist Dictatorships. No matter how swell a uniform the dictator wears, he’s really nothing more than a Southern Work Camp Warden. I look at them with the same disdain that Paul Newman did to “the captain” in Cool Hand Luke.

It’s in this psychological context that we will talk about Communist China and its sudden rather odd obsession with Taiwan. I have to admit that I’ve been dumbfounded about why China would be so willing to stomp its feet and get right up in the face with the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan. Rest assured, I don’t think China is fooling around here; I think they are dead serious. Most Asian cultures put a great deal of weight into the idea of ‘saving face’, so when they say they will do something, they will do it, even when it’s a generally bad idea to carry it out, just so they can ‘save face’.

So when China says “ Oh no you wont!” and then a million Taiwanese stand up and say “ Oh yes we will!”, my reaction is the same as it would be if I were in an Oakland biker bar and someone shouted out “ Harleys Suck!” – I’d grab my beer, and quickly get next to the wall or out the back door, because one way or another someone is about to get a baseball bat broken over their head. Communist China cant say “ just kidding, we didn’t know you felt so strongly” and neither will the Nationalists. In some ways we find ourselves in a big world version of the famous Chinese Finger Trap.

But I’ve been puzzled as to “why”? Why is this one country, well off the coast, and well out of the way, why does this place mean so much to China? It’s like the US suddenly getting uppity over the Ontario province of Canada and insisting that they are really part of the US, and any talk of Canadian sovereignty and independence will be met “in strongest terms”. (Can’t you just picture the 30 million Canadian ‘stink fingers’ being displayed if anyone ever said such a stupid thing?)

So I’ve been stuck on this problem for a bit, and then this week I read something that made it all click into place, and I’ll get to that in just a minute. But first, let’s be clear this is not about Taiwan per se, Its about China. China, like all totalitarian governments exists primarily because they can control every aspect of life for their inhabitants. Most importantly, they can control the myths that drive the culture and the definition of the nation. One of those myths is the myth of “One China”.

There are many types of “China”, many provinces, many peoples and many dialects but they are all under control by the Communists. At least that is the story the Communist Chinese needs to be true, and it is true, except for one little place.

Taiwan.

In the words of Professor Philip J. Zimbardo, Taiwan is being a “bad prisoner”. By its very existence, and by its insistence on defiance of Communist Chinese dictates, Taiwan has become the “Cool Hand Luke” of Asia. To the Communist Chinese, this by itself is bad enough; but what’s really bad is the ideas it may give to the rest of “the prisoners”. If they begin to think that perhaps they too should be able to have their own say in affairs, then all hell will surely break loose.

The Communist Chinese do not live in fear of American Firepower; they live in fear of a loss of control. Once upon a time and seemingly out of nowhere, the Chinese lost control for just a moment and in that moment, they nearly lost it all. Do the Chinese fear the Taiwanese military? Hardly. What they really fear is the other provinces “getting ideas” from the nationalists.

Like I said earlier, I was struck by something I read this week and it helped me understand the gravity of the Taiwan situation. This week, I read the story of Lanier Phillips, the first African American Naval Sonar Operator. In his story, he related the racism that had formed the early part of his life and how an incident in Canada brought it to an end. At one point, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Newfoundland. Upon being rescued, Mr. Phillips discovered something he had never been allowed to consider before that time.

Excerpt:

“His entire life, he had been raised to believe that the color of his skin made him somehow inferior to white people. He had been kicked, abused, threatened, and belittled. Even the Navy, his chosen service, reminded him constantly that he was of less importance than his white shipmates. And now, here was a white family - an entire white community - treating him as though the color of his skin didn't matter at all.”

“He wasn't the same man after St. Lawrence. He had seen life as it could be: life as it should be. He knew that he was worthy of fair treatment and respect. He knew that a society could exist in which the color of a person's skin was irrelevant. He had seen that society, walked its streets, and been invited into its homes.”

After the incident in Canada, Mr. Phillips went on to improve his lot in life by insisting that he be treated as a man of equal value and dignity to whites. He had seen that he was not inferior and he would no longer tolerate the sort of inhumane things that had been done in the past to be done to him again. The illusion had been broken and there was no putting it back together. Mr. Phillips had found his dignity as a man, as a human being, and no one was going to take it from him.

You see, here’s where China has a real problem. All along its borders are countries and peoples who are finding the human dignity that comes with Democracy. All around it are people who are no longer finding themselves property of the state and are slowly but surely working their way towards the dignity of citizenship over that of being a subject to the state. You and I may look at this as a wonderful thing but to ‘the captain’, it’s a real big problem. If you cant control your people, if they really think they are people, with real human rights and dignity then how can you keep order? (Oh, and you know what I mean by order, right? The kind of order where “we” are in charge and “they “ do what we tell them, right comrade?)

“The captain” once put down a prison uprising in the Chinese State, but it came very close to bedlam. Back then; the world had never seen a Communist country fall away from control by the state, but that all changed one day in 1989. Today, it’s a very different thing. Today, people in the even the most obscure places are insisting on the right of self-determination. so why not china too? they ask...

You see, its not really about Taiwan independence at all, it’s about basic human dignity. You can’t make someone a slave if they have it, and you cant keep them as a slave if they think they are entitled to it. Once Mr. Lanier Phillips discovered his dignity, his life was never the same. I suspect that millions of Nationalist Chinese are discovering their dignity, but the real question is “How many other Chinese people living under Communist rule are now discovering that they too might be entitled to the dignity that only democracy can provide?”

Because of recent events, because of the memory of the horror (in their mind) of 1989,This thought has to be weighing heavily on the minds of the Communist leaders as they try to sleep in their silk pajamas. Out there on the streets of Beijing, riding their bicycles, sitting in parks, might be millions if not billions of people who might wake up one day very soon and tell “The captain” to get stuffed.

Posted @ March 27, 2005 01:15 AM | Current Events

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