On the coffee table — ‘Empire of Lies’

And, no, it’s not about the United States under Bush, either!
“Empire of Lies,” fully titled as “Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century,” is Guy Sorman’s
excellent effort to rip off the mask and blow up the Potemkin Village of today’s China … a mask and Potemkin Village many Westerners have willingly co-created with Chinese Communists.

Economic conservatives and neoliberal “spinners” from James Fallows and Reed Hundt through Bill Clinton (singled out in one passage) are exposed as frauds, liars and enablers for a China of modern myth in this power-packed new book.

French journalist, politician and philosopher (and why can’t we get that combo in America) Sorman exposes the lies of both the Chinese Communist Party and its Western apologists, which range from hardcore economic conservative American capitalists to French communists.

There’s a few basic lies that underscore the scores of surface lies both the Chinese Party and its western enablers tell.

Sorman says Lie No. 1 is that capitalism will lead to democracy. He has a clear, albeit much smaller, counterexample – Singapore, led by, ironically or not, Chinese.

Lie No. 2 is that there is a “Chinese mindset,” “Chinese way of business,” or whatever, that is antithetical to democracy. Variants of that include references (usually wrong ones, according to Sorman) to Confucianism, etc. Counterexample? Taiwan. Daoism, repressed in China, flourishes there along with Confucianism, Buddhism and Protestant and Catholic Christianity — along with traditional Chinese culture.

Lie No. 3 is the lie of Chinese economic statistics. Sorman says that even if you don’t discount the costs of environmental degradation, Chinese growth rates are almost surely somewhat overstated, and possibly highly overstated.

Lie No. 4 might be a partial variant of No. 2, and would be the “China isn’t all that bad” lie, especially if you compare it to the former Soviet Union. Sorman argues the other way around, that China is arguably more repressive than the Soviets of Khrushchev and beyond, at least in some ways.

As a result of all this, Sorman says, we really don’t have that much to fear from China as a foreign power in general or a military adventurer in particular. On the economic side, in fact, he expects the rich-poor gap to be likely to worsen, not improve.

Another “sublie” would be the one that Western countries, through “economic involvement” with China, can moderate its behavior. China isn’t going to be moderated by that. And, as a sidebar, Sorman estimates that about half the Western-owned factories in China are money-losers.

Finally, while not absolving Japan, Sorman accuses China of manipulating the Nanking Massacre of 1937.

Read this book and get an unvarnished view of today’s China.