Saddam Hussein as Surrogate Dictator By JIANYING ZHA (author of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Best Sellers Are Transforming a Culture)

"Tolstoy would have said that every democracy is different, but all totalitarian countries look the same," my cousin said as images of Baghdad rolled by on television. They reminded him of his visit to Pyongyang, but I could have easily added Stalin's Moscow or Mao's Beijing. He added, "The leader puts his statues everywhere and gets 100 percent of the vote � and you know life must be living hell in that country."

This was the second day of the war, and we were watching the news in my mother's Beijing apartment. My cousin supports the war; so do all his colleagues at work. My mother, too, is rooting for American victory; so is her downstairs neighbor.

Feeling ambivalent about the war, I visited Beijing and discovered a startling phenomenon: many Chinese I spoke with resolutely support it. Sure, you can't hear their voices in the state news media because of the government's antiwar stance, but in private conversations and anonymously on the Chinese Internet, these voices are distinct and impassioned.

Here is one posting from a major Chinese Web site, Sohu.com: "Saddam rapes the will of his people, treating them as weeds and Iraq as his private property. Why should such a leader be allowed to stay on? War is cruel, but after the war Iraq will have a bright new future."

Or consider this view on the American decision to bypass the United Nations: "Suppose a thug has been raping a young girl behind closed doors and the girl is too scared to cry for help," said a guest at a dinner I attended. "Should we keep sitting on our hands and waiting for a neighborhood committee to come to a decision? No! The right thing to do is to rush in and save the girl!"

The analogy may be crude, but I understand its roots. Most of the supporters of the war, I noticed, experienced the darkest periods of contemporary Chinese history. They are officials, scholars and journalists ages 30 to 60 � and they remember Mao's Cultural Revolution and Deng's Tiananmen Square massacre. Much like Eastern Europeans, they see in Saddam Hussein the kind of despot they know too well.

The Chinese government hasn't missed this. After all, the people who support the war exert considerable influence over China's cultural life. That's probably why, despite relatively thorough and neutral war coverage in the state news media, all information about Saddam Hussein's murderous rule has been withheld. (The war, the stories suggest, is about oil and 9/11 retribution.) Chinese leaders, even the new reformists, do not want comparisons drawn between them and Mr. Hussein. Meanwhile, the Iraqis' lot reminds Chinese liberals of China's own past. It also reminds them how far China has to go to reach full democracy.

Support for the war is by no means widespread, and young people who missed the worst of China's purges and know little of Saddam Hussein's atrocities � but plenty about the American strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade � are the most fervently opposed to it....

Update

Indeed. I opposed the war in Vietnam, feeling very virtuous about myself, but seeing what a bunch of miserable turds the Chinese Communists were, I later decided that the war wasn't necessarily wrong. And I think that's why I'm sympathetic to the attack on Saddam. Let's hope everything turns out well for the Iraqi people.