Autocrats, on the Knife’s Edge

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

When people in the West are reading about civil unrest in China, things in China are bad—normally, Beijing does a reasonably effective job of suffocating news about domestic political discontent. As the Wall Street Journal reports, there has been a rush of knife attacks, vehicular homicides, and things of that nature that have the men who rule China on the edge. 

 

I do not have a lot of the hell-raising Jefferson-Jackson element in me—I’m an Adams-Adams-Eisenhower man—but, upon reading the Journal’s report, my first thought was: “These people need guns. Lots of guns.” I’d be happy to contribute 10,000 rounds of ammunition to the cause and cover the freight. If the Chinese people should decide to drag their oppressors out of their palaces by their heels and murder the lot of them, it would be an act of justice. 

 

But it also would be dangerous chaos. With American leadership in retreat—and there is no denying that it is, irrespective of how you feel about it—to where do freedom-seeking people turn? Germany? The United Kingdom? The ayatollahs have Israel to deal with, and the sanctions targeting Russia haven’t been trivial, but, in the main, the tyrants have problems at home that have very little to do with outside pressure or influence.

 

Xi Jinping, like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, knows that there are few good retirement options for gangsters. Bashar al-Assad, who is not yet 60 years old, could as an actuarial calculation expect to have at least a couple of decades left in him. He’s going to be a lot of trouble—and expensive—for his Russian hosts, who are having a little bit of difficulty affording much of anything right at the moment, with interest rates at 21 percent and the ruble on the rocks. (A note to the U.S. president-elect: This would be a terrible time to force a peace deal on the Ukrainians and, in effect, bail out Moscow—rather, this is the time for an all-out blitzkrieg on the Russian economy.) But Assad’s despondent retirement is not the worst possible outcome: The most likely end-game scenarios for Xi Jinping are either 1) clinging to power and dying in his bed; 2) the Ceaușescu treatment. 

 

As satisfying as the latter would be, the best thing for the United States would be a China that transitions, in the most peaceful and orderly way possible, into something better. And China does not have to look to Washington or London or Brussels for a model of how to manage its affairs: Hong Kong had an economic and political model that worked nothing short of a miracle in the 50 years after the end of World War II. Yes, that happened in the British colonial context, but Hong Kong more than proved that Chinese people can run their own affairs in a liberal, open, and magnificently prosperity-creating way. If Chinese nationalists really want their country to be a genuine superpower, all they have to do is look to their own recent history: The secret of the secret sauce is that there is no secret—there isn’t something in the Anglo-Saxon genome that gives the English-speaking peoples special access to liberty and decent government. The Hong Kong model will get it done. 

 

Our so-called nationalists here at home have long looked with envy at corporatist-nationalist states such as Russia and China. The excesses of American liberty, they believed, had made Americans weak, soft, unable to compete in a vicious, zero-sum world. And yet: China is convulsed with political discord at home; Russia has encountered catastrophe in Ukraine even with only desultory half-measures from the United States and Europe; Iran was riding high after its proxies carried out the massacres and other outrages of October 7, 2023, but now finds itself much reduced and its proxies all but eliminated. With Iran chastened and Russia overextended, the Assad regime is gone, swept away in a matter of days. The would-be Legion of Doom—Russia, China, North Korea, Iran—is in dire straits. 

 

I do not care for revolutions, and I do not think there is any great need to remake Chinese society or Iranian society or Russian society—and it is not as though cultures and civilizations are things that can simply be taken apart and put back together in some improved form by enlightened philosopher-kings. Nor do I care for an oversimplifying pragmatism. But there are things that work and things that do not work, and we have a pretty good idea of what those things are: Good things like property and honesty are not alien to China or Iran or Russia. And that’s really the only kind of revolution in domestic affairs these countries require: security in property and rules that are administered and enforced in an honest, open, and evenhanded way. Yes, yes: Simple to write, much less simple to do. Agreed. 

 

It is ironic that Americans have chosen to reelect the most Sino-Russian figure in American politics at the very moment similar caudillos abroad are having such an unpleasant encounter with non-negotiable reality. But we will get through this and eventually figure out, once again, that there are better courses of action than entrusting the vast power of the American state to elderly incompetents and fanatics and mobs. We are rich enough and powerful enough that we can afford some—some—foolishness, though not too much of it. 

 

When the United States endures a period of economic stagnation—or cruelly high inflation—Americans throw out the president and install a new one. They believe, for some reason, that this will fix the problem. (It won’t, because inflation and recessions aren’t caused by having the wrong kind of president.) The Chinese people do not have that option—their choices are to endure the viciousness and incompetence of Xi and the ruling junta or to fight them. And, unlike Donald Trump, Xi Jinping doesn’t have the option of sitting out a round and then running for the top job again—his options are to effectively oppress the Chinese people or to make a run for it.

 

Xi is not a stupid man, and he knows how many emperors have been done in by their bodyguards. The edifices of tyranny always look solid but seldom prove so. Beijing may have 2 million active-duty troops at its disposal, but they are not nearly numerous enough—or good enough—to keep down 1.4 billion Chinese people if those Chinese people decide that, like the Syrian people, they have had their fill. It isn’t a brute-force problem—it is a bell-the-cat problem. 

 

There are better ways to govern a people. The Chinese know that. So do the Russians and the Iranians. So do we Americans, on a good day, when we are halfway sober. Even the jihadists who have knocked off the Assad mafia feel obliged to make moderating noises and gestures. The world has plenty of autocracy, illiberalism, and nationalism to go around. But those are not what has made the United States into a superpower. To repeat: There is no secret. The way to prosperity is not easy, but it is not a mystery, either. For better and for worse, the bits of the world that are happy and prosperous and stable are built on the same foundations: property and the rule of law. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.