Pot calling the kettle black

China calls for quick reforms in Myanmar

"YANGON, Myanmar - China called on Myanmar to speed up democratic reforms, state media reported Saturday — an unusual move for Beijing, which has traditionally refrained from criticizing the military regime.

The call came as a U.N. human rights investigator wrapped up a trip to the country that he said had helped him to determine that at least 15 people died during the junta's crackdown on pro-democracy protests in September.

China's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi also expressed support for U.N. attempts to reconcile the regime and the suppressed democracy movement during a two-day meeting with the junta that ended Friday. The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported the meeting only after Wang had left the country.

China, a communist country whose own record on democratic reforms and human rights has been criticized, is one of Myanmar's largest trading partners and its main political ally."

Many more than 15 people died in Tiananmen Square in 1989, of course. By the estimates of student groups and aid agencies, 2000-3000 people.

The truth is that for all of the celebration of China, force as a governing philosophy, and more authoritarian measures in general, a liberal democratic path - meaning more freedom and more democracy - is the only path forward in either China, Burma, or the rest of the liberal democratic and illiberal world, no matter how much an illiberal path has been embraced even in liberal democracies.

The truth is that liberal democracies have been setting a terrible example for illiberal and authoritarian regimes of the world like China and Myanmar. You can hear it in their words. Their embrace of the rule of law. Their emphasis on rules. Their whole-hearted agreement with the need to force change upon their people.

All of it has been one long smokescreen for accumulation and exercise of more power, both in in illiberal and autocratic corners of the world and in the liberal democratic cultures that are supposed to offer a better model. Liberal democracies share some responsibility for these crackdowns - and the ones in Georgia, Pakistan, Venezuela, and all over the world - as much as the regimes that have cracked down. Because we keep telling the world that force as a governing philosophy is the wave of the future and the path of progress. And so they watch our example and do as we say and as we do. And so we decry their efforts as undemocratic, even while we avoid acknowledging that it is exactly what we said.

Do we really believe that historians will look back at this period and see how much freedom was lost and compromised, how much power trumped a more genuine democratic discussions, how much leverage was substituted for substantial engagement about important issues, how much free trade and free economies were set back, how much intimidation and the illusion of inevitability of being overpowered were asserted, how much real, empirical regress we experienced - two straight years of spikes in violent crime in America and a spike in crime internationally, an increase in American hegemony and disregard for more genuine democratic norms, crackdowns and more brutal activity of authoritarian regimes, an increase in nuclear proliferation by rogue regimes - and say, "That is what progress in liberal democracies looks like."

Really?

Lord Acton was right. And it doesn't matter which party or ideology or group or country is pursuing the power. It always corrupts. And thank god there are so many opportunities in liberal democracies to keep it from corrupting absolutely.

Democracy doesn't make countries ideal places to live, that should be clear by now. But it does keep us from destroying one another completely.

And for those who do not pursue power, it gives us a much stronger opportunity to build one another up, for real, and not as a means to some corrupt and powerful end.

Thank a political philosopher or an economist or a historian or a sociologist or a journalist or a novelist or even an activist for that. Plenty of mistakes made by these folks as well. But the more diverse their outlooks and the more freely and empirically they think about the world and arrive at important conclusions about the world, the more they, generally, come to the conclusion that it is all that freedom that keeps us honest in this world, and the more they keep us all honest about the need to take that freedom and the responsibilities that come with it seriously. And they are right.

May China and Myanmar know that freedom to take it for granted, just as we do, one day.