A Decrepit Old Man

If a decade in power had not been enough to convince us, Jean Chretien's recent attack on Stephen Harper confirms the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the former Prime Minister.  In a speech Monday, he blasted the current PM for his criticisms of China's human rights record.  A shrewd political hatchet man, he came to prominence as one of the many mediocrities Pierre Le Grande elevated to high positions in government.  Forcing men of genuine administrative talent, such Gerard Pelletier and Jean Marchand (both close friends) and John Turner (a bitter enemy), out of government in the mid-1970s, Trudeau had a free hand to reshape the Liberal Party and Canadian society.  Chretien worked as his rather improbable side kick, shepherding through fiscally disastrous budgets and doing much of the dirty work behind patriation, culminating in the famous kitchen agreement with Roy McMurtry and Roy Romanow.  The general shift to the Right in the early 1980s allowed for Turner's return in 1984, delaying Chretien's successful leadership bid to the 1990 convention.  A political pragmatist who limped to the Left (to borrow an old line from Ayn Rand), Chretien's main focus was on gaining and keeping power.  Fiscal crisis forced him into a somewhat uncomfortable austerity in the mid-1990s, yet he was able to successfully exploit the divided Right and win three majority consecutive governments, the first Prime Minister to do so since the Great Equivocator himself, Mackenzie King. 

Through out his decade in power Chretien aggressively courted the Red Chinese leadership, leading several trade missions to the mainland.  Much to his horror, the Harper government has more than reversed course, it has gone out of its way to poke the ChiComms in the eye.  Blasting the PRC's human rights record, Harper has compounded his impolite language with dramatic gestures, such as making the Dalai Lama an honourary Canadian citizen.  It was under Chretien that Nelson Mandela was also made an honourary citizen, a decade after the gesture would have had any real political impact.  Harper has taken brave steps in defying a rising great power just at the moment when virtually the rest of the western world is eager to appease it.  Citing the much remarked upon Chinese sense of "face," Chretien remarked  "collective memory there...is very important and plays a big role." 

Much the same language was used by those who were eager to appease Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.  It seems murderous regimes have very thin skins.  Modern China has over the last thirty years passed from a brutal and primitive totalitarianism to a fairly sophisticated authoritarianism.  It's debatable whether, if only in a per capita sense, the PRC of today is worse that Salazar's Portugal or Franco's Spain.  There is now a tremendous internal momentum in China for change, mostly positive so far.  It's a momentum that can still be misdirected toward disastrous ends, as the example of Wilhelmine Germany, another fast rising and seemingly liberalizing giant, shows.  The Party masters who still rule the Middle Kingdom have little desire for liberalization, freedom isn't in their interests.  To maintain power they must keep the economy growing quickly enough to appease the Chinese people, while throwing the odd scrap of political reform. 

They too are now pragmatists who limp to the Left, albeit with a still awful human toll.  When appeasers of the current regime speak of China losing face, they really mean the Party losing its international prestige.  Harper isn't talking to the Party, or its rotating - and essentially interchangeable - administrators, he is speaking directly to the Chinese people.  Seven decade ago, the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune aided and abetted the rise to power of Mao.  Today the Chinese people face another crucial turning point in their remarkable history, Stephen Harper has clearly signaled that unlike Bethune and Chretien, he is on the right side of history and basic morality.