Random Walk

A totalitarian regime also has to control most of the economy. If the state is the main employer, landlord, and food distributor, then rebellion against those in power risks not just imprisonment but starvation. Today China fails this criterion. The economy in most provinces is largely private. As a result, the state has lost a potent lever of economic control over its citizens, leading, for example, to a reduction in daughter killing—the habit of killing girls, in order to have sons while staying within draconian laws that punish the rearing of more than one or two children. Reportedly, many of the girls who disappear shortly after birth do not get dumped in the river but are brought up by their parents in secrecy, in a sort of population grey economy. This would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago—where would the parents have got ration cards to feed the extra mouth?

The current spirit of China reveals itself in a little compound in the old part of Peking, where I was taken by Zdzislaw Goralczyk, the Polish ambassador. An entrance gate with red pillars and a traditional roof leads to several courtyards formed by low wooden outbuildings connected by shaded arcades. The flora is now neglected, but a pagoda stands on top of a stone garden. A small door in its base leads to a nuclear shelter several stories deep. This was once the home of K’ang Sheng, Mao’s Beria, the man who made it possible for the tyrant to carry out such bold schemes as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Today, you can sleep in his bed for a few hundred dollars, and the ambassador, who was a student in Peking when the ogre was still rampant, treated me to a delicious supper in a restaurant in one of the outbuildings.

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A totalitarian regime also has to control most of the economy. If the state is the main employer, landlord, and food distributor, then rebellion against those in power risks not just imprisonment but starvation. Today China fails this criterion. The economy in most provinces is largely private. As a result, the state has lost a potent lever of economic control over its citizens, leading, for example, to a reduction in daughter killing—the habit of killing girls, in order to have sons while staying within draconian laws that punish the rearing of more than one or two children. Reportedly, many of the girls who disappear shortly after birth do not get dumped in the river but are brought up by their parents in secrecy, in a sort of population grey economy. This would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago—where would the parents have got ration cards to feed the extra mouth?

The current spirit of China reveals itself in a little compound in the old part of Peking, where I was taken by Zdzislaw Goralczyk, the Polish ambassador. An entrance gate with red pillars and a traditional roof leads to several courtyards formed by low wooden outbuildings connected by shaded arcades. The flora is now neglected, but a pagoda stands on top of a stone garden. A small door in its base leads to a nuclear shelter several stories deep. This was once the home of K’ang Sheng, Mao’s Beria, the man who made it possible for the tyrant to carry out such bold schemes as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Today, you can sleep in his bed for a few hundred dollars, and the ambassador, who was a student in Peking when the ogre was still rampant, treated me to a delicious supper in a restaurant in one of the outbuildings.