This is a working draft and is rambling and discursive.

How Well-Intentioned Policies Make Things Worse for Democracy Groups

Here are some thoughts after attending the CSISTaiwanConference.

The defining moment of my life happened in 1989 when the Tiananmen Massacre occurred and the Berlin Wall fell. For a number of years afterwards, I was involved at the margins, but still involved with pro-democracy groups, but over the decade of the 1990's, I became increasingly disillusioned with these groups, and I've finally found myself where I am today, something of a "communist sympathizer." My attitude toward the CCP is that like democracy, it is the worst possible government for China except for all of the other possible options. I'm not particularly alone in this view, and the fact remains that during the 1990's, the overseas student democracy movement self-destructed to the point that nothing is left, and the tragic thing is that some of this destruction was due to well-meaning but misguided policies that the US government imposed.

If you want the short summary - rent the movie "The Life of Brian" by Monty Python.

The basic problem is that you have a small, fragile group of inexperienced activists. Providing these activists with money and fame can unleash some very destructive forces in these groups, making it difficult for the activists to cooperate, and alienating these groups from the bases of support.

It is a very exhillarating experience for an idealistic young college student to be part of a movement to change the world, and getting money or even being noticed by a major government-sponsored organization like the National Endowment for Democracy is an amazing experience. Attending conferences, meeting politicians, this is an ego-boosting experience. The trouble is that attention and money are scarce commodities, and becoming a leader in these organizations allows one to control access to these commodities. Hence these scarce commodities become objects of political infighting. It was incredible the amount of personal backstabbing and nasty politics that went on in the Chinese student democracy movement in the early 1990's, and this led many people to just tune out.

Another problem is that in these sorts of groups, there comes with it this incredible intolerance of dissent that comes with small inbred societies. Since you have a secret movement that seeks to overthrow a government, if you agree with the government in the slightest possible way, then you are obviously a spy and a traitor and must be expelled from the group. This sort of thinking eventually excludes amount everyone since eventually almost everyone agrees with the government about something. What you are left with is then a small group of activists talking among themselves and getting shut out from the rest of the world.

Compounding this is that the relationship between donor and aid recipent causes democracy activists to take positions which cause them to lose their base of support. The situation in which I saw this was in the battle over most-favored nation trade status for China in the mid-1990's. The overwhelming number of overseas Chinese students were in favor of most favored nation trading status. However, because the leadership of the major overseas democracy groups had very strong working relations certain congressmen who opposed MFN (particularly Nancy Pelosi who helped draft the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992), the leadership was in a position of having to try to sell a very unpopular policy to the rank and file. This caused the overseas Chinese democracy groups to lose their base of support. By the time the WTO rolled around, they were completely irrelevant.

* Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = joe