by SASHI KUMAR
Tariq Ali, in this exclusive interview, seamlessly switches from contemporary historian to scholar-at-large to polemicist to raconteur, as he tackles many of the impinging issues of our times.
CHINA: MIMICKING AMERICA
And that clash, again, doesn’t have the nature of an ideological tension because, as some say, China has gone down the capitalist path the whole hog. Or, is there still an element of an ideological divide there?
I don’t think there are any signs of an ideological divide. If you talk to Chinese intellectuals close to the state as it exists at the moment, they just want to be like America. They mimic America and the West quite blindly. I was reading, not so long ago, about these new towns that they are building—they had built a small town where the houses were built like Swiss chalets, and no one was buying them, and they are surprised! I mean, why would the Chinese want to live in Swiss chalet-like houses when their own traditional architecture is pretty good? So this mimicry has gone pretty far and, ideologically, you have worshippers of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek who are very close to the state and the needs of that regime. So I do not see any ideological challenge. The only ideology they can come up with now is Chinese nationalism.
And then they do silly things like they did when the Nobel committee gave the Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo, who was, in my opinion, a rogue on the American payroll, who had publicly stated that it would be better if China had been occupied by imperialism…. I mean a sort of deeply unpleasant figure made into a human rights martyr by the Chinese arresting him. When they wanted to react to the Peace prize, the only thing they could think of was launching the Confucius Prize, which made absolutely no sense and people the whole world over laughed at them. They run away from the idea of having a prize named after some more modern Chinese scholar like Lu Xun, for instance. And when you think back on the history of that country, within the Chinese communist leadership and the party, attacking Confucius was part and parcel of your everyday education as party cadre, because all the backward traditions of China like fatalism, not resisting, and so on, were ascribed to Confucius. And now Confucius is the only Chinese they can think of! It shows actually a total vacuum of ideology, and the only way they can even think of filling it is with nationalism. There are many disturbing signs in China. There are people within the Chinese leadership who, at least in private, talk about the Kuomintang regime and Chiang Kai-shek quite favourably. I mean, this guy was a total butcher and a murderer, but that is linked to their nationalism.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)