Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [117]
“The Chinese Communist Party is completely hypocritical,” said Fang Caodi. “They’re always lying, hiding the truth, distorting history—you cheat me and I cheat you. It starts with the top leadership and the lower echelons emulate them; even the younger generation has been corrupted. When a nation that used to pride itself on its honesty has become so morally degenerate, how can you talk about prosperity and ascendancy?”
“You’ve just been talking back and forth about the old ideal of ‘enriching the state and strengthening the military,’ ” Lao Chen chimed in now, “about how to grab resources, how to stimulate economic growth, overtake Japan, and catch up with the United States, but the costs of your economic development have been tremendous. You’ve ruined the environment and exhausted all the resources of even your grandchildren’s generation. Following the Western industrial nations’ model of development, sooner or later you’ll come to a dead end and be stopped in your tracks.”
Fang Caodi had done business in Africa and had seen a very different scene from the one He Dongsheng described. When Chinese enterprises worked on major infrastructure projects, they hired only Chinese workers; they didn’t employ local workers and didn’t help reduce the high levels of local unemployment. Cheap Chinese products flooded the African market and ruined those few manufacturing industries still in existence there. The Chinese were no different from the former European colonialists. They colluded with corrupt local ruling elites to exploit Africa’s natural resources, and they didn’t help the African people with any long-lasting economic development that could be of genuine assistance.
“Why is such a powerful nation so weak that it can’t accept even the smallest amount of criticism?” asked Little Xi. “Why do you stifle freedom of speech? Look how frightened you are of the Internet—not at all like a great nation.”
After Fang Caodi had returned to China, he had traveled all over the minority peoples’ regions; because he was particularly looking for traces of his father and the former Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai, he went everywhere in North and South Xinjiang. His overall assessment was that the Communist Party’s nationalities policy was a total failure. The Han Chinese complained about the injustice of positive discrimination, while the Uighurs and Tibetans felt humiliated and oppressed. The local communist cadres in Xinjiang and Tibet were corrupt to the core and grew rich on the ethnic conflicts. With old hatreds and new complaints, Xinjiang and Tibet would never be at peace. “If China doesn’t institute a federal system, there will be dire consequences!” shouted Fang Caodi.
“He Dongsheng,” added Lao Chen more calmly, “you’re a typical old-style Chinese scholar. You have a head full of ideas about ‘ruling the nation and pacifying the world’ and you’re dying to become an official and a state tutor. When you’re close to power, you get all excited, and as soon as you enter the inner circle of power, you immediately support authoritarian dictatorship. You pretty it up with fancy words about needing absolute power to accomplish big things, but in fact you are consumed by a burning personal ambition. Doing something big doesn’t necessarily mean doing something good. You can also do something very bad that will have terrible and incalculable consequences for years to come. In the last several decades, there has been no lack