No cheers for democracy

Stealthily, our view of the world has changed. We no longer see Russia, and above all China, as powers-to-be: we have come to see them as powers-that-are, and the thought is a fearful one. Will they see the world, as they have done throughout their histories, as a zero-sum universe in which, if the sun rises in the east, it sets – should set – in the west? Feeding that fear comes a realisation: that they are not interested in being democracies. The path up Mount Fukuyama is closed. As Robert Kagan puts it in his just-published The Return of History and the End of Dreams, “the rulers of Russia and China believe in the virtues of strong central government and disdain the weakness of the democratic system”.

And not just the rulers. In one scene in Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby (Sunday, BBC2), a young man at a party in St Petersburg that was full of English-speaking, well-travelled sophisticates, said: “You know, democracy has no real meaning any more.” Another guest glided up and murmured: “I don’t like democracy myself.” And in Secrets of the Forbidden City (Saturday, BBC2) a nice English chap, a construction engineer working for Arup on a Beijing building site, said slightly bashfully: “They have a one-party state here …and there certainly isn’t the same confusion and delay as in the west.” Even westerners, with the benefit of a bit of Chinese efficiency, disdain the weakness of the democratic system.

Secrets …was set in the reign of the early 15th-century Ming emperor and mass murderer Yongle, who built the Forbidden City palace complex in his new capital, Beijing. He did so to underpin his power, shakily built on the base of his violent deposition of the chosen emperor, his nephew. Documents recently discovered tell this story in some detail: and Secrets … reconstructed it, with interludes flashing forward to today’s China. It was hammy, but a storybook narrative drove it along, as did the recitation of the scale of the world’s largest palace – a million slave workers sent logging in uncharted forests (half never came out); a grand canal rebuilt from Nanjing to Beijing; a managerial class of eunuchs created to oversee the infrastructural innovations. Mao Zedong, later successor as emperor and mass murderer, much admired Yongle: he and those of his comrades he had not had killed lived in the palaces Yongle built, and their successors do so still.

The denouement was suitably massive and horrible. Yongle had more than 2,000 of his concubines slaughtered for the alleged dallying of one of them with a eunuch – a dallying that could only have gone so far. No matter: in those days, emperors always went much further, and China still does. Interlaced with the logs, eunuchs and the unfortunate concubines were contemporary nuggets – such as that half the world’s steel and a third of its cement are sucked up by China’s building programme; one that includes plans for 300 skyscrapers in Beijing and nearly 100 new airports in the country.

Russia, for all the menacing boorishness of its barely retiring president, isn’t quite in that league, except in contempt for democracy. Infected, Jonathan Dimbleby showed contempt for propriety by publicising this series through revelations that he had left his wife some years before, and needed a “redemptive journey” which had “given me time to …think about what happened: pain continues for a long time”.

The series also continues for a long time: five one-hour episodes, and on the evidence of the first it will be quite soppy – Dimbleby on redemptive journeys through battered Murmansk, the Karelian lakes and down to St Petersburg – meeting, on the way, a nice white witch who gave him a kind of back massage with a knife and whose nice budgie relieved itself on his shoulder, and some nice ladies of a certain age and girth who put on traditional dress and danced and sang for him, calling him a krasivy paren (handsome lad), which seemed to help the pain.

There was a genuinely revelatory moment, though, when a youngish man took him to a crumbling St Petersburg mansion that had been made into collective flats, where the man had grown up and matured. When Dimbleby asked him how he put up with the cramped quarters and the crowds of people constantly around, the man said: “We Russians separate life, and everyday life.” It was a good encapsulation of my experience of the people I met when I lived in Russia before and after the collapse of communism. The inner life, the intensity of friendship, the delight in play, including the word play, constituted a parallel and much more vivid universe than that from which only disappointment could be expected. For such a mentality, democracy can be seen as merely another manoeuvre of the disappointing real world; while for the Chinese, it threatens an end to the good times rolling over their land by slowing up the skyscrapers. However this may go, we’re talking massive here, and we little European peoples quake.

john.lloyd@ft.com