Reason Pimps The Wrong China, Again

Bradley Gardner: Reason's Thomas Friedman

Reason's very own version of Tom Friedman, Bradley Gardner, has a new post about Wenzhou, China.  A choice quote, slipped in at the end:

The government is strong enough to keep the mob from monopolizing finance and kleptocratic enough to keep entrepreneurs from dominating the industry; but beyond that the police are hands off.

Thomas Friedman, the NYT Bradley Gardner

In his previous article, Gardner painted a rosy picture of the PRC leaving everybody alone, a veritable libertopia of commerce that Liberation Daily touted Wenzhou as the model for the rest of China as far back as 1985, but claims that the recent alarm from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times(!) are nothing to worry about.  Apparently Gardner counts everybody with a hammer as a "factory owner" (his count of "factory owners" in the province of 3 Million is 400,000) so ninety of them fleeing after a government crackdown is nothing to worry about.  If every "factory" really had only 7.5 workers, this might be nothing.  Other opinions differ.

Has history been erased so well that even a former Libertarian standard bearer like reason has forgotten scenes like this?

Tank Man, 5 June 1989

Demolition of a Church in China

Note that Gardner is a reporter in Beijing, presumably with permission from the PRC.  Perhaps the Shanghai Commies at Liberation Daily (Jiefang Daily?) were flying under the radar of the home office in Beijing in 1985?  Reason being, well, reason, does not mention the state of religious freedom in Wenzhou.  However, to be fair, reason has never been big on that aspect of freedom, so one will not find the answer there.  However, in 2000 the Baltimore Sun knew what was still happening in China with basic religious freedom:

The recent demolition campaign focused on several areas in Zhejiang Province, particularly Wenzhou, a city of more than 6 million people known for its energetic merchant class and deep religious roots. Protestant and Catholic missionaries began converting people in Wenzhou beginning in the latter part of the 19th century when the city became a treaty port. With more than 700,000 Protestants and several hundred thousand Catholics, it has a higher percentage of Christians than any other municipality in China.

China's state-run media rarely - if ever - publicize demolition campaigns because it only invites international condemnation. This time, though, the government gave some media a green light to report on the demolitions.

Late last month, the Wenzhou Daily reported that thousands of government employees and Communist Party cadres in Zhejiang's Ruian City demolished 28 unapproved "religious sites" and 356 small temples, occasionally using dynamite when needed. - The Baltimore Sun, Places of worship razed in Chinese crackdown, 15 December 2000, by By Frank Langfitt

Chinese factory workerss

Make no mistake, nothing has improved on that front.  Note also that Christian missionaries to China from the United States still must take extensive precautions to avoid arrest.  Mainland Chinese citizens who attend Churches in America frequently do so under assumed names and still live in fear of being found out by the PRC authorities.

Back to reason, by the time 1989 rolled around, the pulp version of reason was printing this about China:

The emergence of the American world nation also has profound ideological implications. The American message– stressing individual rights and private initiative–is gradually becoming universal and less linked to "white" ideology. Nowhere is this clearer than in China, where American cultural and political influence has a powerful appeal, particularly among the young. When 50,000 Chinese students demonstrated in Shanghai’s People’s Square in December 1986, they waved banners depicting the Statue of Liberty and a dragon bound in chains. Emblazoned on the banners were calls for such American-style values as democracy, human rights, and freedom. - Reason, America's Rising Sun, January 1989, by Joel Kotkin

So, how did reason cover the Tienanmen Square protests five months later?  With silence.  No, really.  They finally mentioned Tienanmen Square in a 1995 book review on non-violent protest.  Apparently, as far as reason is concerned, the demonstrations ignored by the PRC are the ones that count and the ones the tanks show up for are the ones that they do not bother mentioning, until 2009, twenty years after the fact:

But the episode was not what it initially appeared to be: the end of China's evolution toward a more liberal system. It was only an interruption of that process. In the aftermath, the Chinese Communist Party grasped that it could hold onto power only by delivering a better life to its people, which it could achieve only by loosening its grip on their lives. 

The rose colored bong continues to bubble at 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.  Like many who are blind to the wiley ways of Socialists, the reason staff and contributors seem to be under the false illusion that having the liberty to chose what color shoes to wear on the way to the factory is freedom enough.  As Jonah Goldberg has mentioned, the ROC murdered 67 million people before trying (crony) capitalism, and I will add that they have not even given a wink to the free market.  It is only a matter of time before the people of Wenzhou get the treat of seeing how well their privately built roads hold up under the load of PRC tanks.

PBS's FRONTLINE unarguably has a much better grasp on the situation in China than reason ever did, or will.

Almost two decades later, the educated elite who led the protests of 1989 have benefited handsomely from China's rapid economic growth, but many Chinese workers still face brutal working conditions and low wages. "A lot of factories do not even have one day off," says labor expert Dr. Anita Chan who has been researching working conditions inside China for 15 years. "That means seven days a week, 13 hours a day."

In fact, some experts see the emergence of two Chinas: one modern, wealthy and urban; the other rural, poor and disenfranchised. There is evidence that unrest among workers and peasants is growing; in 2005, there were more than 87,000 "civil disturbances" in the country.

A real success story, the Republic of China, aka, Taiwan began at the same time as the PRC with much better results.  Perhaps Gardner and Friedman could take a little field trip there and see what they can find?

The Decline of Reason: Riggs Is The New Weigel

Gun toting Socialist, David Weigel

As a frequent reader and infrequent commentator at reason magazine's blog for several years, I am somewhat shocked at the latest incarnation of David Weigel, who goes by the name Mike Riggs, gracing their blog.

Like Weigel, Riggs expresses not one hint of knowing that government police power is perfectly acceptable to protect private property:
New York Judge Upholds Eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park by Mike Riggs

The new Dave Weigel Socialist at reason: Mike Riggs

Everything Bloomberg does to you is for your own good, even jail! was his tone when the city of New York finally got around to clearing out the #Occupy squatters defiling privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan.  I defy you to distinguish the reason post from the worst one can find daily in the Nation or Slate for refusing to even acknowledge that private property owners have any rights whatsoever.

Bradley Gardner: Reason's Thomas Friedman

Reason no longer confines itself to being a champion of stripping real property owners of any control of their land, while bashing the police for actually doing something that they are supposed to do.  No, as if Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, Norman Fleishman, Tom Friedman (and the rest of the New York Times staff) were not falsely touting Communist China's crony capitalism (conveniently leaving out the word "crony") in the mainstream media, reason recently entertained us with this bit of Bradley Gardner pap:
New at Reason: Bradley Gardner on China’s Black Market City

Chen Mingyuan has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. “All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense,” Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure. 

The article fawns over the people of Wenzhou for building the infrastructure that the government did not build, and the Communist Chinese government for "looking the other way" so that these brave entrepreneurs can engage in commerce.  Perhaps a video of what the Chinese government does build around Wenzhou should dampen any praise for Communist engineering, or any respect for private property to build disasters waiting to happen:

Not a matter of if, but when.

Oddly, the reason take on the situation is that if the Communist government took a peek and went away, then they will continue to do so.

The government’s indifference didn’t last forever. But when the authorities got around to paying attention, they decided not to mess with a good thing. In 1985 Liberation Daily, a paper sponsored by the Shanghai Communist Party, referred to Wenzhou as a “model” for other parts of China to study. In the next year 15,000 government officials visited the city to learn, not crack down. Although bureaucrats still occasionally try to impose state controls on the city, the futility of the effort quickly becomes apparent. By now the local Chamber of Commerce has taken to negotiating trade deals both domestically and internationally because, as in most other things, the private sector is more effective here.

There was no pondering of how long it would be before the autocrats in Beijing show up to claim the "people's property" without so much as a thankyouverymuch and seizing the privately built roads and utilities.  No, the article waxed on about how this is the way Chinese capitalism works.  Something else missing was any government enforcement of contracts, but there was a slight nod to the iron-fisted loan shark enforcement that may or may not exist.

Gray-market lenders are often established, though technically illegal, financial institutions that lend primarily working-capital loans at rates as high as 10 percent a month. Contacts often modify interest rates based on how well you know them. Forms of repayment enforcement differ. Weng points out that in a community so dependent on guanxi—relationships—defaulting on a contact’s loan could blackball you from future business opportunities. Weng doesn’t clarify how defaulters are treated by underground debt collectors, but he does say they “aren’t the type of people I’d want to get involved with.”

This is an incredibly naive view of how authoritarian governments operate.  Even here in the United States, where nobody could argue with a straight face is anything approaching the authoritarianism demonstrated in China, when people make property valuable the government swoops in to take it over or get their unconscionable cut.

Reason, it has been nice knowing you as a sometime voice of reason (drink!) in a world teaming with Socialists.  Now you have joined their ranks as a sideshow act, destined to be a punchline in the monologues of David Corn and Katrina Vanden Heuvel on cable news appearances.