For those who took the bigoted bottle-flinging and window-breaking in China this past week as absurd on its face, a Politburo tantrum poorly translated into an awkward popular spectacle that scuffed the Red regime as much as Japanese effigies, Tokyo's official response can be celebrated as both deserving and merciful:
[Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi] made clear his irritation with Beijing, and its tolerance of weekly demonstrations that have often turned to violence against symbols of Japan, including diplomatic offices and shops. In a interview to be broadcast on Australian television, Mr Koizumi insisted that relations with China remain good but added: "I hope that the Chinese will, shall we say, become more grown up and will be able to look at friendly ties from broader perspectives with, shall I say, a cool head."
Shall he? You can get a taste of a man's character by placing him under duress, watching to see if he breaks, bends, snaps or — should there be something of worth inside — sharpens, redoubles or fortifies. If nations reflect men, Beijing has committed the equivalent of breaking up a dinner party under the pretenses of a missing salad fork, knocking over a decanter while rising in a huff, stammering out a poorly worded malediction and then tripping down the grand staircase with napkin in pocket. China wants Taiwan; no secret. Taipei will have none of Beijing's threats; no secret there, either. The American promise to defend Taiwan, despite a "One China" policy carrying all the modern sense of pantaloons, becomes less speculation and more policy overruling charter by the month. Charter, military charter, has entered the Tokyo Diet as a subject of debate; the House of Councillors is halfway to revising Japan's constitution to accommodate its long-standing Self-Defense Force, the House of Representatives three-quarters. How, not if, is the prevailing questoin. Entitling the use of force may take Japan's lawmakers as many years as led up to the moment when House Speaker Yohei Kono received the revision panel's report. But Japan's intentions are unmistakable and abiding, driven by self-preservation as much as responsibility. It, too, has stepped up to suggest that the Taiwan Strait is for transport and recreation, not invasion.
China cannot accept this. For all the danger it promises for a free world weak or unwary, the country's industry burns a totalitarian fuel — it runs hot and fast, and won't sustain. Dictatorships consume. Individuals produce so, deprived of the simplest rights, they cannot; and any authoritarian state will devour itself if it can't sink its teeth into a more productive neighbor. (Bashar Assad wants Lebanon for more than beachfront property.) In recent commentary on that constraint, Japan's success was enough to refute the economic and cultural indomitability Beijing has advertised for free in many intellectual circles. Man for money, the island nation is thirty times more productive, with far fewer natural resources and no crude gluttony: very straight math. What have China's cherrypicked economic reforms won it? A few years before the inevitable, writes Michael Ledeen:
No doubt the oligarchs worried that the Chinese people might notice that the regime's policies were a shambles, and that they might come to suspect that things could improve if only the people were free to choose their own leaders. Thus, one of the delicious paradoxes of our time: China threatens Taiwan with huge armies, but Taiwan threatens China with freedom, and may well win in the end. As Janet Klinghoffer put it, "China is facing the same innovation roadblock the Soviets did." The Soviet Union could never match Western technological innovations, because Soviet citizens were never given the freedom to do so.
There is a black comedy in tyranny's clumsy tries to ape what free men do naturally. In the hours during and the first few after Hezbollah's pro-Syrian rally in Beirut, Bashar Assad's sympathists and the Cedar Revolution's skeptics contemplated exactly what the Islamist terror group wished them to: were authoritarians still able to extract praise from a nation enduring three decades stripped of autonomy, prosperity and identity? When the frenzy was over, Hezbollah's charade fell forward and down flat, its repellent and foul-mouthed crowds of Damascus faithful now suddenly alongside a brilliant panoply of Lebanon's independence protesters. The Cedars held a final series of rallies that dwarfed Hezbollah's best and no more major demonstrations have taken place since, democrats the uncontested masters of public opinion. Beijing has been more couth than most dictatorships but the oligarchy is just as incapable of conceiving or controlling what it does not understand. Syria's decline is daily marked by its bewilderment to the free world it so long shut out but chanced six weeks ago; fitting, then, that China's tyrants might have brought on the beginning of their end by the same institution they simply intended to mock.