Contradictions

A decade ago, I read an article entitled “When Will the Chinese People Be Free?”. In it, the American academic Henry S. Rowen argued that growing economic prosperity would automagically make China “Partly Free” by 2015 and “Free” by 2025 (using the labels from Freedom House). What a difference ten short years can make.

When working in China, I was often asked how I could “support” such a regime by living there. While I understood where that question was coming from, my answer has always been that more engagement is better than less. As long as one avoided certain sensitive topics such as Tibet or the Falun Gong movement, I was in fact surprised by how open both Chinese students and fellow faculty members were about the dysfunctionality of authoritarianism.

Now, as I find myself writing about Russia (and wanting to travel there), similar questions have returned. However, far from discouraging me, they have made me even more convinced of the need for new, more positive narratives about Russia’s role in the world. Otherwise, just like in a preschool, if one child is seen as a troublemaker, that may quickly become the only role that child knows how to play.