我知道，对抗暴政并不容易。当年我大声疾呼，反对中国的「独生子女政策」和其他不义事件，结果遭到迫害、殴打，被送进监狱，也被软禁……中共是人类的敌人。它恐吓自己的公民，并威胁世界的福祉……。美国必须利用其自由、民主和法治的价值观，来联盟其他民主国家，以制止中共的侵略。
川普总统领导了这个工作，我们需要其他国家跟他并肩，为我们的未来而战。

几个小时后，陈光诚在美国的老朋友，也是人权律师的滕彪，发了推文：「我完全反对他的所作所为。」滕彪也曾饱受中共的迫害、殴打和监禁，他不会不同意陈光诚关于中共的说法，他反对的是陈对川普的推崇。滕彪在推特上说：「对于中国维权者来说，支持川普在逻辑上是毫无逻辑可言的。」

这两个朋友之间的裂隙，只是中国异议人士群体中「挺川」和「反川」之间巨大分歧中的一个小例子。裂痕在中国境内外均清晰可见，并可能在拜登时代以其他形式持续存在。分歧的原因与基本价值判断无关。双方都不同意将维吾尔人关进新疆的集中营、粉碎香港的民主制度、在中国遍地安装数亿个监视摄像机、也反对中共专政下的许多其他现象。在川普和习近平的政治直觉上，双方都看不出有什么大的区别。习近平控制着他的国家的新闻界，而川普若做得到，也会如此。这两人都把他们的批评者称为「人民公敌」；他们都想把对手关起来（习近平做到了）；两人都设想取消对自己任期的限制（习近平成功了）；两者都要求下属忠诚；他们俩身边都围一帮应声虫（yes-men）。中国的互联网上有个玩笑就说，川普是以微弱多数当选的，在中国，习近平可不是（以微弱多数上位的）。所以两人之间最为相似的是，他们都不是被选出来的中国代表。

在中国，川普的批评者包括着名的法律学者贺卫方和张千帆，他们很睿智地看透了，川普许多行为本质上是反民主的，这损害了美国的民主以及世界其他地方的民主前景。但是，在中国国内外的持不同政见者中，川普的支持者超过了他的批评者，去了解原因何在是很重要的。这并不是因为他们在政治上是极右翼的，从意识形态上讲，他们更接近美国政治领域中传统的自由主义者。

他们之所以成为「挺川的」，是因为他们认为几十年来美国政府对中共一直都很幼稚，他们将川普视为首位对此持反对态度的美国总统。为了报复他认为不公平的贸易，他于2018年中期开始对中国商品加征关税，看起来是出于直率的「美国优先」冲动，而并非持不同政见者更喜欢的那种削弱中共国内实力的企图。尽管如此，他还显示一点反抗的精神，这与老布希总统形成了鲜明的对比，为了「维持关系」，布希对1989年6月4日天安门屠杀宽容了；克林顿总统将贸易与人权脱钩；小布希总统将中国加引进世界贸易组织；欧巴马推出对华政策，保证人权不会「干扰」贸易、气候变化或安全；还有另外的美国政府放任中共的种种例子。无论出于何种原因，与中国政府对峙，似乎是异议人士期待已久的转折，足以抵消川普性格的瑕疵和其他政策的弊端。

10月下旬，现居美国的中国着名异见人士余杰发表一个97人的名单，这些是来自中国、香港、台湾和海外的中共批评者，他把他们按照公开反对和支持川普来排列。在做我自己的一些小调查来补充余杰的清单时，我很惊讶地发现，竟有这样多中国自由思想者是挺川的。

除了陈光诚和余杰本人外，他们还包括一些杰出的人物。蔡霞是北京中央党校研究中共思想的退休教授，由于对习近平的批评，她离开了中共高层，现在流亡美国。她告诉一个在线聊天小组，她发现普通美国人天真诚实，「这当然是好事。但这也有负面的影响，即美国人的相对简单，普遍对中共的邪恶认识不足。」1989年天安门游行示威的杰出学生领袖王丹指出，持不同政见的出版大亨黎智英和香港其他中共反抗者最近下狱，可能对拜登政府构成考验：缺乏反应将释放一个将重返川普之前绥靖政策的信号。

经济学家何清涟和作家廖亦武也都是川普的支持者。出色的《痛苦的西藏》一书的作者李江琳也是如此；刘军宁，《零八宪章》运动的主要人物；北京最受欢迎的书店「万圣书园」的经理刘苏里；在美国流亡了数十年的杰出批评家胡平和苏晓康也都是。还有来自湖南的诗人师涛，他在2004年向纽约的朋友们转发了一项政府命令，不让公众提及天安门屠杀15周年。他被指控「洩露国家机密」，并在雅虎向中共透露身份后被判入狱八年半。

简而言之，把支持川普的中国异议份子归咎到教育程度低或信息不足的说法是错误的。他们并非如此，他们对西方民主国家不愿跟独裁对峙，其实有比川普总统更深远的认知。

15年前，2010年诺贝尔和平奖获得者刘晓波写了一系列文章，他称之为「二十世纪自由国家的四大错误」。2017年作为「囚犯」去世的刘晓波提出的问题是：1930年代的西方知识分子为什么会被斯大林迷惑？为什么英国和法国如此轻易地与德国和意大利的独裁者妥协？第二次世界大战后，为什么美国和英国向苏联屈服呢？在1960年代和1970年代，欧洲的前卫知识分子为何中招「毛泽东热」，这种「热」为何持续这么长时间？

让刘晓波格外不齿的是西方知识分子声称要通过毛泽东为平民—被压迫的弱者—「群众」发声。实际上，他们的做法恰恰相反：他们与压迫者站在一旁。1989年，苏联帝国瓦解时，西方人发出了「冷战结束」的嘆息。结束了？中国、朝鲜、越南、古巴呢？为什么西方看不到世界的某些部分？

美国的政策不仅忽视了中国的独裁统治，它还帮助了中共权力的增长。在天安门屠杀的几天之内，国际尽管对北京实施了制裁，布希总统还是秘密派遣使节向中共领导人保证，他想维持与中共的良好关系。当国会从1990年代初开始要求北京在年度人权方面改善，以换取「最惠国」贸易条件时，克林顿总统在华尔街的压力下，于1994年突然将贸易与人权「脱钩」。美国资本和（一部分是偷来的）技术开始推动中国制造业的蓬勃发展和出口。

在美国的支持下，中国于2001年加入世界贸易组织，并获得了世界银行数十亿美元的贷款，帮助其经济进一步飞跃。2005年，美国副国务卿罗伯特·佐利克（Robert Zoellick）发表的讲话广为流传，他说中共可能成为世界体系中「负责任的利益伙伴」。对于中国持不同政见者来说，这次演讲更多地显示了美国的天真，而不是对中共有所期望。

不幸的是，佐利克在西方人中并不罕见。在大西洋两岸的首都中，人们越来越相信「他们会变得像我们一样」。在2008年壮观的北京奥运会上，长期以来一直支持中共「参与」的咨询公司基辛格商会（Kissinger Associates）的一位约书亚·拉莫（Joshua Ramo）预测中国是「一个能将火箭点燃的火柴国家」。他没有提到成千上万的平民百姓，被迫离开家园，以确保伟大的奥林匹克尽善尽美，让中共赢得巨大礼赞。在中国持不同政见者中总体形象良好的欧巴马在2015年公开表示，中共的脱贫计划是「人类史上最杰出的成就之一」。他不承认1959年至1962年的大跃进农业灾难，导致上亿人口堕入极度贫困 （令至少三千万人死亡），中共政策直接造成的贫困，后来必须逐步清除。

几十年来，美国方面处理中美关系的工作，一直由一小撮政府和学术界专家组成， 民主党和共和党政府在操作上中都惊人地相似。他们的第一个原则是，「关系」必须守住，关系的「另一端」仅限于其正式的对话者，也就是中共那边责任在身的代理人。这些专家发表演讲，其中「中国」或「中国观点」之类的词，专门指政权高层中的极少数人。美国专家确实对那些精英做了研究，但对汉语、文化和社会的理解并不深广。北京知道如何利用这些美国人来强加自己的观点，即美国必须尊重「中国的核心利益」（直接或间接影响中共权力的利益），否则这种关系将受到威胁。只有美国，而不是中共有可能危及它。

川普轻视这些中国政策精英，是中国持不同政见者青睐他的原因之一。川普在国务院用了余茂春、白宫用了博明（Matthew Pottinger）等为中国顾问，似乎美国政府终于开始了解中共了。博明来自波士顿，1990年代中期学中文，十分优异。1998年至2005年他成为路透社和《华尔街日报》的中国特派记者，很快掌握了共产党是怎么回事。2005年，他加入了海军陆战队五年，被派往伊拉克和阿富汗。2017年，他在白宫国家安全委员会工作，他既在中国政策上参与，又能完成工作，而不致被（川普）解僱，由此可见他有多么的聪敏。（他于1月7日辞职，作为对国会大厦受到袭击的回应）。

23岁的余茂春于1985年离开中国，在斯沃思莫尔（Swarthmore）大学念书，后来在伯克莱拿到博士学位。1989大屠杀之后，他编印简报《中国论坛》，这是我所见过的，对中共统治最为尖锐揭露的出版物。他是海军学院的历史学教授，在校请假到美国国务院任职。

在2020年11月16日接受美国之音的采访中，余茂春指出了川普国务院启动的三项对华政策的新方向。其一，须停止把「中国共产党」和「中国」作为同义词，关键不是要在语言层面上挑动中共的反感，而是为了使美国人摆脱把中国和中共视为同一件事的坏习惯。只有清楚区分，才能开始理解中共对中国的破坏。其二，要改变「参与」（engagement）的概念，这是美国的「中国通们」长期倡导的战略名称。根据「参与」理论，将中共纳入商业、教育旅游等领域的交流，以为会促使中共遵循国际规范，但结果是趋势却朝相反的方向流逝。中共入侵了西方媒体、工业、金融、研究、教育、个人数据收集和其他领域，我们必须抵制这种「参与」。其三，与中共的协议必须以「结果为导向」。多年来，中共一直采用谈判的策略，对紧迫问题如朝鲜无核化，或伊朗制裁等进行拖延，说这一类问题需要更多的研究，更多的协商和更多的时间，直到美国耐不住了，最终接受不了了之的结果。余茂春说，国务院不再这样做了。

中国的民主人士十分困惑，不明白为什么美国决策者这么多年来一直被中共耍弄。对于企业界来说，原因并不难理解。庞大的，廉价的，受箝制的劳动力自然吸引了美国制造商，还有那潜在而巨大的市场诱惑。得罪中共，这些好处可能会消失。但是将政治理想这么轻易就撇开，这很令民运人士感到困惑。西方人怎么看不见，中共更像黑手党，这跟他们的政府实在并不相似啊。西方自由主义者为什么要对暴政那么尊重呢？「社会主义」和「人民」这种漂亮的标籤是否愚弄了他们？

大约十年前，「白左」这个词出现在中国互联网上。这高度的贬义词的意思是「无意间背叛了西方文明左派的白人」。1950年代访问过中国的让·保罗·萨特（Jean-Paul Sartre）是一个早期的例子。萨特谴责西方帝国主义，并书写他在毛泽东统治下的中国，所感知的「美」，虽然那时千百万中国人正在遭受荼毒。到现在，「白左」思想能否说明西方人为何仍然看不透中共？为什么当美国人振振有词地谴责自己国家侵犯了人权，而在自称「社会主义」国家中发生滥权时，却采用不同的标准呢？

中国人对「白左」的批评并非一贯严厉。来自台湾的美籍华人蒋慧娜（Louisa Chiang）与大陆持不同政见者紧密合作了数十年，给我的信中说：

许多「白左思维」都是善意的，自由主义者同样有权获得其他人所能获得的善意理解和宽容。但这是在提醒他们，如果他们真正听取第三世界的声音，他们的努力甚至可以更有效，并且可以获得更深入的认知。敞开心扉，认真倾听。

蒋女士看不惯西方自由主义者瞧不起中国受害者，认为他们缺乏应有的政治判断能力。

在纽约大学法学小组和德克萨斯州基督教团体「中国援助」的帮助下，陈光诚于2012年来到美国。以往的经历证明，他拥有独立做政治决定的超强能力，然而，两个接待团体中的人都希望他接受他们的指导，学习如何在美国政治上表现得体。后来，当陈光诚成为川普的支持者时，一些观察家更加觉得他非常需要接受政治指导，认为中国人在一个压抑的社会中长大，毕竟那里的权利意识薄弱，所以，像川普这样的骗子那么容易让他们上当受骗是可以理解的。但若以这种方式看问题，实际上，美国人认为中共领导人具有更高的判断力，而对中共批评者的判断力反而差多了。异议人士在民主党和共和党之间做选择，需要得到咨询，但是胡锦涛和习近平在有机会以「负责任的利益伙伴」之身份加入世界时，美国人能相信他们自然会做出正确的决定（直到事实证明美国人才错了）。

在某种程度上，异议人士能够接受西方自由主义者的这种批评。与专制思想的毒素作斗争常常是他们自己经历的一部分。刘晓波在2003年写道：「我可能需要一辈子才能摆脱毒素。」但是，在经历了磨难之后，这种人要比那些自以为是、悠哉的旁观者具有更深刻的认知。他们不需要怜悯。他们感到奇怪的是，像刘宾雁、方励之、胡平和苏晓康这样的资深异议人士，本来完全可以帮助华盛顿去了解中共，但在美国住了几十年，却从未有人去征询他们的意见。

许多人告诉我，他们觉得很难理解，为何西方几乎没有察觉到，他们的国家一直在付出很大的代价。为何西方跟希特勒、墨索里尼和史达林这些独裁者对立，所汲取的教训就不能应用于中国？中共正在向外扩展权力，情况就会有所不同吗？西方准备好了吗？还是西方自己已经朝着专制方向发展了？中国境内的一个朋友开玩笑却同时提出一个重要的观点问我，在推特上班的审查员是否是中国移民？她打趣地说：「他们具有专业知识，当美国某人说出某些『政治不正确』的话时，不仅会被自动打回来，而且人家开始调查他的动机。简直就是毛派作风嘛！」

言论自由一直是川普支持者和批评者之间的争论问题。笑蜀是一位长期以来虽然徒劳无功，却一直为争取中国的媒体自由而奋斗的记者。当他听到美国总统称新闻界是「人民的敌人」时，打了个冷颤。川普知道这个词在世界其他地方是怎么用的吗？知道可是不在乎吗？曾经写过一本关于中国如何过渡到民主的书的王天成先生批评在美国的川粉说他们愿意为了短期内的好处牺牲基本的民主宪政原则。

挺川的能够接受这里头的某些批评，但也不要放弃基本的观点。华盛顿对华政策新的、也许短暂的改善总比没有改善好，反正几十年来都是这么个情况，美国式的民主，哪怕不完善，总比中共的制度好得多。就拿说谎这个问题来看，川普撒谎吗？肯定的。中共宣传部（后更名为公关部）说谎吗？苏晓康温和地跟我说，这个问题很幼稚。他解释说，中共系统用一种完全不同的方式来评估语句的价值。真实和虚假是偶然的。如果陈述的「社会效应」「良好」，那么这种陈述就很有价值，而如果一种陈述支持中共的权力利益，那么这种陈述就算是好的。（对于天气预报或篮球成绩等政治上无害的事情，党不在乎支持与否，但依然要避免对党的任何伤害。）因此，「好」的陈述可能是真的，半真或不真实的，这都无关紧要。

陈述中包含一些真实成份，会更有效地影响人们，因而包含真理的趋势是很重要的。但是，真理永远不是首要条件，从这个意义上说，说谎也不是。美国民主派对总统撒谎感到头疼，这与中国生活在中共的宣传机构下本质上根本不同。中国的宣传机构可以追溯到1940年代，而如今的专家们更是非常精于此道。

西方媒体的读者，无论是否意识到，反正都已经看到了这类专业的例子。在2008年北京奥运会前夕，新华社的英文媒体开始频繁使用「lifted from poverty」（从贫困擡起了）一词。意思就是说「中国」（意为中共）为亿万中国人所做的大事。世界各地的媒体，例如《纽约时报》、《华尔街日报》、路透社、半岛电视台、共同社、BBC以及许多其他媒体，都采用了这个词组，西方政治家们，不论左派或右派也都选用这个词组。世界银行在官方报告中也使用了。简而言之，这些话在取得预期的效果方面非常成功：全世界开始相信中共成就了伟大的擡起事业。

但实际情况并不是这样子的。 中国经济发展史，从1980年代以来，要是更透明地说，是这样：中共对中国老百姓局部放开了经济管制，让他们几十年来第一次能够自己赚钱；数以亿计的工人于是拿低工资而超长时间地努力工作，没有工会，没有劳保，没有新闻自由或独立司法的保护；的确，他们赚了很多钱，自己脱贫了，同时也将高居他们头顶之上的中共精英，推上巅峰，让他们获得了炫目的财富。

简而言之，「擡起」一词需要分析，到底谁擡起了谁。在世界各地阅读到「中国人被擡起」的读者通常不会想到这个问题。有了这些句子的语法，再加上「中国＝中共」（China = CCP）的公式，就不需要再提问了。这个文字工程是故意的吗？任何对此有怀疑的人都应注意，中共媒体在英语、法语、德语和其他外语出版物中使用「中国人被擡起」一词，但在本国的中文媒体中不使用。这是有道理的。如果中共开始对自己的老百姓说「我们擡起了你们」，会怎么样呢？人们心里很清楚，双方都心知肚明。做出这样的断言可能会产生不良的「社会效果」，例如会有更多的示威、罢工、静坐、路障，以及公安部标记为「群众事件」。最近每年已经有数万起。

「挺川」和「反川」的公开辩论升温时，人身攻击有时候代替内容（但未必比其他地方的政治辩论多）。川粉说批评川的与西方自由主义走得太近了，借了人家的许多反川的论点，这就显示着中国的斗争屈服于美国的政治斗争，这是不恰当的。进一步声称，反川的人摆出了温和的道德敲诈态势：「您不谴责川普，您就是种族主义、法西斯主义和厌恶妇女的人。」挺川的说，这种压力再次让人联想到毛泽东时代，当时人们被要求检视自己的灵魂和思想，直到他们公开表达了「正确」的观点。

川普离职，拜登组建外交政策小组，他能对中共有多实际的把握？如果拜登能召回余茂春或博明在他的政府中任职，那就不仅是两党合作的标志，也是避免幼稚的门户之槛的高明之举。可惜，我看这样做是不太可能的。关键不仅在于美国对华政策的问题上，更基本的问题是拜登的班子能否正确地掌握中共的性质。

林培瑞，2021年1月13日

林培瑞（Perry Link）是加州大学河滨分校跨学科的校长特聘讲座教授。他最近的着作包括《剖析中国：节奏，隐喻，政治》，以及中国天体物理学家方励之回忆录的译本《中国最想要的人：从科学家到国家敌人的旅程》。

附英文原文如下:

The New York Review
February 11, 2021issue
Seeing the CCP Clearly
Author：Perry Link

For Chinese dissidents, the end of Washington’s deference to Beijing has been a long time coming.

In a speech at the Republican National Convention last August, Chen Guangcheng, a blind, iron-willed human rights lawyer and dissident from China whom the Obama administration brought to the United States in 2012, said:
Standing up to tyranny is not easy. I know. When I spoke out against China’s One Child Policy and other injustices, I was persecuted, beaten, sent to prison, and put under house arrest….
The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is an enemy of humanity. It is terrorizing its own people and it is threatening the well-being of the world…. The United States must use its values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop CCP’s aggression. President Trump has led on this, and we need the other countries to join him in this fight—a fight for our future.
Within hours, Teng Biao, an old friend of Chen’s who is also a Chinese human rights lawyer based in the US, tweeted, “I completely oppose what he is doing.” Teng, too, is a veteran of persecution, beating, and imprisonment at the hands of the CCP, and he would not disagree with what Chen said about the CCP. What he opposed was Chen’s bow to Donald Trump. “For Chinese human rights defenders, there is zero logical consistency to supporting Trump,” Teng tweeted.
The split between the two friends is a small example of a wider disagreement between “Trump boosters” and “Trump critics” in the Chinese dissident community. The rift is plainly visible both inside and outside China and is likely to persist in one form or another into the Biden years.
Its causes have little to do with basic value judgments. Neither side approves of putting Uighurs into concentration camps in Xinjiang, of crushing democracy in Hong Kong, of installing hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras across China, or of any other of the many symptoms of the CCP’s obsession with power. And neither side sees much to distinguish in the political instincts of Trump and Xi Jinping. Xi controls the press in his country and Trump would if he could; each labels his critics “enemies of the people”; both imagine (and Xi succeeds in) locking up opponents; each contemplates (and Xi achieves) setting aside term limits for himself; both demand loyalty from subordinates; and both surround themselves with yes-men. One online wit in China, using indirection that is common on the Chinese Internet, noted that Trump had, however barely, been voted into office in the US while Xi, in China, had not, and then offered the arch observation that the most crucial similarity between the two men is that neither is the elected representative of China.
Trump critics in China include the distinguished legal scholars He Weifang and Zhang Qianfan, who have a sophisticated grasp of why much of his behavior is intrinsically antidemocratic and how it damages both US democracy and prospects for democracy elsewhere in the world. But among dissidents generally, both inside and outside China, Trump supporters outnumber Trump critics, and it is important to understand why. It is not because they are a far-right fringe. In ideological terms, they are closer to classic liberals on a US political spectrum.
They are “pro-Trump” because they feel that for decades US administrations have been naive about the CCP, and they see Trump as the first US president to stand up to it. His tariffs on Chinese goods, imposed in mid-2018 in retaliation for what he saw as unfair trade practices, appear to have sprung from a blunt “America first” impulse, not from an intention to weaken the CCP domestically, as dissidents would have preferred. Still, he imposed them, which marks a clear contrast to George H.W. Bush’s tolerance of the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989, for the sake of “the relationship”; Bill Clinton’s about-face in separating trade from human rights; George W. Bush’s ushering China into the World Trade Organization; Barack Obama’s launch of his China policy with the assurance that human rights would not “interfere” with trade, climate change, or security; and other examples of US government indulgence of the CCP. Standing up to the Chinese government for any reason seemed to dissidents a long-awaited turn of events, and enough to outweigh all the drawbacks of Trump’s character and other policies.
In late October Yu Jie, a well-known Chinese dissident who now lives in the US, published the names of ninety-seven critics of the CCP from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas whom he judged, by what they had said publicly, to be either critics or boosters of Trump. In supplementing Yu’s list with some inquiries of my own, I was surprised to find how many Chinese freethinkers were pro-Trump.

In addition to Chen Guangcheng and Yu Jie himself, they include some remarkable figures. Cai Xia is a retired professor of CCP ideology at the Central Party School in Beijing who, because of her criticisms of Xi Jinping, left the upper levels of the CCP and now lives in exile in the US. She told an online chat group that she found ordinary Americans ingenuously truthful, and “that, of course, is a good thing. But it also has its negative side: Americans are simple and just don’t grasp the evil of the CCP regime.” Wang Dan, a prominent student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, has noted that the recent imprisonment of the dissident publishing magnate Jimmy Lai and other CCP resisters in Hong Kong is likely a test of the Biden administration: a lack of response will be a sign of a return to pre-Trump appeasement policies.
He Qinglian, whose first book on the Chinese economy Liu Binyan and I reviewed in these pages,and Liao Yiwu, who has also been reviewed, published, and interviewed here, are both Trump supporters. So are Li Jianglin, author of the splendid book Tibet in Agony; Liu Junning, a major figure in the Charter 08 movement; Liu Suli, manager of All Saints Book Grove, Beijing’s beloved (and precariously surviving) bookstore; Hu Ping and Su Xiaokang, distinguished critics who have lived in US exile for decades; and Shi Tao, a poet from Hunan who in 2004 had forwarded to friends in New York a government order to make no public mention of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. He was charged with “revealing state secrets” and sent to prison for eight and a half years after Yahoo revealed his identity to the CCP.
In short, it would be a mistake to write off dissident Chinese Trump boosters as poorly educated or ill informed. They are not, and their views on the reluctance of Western democracies to stand up to dictatorships have roots that go much deeper than the Trump presidency.
Fifteen years ago Liu Xiaobo, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote a set of articles that he called “The Four Big Mistakes of the Free Countries in the Twentieth Century.” How, asked Liu, who died a prisoner in 2017, could Western intellectuals in the 1930s have been enamored of Stalin? Why did Britain and France compromise so easily with dictators in Germany and Italy? After World War II, why did America and Britain concede so much to the Soviet Union? In the 1960s and 1970s, how could leading European intellectuals have caught “Mao Zedong fever,” and how could that fever have lasted so long?
Especially galling to Liu was the claim of Western intellectuals to be speaking, through Mao, for ordinary people—the downtrodden, the underdogs, “the masses.” In fact they were doing the very opposite: they were siding with the oppressors. In 1989, when the Soviet empire collapsed, the West heaved a sigh that “the cold war is over.” Over? What about China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba? Why does the West not see some parts of the world?
US policy has not just overlooked dictatorship in China; it has aided the growth of CCP power. Within days of the Tiananmen massacre, despite international sanctions on Beijing, President Bush secretly sent emissaries to assure CCP leaders that he wanted to maintain good relations. While Congress was extracting its annual human rights concessions from Beijing in return for “most favored nation” trade terms in the early 1990s, President Clinton, under pressure from Wall Street, abruptly “de-linked” trade and human rights in 1994. US capital and technology (some of it purloined) began to drive a boom in Chinese manufacturing for export.
With US support, China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and secured billions in World Bank loans, helping its economy to take another leap. In 2005 Robert Zoellick, a US deputy secretary of state, gave a widely reported speech in which he said that the CCP might become a “responsible stakeholder” in the world system. To Chinese dissidents, the speech revealed more about American naiveté than about what could be expected of the CCP.
Unfortunately, Zoellick was not unusual among westerners. In capitals on both sides of the Atlantic, a faith grew that “they will come to be like us.” At the spectacular Beijing Olympics in 2008, Joshua Ramo of the consulting firm Kissinger Associates, which was long a proponent of “engagement” with the CCP, predicted that China was “a nation about to put a match to the fuse of a rocket.” He made no mention of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who had been forced from their homes to assure that the great Olympic salute to the CCP looked as perfect as possible. Barack Obama, whose image among Chinese dissidents was generally good, said publicly in 2015 that the CCP’s antipoverty program was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.” He did not acknowledge that the Great Leap agricultural disaster of 1959–1962, which thrust hundreds of millions of people into dire poverty (and killed at least 30 million), was a direct result of CCP policies as well as the most direct cause of the poverty that later needed to be alleviated.

For decades the work of managing the US relationship with China fell on the US side to a small group of specialists in government and academia, whose approach was remarkably consistent across both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their first principle was that “the relationship” must survive, and “the other side” in the relationship was limited to their formal interlocutors, who were duty-bound representatives of the CCP. These experts gave speeches in which terms like “China” or “the Chinese view” referred exclusively to a very few people at the top of the regime. The Americans were indeed expert in the study of that elite but not well versed in Chinese language, culture, and society more broadly. Beijing knew how to use these Americans to impose its view that the US must respect the “core interests of China” (that is, interests that directly or indirectly affected the CCP’s power), failing which the relationship would be in jeopardy. Only the US, not the CCP, could endanger it.
Trump’s demotion of this China policy elite is one reason why Chinese dissidents have come to favor him. Under Trump, with China advisers like Miles Yu at the State Department and Matthew Pottinger at the White House, it seemed that people in the US government were finally beginning to understand the CCP. Pottinger, who is from Boston, learned Chinese unusually well in the mid-1990s and, as a China correspondent for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal from 1998 to 2005, was a quick study in how the CCP goes about things. In 2005 he joined the marines for five years and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan; in 2017 he joined the National Security staff at the White House, where his intelligence showed not only in China policy but in his ability to get things done without getting fired (he resigned on January 7, in response to the attack on the Capitol).
Yu left China in 1985 at age twenty-three to study at Swarthmore and then got a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley. After the 1989 massacre, he began editing a newsletter called China Forum that exposed the methods of the CCP as trenchantly as any publication I have seen before or since. He is a professor of history at the Naval Academy, from which he took leave to serve in the State Department.
In an interview with Voice of America on November 16, 2020, Yu pointed out three departures in China policy that the Trump State Department had launched. One was to stop using “CCP” and “China” as synonyms. The point was not to stick fingers in Beijing’s eyes at a linguistic level; it was to wean Americans from the bad habit of thinking of China and the CCP as the same thing. Only when the distinction is clear can one begin to understand the damage that the CCP has done to China. A second change concerned “engagement,” the name of a strategy that the China-expert group had long promoted. According to the engagement theory, exchange in commerce, education, tourism, and other areas would induce the CCP to adopt international norms, but the result was that considerable influence began flowing in the opposite direction. The CCP has made inroads in Western media, industry, finance, research, education, personal data collection, and other areas, and that sort of engagement had to be opposed.
Third, agreements with the CCP needed to be “results oriented.” For many years, the CCP had been using the negotiating tactic of shelving urgent questions, like North Korean denuclearization or Iran sanctions, by saying they needed more study, more consultation, and more time—until the US finally grew tired of waiting and just accepted the result that there would be no result. We don’t do that anymore, Yu said.
Puzzled Chinese democrats have wondered why US policymakers have indulged the CCP to the extent that they have over the years. For the business community, the reasons are not hard to understand. A large, inexpensive, and captive labor force was naturally attractive to American manufacturers, as was the lure of potentially huge markets. Cross the CCP and these prizes might disappear. But why, Chinese democrats ask, is it so easy to set political ideals aside? Is there something that prevents westerners from seeing that the CCP resembles their own mafias more than it does their governments? Why should Western liberals show respect for a thuggish regime? Do the pretty labels “socialist” and “People’s” fool them?
About a decade ago the word baizuo appeared on the Chinese Internet. Highly derogatory, it means literally “white people on the left” who unwittingly betray the ideals of Western civilization. Jean-Paul Sartre, who visited China in the 1950s, was an early example. Sartre excoriated Western imperialism and wrote about the beauty he perceived in Mao’s China even as Mao was tyrannizing millions. Does baizuo thinking, some have wondered, help to explain why Westerners still can’t see the CCP for what it is? Why do Americans, who are eloquent when they denounce human rights abuses in their own country, apply different standards when abuses happen in countries that call themselves “socialist”?
Chinese critics of baizuo are not uniformly harsh. Louisa Chiang, an American from Taiwan who has worked closely with mainland dissidents for decades, wrote to me:
A lot [of baizuo thinking] is well-intentioned, and liberals are just as entitled to the kind interpretation and allowances that all should receive. But this is to remind them that their power can do even more good, and that they could gain even more insights, if they were to truly heed third-world voices. Open their hearts and listen hard. It might advance their domestic agenda and make unexpected international accomplishments in their fight against any and all imperialism.
Chiang and others are annoyed when they see Western liberals condescend to Chinese victims, whom they assume are less qualified to make political judgments than they themselves are.
Chen Guangcheng came to the US in 2012 with the help of both the law program at New York University and a Christian group in Texas called ChinaAid. He brought with him a formidable record of making his own political decisions, and yet somehow people in both his host groups expected him to accept their tutelage in how to behave politically in the US. Later, when Chen turned out to be a Trump booster, some observers became even more confident that what he most needed was political guidance: Chinese people have grown up in a repressive society, after all, where awareness of rights is weak, so it is understandable that they are easy prey for charlatans like Trump. But in viewing matters this way, Americans in effect attribute greater powers of judgment to CCP leaders than to CCP critics. While the critics apparently need advice in choosing between Democrats and Republicans, CCP bosses like Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, when given the choice to join the world as “responsible stakeholders,” can be trusted to make the right decision (until, it turns out, they do not).
Up to a point, dissidents can accept this sort of criticism from Western liberals; struggles with the toxin of authoritarian thinking have often been part of their own experience. Liu Xiaobo wrote in 2003 that “it may take me a lifetime to rid myself of the poison.” After they survive the ordeal, however, they emerge with an understanding that is deeper than that of the leisured bystanders who mean them well. They need no pity. They find it strange that veteran dissidents like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, Hu Ping, and Su Xiaokang, who could have been of immense help to Washington in understanding the CCP, lived in the US for decades without ever being consulted.
Many have told me they find it hard to understand how the price their nation has paid, and continues to pay, goes largely unnoticed in the West. Why are the lessons the West has learned opposing dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin so difficult to apply to China? Will things be different now that the CCP is shifting its power grabs outward? Will the West be ready? Or is the West already trending in an authoritarian direction? A friend inside China asked me—jokingly, but with a serious point—if the censors working for Twitter were Chinese immigrants. “They have the expertise,” she quipped, and added, “When a person in the US says something not politically correct, the response to him seems to be not only to reject it automatically but to begin examining his motive. How Maoist!”
Freedom of expression has been a major issue between supporters and critics of Trump. Xiao Shu, a journalist who has long struggled, mostly in vain, for media freedom in China, cringes to hear a US president refer to the press as the “enemy of the people.” Does he know how those words have been used elsewhere in the world—or care? Wang Tiancheng, the author of a book on how China can transition to democracy, writes that China’s Trump boosters present “a huge problem: they put passing policy advantages ahead of principles of democratic constitutionalism.”
Pro-Trumpers can concede some of these points and still say that things must be kept in perspective. New, perhaps short-lived improvements in Washington’s China policy are better than no improvements at all, which is what we have been living with for decades, and a US-style democracy, even if damaged, is immeasurably better than what China has. Take the question of lying. Does Trump lie? Yes. Does the CCP’s Department of Propaganda (later renamed the Department of Publicity) lie? Su Xiaokang gently told me that the question is naive. The CCP system, he explained, has an entirely different way of measuring the value of statements. Truth and falsity are incidental. A statement is valuable if its “social effects” are “good,” and the effects count as good if they support the power interests of the CCP. (For politically innocuous matters like weather reports or basketball scores, support of the party does not apply, but avoidance of harm to the party still does.) Hence a “good” statement might be true, half-true, or untrue—that is beside the point.
A tendency toward including truth does become relevant when someone judges that a statement will influence people more effectively if a bit of verisimilitude is supplied. But truth is never the first criterion, and in that sense neither is lying. American democracy’s headache with a president who lies is a fundamentally different problem from China’s living under the CCP’s propaganda apparatus, whose roots date from the 1940s and whose experts by now are very good at what they do.
Readers of the Western press, whether aware of it or not, have seen examples of that expertise. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the international wing of the Xinhua News Agency instituted frequent use of the phrase “lifted from poverty.” This was what “China” (meaning the CCP) had done for hundreds of millions of Chinese people. The world’s media—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Kyodo News, the BBC, and many others—picked up the phrase, as did Western politicians on both the left and the right. The World Bank used it in official reports. Those words were, in short, highly successful in achieving the intended effect: the world came to believe that the CCP was doing great good.
A more transparent account of what it had done, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, is that it released its controls on the Chinese people so that, for the first time in decades, they could make money for themselves; hundreds of millions responded by working long hours at low wages without the protection of labor unions, workers’ compensation insurance, a free press, or independent courts; and, yes, they made great amounts of money, escaping poverty for themselves and simultaneously catapulting the CCP elite, who still rode high above them, to truly spectacular wealth.
In short, the word “lifted” begs analysis of who lifted whom. That question did not normally occur to people around the world who read the words “China lifted.” The grammar of such sentences, combined with the formula China = CCP, left no need for a question. Was this word-engineering deliberate? Anyone who doubts that it was should note that CCP media used the “China lifted” phrase in publications in English, French, German, and other foreign languages but not in Chinese-language media at home. That made good sense. What would happen if the CCP started telling the Chinese people that “we lifted you”? The people would know better. Both sides know better. To make such an assertion might generate unfortunate “social effects,” such as a greater number of demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, roadblocks, and other examples of what the Ministry of Public Security labels “masses incidents” and counts in the tens of thousands per year.
When debate between Chinese Trump critics and Trump boosters heats up, attention sometimes shifts (although not really more than in political debates elsewhere) away from issues and toward personal attacks. The boosters say the critics are too close to Western liberals, from whom they have learned their anti-Trump talking points, and that this shows an inappropriate subordination of China’s struggles to the political battles in America. They further claim that the Trump critics exert a gentle form of moral blackmail that says, essentially, “If you people don’t denounce Trump you must be racist, fascist, and misogynist.” That pressure, they say, again conjures the Mao era, when people were asked to search their souls and examine their thoughts until they arrived at public expression of “correct” views.
As Trump leaves the scene and Biden forms his foreign policy team, how realistic will its grasp of the CCP be? It would be not just a gesture of bipartisanship but a brilliant inoculation against backsliding into naiveté if Biden were to recall Yu or Pottinger or both to service in his administration. Yet it’s hard to see that happening. At stake is not just the question of US policy toward China but the logically prior question of whether the CCP is accurately seen for what it is.
—January 13, 2021
ssue
China’s New Censorship
September 5, 2017
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo
July 13, 2017

Perry Link
Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. His recent books include An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics and a translation of the memoirs of the Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State. (February 2021)
※本文转载自台湾雅虎论坛及《欧洲之声》