An Offer They Can't Refuse.(Brief Article)

A bloodless transition of power is no mean feat for an authoritarian government that lacks the dubious benefit of being a dynasty. China appears to have managed it once again. But this does not solve the problem inherent to any dictatorship: its suppression of the right to free speech. For now, the only Chinese who can protest without fear remain those who live beyond the country's borders.

It often seems as if it would be easier for everyone if China's dissidents in exile just went away. Easier for Western governments, which want to do business in China without being made to feel guilty about appeasing an oppressive regime. Easier for the educated elite in China's bustling urban enclaves, who want to get rich without being reminded of the compromises they've made. And easier, of course, for the Chinese government, which doesn't like to see its abuses of human and political rights advertised around the world.

The problem, however, for Chinese dissidents abroad is what plagues all political exiles: their chronic lack of influence. For all the reasons cited above, it suits everyone to dismiss them as irrelevant extremists, out of touch with the country they left, or, to be more precise, were forced to leave. Even if they were not dismissed by others, their voices would still be muted by being so far from home.

China, of course, has no shortage of people willing to voice their political disagreements in private, and to a limited degree on Web sites and in academic journals. But this is not the clamoring criticism of a true dissident community. While allowing more individual freedoms, the communist government has been fabulously successful at snuffing out any organized dissent. It's impossible to start a political party, a trade union or even a think tank that is free of government control. The Falun Gong is an exception, which is why it came as such a shock to the Chinese government, even though it is a religious rather than political organization.

It is as if the Chinese Communist Party has drawn up a contract with the educated urban elite--precisely the kind of people who supported the student demonstrators in 1989 and might have been receptive to subversive ideas from abroad. The deal has nothing to do with communist orthodoxy, which nobody really believes in anymore. Instead what the educated classes are offered is stability, order and the chance to make money, in return for political obedience. This has worked in Singapore, and the party hopes it will work in China, too.