An editorial in the International Herald Tribune "Speaking out against repression in Tibet" (March 25) called for the West to put pressure on the Chinese government to improve its human rights record.
From a human rights perspective, the Chinese state is excessively strong. Put differently, individual citizens have very limited political freedom. China's political system is aimed at preventing political instability at all costs, and is founded on a national consciousness in which political instability is the worst possible disaster.
In order to understand why today the state is overly strong we should look to the period before 1949, when the current political system came into being. In the century before 1949 China suffered severely from political instability. The weakness of the central government led to widespread violence and famine. After 1916, when it collapsed altogether, the disasters to which the population was exposed became even greater. The lack of an effective central government resulted in many millions of deaths.
The erosion and collapse of the Chinese state was the result of internal conditions, but also from interventions by the leading Western powers. From the second part of the nineteenth century, these countries - joined by Japan and Russia - disregarded Chinese sovereignty in order to attain economic and strategic benefits. Consequently, the Chinese central government lost what it needed most for its survival: political legitimacy among its own population. Thus the political instability that produced China's current political system was itself partly caused by the West.
The lesson from history for China's leaders is that foreign interference leads to political instability. There are two ways to prevent this: having influence in foreign affairs and making sure there is no domestic opposition.
The leading Western governments openly pressuring Beijing would not only be futile but counterproductive. It would sooner cause the Chinese government to further limit political freedom, than grant more of it.
This article was first published as a Letter to the Editor in the International Herald Tribune on April 7, 2008.
