Anti imperialism

Why Russia Went Wrong and China Went Right -- Lessons for the United States
By George Koo
Date: 09-09-98
Policy makers in the United States have had a tendency to see the world's two communist giants as peas out of the same pod. But the current situation in Russia, which followed U.S. advice, and China which did not, suggests both the diagnosis and prescription should be reconsidered. PNS commentator George Koo is an independent business consultant, former Chairman of Silicon Valley based Asian American Manufacturers Association, a Human Relations Commissioner of Mountain View, Ca. and a member of Committee of 100, a national organization of prominent Chinese Americans.
China has just pledged $540 million to the International Monetary Fund to help stabilize the Russian ruble. This is on top of $1 billion already committed to bail out Thailand and $500 million for Indonesia.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way.
When Gorbachev "glasnost'd" himself out of a job and Boris Yeltsin became the first elected leader of Russia, America rejoiced. President George Bush declared an end-of-cold-war dividend to all Americans, and he and his successor Bill Clinton proceeded to pour money and advice into the newly formed state to help the Russians shed the vestiges of their evil empire and become more like us.
At the same time, U.S. policy makers offered plenty of criticism of the route taken by China. While the Russians opted to go cold turkey from a planned economy to a market-driven one, and for sudden transformation to a democratic form of government, the Chinese choose to liberalize their economic and political system gradually. This brought nothing but wrath, particularly from certain members of Congress.
Recent events suggest that, U.S. aid notwithstanding, Russia is on the brink of complete political and economic collapse. Recent events also make it increasingly obvious that China is emerging as the island of stability and economic strength in the sea of Asian financial distress.
American pundits and politicians tend to look back at the former U.S.S.R. and China as two peas in the same communist pod. In reality, even before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the economic underpinnings of the two countries were already fundamentally different. While the Soviet Union devoted an increasing percentage of its economy to building missiles and warheads to keep up with the U.S., the Chinese concentrated on developing a peace time economy.
In the 1970s, whenever members of the Soviet diplomatic corps in China were scheduled to return home, they invariably cleaned out the shelves of the Beijing Friendship Store -- which served only foreigners in those days -- in one last shopping spree to help fill the bare cupboards awaiting them in Moscow.
A fitting illustration of the gap between the two countries is offered by a tale set in Erlian Houte, a border town in Inner Mongolia, once the place of face-to-face confrontations between China and former U.S.S.R.
In 1993, Russian soldiers, unpaid and hungry, surreptitiously drove to the border in the Soviet tanks that had formerly trained their sights on Mongolia. Chinese entrepreneurs bought them for about $3,600 apiece, cut off the cannon, took them across the border and sold them to small steel mills as scrap. The melted-down Soviet tanks were converted into construction steel to feed the building boom then going on in China.
On the political front, Russia's move toward democracy without installing necessary institutions and the rule of law has not improved the human rights situation for the general population, but has served only to enrich the clique of reformers that adopted the American party line.
Despite America's best intentions, and generous infusions of political energy as well as money, the Russian people are much worse off now than they were even during the waning days of the U.S.S.R. Today, there is a growing longing for the good old days of Communist rule -- and anti-American sentiment is running at an all-time high.
The U.S. has sent more than $2 billion to Russia since 1996 just to defray the cost of dismantling warheads and decommissioning missiles -- a process that is years behind schedule and must be giving U.S. officials severe cases of insomnia.
It's time for U.S. policy makers to face reality and order some humble pie. They are wrong in thinking they have the prescription to solving Russia's many problems and wrong in condemning China. It's time to admit that they do not necessarily know how other parts of the world should be governed.