From Man to Pig

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 18, 2010

Fewer eyebrows than usual were raised last week when British Prime Minister David Cameron shied away from remonstrating his Chinese hosts on China’s human rights abuse record during his strictly business promotion trip to Beijing.

The West finds fewer cards in their hands as China climbs up to its place as the second richest nation in the world. Beijing starts lecturing the United States and Europe about the successes of the “Beijing Model”—combining Leninist dictatorship with nepotistic capitalism, letting corruption flourish along with the GDP, with no place for judiciary independence, free media or ICAC-like institutions. Refusing to appreciate the Renminbi, Beijing sees little reason to swallow the medicine for the economic sickness of the United States, let alone ingest a prescription from the West about how to treat its people less like pigs and more like human beings.

Among the contracts that were to be hawked by the British Prime Minister and signed with China was, bizarrely enough, one about pig-breeding technology. Britain, particularly the Tory party, takes trade as the priority in its diplomacy with China while holding a historical insouciance about China’s democracy. British missionaries and adventurers traveled to China in the 19th century, witnessing atrocities under the Taiping and Boxer uprisings with an eye of exotic curiosity. While human rights philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham were preaching equality, there was a budding consciousness regarding China already forming in Europe, seen in its acquiescence to public executions of deaths by a thousand cuts at a market in old Peking—this was seen as a part of the ancient Chinese civilization, through an early lens of multiculturalism.

Neither are Chinese intellectuals particularly sentimental about British values. Chinese historical textbooks have long accused the British of exporting opium to China in the 19th century as a conspiracy to destroy the health of Chinese people. Any British government should be more discreet and neutral on issues like the recent imprisonment of Zhao Lianhai, the father campaigning for his sick baby who fell victim to the made-in-China melamine-contaminated milk.

With the West demoralized and divided, Cameron came to Beijing as a humble student to learn more about Confucian doctrines where slavery has long been sanctioned. It is time for the West to correct its perspective to the East. Closing the door firmly to ungrateful, anti-Christian and benefit-claiming immigrants from Shanghai or Islamabad, for example, is one way to escape the slow death by a thousand cuts of Western civilization. Let the Chinese solve their own problems, while exporting British pig-breeding technology to help a hungry world feed itself. Who is more superior in this global chaos? We all need a bit of humility. George Orwell famously puts it in the end of “Animal Farm”: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to tell which was which.”