陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

陈凯一语：

当今中共党奴朝的政经模式有如当年纳粹德国的政经模式一样，是一个对资本主义自由贸易经济与对联邦宪政的民主自由文化的理念挑战。 孔学院、孔学堂只是这种挑战的一个样本。 世界上热爱自由的人们应当对此有深刻的认知与足够的精神准备。

Kai Chen's Words:

Today China's economic and political system - a bureaucratic mercantilism and communist despotism, is like the pre-war Nazi Germany with its booming economy, political tyranny and growing military strength, posing not only as a military threat but also an ideological challenge to the Western concept of Constitutional Democracy with individual freedom and free market capitalism. Confucius Institutes/Classrooms is only one such example of the challenge. Freedom-loving people in the world should understand such a mortal threat and be ready intellectually, morally, militarily and psychologically to face such a challenge.

"联合国的人权宣言看上去美言连篇，但它实际上是一个孔孟腐儒的文件（孟子是一个孔儒的门徒）。 反映个体价值、个体尊严的字眼在整篇人权宣言中从未出现过。 整个人权宣言只是个孔孟儒家的烂语，因为一个起草宣言的主要人物是个叫P.C.张的华裔人。 --- 爱德华. 弗里德曼

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius is one of Confucius’ disciples). The word “individual” never appears in the document. The language was shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C. Chang." --- Edward Friedman

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Living Without Freedom in China
对自由的挑战-在没有自由的当代中国

June 2007

By Edward Friedman

(Edward Friedman is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation; this program was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.)

It’s not easy for American students to know what it means to live without freedom. They know all the bad things about their own country—Virginia Tech, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Enron and Halliburton scandals, the LA riots, elections stolen, federal attorneys fired for pursuing criminals rather than a political agenda, etc. How democratic is America?, they cynically wonder. When you tell them how awful these other places are, they ask, aren’t you just whitewashing your own society.

The hardest place to understand what the lack of freedom means is China, which is nothing like the Stalin model or Cuba or North Korea. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a totalitarian society. In post-Mao China, Chinese travel abroad in huge numbers. The country has the fifth largest tourist population in the world, on its way to being number one. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are abroad; in internet use, China is about to overtake the U.S. as number one in the world. It’s a market society, brutally competitive; the economy is less state-owned than France or Austria’s, for example. Life is not dominated by communist block units; you can buy your own house or car, there’s no forced labor. You can choose your physician freely; most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.

So what does it mean to say that Chinese people live without freedom? First, it is a brilliant system at making people complicit with the unfreedom. For days after the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijing of democracy supporters headquartered in Tiananmen Square, there was great tension in the city between people who live there and the occupying army. How did the party respond? Teachers were ordered to teach their students a new song: “The Army loves the people, the people love the Army.” Parents couldn’t say the song was untrue lest their children repeat this back at school. You can’t bring up your children the way you want to.

This is true for many lies the Chinese are forced to let stand uncontested. There still are committees for the defense of the revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren’t complicit, maybe you won’t get a passport. It may be held against your child when s/he applies for college. You and your family will be shunned in the neighborhood. You could be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

China is not the worst stable authoritarian regime in the world: a North Korean might consider it free. Even foreigners who go to North Korea and then come back to China feel they are returning to a free country. But you get faced every day with decisions that bring it home to you that you’re not. If your child is ill, should you go to the pharmacy and buy some medicine? Of course, but medicines are often frauds in China. There have been cases where baby formula is bogus and children have died from receiving no nutrition. China has a ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no CDC, no NIH. It’s also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable. A Chinese journalist recently went to 10 Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test his blood. But he didn’t give them his blood, he carried in a thermos with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would cost them endless money for treatment.

China has people who see the problems of this corrupt, arbitrary society and try to do something about them. There are courageous lawyers and journalists. The leading political crime in China is land seizures. The economy is growing at a fantastic rate, which means that you can sell pieces of land to a developer for a lot of money. You don’t want ordinary people to get rich. All the goodies are grabbed as much as possible by the ruling group. Over 97 percent of all millionaires in China are relatives of the top party elite. There are those who complain and resist, who stick to their guns. Lawyers come in to defend them. Accordingly, China is first in the world in the number of lawyers, journalists and Netizens in prison.

These things are hard to see when one is visiting, but there are signs one can see if one looks hard. Go to the railroad station at midnight, and you will see tens of thousands of people sleeping in the street. It is probably the most unequal stable society in the world. Income in the poorest rural areas has been declining. There’s no union, with one exception: the government is now promoting getting unions into multinational corporations, but as an instrument of party control, not to help the workers. The Party doesn’t like foreigners doing things they don’t know about. They want their agents in the places where the foreigners are, to control things as much as they can.

Freedom means the ability to hold your government accountable. There is no way to do this in China, and people die. China is said to have 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, and some would say it would be 20 out of 20 if they didn’t lie about the other four. Everything is corrupt. The only way you can get anything done is through corruption. This creates a sense of no morality. But people want meaning in their lives. So there’s a tremendous religious revival. All over China, all religions are reviving. The Party fears it. How does it respond? It crushes Christian house churches, it doesn’t like Lama Buddhism, it’s careful about Hui Muslims, but beyond that, it’s pushing essentially its own state religion, a combination of Han chauvinism, in which Chinese worship the yellow emperor, and an authoritarian Confucianism. The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It’s going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it’s going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.

China is a superpower. Its economy is rising, its military is rising, and Chinese people in surveys are more popular in most countries of the world than are Americans right now. China’s going to be using this money to serve certain purposes. Among them are undercutting the power of the United States, democracy and human rights and supporting authoritarian regimes. Whether it’s Sudan or Nigeria, they can buy up the oil and governments don’t have to listen to any kind of international pressure about conforming to human rights. China has already defeated the international human rights regime.

China’s rise means that freedom is in trouble. The era we’re in is very much like the era after WWI. Authoritarian models are rising and are becoming more attractive. I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.

In describing this Chinese rise and how I believe it has the potential of being a threat to freedom in an extraordinary way that we haven’t seen since the end of WWI. I am not trying to suggest that Chinese don’t care about freedom; people do not need a Greek-Roman Christian heritage to care about freedom. That kind of claim is parochially and culturally very narrow. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius is one of Confucius’ disciples). The word “individual” never appears in the document. The language was shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C. Chang. Of course this is December 1948, the day after the Genocide convention was passed. The communists didn’t come to power for another year.

There is no trouble in understanding freedom and human rights in any culture in the world. People living in tyrannies may in fact have a better understanding of what freedom is about than American teens, who think it’s just that you get your driver’s license in your late teens.

The Chinese regime has fostered a nationalism to trump democracy. People are taught that they are threatened by democracy, that democracy would make people weak. Party propaganda has it, “How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That’s what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system.” The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They’re proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don’t care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.

So what is growing in China is an authoritarian, patriotic, racially defined, Confucian Chinese project which is going to be a formidable challenge not just to the United States but, I think, to democracy, freedom, and human rights all around the world. China is going to seem quite attractive to many people. That is why it is so very important to understand what living without freedom really means.

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陈凯一语：

施化与其他批评中国专制的文人们一样，仍旧看不到中国的人们迷恋专制的关键原因： 个体价值与人类终极道德感的完全缺失。 将个体置于族群中去得到某种“存在与满足”的幻觉认同是中国式东方虚无主义的邪恶焦点。 共产专制在这种肥沃的“无个体”的毒文化中猖獗泛滥是不足为奇的。

Kai Chen's Words:

The author of this article, in criticizing China's despotic culture, still fails to see the root cause of Chinese despotism and tyranny (Communist dynasty is only one example): A total lack of individual identity and faith in eternal human values/morality/God. Using one's cultural, racial and family background to justify one's immoral behavior and escape one's individual responsibility is universally accepted in China as normal and even as the very identity of being Chinese. An illusion based on Oriental Nihilism somehow gives the Chinese a fake identity and satisfaction. Communism/Fascism indeed has a fertile soil in such a cultural environment.

陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

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施化︰為什麼共產主義能在中國受到歡迎？

Why did Communism Take Roots in China?

作者 : 施化 2010-08-13 12:00 AM

過去的一個世紀，這個地球上發生的最大事件，除了兩次世界大戰以外，無過于共產主義運動。共產主義運動對中國社會造成的巨大影響和後果，之所以直到現在還沒有開始被中國人廣泛反思，主要原因不外乎是他們仍舊懷念著共產主義。

盡管在今天的中國，年輕一代人已經不談論共產主義，這遠不能說明共產主義已經在中國死亡。“執政”的中國共產黨，仍舊在黨章里寫著︰“黨的最高理想和最終目標是實現共產主義”。在可見的近期內，這個黨章不會被修改，共產黨也不打算改名。這不僅由于共產黨愛面子，怕否定了共產主義等于揭底坍台，也因為他不這麼做，民意不反對，不危及自己的執政地位。共產主義如果危及到中共統治地位的穩定，也會被提出來否定的。

一位筆名叫流波的大陸作者，是這樣評價共產主義的︰“現在，從世界範圍來說，雖然社會主義共產主義運動處于低迷之時，但資本主義制度殘酷剝削的本質、虛偽的民主自由和打著人權而行其殺戮霸權之實的行徑也正在被全世界人民所重新認識，毛澤東思想正又一次讓拉美、東亞南亞、非洲、歐洲的勞動人民所景仰！人民在覺醒，勞資矛盾在激發，民族主義猛回頭，愛國主義在升華，……在不久的將來，一場新的社會主義共產主義運動必將在全世界又一次風起雲涌，讓暴風雨來得更猛烈些吧！”

不知道“暴風雨”到底何時能來，也不能確定上述的思潮在中國境內產生多大回響，但可以確定，同樣的語言如果出現在美國或加拿大，只能得到幾聲嗤笑。

美國人對共產主義最明晰的表達，無過于建立在華盛頓哥倫比亞特區的共產主義受難者紀念碑（Victims of Communism Memorial）。2005年11月，美國國家首都規劃委員會批準該紀念碑的設計，該設計乃仿制自1989年中國八九民運中，由學生建造的民主女神像，標明是為了“紀念超過一億名共產主義之下的受難者”。

2007年6月紀念碑揭幕，小布什發表了演講。他在演講中提到的受難者，有在斯大林的大饑荒中活活餓死的無辜的烏克蘭人，有死于斯大林清洗的俄國人，有將全部家當裝上牛車背井離鄉被流放到北極這一甦聯共產主義死亡集中營的立陶宛人、拉托維亞人和愛沙尼亞人。有在大躍進和文化大革命中死于非命的中國人，有在波爾布特的殺戮戰場中被屠殺的柬埔寨人，有為了投奔自由試圖挖掘柏林牆而被射殺的東德人，有在卡廷森林被屠殺的波蘭人，有在“紅色恐怖”中被屠殺的埃塞俄比亞人，有在尼加拉瓜桑地諾獨裁政權中被謀殺的摩斯基多印地安人，有為逃離暴政而溺死在海上的古巴人。他說︰我們從來都不知道那些死難者的人的名字，但在這個神聖的地方，無名的共產主義受難者的名字將被祭獻于歷史，永遠被銘記。

中國政府對布什講話的回應是“干涉中國內政”。中國互聯網刪除了所有對此講話帶有肯定的言論。大部分中國的老百姓都不知道還有這樣一個紀念碑和這樣一個講話。在中國，對于共產主義僅僅是一個烏托邦還是一種極端主義恐怖主義思潮的辨認，可能還要等很久才見分曉。

不過，一種思潮能夠在一個時期一個地區廣泛地傳播扎根，一定和當地的思想傳統有關。共產主義是在歐洲發明的，是西方人的精神產品，但在西方沒有什麼市場，卻在東方暢銷，包括前甦聯。如果要問一下，為什麼在西方受到冷遇的共產主義思想在中國卻總受歡迎，騙倒了中國一代又一代的精英？我以為有幾個重要思想因素不可忽略。

首先是“不患寡，患不均”的樸素農民思想。中國的傳統思想主體上是農民思想。農民佔總人口的大多數，農業是主要的產業。由于生產以農業為主，而農業生產力低下，缺乏工商業對等交換的價值因素，“均富”的理想，可以追溯到遠古。這種理想和共產主義一拍即合。東方的“平均”不同于西方的“平等”，前者要求生產後分配的平均，後者要求生產前機會的平等。由于目前的中國既不存在分配的平均，也不存在機會的平等，終會在某一天失去平衡。重新構建權力支架後，人們提出的最高要求，可能還是分配平均，而不是機會平等。共產主義的死灰復燃，可能從另一種“打土豪，分浮財”開始。

其次是對“天”的無限依賴。農業“靠天吃飯”，農民的基本意識自然也是“天”。 除了“天”以外，人們找不到另一種可以改變現狀的力量，比如自己。 皇帝由自封“天子”而得到合法性，官員的公正裁判被視為“青天”。“天”不是不可以被信仰，但必須存在某種價值。中國的“天”沒有價值，只是不可知和未來。 “共產主義”的不確定性和未來性，有點像“天”，所以很受中國人追捧。在中國，人們對自己沒有信心，“沒辦法”是最常用的口頭語。他們時刻等待著“變天”，也就是“福從天降”。可惜從來沒有出現過。

最後是對“同”與“不同”的僵化概念。由于農業的特性，人的社會地位十幾年或幾十年不變。久而久之，給人一種階級地位永久固定的印象。中國自古來就有把人分成不同的相對固定群體的習慣。“官、民、匪”的劃分永遠是固定的。這跟馬克思把階級地位靜止化，有些異曲同工。中國人解決“不同”的途徑一直是︰“革”去不同的部分，使之相同。他們不懂，“不同”是會變化的，因此只能暫時讓“不同”同時存在，慢慢互動。當辛亥中國首次出現“革命”的時候，人群就被劃分為對立的“進步”和“反動”。這使後來共產主義的階級劃分和階級斗爭，變得格外順暢。從孔子一直到孫中山的“天下大同”理想，為共產主義在中國暢行作了有力的背書。

2010-8-10