Small Government or Big Government?

What is democracy?
Qinshiuang (the first emperor of ancient China) asked;
Caesar asked;
Lewis XIV asked;
Meiji emperor asked;
Alexander Hamilton asked;
Mao Zedong asked;
Obama also asked;
“Democracy means we can express their idea freely, can elect the leader who they trust, can enjoy the necessary rights which protect us.” People answered.

The sentence printed on my anthology—“what does it meant to be human in the year 2009 on an abundant and fragile planet, with memory and possibility, with people like ourselves and different, with affluence and squalor, hope and despair, with mountains and rivers and trees, with herons and cyborgs, music and noise, with art and TV and infinite space?” has touched my conciousness and emotion every time I open it. Eating, sleeping, talking as well as moving, these fundamental elements which make human lives happily and normally are indispensable. But in what way can those living-rights be protected? What if those rights are deprived from our life? Those questions lead to another important concept, which is also the topic I am going to talk about—government.

People select their leader though election, both public (in American) and indirect (in China). And the chosen leader organizes his or her assistants to work with. So this is the simplest idea about how government was created and works. However, the power of government is something that is hard to control. As George Orwell articulated in his famous 1984, an omnipotent government can even scare, monitoring people’s life and restricting their movements. But its counterpart—a government without too much power, is always tardy and ineffective when addressing urgent problems. Chinese government, the biggest government in the world, which is constituted the stunning more than 24,000,000 public servers and huge national structures, has always faced the dilemma between effectiveness of problem-solving and the l ignorance of individual’s rights.

One day in June, when I was watching television and my father was cooking in the kitchen, the news review which was made by a Hong Kong company suddenly shocked me. The title in a relatively lower place of the screen clearly showed ten words: Patriotism is the only way to testify history. I rushed to the kitchen, yelling to my father: “see the news review, quickly”. My father got surprised too when he saw the title. A few minutes later when the review ended, dad and
I sunk into a long, suffocating silence and contemplation—today is just one day before the 20th anniversary of that tragedy happened in June 4th, Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
I said: “such an interview, after all, can only be produced by a company located in a place that strictly does not belong to mainland China.”
“Right” my father agreed: “but it must be under a lot of pressures. Anyway, the political atmosphere indeed changed tremendously, compared with the past. This interview itself is a progress”

Tiananmen Square, which means ‘the gate to forever happiness’ in Chinese, has always been a place full of conflicts and turbulences. In the feudal age, the general people always gathered in front of Tiananmen to confide their most painful encounter with injustice to the empire, and during the time when ancient feudalism met the outcomes of modern industrial revolution, the democratic parade in front of Tiananmen directly led the May 4th movement, even the establishment of Chine Communist Party (CCP).

But why the democratic students who demonstrated their anger in 1919 and most of whom did become the pillars of CCP, at the time of 1989, became the targets for people to demonstrate? The reasons which led to the incident were pretty complicated and hard to explain, but the most significant linchpin is in fact very simple. The confrontation of planned economy (everything was given depends on need) between Prime Minster Deng Xiaoping’s blueprint of opening the market, created two price lines for Chinese economy: one is the official price and another is the black market price. So many “civil servants” used their power buying products in one price and selling them in another price. Those dark transactions as well as the stunning inflation finally made people angry thus led them to use parade as a way for solving problems.

With no doubts, the superiority of big government showed itself clearly in the night of June 4th. People were ‘asked’ to remove themselves from Tiananmen Square. And such a chaos, which lasted for more than two months, spread in almost twinty provinces, and seriously obstructed people’s lives, was shot down quickly and firmly. Demonstration stopped, but it did give government a warning, and led more people to think about China’s future, including the power-holders—how to find a midpoint between an over-powerful and a lack-power government.

Michel Foucault said in his Docile Body which discussed in one part the ways to reach maximum forces by arranging people’s behavior appropriately:
“First, the individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others. Its bravery or its strength are on longer the principle variables that define it; but the place it occupies, the interval it covers, the regularity, the good order according to which it operates its movements. Second, the various chronological series that discipline must combine to form a composite time are also pieces of machinery. The time of each must be adjusted to the time of the others in such a way that the maximum quantity of forces way be extracted from each and combined with the optimum result. Third, the carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individuals must be punctuated and sustained by injunction whose efficacy rests on brevity and clarity.”
In his words, the people, or specifically the soldiers are mercilessly described as machines, and the words such as ‘must’, ‘no longer’ appear frequently in his essay. Foucault did acknowledge the fact that body, in such training, is manipulated, shaped, which obeys, responds, and thus achieves the level of docility.
Also, American politician Huntington suggested in his The Soldier and the State：The Theory and Politics of Civil Military Relations the question that in a democratic country which believes liberalism, what relationship should the government establish with military which represents conservatism, based on the fact when President Truman dismissed general MacArthur because of his openly disobedience in 1959.
“From military prospective, a democratic country can act more excellently than a monarch country. But when facing the enemy who in believe of conservatism, democratic military is always lack of the necessary efficiency.”

The theory of docility of body (relationship between commander and soldier), obviously, applies to government politics (relationship between government and general people). Let’s go back to the time of World War 2, in which time the governments’ power reached their peak because of the extensive war. During the war time, Hitler and his administration changed Constitution which enabled them to use special rights when country facing the imperative emergency, thus made Hitler monarch despite the impediment from Federal Parliament. In America, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 relocating 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast into internment camps for the duration of the war. The personal rights, liberties, and freedoms of Japanese Americans were taken away from them by their own country. Although such unbelievable act was criticized by most historians and Americans later and the Congress did apologize to Japanese-American, a lot of people in fact were in favor of it in the war time. Put the specific case in war-time to a larger stage, it appears to that everytime the country facing emergency, the governments’ power would increase dramatically, no matter such emergency is economical, political or ideological. During the New Deal of 1930s, the time which marked the initiation of Big Government age, FDR strengthened the federal government’s power over state government, and increased the regulations in free market. In recent years of terrorism threat, general people also face the dilemma between national security and personal rights. In a file which was published by Department of Justice in March, president’s power was significantly enlarged, which enabled Bush administration to monitor personal phone calls and gave him a larger space to deal with terrorism suspects. “If the president is working for anti-terrorism” the file claimed “the fourth Amendment of Constitution, which contains the clause about restricting illegal search and holding, is futile”.

However, the demonstration or parade against the ignorance of people’s diminishing rights never disappears from the world. Today, I sitting in my dorm in upper state NY, thinking about another parade happened in 1960s America which was led by Martin Luther King, Jr.—the march on Washington. With no doubt, the March was successful. It not only made every person in America familiar with MLK’s symbolic speech ‘I have a dream’ but also articulated the darkness took place in southern states. The march did, clearly, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. As MLK sail in his the Letter from Birmingham Jail, where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were their voices when Governor Wallace gave the clarion call for defiance and hatred? The government’s role in southern states did deteriorate the situation of African-Americans. Openly disregarded the judgments carried out by Federal Count (the infamous governor of Arkansas used national guards to stop nine African-American students from going to school) and setting obstructions to limit African-American’s rights (the notorious only the people who passed the education exam can have the rights to elect or if a people want to elect, his or her grandfather must have use the right of election before the Civil War) are all examples of the government malfunction.

Unfortunately, MLK paid for his desired freedom, using his life, as did the students paid for their desired democracy in 1989, China. When the students standing on the Tiananmen Square used their bodies to stop the invasion of powerful national machine, when MLK standing in front of Lincoln Memorial used his words to stimulate the strength of African Americans, they must think the same, just as did Antigone think when she openly disobeyed the idea of her uncle and buried her brother: I must sacrifice for what I believe.

After the whole passage’s objective writing, why don’t I end up the essay with a philosophical ending, to stop heated dispute and argument? Confucius said: there are no absolute wrongness and rightness in this world, just as there is no absolutely good government or absolutely wrong people. Neutrally, we should limit our blame about governments for their restriction of human rights; also we should limit our praise to those people who dedicated themselves in protecting rights. Adam Smith said in his The Wealth of Nation: “there is always an ‘invisible’ hand that controls people’s life and manipulated the happening and ending.” Shuren Chou said in his essay: “Initially, there are no roads on the ground; it is people’s too much walking that makes roads.”

It is still a mysterious and cryptic world.


2009.8.22.Bard