This essay examines the background to the West’s post-Tiananmen shift toward lifting sanctions on China, and the true nature of the “China model” that subsequently spread across the world.
It is a sharp warning against the twenty-first-century crisis in which democracy, human rights, and freedom are being eroded by money worship and propaganda.

2019-06-06
Mr. Halper is sounding the alarm that such an extreme Chinese model of “economic-growth absolutism” is rapidly expanding across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and is gradually spreading over the world.

The following is a continuation of Terumasa Nakanishi’s essay published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Seiron.
And in this Tiananmen Incident, there is also a bitter lesson for Japan’s own diplomacy.
It is the “visit of His Majesty the Emperor to China” in 1992 (Heisei 4).
Triggered by that visit, aid to and investment in China by Japan and other countries once again became vigorous, but as China’s foreign minister at the time, Qian Qichen, later recalled, the visit was the “fruit” of Chinese authorities’ diplomatic maneuvering toward Japan to break through the network of sanctions imposed on China by the Western nations immediately after the Tiananmen Incident.
However, the author also believes that in the future, when Japan and China achieve true reconciliation and coexistence, an era may come in which this visit is evaluated as “the occasion that led to a historic reconciliation between the peoples of the two countries.”
And yet, on the occasion of the recent imperial succession, in a television special in Japan, Mr. Tadashi Ikeda, who had been Director-General of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Bureau at the time, revealed in an interview that in fact, a considerable time after the visit to China, the Emperor Emeritus had asked him, “Was my visit to China the right thing to do?”
We must not forget that it had caused the Emperor Emeritus to harbor that degree of concern.
It is also quite possible that behind Japan’s decision to proceed with that visit, there was tacit or explicit consent from Washington.
In other words, why was it that the United States here as well moved in the direction of lifting sanctions on China?
That is a grave question.
The Beginning of the Corruption of Human Civilization.
Of course, behind the easy compromise toward China by the Western nations led by the United States after the Tiananmen Incident, there was also the fact that they could not resist the “attraction” of China as a market with an enormous population.
However, the fact that at this time the United States and Japan themselves took the lead in abandoning the principles of freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights, and that this made today’s Chinese “challenge to world hegemony” a reality, is something that needs to be explored and discussed once again in depth here.
I have long pointed out that the world order of the twenty-first century would be ruled by “frenzy” and “corruption” (see Terumasa Nakanishi, “The International Order After the Cold War,” included in Encounters with Different Cultures, Kyoto University Press, 1998).
“Frenzy” means, for example, radical Islamic fundamentalism, or globalization as the “new world order” pushed forward by the United States as the sole hegemonic power.
“Corruption,” simply put, means greed for money and money worship.
Both individuals and states, compared with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are becoming far more heavily moved by money power, and the world is becoming one covered by money worship.
This is nothing other than the corruption of human civilization as a whole brought about by the emergence of the global economy, but it may also be called a historical trend of the twenty-first-century world in which values such as democracy, freedom, and respect for human rights, values that in the twentieth century world were supported by a sincere and overflowing sense of justice, are retreating and being eroded by money power.
One reason behind this is probably that the ideologies that swept across the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have no longer retained their attraction.
One of these, Marxist ideology, which sought liberation from labor exploitation and human alienation, appears in retrospect to have been earnest and austere, and precisely for that reason, some of its branches also rushed into the madness of fascism.
Once such ideologies and values weakened as motives for human behavior, it was only natural that greed for money and material desire would enter the resulting spiritual vacuum and take their place.
A second reason why money worship has spread is probably the progress of IT technology.
Through the advanced technology of SNS, that is, social networking services, which have become highly individualistic, the world is becoming one in which everything moves through the pseudo-reality called “advertising.”
We who live in the present are being daily implanted with the psychological space of “advertising,” that is, a “post-truth” mental world in which propaganda is omnipotent.
The reason fake news overflows is that such a foundation exists.
Democracy, which presupposes the accumulation of calm and mature discussion based on facts, is now being hollowed out from within.
It has been pointed out that it is the world strategy of the Chinese Communist Party that is taking the lead in making use of, and putting into practice, such corruption of human civilization.
Stefan Halper, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who later also became a temporary topic in the Trump administration’s “Russia suspicion” affair, analyzed this in his book The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (Japanese edition, Iwanami Shoten, 2011).
According to that book, the “Chinese-style economic model” is one that regards the exclusion, in economic activity, of such “universal values” for the Western nations as democracy and human rights as a plus for economic growth, and even as factors that hinder regime stability.
Mr. Halper is sounding the alarm that such an extreme Chinese model of “economic-growth absolutism” is rapidly expanding across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and is gradually spreading over the world.
To be continued.