The China fantasy

China is preparing for the Olympic games in Beijing in 2008, an event the communist regime plans to turn into a celebration of nationalistic pride and its own indomitable power. A year before the torch is lit, this very regime is facing a far less enticing prospect: accusations that its country is the source of major food-and-drug scares with fatal consequences as a result of the uncontrolled exports of counterfeited goods.

China can rightly feel proud of having become, in just two decades, the world's factory and a major trade player, as well as of having facilitated the emergence of a booming new middle class out of an egalitarian society. But these successes have come at a cost: a still very repressive regime at home and a worrying lack of control on tradable goods (whether for domestic or export consumption) with fragile safety barriers.

The question is: at a time when health-and-safety regulations are becoming ever more stringent in the European Union and the United States, why are westerners so lenient when China is not playing by the rules?
Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.

Among Patrice de Beer's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"French politics: where extremes meet"
(4 December 2006)

"Why is the left so gauche?"
(26 February 2007)

"France's telepolitics: showbiz, populism, reality" (2 April 2007)

"France's intellectual election"
(16 April 2007)

"France's choice: the Bayrou factor"
(24 April 2007)

"Sarkozy's rightwing revolution"
(8 May 2007)

"Le Monde's democratic coup" (30 May 2007)
The poisoned trail

An answer to this lingering question can be found in James Mann's latest book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking, 2007). Mann is former Los Angeles Times correspondent in Beijing; author of Beijing Jeep: A Case Study of Western Business in China (Westview Press, 1997) and About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (Vintage, 2000); and now at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H Nitze school of advanced international studies. What this old hand in Sino-American relations writes on the art of dealing with China in this sharp pamphlet could also be said on behalf of all developed governments, Japan excepted: that relations with China are different from relations with any other country in the world as they are not based on hard facts but on a quasi-theological vision of the "middle kingdom", which has adapted from its longstanding basis in anti-communist ideology to an obsession with business and trade which has nurtured unsustainable trade deficits and gradually bound the west to a more and more monopolistic and greedy supplier.

This might explain why Washington has reacted so mildly to the melamine-tainted pet-food scandal which has killed 8,500 dogs (also sold for use in feed for hogs and chickens) in the United States and caused a massive recall; or to the drug scandal involving cough syrup laced with poisonous diethylene glycol (used in anti-freeze) falsely labelled as less expensive - but fit for human consumption - glycerine, which caused the death of between 100 and 450 Panamanian kids after having been used in exported toothpaste (see "Cleaning up China's Honey", Los Angeles Times, 3 May 2007; "From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine", International Herald Tribune, 5 May 2007; "Tainted Chinese Imports Common", Washington Post, 20 May 2007; "China Investigates Contaminated Toothpaste", International Herald Tribune, 22 May 2007).

Yet these incidents are not exceptional. In the first four months of 2007, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors - who are able to check less than 1% of imports - have sent back to China 298 contaminated food shipments (twenty-five times more than from Canada); among them dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical, honey with banned antibiotics, mushrooms with illegal pesticides... many of which turn up again at US borders.

The FDA may have tightened its controls, but fighting poisonous or counterfeited Chinese goods is far from straightforward and would need more cooperation from Peking, a stronger will to act from US authorities and the business community, as well as less dependency on Chinese goods (which in areas like apple concentrate and wheat gluten have gained a quasi-monopoly). As former assistant US trade representative Robert B Cassidy told the Washington Post: "so many US companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now, the commercial interest of the United States these days has become to allow imports to come in as quickly and smoothly as possible"; he added that the US finds itself "kowtowing to China" as foreign dignitaries were once humiliatingly compelled to do at the feet of the "son of heaven".

In addition, China has accumulated a trade surplus of $1.2 trillion which it is in part using to purchase around half of the US's fast-growing debt. Thus the only superpower finds itself increasingly dependent, tied to China by more and more bonds every year, like Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's novel. While Chinese authorities reject reciprocal ties, in a regime where the rule of law is still distant, where food-and-safety regulations are regularly flouted, including by state corporations, and rarely monitored and punished (despite the odd condemnation thrown from time to time at domestic and foreign public opinions as a token of good faith).

In May 2007, the Chinese drug administration - asked to explain why the Taixing Glycerine Factory (which used Glycol in the deadly syrup sold in Panama) or the Beijing-based state trading company Fortune Way could not be prosecuted - said that it had no jurisdiction, as the plant was not certified to make medicine. But is it not simple justice that the culprits should be prosecuted for illegally making adulterated drugs, as they would be in any country governed by the rule of law?

The rules of the game

Many influential figures warn against threatening China with sanctions when it breaks international rules of conduct - among them every US president since Richard M Nixon, former senior government figures like Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, prestigious academics and members of think-tanks, prominent businessmen and journalists such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. They pretend that China has only two options for the future, a "soothing scenario" which sees its political future gradually opening up and a "chaos scenario" where its political or economic system falls apart - and that it is crucial to uphold the first one. To this model, James Mann opposes a "third scenario", equally plausible, where China continues to develop under the same authoritarian system.

Mann opposes those who dream of a mythical market of 1.3 billion consumers and a politically-correct theory which pretends that democracy will automatically follow economic development. He feels that the emerging urban middle class has no desire to see its newly acquired wealth threatened by hundreds of millions of farmers and migrant workers who receive only the crumbs of present prosperity. Meanwhile the communist regime, which outlaws any free political, trade union or religious organisation, has been since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 too worried about potential dissent to allow it to develop any voice.

George W Bush may have depicted China (in February 2000) as a "strategic competitor", but a collusion has developed between both sides of the Pacific; the official US side even scorns criticism of its China strategy as "China bashing" (thus creating a new lexicon where critics of the People's Republic of China can in a democracy be termed "troublemakers", "provocative" or "anti-Chinese"). "People in China don't care about politics, they just care about making money" and similar clichés are widespread - even as they forget that Chinese people in Taiwan or Hong Kong care very much about democracy, as did those mainlanders who demonstrated eighteen years ago before being crushed by tanks. In any case, who are we Europeans or Americans to dare say that Chinese genes are not fit for democracy, as Charles de Gaulle and Alain Peyrefitte (Jacques Chirac's former minister and self-appointed China "scholar") once pontificated?

To trade in Chinese goods or to help the most populated country in the world to develop is one thing; to bow to political or economic pressure is another; to hope that China will become a major, responsible power with global responsibilities is one thing, to grant one of the world's most repressive regimes a seal of undeserved respectability is another. The People's Republic of China cannot be allowed to present itself as the model to follow when it counts among its allies and most favoured trade partners regimes such as Zimbabwe or Sudan.

The time has come - as James Mann sensibly concludes - to tell the Chinese that they have to abide by more democratic rules, both domestically and abroad. Waiting could be fatal; within two or three decades, an unreconstructed state is on track to become a real strategic threat to the United States. But then, to adapt a phrase attributed to Lenin, capitalists would sell anything to anyone, including the rope to hang themselves.