New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Resist China's hold

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Resist China's holdResist China's hold

U.S. must spurn the lure of huge market
& restore ethics to capitalism

The conventional leftist analysis is that Marxism is the solution to the corruption of capitalism, right? But the case of China seems to prove that the evils of Marxism can be supported by capitalism.

That is why there was an element of the absurd to seeing President Bush "covertly" warning China about human rights abuses, as if anyone in the single party there cares what any country outside of China says about anything. The party's top dogs have discovered that a market of 1.5 billion people inspires so much outside greed that the multinational roar of capital profit drowns out the much softer sound of international compassion.

Ours is a monstrously interesting moment because, once upon a time, the Chinese could only be threatened by the atomic bomb. About 20 years ago or so, the Chinese realized that their endless waves of troops meant nothing in the nuclear age and began to adjust. Now, with much pilfered Western technology, they are as prepared to set off the chain reaction of doom as any other superpower.

The Chinese have learned, as a friend of mine in Harlem always loves to say, that "Marx told us that the capitalist will sell the very rope intended for his hanging."

Of course, contempt for the profit-obsessed businessman, or merchant, is older than Chaucer. But the point holds and sticks a gritty fact in our faces. China has been able to make big business concerns heel to its rules.

Even the supposedly all-powerful Internet, which is supposed to liberate through the free flow of information, has been put on permanent hold. The big dogs in the party know that the Soviet Union fell, at least partially, because the reality of the world was able to get into the country electronically, where it contradicted so much of what the people were told. Consequently, Google and Yahoo, for instance, filter out the information that China does not want its population to see. Beyond that, China has built one of the biggest and most effective firewalls in the world so as to block out all unwanted computer information. The Iron Curtain has become electronic.

Perhaps the most impressive piece of high-level chess-playing brought off by the Party was its admitting businessmen into its midst, whom it absorbed into an ever more wealthy structure that allowed for individual profit as long as one genuflected before the unbending "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Perhaps it is time for America to recollect that our capitalism has, at its best, been about bringing together the profit motive, ethics and morality. That would lead to isolating China from the world market unless it begins to treat its people better. There could be no bigger job for world leaders than convincing their business communities of that, which is something that President Bush might realize the minute he starts to seriously think about it.

Originally published on November 17, 2005