An outrage in China
LIU Xiaobo, the dissident professor who became China’s first Nobel Peace laureate when he won the prize in 2010, died in state custody on Thursday, having spent almost the last nine years of his life in prison. His death is a tragedy and an outrage. It’s also a warning to his jailers.
No nation that imprisons its best people is going to become great. No country that is afraid to let a man such as Liu speak freely can possibly be described as strong.
That’s a thought that ought to vex those China enthusiasts who have been predicting that the country’s rise to global primacy is a matter of time. This is analysis by way of gradeschool math: If the US , with a gross domestic product of $18.6 trillion, continues to grow at its sub-2 percent a year, and China, with a GDP of $11.2 trillion, grows at its plus-6 percent rate, then China will overtake the US in about a decade.
But China’s official growth rate has slowed every year this decade; it’s now at its lowest point since the era of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Bad loans at Chinese banks are at a 12-year high, while productivity growth is at a 16-year low, according to Bloomberg. China’s workforce lost nearly 5 million people in 2015. Capital outflows hit $640 billion last year; China’s upper and middle classes are voting with their real estate choices.
All this could mean nothing more than that China is tracing the same arc of most other economies that emerge quick- ly from poverty only to stall out. But things are likely to be worse. Why? Liu Xiaobo knew the answer.
Political control over economic resources is a recipe for corruption and capital misallocation. Beijing treats its economy as an extension of state propaganda, manufacturing statistics and mistaking trophyism for development.
The mistake is to assume that values aren’t inputs. “The process of abandoning the ‘philosophy of struggle’ was also a process of gradual weakening of the enemy mentality and elimination of the psychology of hatred,” Liu wrote in a courtroom statement that would become his Nobel lecture (delivered in absentia).
“It was this process,” he added, “that provided a relaxed climate, at home and abroad, for Reform and Open- ing Up, gentle and humane grounds for restoring mutual affection among people and peaceful coexistence among those with different interests and values, thereby providing encouragement in keeping with humanity for the bursting forth of creativity.”
Liu understood the Chinese model of economic modernisation without political reform was destined to fail: The insight is at the heart of the Charter 08 manifesto that landed him in prison. As if to prove it didn’t get the point of Liu’s teachings, Beijing moved to censor stories about him and expressions of sympathy But one pointed anonymous message got out to the Wall Street Journal reporter Nicole Hong: You want to bury him bury into the dirt but you forget he is a seed.