Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate and economist, once observed that the modern era is an abnormal period in human history, given all of the freedom and prosperity that individuals enjoy. Until very recently, he noted, man’s natural condition had always been to live in poverty and under tyranny.
His observation helps put into context just how precarious freedom always is — more precarious even than wealth. And at the time Friedman first said it, the Cold War was still raging. Freedom was under constant threat from the malevolent and expansionist force of Soviet communism.
Today, unfortunately, freedom is once again under threat on a global basis. And this time, the biggest threat does not come from the still-malevolent Russian state. Although constantly vicious and aggressive, Vladimir Putin is limited in what he can do. He leads a hollowed-out and declining nation aptly described with its shrinking population and economy as “Mexico with nukes.”
This time, the main threat and the main design for world domination comes from a country that is growing fast and has an actual future. And that makes it all the more frightening.
China is the largest nation on earth. Its abandonment of state socialism and embrace of free trade in the late 1970s allowed it to thrive and grow. Under these conditions, its enterprising people have pulled themselves out of poverty at a rate unparalleled in history.
But there has been no accompanying flourishing of human freedom to go with this growing prosperity. Today, in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang province, and in the colonial aspirations signified by China’s Belt and Road initiative, humanity is getting a glimpse of what the world could look like under the thumb of Xi Jinping. It is a terrifying thought.
In Xinjiang, newly leaked documents show what a real “Muslim ban” looks like. The western province’s Uighur residents — a Turkic people mostly of the Islamic faith — are being rounded up, hundreds of thousands at any given time, and placed in concentration camps. They are confined, the documents reveal, until they sufficiently demonstrate their commitment to the Chinese state. Their reeducation process includes constant pressure to renounce their faith, to relinquish any ideological reservations about the Chinese regime, and to give up their unique minority culture and learn to speak Mandarin. The documents also show that thousands of Chinese officials are being rooted out and punished for being too lenient toward the Uighurs, letting them go before they have been sufficiently broken by the brainwashing process.
In Hong Kong, at the extreme opposite end of China, the regime is flagrantly disregarding the promises it made to preserve the former British colony’s democratic and common law system of governance. Amid the resulting protests, Chinese authorities and pro-democracy protesters have each been attempting to shape the narrative, for Chinese and international consumption, of what is actually happening on the ground. And last weekend, the stunning landslide results of Hong Kong’s record-turnout election left no doubt at all about which narrative the locals understand to be true.
In most of China, the population is either captivated by nationalist rhetoric or intimidated through the regime’s Orwellian “social credit” system, which is designed to deprive insufficiently supportive citizens of their human rights. But in Hong Kong, they still get to vote — in fact, they are the only part of China that is allowed to vote on anything. And in the recent elections, Xi Jinping was just given a drubbing that would end the career of any leader in any free country. Candidates friendly to Beijing were wiped out in 17 of 18 council constituencies. Whereas 300 of Hong Kong’s 452 council members before the election had counted themselves supporters of Xi, there are now only 58 left.
It should be added here that outside of China, the Chinese government is working hard to expand its influence through a campaign of foreign assistance and lending with strings attached. China is currently trying to buy influence and access to strategic assets throughout Africa, South Asia, and even Europe, at times using “debt-trap diplomacy” to seize key infrastructure in poor but strategically located countries.
So when China flagrantly steals American intellectual property, menaces Taiwan and its other Pacific neighbors, and throws fits over the lack of respect for its baseless claims to various other islands, that’s only part of the story of Xi’s rule. At home, he brutalizes pro-democracy protesters and attempts to eradicate minority cultures, employing political repression on a scale seen nowhere else on earth today.
China has the sheer population to overwhelm the United States militarily. And the technological edge that currently offsets that advantage could prove fleeting.
Combine Xi’s domestic repression with his international ambitions, and you start to understand how precarious freedom really is. How easy it would be to slide back into life under a true tyranny — the natural condition of man.
