Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (37 page)

The videos came at the end of a long, behind-the-scenes battle for leverage over the election process. Saakashvili’s government faced a clandestine, hydra-headed campaign to corrupt the political process in myriad ways, beginning almost a year before the election, when Ivanishvili first declared his intention to enter the race and unite the fragmented opposition. According to authorities, his brother, who owned a large satellite-dish company, bought people’s votes by giving them free dishes.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, Ivanishvili, who had given money to the Georgian Church for years, exploited his connections for maximum political impact, and “in some localities priests and bishops actively campaigned against the government.”
¹¹
Any attempt to move against the church in a country as religious as Georgia would be disastrous.

Ivanishvili threatened to bring a million people onto the streets if Georgian Dream lost.
¹²
Apparently it never occurred to him that he could lose legitimately. Indeed, with such threats, he merely aped the spontaneous processes that had marked the so-called Color Revolutions of the 2000s, in which the populace in regions of the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, and elsewhere rose up, in each case, against stolen elections. But Ivanishvili’s threats contained more sinister undercurrents than the generally nonviolent approach of the earlier revolutionaries in places such as Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

What terrified the Saakashvili administration most was a scenario in which Ivanishvili’s mobs would reject a negative election outcome and take to the streets (with robust financial support), causing such sustained paralysis that the government would have to fight street battles to oust them. This would offer the Russians an excuse to intervene militarily “to restore peace and stability”—the old excuse, one that they’d used to invade Georgia in 2008. The pressure applied not only to the post-election period but also to the election itself, because the opposition also threatened to send mobs to voting centers to “protect the vote” and ensure fairness.

In effect, the planners of Georgian Dream’s campaign had neatly trapped the Saakashvili administration in a political checkmate even before the people expressed their preference. The public quietly concluded that the most peaceful way forward lay in voting for the challenger, Ivanishvili. For its part, if it wished to avoid a possible destruction of the country, Saakashvili’s ruling party simply could not afford to win.

And so, on Election Day, Ivanishvili prevailed with 55 percent of the vote. Within a month of taking office as prime minister, he began arresting and prosecuting leaders of Saakashvili’s pro-Western party, many of whom had vocally criticized the Kremlin in previous years. The message was clear: Georgians could say good-bye to Western-style democratic processes of the sort they had enjoyed under President Saakashvili.

The 2012 Georgian elections offer a glimpse of how the Axis is winning the global propaganda struggle. Here is a country that astonishingly voted against its interests, even its emotions, and chose to realign itself with its centuries-long oppressor. The outcome of the elections should act as a huge slap in the face for all those who believe in American values and Western leadership as the best hope for humanity. We should all wake up to a new reality, one in which our principles are not self-evident and do not automatically generate support.

We are facing a highly effective antidotal force—not only from Moscow but also from Beijing. It is illustrative to take a look at how the Chinese government orchestrated political protests against Japan to shore up support for the Communist Party and galvanize nationalistic sentiment.

Protest, Beijing-Style

“Just skip to the main course and drop an atomic bomb,” the state-run
Beijing Evening News
declared. “Simpler.”
¹³
The newspaper made this
startling pronouncement in September 2012 in reference to Japan, which had just purchased from a private landholder part of the Senkaku Islands—known as the Diaoyu Islands in China—an archipelago that has long been disputed between the two nations (as discussed in Chapter 4). Tokyo’s purchase seemed to push official organs of the Chinese government and media establishment over the edge. A few days after the sale, the Chinese navy sent six surveillance vessels to the islands’ shores, prompting a protest by the Japanese government.

“Is Japan prepared for the consequences of its odious acts?” asked the
People’s Daily
. Ten Chinese generals, quoted in Hong Kong’s
South China Morning Post
, declared that the People’s Liberation Army was “ready to take Japan on.”
¹⁴
Meanwhile, around Beijing and across the country, massive anti-Japan protests were under way. They coincided with the 81st anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria on September 18, a day of annual commemoration in China. But under the influence of the Senkaku dispute, the historical observances transformed into exhibits of intense nationalist frenzy. Soon enough, the demonstrations became destructive and violent.

Popular outrage was widespread. A hot bowl of noodle soup was thrown in the face of a Japanese man in Shanghai; the scene, also in Shanghai, of a Japanese car burning in front of anti-Japan banners in the background was photographed and circulated online.
¹⁵
Protests took place across China. The demonstrations of several hundred outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing were relatively orderly, though the crowd angrily demanded that China assert its control over the islands. The rallies in more than 50 other cities from Shanghai to Guangzhou to Qingdao were more raucous and occasionally violent.
¹⁶
In Qingdao, locals looted a Toyota dealership and set fire to a factory owned by Panasonic.

In a country that prizes order above all other things, one might expect that such mass unrest—even if directed against another country—would
make the political and media establishments uneasy. Not this time. The
People’s Daily
praised the protests as an apt symbol of Chinese patriotism and suggested that anything less energetic would paint the Chinese as a weak people: “No one would doubt the pulses of patriotic fervor when the motherland is bullied,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “No one would fail to understand the compatriots’ hatred and fights when the country is provoked; because a people that has no guts and courage is doomed to be bullied, and a country that always hides low and bides its time will always come under attack.”
¹⁷
The protests even reached Japan’s shores. “New scores and old scores will be settled together,” read a cardboard sign carried by Chinese men protesting in Tokyo.
¹⁸

All told, the anti-Japan demonstrations were of a size and energy not seen in China, perhaps, since the Tiananmen protests of 1989. But the 2012 protests differed from the 1989 demonstrations in two crucial respects: First, the people’s target was not the Communist Party leadership in Beijing but another country; second, the government wholeheartedly endorsed the protests. In fact, there is a good case to be made that the government orchestrated them. Conspicuous signs of government direction include the aforementioned 500 rural farmers, who could not have traveled to Beijing without government transport. Most of these protestors didn’t speak the local language and didn’t have rail passes.

It’s also undeniable that the state-run media incited the protests; it practically begged people to act up. Tapping into long-held resentment against the Japanese for their historical abuses in Manchuria, the media skillfully fostered a climate of anger.

Chinese police played a crucial collaborative role as well. After protests became particularly heated, the Chinese government sent large numbers of police to oversee the demonstrations—for example, ensuring that protestors in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing didn’t get out of hand. Each group of protestors was brought by the
police to the embassy, given some time to throw government-supplied water bottles and express their feelings, and then whisked off to make room for the next group. During the rally outside the embassy, a police station played a recording telling the protestors that the government shared their concerns and supported their vocal, patriotic protest, but the recording also asked people to remain orderly and follow instructions. Plainclothes officers outside the embassy directed two journalists, whom they had misidentified as protesters, to a location where they could join the demonstration.
¹⁹

One longtime foreign resident in China was convinced that “the whole thing was a fake.” The resident, who spoke to
The Economist
, suggested that “every single person with their fist in the air” was a member of either the Chinese army or police force who had been “assigned to compulsory duty to fake the protest.”
²⁰
While that may be an exaggeration, given that anti-Japanese feeling in China is genuine and has been around a long time, it’s likely that the government played a substantial role in ginning up protest fever, channeling it in the proper direction, and then bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

“The party is skilled a manipulating such public opinion . . . and the signs that these demonstrations were organized by the government is very high,” said Liu Junning, a Chinese political analyst. “The protests come when the leaders need one to come, and the protests will stop when they want them to stop.”
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Sure enough, the state-run media began to change its tone after several days of demonstrations, signaling that Beijing was ready to wind them down. The mood in the media shifted rapidly as the state decided that the protests had run their course. Though statewide news agencies had supported the protests earlier and even tacitly approved of the use of violence in those protests, the New China News Agency suddenly removed anti-Japanese content and then ran new editorials urging restraint.

“Irrational, violent anti-Japanese protests should be avoided,” wrote a Communist Party newspaper, the
Global Times
.
²²
And they were. Soon, Beijing’s streets were quiet again. The protests had served their purpose, and Beijing had given the world a lesson in a seamlessly managed, 21st-century propaganda campaign.

THE MUDDLED AMERICAN MESSAGE VS. THE NEW CONSERVATISM

When compared with determined political and communications operations like the ones just described, America’s model seems very ill-fitted to the current tasks. We have prevailed before against ruthless adversaries, and there is no reason we cannot do so again. But we face a new and more complex set of conditions and circumstances that require a creative response and determined rethinking. For a country so well versed in the arts of marketing, we have become surprisingly reluctant to market ourselves, and when we do make PR efforts, we’re incompetent. Our approach, we all believe, is better for many reasons—for happiness, for freedom, for liberation of talent, for equal rights. But we cannot win that argument if we don’t understand the arguments against it—they are not the same as they were during the Cold War.

Unfortunately, our approach remains naive. We tell ourselves that in our system, freedom stands supreme and that the open friction of ideas ultimately produces the best outcomes. Too often, the result is that the U.S. serves up a babble of contradictory messages, emanating from numerous sources, from different ethnic groups to bizarre pop-culture niches to civic groups with single-issue agendas. What less diverse populations in less sophisticated cultures see is not a rich kaleidoscope but a state with no crafted image, no unified voice or message. Many would argue that this is the very strength of our tradition: Democracy is messy, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. To a good portion of the rest of the world, though, it seems more threatening than liberating.

Neither Vladimir Putin nor the Chinese leadership has formulated a fully articulated ideological alternative to the American vision; again, this is not the Cold War. But they do tacitly offer a worldview, one that begins with the simple advantage of being clear about
who
they are. The Russians are Russians. The Chinese are visibly Chinese. Who are the Americans?

We believe that American culture is now world culture and vice versa, not least because the world shares the same media technology through which that culture inexorably flows. But the world is now perfectly capable of cherry-picking among elements of Western culture, and, more and more often, citizens in other countries are rejecting vital segments, especially those that might unleash the uncontrolled centrifugal forces that can accompany Westernization. Consider the effects of our ethics scandals on the increasingly religious politics of the Islamic world as it democratizes. They accept our political machinery but reject the content that comes with it. They use Western liberal methods to impose illiberal policies, and they often do so because they do not wish to arrive at the same place. Conservative societies, indeed most societies, have no desire to embrace the brash, loud, unabashed freedoms of our society.

We in America do not set any limits on diversity, nor do we offer an answer to the question of how other countries faced with minority or ethnic conflicts might set limits. Perhaps this allows us to feel more virtuous and humane than everyone else, but it does not constitute a winning formula in the battle of ideas.

“At least the Russians will not force our men to marry men.” That was one of the slogans Georgian Dream used in the 2012 election to appeal to pro-Russian, conservative sentiments in the electorate. Others spoke darkly of the capital Tbilisi’s being full of “Chinese and Jews,” implicitly criticizing President Saakashvili’s party for overwhelming Georgian identity with multicultural elements.

In East Asia and the rest of the China sphere, similar conservative values prevail in the culture. You won’t find much sympathy for immigrant rights or a welcoming attitude, in the name of global meritocracy, toward a continuous influx of outsiders. In Egypt—or indeed anywhere in Africa—it would not be wise to ask for official recognition of gay or lesbian rights. In Afghanistan, the surest way to ensure Taliban victory would be to demand that women have the right to wear makeup on the street in Kandahar or Jalalabad.