From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

particular, how Japan, Korea and Taiwan, with cultures and traditions similar to
China’s, are governed will have a great influence on the thinking of the Chinese
intelligentsia.
Several problems can cause serious disruptions: a breakdown of the banking
system, huge unemployment following reforms of state-owned enterprises
without adequate social security nets, an ageing population that will place a
heavy burden on the one-child family generation having to support their elderly
parents, and serious environmental pollution.
However, the most pernicious problem is corruption. It has become
embedded in their administrative culture and will be difficult to eradicate even

---

after economic reforms. Many Communist Party cadres and government officials
in the provinces, cities and counties are not above corruption. Worse, many
officials who are expected to uphold and enforce the law – public security
officers, procurators and judges – are also corrupt. The root cause of the problem
was the destruction of normal moral standards during the Cultural Revolution.
Deng’s open-door policy in 1978 enlarged the opportunities for corruption.
The leaders want to establish a legal system with proper institutions. Because
they know the institutions necessary for the rule of law in a civil society cannot
exist in a moral vacuum, they are re-emphasising Confucianist teachings among
the population. They have also launched the “three stresses” campaign in an
attempt to clean up the party’s rank and file: to talk about learning, to talk about
politics, and to talk about honour and dignity. But so long as officials are paid
unrealistically low wages, such exhortations will have little effect, regardless of
the severity of the punishment meted out, even death and long prison terms.
Nevertheless, pragmatic, resolute and capable leaders have steered China
through these perils since 1978. They command authority and credibility. They
have successors in place as competent and resourceful and even better-educated
than themselves. If these future leaders remain pragmatic, they should be able to
overcome these difficulties.
In the two and a half decades since my first visit in 1976, I have seen China
transformed. I find most astonishing not the physical structures, new buildings,
expressways and airports, but the different attitudes and habits of the people and
their willingness to speak their minds. Books are written and published that
would have been sedition in the 1970s or ’80s. The free market and modern
communications have brought more openness and transparency. They will make
China as different again in another two decades.
I place my hope for China’s progress on their best and brightest who have
studied or travelled extensively abroad in their impressionable years. More than
one hundred thousand of them are now studying in the United States, western
Europe and Japan. The present leaders in their late 60s and 70s are products of
the anti-Japanese war and did their postgraduate work in Russia. Their mindsets
will not change much. Many of their children who have PhDs from American
universities have vastly different outlooks. Vice-Premier Qian Qichen, formerly
the foreign minister, has a son, Qian Ning, who worked for the 
People’s Daily
and shortly after Tiananmen went to the United States to study journalism in
Ann Arbor. He stayed in America for four years and on his return wrote a candid
book which was published and sold in China. The observations of a man with

---

such an impeccable background are significant, reflecting the thinking of a
younger generation in their 30s: “I realised a simple truth, we Chinese, at least
the younger generation, can have another way of life. … Chinese women are
liberated once again – what they have lost are only the chains of tradition, but
what they have gained is their freedom.” I believe it is not only Chinese women
who lose their fetters after a stay in America. These men and women in their 20s
and 30s who studied in the West are the best-equipped intellectually to meet the
needs of China’s modernisation. They have been exposed to new ideas and
knowledge in societies vastly different from their own. In 20 to 30 years their
generation will change the shape of China. They probably already realise that
even after China has been restored as a great industrial power, it will not be a
Tang or a Han “Middle Kingdom”, the centre of the universe, but one of several
advanced nations.
Americans would do well to keep their options open. The Chinese are a
different people with a different culture and a different history. They will change
at their own pace in their quest for technology and a modern economy,
preserving their values and traditions, and maintaining continuity with their past.
China-bashing by constantly denigrating them for their lack of democracy and
human rights will only antagonise a whole generation of Chinese and make them
anti-American and xenophobic. This is not far-fetched. When the tragic bombing
of the Belgrade Chinese embassy took place in May 1999, I thought at first that
the demonstrations, with slogans reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, were
orchestrated. But our mission in Beijing reported that the Chinese were
genuinely outraged and angered by what they saw as a bullying America out to
put China down. To foster such a reaction will not contribute to peace and
stability. The Americans will have to learn that some reforms require time to
make them possible. And such changes will be made by the Chinese for Chinese
purposes, not in order to comply with American norms, under American
economic or moral sanctions.
Even before the bombing, bilateral relations had already been strained when
President Clinton did not accept major concessions made by Premier Zhu Rongji
in April in Washington to join the WTO. When I met him in Beijing in
September, Zhu dwelt at length on this subject. He would not back away from
the offers he had made, but required serious concessions in return. Four days
later, while in Shanghai for a meeting of the Fortune Global Forum, Henry
Kissinger and I urged Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary who had just resigned
in July after an illustrious six-year term, to speak to President Clinton. And I

---

made the same points a few days later to the US secretary for defence, William
Cohen, when he visited Singapore. Cohen, who needed no persuasion on the
merits of bringing China into the WTO, brought it up with his president.
After five days of strenuous bargaining in Beijing, China and the United
States reached agreement on 15 November 1999. It was a relaxed Premier Zhu
who visited Singapore a fortnight later. He attributed the success of the
negotiations to the intervention of President Jiang. Joining WTO was not without
its dangers, he said to me, but if China’s leaders did not believe they could
overcome the problems, Jiang would not have agreed to it. Zhu’s responsibility
was to implement Jiang’s decision. The painful measures necessary will be less
difficult to execute because it was the president who made the decision to join.
For both China and the United States, strategic considerations must have
been as important as economic benefits in reaching this agreement. China’s
WTO membership will help it restructure its economy to gain in competitiveness
and long-term growth, but it will have to become a rule-abiding member of the
international community.
Over the last 40 years, I have seen how Koreans, Taiwanese and Japanese
officials and business executives have changed. From a reserved, inward-looking
and nationalistic elite, they are now self-confident and at ease with American
and Western ideas. Many of them have been educated in the United States and
are not ill-disposed towards its people. This is not to say that Chinese on the
mainland, conscious of their potential big-power status, will evolve just like the
Taiwanese. America has a choice, to have them neutral or friendly instead of
becoming hostile. When dealing with an old civilisation, it is wise not to expect
swift changes. The biggest problem between America and China will be Taiwan.
It is an imponderable, left over from the unfinished Chinese civil war. With
Taiwan under Chen Shui-bian, a new president whose party stands for
independence, the danger of miscalculation by the three parties directly involved
– mainland China, Taiwan and the United States – has increased. Any misstep
could upset growth and development in China and East Asia. This problem can
be contained if the status quo is not changed, and eventual reunification is an
aspiration for both sides.
Meanwhile, through the WTO, the Chinese economy can become integrated
into the rest of the world. With broad and deepening people-to-people contacts,
stereotyped perceptions of each other will be replaced by more realistic

---

appraisals. When the Chinese people’s livelihood is interdependent with that of
the world through trade, investments, tourism and the exchange of technology
and knowledge, there will be a better basis for a stable world.
China has the potential to realise its goal of becoming a modern economy by
2050. It can be engaged as an equal and responsible partner in trade and finance,
and become one of the major players in the world. If it is not deflected from its
present concentration on education and economic development, China could
well be the second largest, if not the largest, trading nation in the world, with
greater weight and voice in international affairs. This is one vision of China in
50 years – modern, confident and responsible.

---