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LOS ANGELES -- Love her or loathe her, Hillary Clinton is something
else.
In 1995, for instance, the then-First Lady stood on a Beijing dais
and delivered a tough speech that denounced violations of women’s
rights worldwide. With steely passion she said: ‘‘Human
rights are women’s rights.’’ The occasion was
the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, an event
that attracted delegates the world over. It was a poignant and moving
address, and neither First World nor Third World countries were
exempt from her critical cascade. She knocked Saudi Arabia for its
medieval attitude toward women; she kick-boxed Africa for unspeakable
anti-woman practices, and she chastised her own country for its
tortured legal contortions on the issue of a woman’s right
to control her own body.
In her unsparing indictment, the First Lady pulled no punches about
her host, either, denouncing China’s policy of one family,
one (preferably male) child. It was a gutsy performance in a Beijing
assembly hall surrounded by grim-faced security personnel.
For its part, the Chinese government should have taken credit for
providing such a prominent venue for an uncompromising statement
on the ethical treatment of women. Instead, it turns out, the authorities
were not only embarrassed -- they remain chagrined today.
We learn this from the recent flap over the publication on the Chinese
mainland of Senator Clinton’s autobiography, ‘‘Living
History,’’ just out in Chinese translation. The book
had been selling very well in the United States -- and so, too,
in China. But it is not exactly the same book. The version published
by Yilin Publishing has been laundered as well as translated. While
the U.S. edition recounts Hillary’s recollection of the 1995
incident and other observations about China, including negative
ones, the Chinese edition offers nothing of the sort.
Even so, Hillary’s tome looks to be one of the biggest sellers
on the mainland since Mao’s Little Red Book. The controversy
has stimulated sales. This in itself tells a tale: For as China
spawns an increasingly assertive and moneyed middle class -- approaching
something like 200 million people -- the old repressive ways are
decreasingly utilitarian. The U.S. publisher, Simon & Schuster,
posted the banned passages on its Web site, presumably accessible
by many in China. Thus, mainlanders who can’t afford to fork
out their hard-earned yuan for the tome can now find Hillary’s
forbidden fruit at www.simonsays.com. The net effect has been to
circulate her criticisms of China even more widely than had sections
in the book not been so foolishly censored.
Not many years ago, a Chinese delegation quietly visited Singapore,
then grappling with the task of figuring out the difficult-to-control
Internet technology. And what they were told was: It’s a complex
media environment, and if you’re buying into globalization,
with all its flow of information across borders, you may have to
accept that control is impossible.
Beijing has to come to grips with this. In this Internet age, the
Stalinist boot-on-brain technique of control just doesn’t
cut it, particularly in the vital realm of ideas and political opinions.
Besides, Clinton is hardly a Trotskyite threat to the Chinese state.
Why pick a fight with her? Like her husband, she has been a strong
supporter of increased trade and diplomatic relations with China,
despite all its human-rights problems.
What this absurd chapter in China’s tortured relations with
the West does is blur the country’s substantial progress in
opening up to the outside world. In truth, the media in China are
rapidly changing -- not because of ideology as much as technology
and demographics. As one top Singapore official put it recently:
‘‘They have more hand phones in China than any country.
You go to their shops and you see the new gadgets in connection
with hand phones, PDAs and so on. The leaders can’t stop this
communication revolution. In fact they are encouraging it! They’ve
overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest market for PCs,
and within a few years there will be more Internet users in China
than anywhere else on earth, including the United States. That is
the new reality they are facing -- and the Communist Party will
have adjust.’’
What’s more, as China becomes more capitalistic and entrepreneurial,
ever-more media entrepreneurs will look for new readers and advertisers.
It’s true that today the vast majority of the media requires
party approval, explicit or otherwise. But boring, politically correct
media won’t sell. Spicy stuff like Hillary’s book does.
Unless Beijing wants to sustain its media as one huge costly state-owned
enterprise, it needs to wake up and smell the global reality.
The People’s Republic of China has shot itself in the foot
-- yet again.
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The above weekly column has just appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser,
The South China Morning Post and The Straits Times of Singapore.
The author, Tom Plate, is a regular columnist at these three papers.
The column also appears in other world newspapers, including The
San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Japan Times and
The Korea Times. Email him at: tplate@ucla.edu.
For publication
and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson
(john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International. |
