IN the lee tide of tranquillity that fell upon Europe in the mid-18th century, observers grappled to explain the transformation that had crept over the great nations, like some twilight's magic cloak, since the ending of the religious wars. Hitherto it had been believed that there were only a very few viable forms of government, and choosing between them was Hobson's choice.
There were republics, where the people ruled themselves but then, having no other authority, felt compelled to rule over each other like despots, bringing about the republic's dissolution. There were absolute monarchies, where the king subdued all rival claimants to authority, but then, having no rivals, possessed no means of restraining his own actions. And there was despotism, which was the nightmare-vision of unrestrained monarchy gone mad. You could have freedom or you could have longevity: you couldn't have both.
Yet now there had arisen a new method of ruling, combining the stability of monarchies with the liberty of republics, while avoiding the extremes of either. These states under the rule of law possessed an acknowledged sovereign power, which brooked no rivals. But this sovereign power was itself subject to the laws which it enforced, itself both ruler and ruled in turn, as Aristotle had once memorably described the logic of ancient democracies.
This was the moment out of which our modern ideas of economy were born. Economics came into being not as a means of defying or subverting the proper role of government - as our distinctive modern species of authoritarian-libertarian intellectuals would have you believe - but rather as the means out of which government could discover its own self-limiting principle, its means of economising upon itself. By means of economy, liberty and authority might walk hand in hand.
None of this story is so very new, even if we don't usually trouble to tell it in precisely this manner. Nor, in a country such as China, where the political elite is supposed to sup upon Marx and Engels from their mother's milk, should the tale cause any great surprise. Even if Marx and Engels themselves believed that the state under the rule of law was a mere imposter, standing in for that true liberation from authority, which would come about (truly magical, this!) through the never-ending expansion of authority itself.
And yet in China today this mundane history is a story that dare not speak its name. A mere 20 years ago elements in the Chinese communist leadership were brave enough to envisage its dissolution, and to imagine the Communist Party as one ship among many, on a sea of contending political voices. In today's China, by contrast, any hint of pluralism is taken as a calamitous sign of weakness; while the mere fact of authority has become a virtue. Beijing's waking-dreams, it seems, are haunted by the obscure terror of dissolution: stability is all. As any good Marxist-Leninist should surely acknowledge, China has now broken free of the tide of history, and is bearing back, on its own icy breeze, into the political past.
Yet how can this be, our eager legion of China-will-save-us enthusiasts cry. If China has weathered theglobal economic crisis better than any other power, and if the Chinese export-economy is as lean and supple as any on the planet, surely they are right to reject our own esoteric way of ordering our affairs, and to insist upon - as party jargon delights in calling it - "market socialism with Chinese characteristics"?
But here's the rub. The economy and the state under the rule of law work together as mutually reinforcing, but also mutually policing entities. The spirit of economy limits the ambition of the state, because it demonstrates which tasks the state cannot manage well. In turn the economy requires a state under the rule of law to maintain it, since any other kind of state would serve either to crush it, or else allow it to collapse onto itself.
And yet as the case of our beleaguered fellow-citizen Stern Hu demonstrates with painful clarity, in China today economy and state are at bottom pure enemies, and they can survive together only by declaring innumerable temporary truces between each other. It's not enough to say - as tactful commentators have said - that the Chinese state seems incapable of distinguishing between economic inconvenience and espionage. It would be truer to say that in the state of contemporary China both facts amount to the same thing. Each economic misfortune is seen as a blow to the authority of the state, while even a pin-prick to state authority requires routine economic negotiations to be thrown into complete disarray.
Shortly before the arrest of Hu, China's National People's Congress released a draft of the country's revised Law on Guarding State Secrets. According to this law, a state secret is any matter that has a bearing on state security or the national interest, from a policy decision to details of an economic negotiation. Of course, it may not always be clear what falls under this broad heading of a secret: these cases are to "be determined by the national department for the administration of state secret-guarding". What is or isn't secret will also necessarily be altered from time to time but these decisions themselves will be secret, and the knowledge of them must be limited to the smallest possible number of individuals. And so on. The logic is impeccable in its clarity, and at the same time judicially insane.
Businesspeople all over the world are aflutter at Hu's plight, and with sound reason. After all, following the unanswerable logic of Hu's arrest - as explained by the Chinese authorities and elucidated in the draft Law of Guarding State Secrets - there is no reason why any other capable Western business negotiator in China might not also be arrested at any moment, or that sufficient evidence should not be found, without too much trouble, with which to convict them.
In short, China has created a pretty muddle for itself. Beijing had thought that calls for freedom would come only from a few easily imprisoned dissidents, or a handful of trouble-makers in Hong Kong or New York. Yet it has now become evident that trade itself cannot be conducted normally until it is clear what mechanisms exist to restrain the activities of the secret-makers, the secret-guarders, and the secret-definers: that host of miniature despots who, agog at their own omniscience, continue to exercise their undiminished authority. China had meant to create the impression of the rule of law, but instead it has created the perfect simulacrum of a modern despotism.
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