In this month’s cover story, Mark Leonard addresses a question that has been largely neglected by even the most ardent admirers of China’s rise as an economic superpower: what exactly are the ideas shaping the growth of this potent challenger to western hegemony; and who are the people thinking them?
China has a very different political and intellectual tradition to those of Europe and America—but throughout history, and since long before Europe began to claim itself a civilized place, it has been at the heart of global technological and educational innovation. As Leonard explains, China’s intellectual class is now growing at an astonishing rate, in tandem with a huge expansion in its universities and think-tanks, whose memberships already outnumber those of any other nation. Free thought in the western sense may remain distant in many areas, but modern China enjoys a level of national debate inconceivable even a decade ago—and one that nourishes a distinctly Chinese model of economic development and political legitimacy which is increasingly proving a global alternative to the attractions of western market democracy. Over 3,000 Chinese-style “special economic zones” are now to be found around the world, for example, in addition to its own expanding multi-billion dollar trade hubs in Africa.
Will the “China model” be to the 21st century what the American way was to the 20th? Mark Leonard presents us with a vivid picture of a nation still in transition, yet determined to bring the results from its formidable laboratory of social experiments to bear on the world. Let us know what you think here (and for those wishing to find out more, Leonard’s book What Does China Think? has just been published by 4th Estate).
When I read the following, I was stunned: “Zhang Weiying has a thing about Cuban cigars. When I went to see him in his office in Beijing University, I saw half a dozen boxes of Cohiba piled high on his desk. The cigar boxes—worth several times a Chinese peasant’s annual income—are fragments of western freedom (albeit products of a communist nation), symbols of the dynamism he hopes will gradually eclipse and replace the last vestiges of Maoism. Like other economic liberals—or members of the “new right” as their opponents call them—he thinks China will not be free until the public sector is dismantled and the state has shrivelled into a residual body designed mainly to protect property rights.”
The New Right has been completely stupified by ther very worst teachings by Locke and Montesquieu. “Society,” in this Enlightened view, consists of consumers whose only relation to anyone else is defined by what they can or cannot afford to consume.
In this Enlightened view, the individual truly is nothing but a bi-pedal tube to put things into to empty–in preparation for the next fix–at the other end.
Zhang Weiying is merely a parody of Hollywood movie stars’ dreams.
What a great article. I really appreciated getting a better glimpse into China. A friend recently returned from China looking to do business there. He decided against it, as he was uncomfortable about a common and rather bold declaration - They were all working toward “One World, One China” as he put it.
So where are our great think-tanks that are trying to determine how to stay one step ahead of China? All I seem to hear is how we are losing the battle, that the rich are going to continue to become richer as the rest of us become poorer by feeding Chinas economy.
For all the different groups with varying agendas in in China the overall message of this article still seems to be one of focus. China has it.
In my opinion, we need to get it back. I am rather partial to the underlying foundation of the United States form of government. For all of the little issues that we seem to polarize around, we have the freedoms that God would wish for all his children of every nationality, race, religion, etc… Unfortunately greed combined with that very freedom seems to lead to ineffective and neverending bickering in our multi party system.
Although it appears that some attempts are being made for a kinder gentler China, their “one world, one dream”, one China philosophy may very likely become a reality. If it does come to pass and the US fades into history as a once great power, will China’s attempt at a kinder, gentler image remain? I doubt it unless a strong freedom based super power which promotes human rights can continue to offset it.
It appears to me that we have been resting on our laurels. In the article, China’s 11th 5 year plan was mentioned several times. There is the focus - 55 years worth of following a plan that I am sure has had course corrections along the way. A real plan for future results based on learning from past mistakes. A plan that guides todays and tomorrows actions. The plan focused on their economy for years making incremental changes toward a form of capitalism, and it certainly has put them on track. We could learn a lot from China.
ML’s rather breathless article doesn’t record one ‘new’ Chinese idea or name one Chinese thinker with a global, or even regional, record/reputation. So I think the “western hegemony” can sleep sound a little longer. And as for the banal observations on the thousands of Chinese thinktanks and ‘tankers, ML merely falls for the old Chinese numbers game … never mind the quality, feel the 1.2 billion quantity. On the other hand ML’s half-baked views are becoming fashionable … Western production of consumer non-durables is doomed, Western ‘thoughts’ are doomed … let’s all roll over…
Naturally, you humans are not able to understand how the Chinese are thinking. You’ll have to understand Vogon poetry first.
When any western thinker comment on other nation`s policy he impose his view and compare with his culture`values. This I think not good and you are making wrong conclusion.When we write on different culture we must understand their culture their view of life, their way of living.
China`s way of living, their philosophy is based on Confusious teaching, obidient to authority is base of their life, their democracy is purely chinese so it useless to impose on them western idea of living. Let live them their own way.
British imposed their values, way of addminatation on India and we are till suffering of this imposed values.When India fully abolish these superfishal values and adopet Indian way of democracy then only they will make progress in all way of their life.
Ah yes, another of the coming “steamroller of china” articles. Nothing to see here folks just another lapdog of a journalist begging at the feet of more enlightened “Easterners” after a sojourn or two to China.
If these “thinktanks”–I would allow “government sponsored baijiu club for reformed red guards”, were so persuasive where is their influence?
Make no mistake—there is a clear message imparted by the government to these “thinktanks”– step outside of clearly defined dogmatic boundaries and risk losing your comfy office, stipend—or worse.
I did a word search of the article to verify my impression that “water,” “pollution,” “famine,” and “drought,” did not appear, even once. Unless those thinking about today’s China consider these fundamental elements their contemplations are shallow. China is about to descend into an abyss containing of ALL of those words.
I’m struck by the term “deliberative dictatorship.” Singapore seems to be the model that China best exemplifies, but it does so with 4 million people rather than 1.2 Billion. Overall, I found this article to be fascinating.
This article deeply impressed me. I have not come across anything which better conveyed the varying currents of thought in China and the potential effects inside and outside China. I know nothing firsthand about these things but I did get the sense the author is writing with authority and insight. I’ve ordered his book. I have personal reasons for becoming better informed about the Chinese Zeitgeist and I thank the author for this report.
This is an excellent article, and I will surely read the book as soon as I can.
I wonder, however, what the impact of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong model will be for China. After all, the Taiwanese are enjoying full democratic rights, and their democracy has taken stron indigenous roots. Same goes for the rule of law in Hong Kong. I don’t think a Chinese path of development that ignores these elements in other parts of “Greater China” will be sustainable in the long run.
I think it is a very well versed and informative article and first kinda objective analysis on China’s socio-political scenario that I have come across in recent times. Nice article!
This is an interesting article that makes a number of valid points. It is encouraging that a western thinktanker has actually got out and done some good old-fashioned reporting on China instead of just theorising about it from afar or engaging in hostile polemic. I have three comments:
1) Mark Leonard accurately charts the shift in leadership priorities away from the “growth and economic reform at any price” policies of the Deng-Zhu-Jiang era in favour of an agenda that puts more emphasis on income redistribution, social infrastructure and party reform. But I think he rather over-estimates the role of Chinese intellectuals in this. In my view, the shift has been driven mainly by growing popular discontent at the huge of costs of wasteful all-out growth: rapidly widening income inequality, a marked deterioration in education and health care, severe water pollution and, above all perhaps, the naked greed of corrupt party officials. Devoid of any ideological convictions, the party since 1979 has based its popular legitimacy almost entirely on its ability to deliver steadily higher living standards to the mass of the people. When it became obvious that simply rising headline GDP every year was yielding diminishing returns - and even becoming counter-productive - the party leadership concluded that it needed, as a matter of political survival, to change course. It did not need thinktanks to tell it.
2) Actually, under Hu Jintao, the needle seems to have swung further than simply correcting the distortions created by a profoundly unbalanced growth model. The new mantra, as I see it, is to make multi-party democracy unnecessary by presenting the party as the provider of all the public goods the Chinese people might desire - and more. This is a massively ambitious and, I suspect, high-risk, agenda. It depends, not only on delivering social programmes and other public goods in an effective and fair manner - in a country which is seriously short of the necessary management and administrative skills; it basically depends on whether the party can fundamentally reform itself. That is an immense undertaking. Apart from rampant corruption in its own ranks, the party rules through the power of patronage, lacks external institutional checks and balances and is largely immune to bottom-up accountability. More than just a few experiments in low-level “democracy” will be needed to change that.
3) In my view, the apparent growth of Chinese “soft power” has been blown wildly out of proportion. To some extent, that is due to the fact that the Bush administration’s policies have created a vacuum into which China has been able to move. That situation may not be irreversible if the US elects a new President committed to pursuing a more responsible and internationally acceptable foreign policy.
In any event, China’s foreign policy is currently driven by one overriding priority: economic need - for export markets, energy and raw materials. In one sense, that is extremely reassuuring, since it gives Beijing a large stake in preserving global stability.
However, in the longer-term, it has a serious weakness: it means that it is based on self-interested materialism and utilitarianism. Even repressive regimes in Africa, flattered by China’s attention, are beginning to suspect that ultimately Beijing is in this game only for itself. At a popular level, there are growing signs of discontent in parts of Africa about the impact of low-price Chinese competition, ruthless Chinese labour practices and the fact that many Chinese-funded infrastructure projects use imported Chinese, not local, labour and materials.
Truly effective “soft power” needs to be about more than this to be sustainable: at bottom, it is about communicating social values, aspirations and dreams that ordinary people abroad can identify with and hope to emulate. Here, China has not much to offer: the prevailing ethos, as any visitor swiftly discovers, is soul-less, get-rich-quick materialism. This is evident not just in business but in scholarship, where unrestrained ambition for fame and fortune has led to a plague of academic plagiarism, incidentally rendering value-less much Chinese research.
Talking to young people in China, I have been repeatedly struck, nonetheless, by how many of them still warm to the American Dream; not only because it appears to offer career opportunities and a comfortable lifestyle, but because it involves individual rights. By contrast, during extensive travels in the rest of Asia, I have never met anyone who said they wanted to live the “Chinese Dream”.
It’s a little sad that, of the 12 comments so far, only two (those by “Stuv” and “chris”) have spotted that, like the Emperor in Anderson’s story, Mark Leonard’s cardboard cut-out of the “Chinese intellectual” has no clothes. What this articles does have, in nauseating abundance, is the all too familiar stench of westerners who, taking freedom and democracy for granted, go off in search of exotic realms with different values, then produce lazy and sloppy generalisations that emphasise the exotic and the different in ways that border on racism (albeit, one hopes, unconscious racism): oh no, the Chinese are so unlike us that they can’t possibly handle freedom or democracy, can they?
“in the medium term, the regime seems to be developing increasingly sophisticated techniques to prolong its survival and pre-empt discontent”: Indeed, and one of those techniques seems to be persuading useful western idiots to write obscene justifications of dictatorship such as this article. What precisely is the difference between Leonard’s incredible gullibility in the face of Chinese Stalinist propaganda, and the gullibility in the face of Soviet propaganda displayed by the Webbs, Shaw and other Fabians 70 years ago? It would actually be a relief to discover that either the magazine or the author, or both, were being handsomely paid by the murderers and liars of Beijing to publish this drivel, if only because cynicism is marginally less revolting than naivety.
Great cover photograph on the magazine, don’t you think? Next, a Dwayne Chambers look-alike in track suit with the headline “How Black Men Run”
Guy de Jonquieres,
You made some comments about Beijing and Africa, so I think as an African it is fair to respond.
People accuse Beijing of investing and giving out aid with no strings attached. But isn’t that the story of China’s remarkable growth over the past 30 years? The West poured in huge FDI into China with no strings attached in the 80’s and 90’s.
The Chinese would rightly conclude that if it worked for them, it should work for others.
The unpleasant truth (which most Africans understand) is that while the West does not really need Africa, China desperately needs Africa. I come from Nigeria, the only thing America and Britain needs from my nation is Oil. The bulk of their investment is in the Oil and Gas sector. Americans and British are not interested in our Banking Sector, Telecommunications Sector, Food Sector, Buiding and Construction or Transport Sector.
China needs the African market, not just as a source of raw materials, but to sell finished products. The Chinese also understand that sometime in the near future, they will need to outsource manufacturing to African countries - and they are preparing for that.
No Western bank would invest $5 billion dollars in a Nigerian Bank. A Western government would rather donate blankets (and generate headlines), than build a dam in Ghana. No Western government is interested in building special economic processing zones in Tanzania or Sierra Leone.
This issue (which most Westerners fail to grasp) is not the motives behind Chinese investment, but whether this investment will lead to sustained economic activity. For most part the answer is yes. The Chinese can build roads, dams and ports faster and cheaper than any Western nation. A road, once built will be used.
The Chinese are not stupid and Africa is not monolithic. The Chinese will abide by rules when they are compelled to. African nations that strike an intelligent relationship with China will do well.
Of course, China isn’t the only game in town. They have India, Russia, South Africa and Brazil hot on their heels.
On the other hand, Western policy towards Africa is governed by a strange mix of post-colonial guilt, Bob Geldof, Oil and the War against Terrorism.
It makes for good tv commercials, but it doesn’t create real jobs - it creates dependants. In poor countries like Liberia, people are crying, ‘trade not aid’.
So far, only the Chinese (and possibly the Indians) are listening.
Dear Kingjaja:
Thank you for your comments. I agree that China’s growing role in Africa presents a challenge to the west’s often hypocritical record there. It is also true that China has invested in infrastructure in the continent (though very often using Chinese - not African - labour and materials). In addition to investments by state-owned enterprises, there is a sizable and growing Chinese private-sector presence in many countries.
But to suggest that China “desperately” needs Africa not just for raw materials, but for its market and for outsourcing, is going too far. Though two-way trade is growing fast, Africa still accounted for only 3 per cent of China’s outward FDI stock in 2005 - against 53 per cent in east Asia - and most Chinese money since 2000 has gone into extractive industries. The stock of US and European FDI in Africa also still dwarfs China’s, though the latter is increasing much faster.
To the extent that China regards Africa as a promising market it is one that it is more interested in serving through exports than local manufacturing. According to Robert Rotberg of the Kennedy School and president of the World Peace Foundation, 86 per cent of South Africa’s clothing imports in 2004 were from China. And when Chinese companies do set up textiles and clothing plants in Africa, it has very often been to take advantage of loopholes in protectionist western trade policies. When those loopholes disappear, so do the Chinese plants - as Lesotho found to its cost when the MFA expired a few years ago and more than 30,000 local workers lost their jobs in barely six months.
I am not blaming the Chinese for this: they are merely behaving like traders and investors from other countries. If African countries want trade rather than aid, they must face the fact that that means competing with foreign producers that may be far more efficient and dynamic than their own. But it would be illusory to suppose that China is in this game for anything other than its own purposes. The resources bonanza created by Chinese demand offers Africa a big development opportunity. But as the Chinese themselves emphasize, how it is used is up to Africans themselves. There is no sympathy in China for Africans’ complaints that their economic problems are due to exploitation or neglect by the west.
Finally, western investment in Africa is not limited to extractive industries. A sizable amount is in activities as varied as banking and consumer goods production. I can also think of reasons other than western curmudgeonliness why China may have been the only investor interested in taking a stake in a Nigerian bank…
G de J makes some astute comments on changes in China’s economic direction i.e. the leadership has responded (sometimes slowly) to grassroots complaints about the gap between the provinces and the seaboard cities, the pollution and corruption…and not necessarily to the counsel of intellectuals. Guy says also, about China’s Africa policy: “However, in the longer-term, it has a serious weakness: it means that it is based on self-interested materialism and utilitarianism.” Sure it is, the Chinese don’t claim to be christian samaritans - marxism is atheist. But capitalist nations act on self-interest too, sometimes in the name of a humanitarianism partly derived from the judaeo-christian western ethos. The big aid donors have often tied in aid programmes with business contracts and the like. I hope China’s robust Africa policy will prompt western governments to keep their own aid and trade policies relating to that continent under keen review.
This fawning and simpering article about “think tanks” in a repressive military dictatorship is disgusting… If China is going to change the world, then they are going to need to open up their society and economy to the rest of the world. They are going to have to give their people rights. I think it’s pathetic that this author described a former member of China’s Red Guard as an intellectual pasha sipping tea, as if he’s spent his time reading books and writing poetry instead of goose stepping around with a gun.
Who funds this paper????
Guy de Jonquieres,
An important (though overlooked) point is that China’s massive investment in Africa is relatively recent. It is not fair to measure ten years of Chinese investment with forty years of post-colonial Western investment.
Of course, China will start with commodity based industries - that is where all newcomers start. The West has been around for more than two hundred years but is still stuck with commodity based industries.
You then accused the Chinese of building infrastructure using mainly Chinese labour and materials - fair point. But that is marginally different from what the West does. The largest construction firm in my nation is Julius Berger (a german firm). They have been in operation for more than fifty years. They still import thier cement from abroad and have made no investment in the local cement industry. Worst of all, they have minimal technology transfer (all the foremen are German, only the lowest labourers are Nigerian).
Now the Chinese can do the same job faster and at half the cost. The cost savings can make up for a temporary lack of employment (if we assume that the Chinese would employ zero Nigerian workers - highly unlikely).
(You also seem to forget that China has serious demographic issues and that real wages are rising rapidly within China).
The same applies to most other Industries. The major exception is the Oil and Gas industry (and it took an ongoing low intensity war to get there).
You then made a comment about Nigerian banks. I understand where you are coming from. Your views have more to do with stereotypes than hard facts on the ground. It was these stereotypes that prevented Western companies from investing in the Nigerian Telecommunications sector (the largest and fastest growing in Africa). South Africa (MTN) and China (Huwaei - equipment manufacturing) grasped the opportunity and are better off for it. (Vodafone tried to get it but alas, it was too late).
The Chinese investment in Nigerian and South African banks is strategic. The Chinese stake in the South African bank gives it access to 19 African countries, while the Chinese stake in the Nigerian bank gives it access to the West African region. Nigerian banks are expanding to areas like Uganda - and China wants a piece of the action.
Now the West may not be interested because the numbers may be too small (Ugandan bank? who gives a damn about Ugandan banks in the City!) or the risks are too high (all Africans do is suffer from AIDS or cause wars). But the reality of Africa is more complex.
As time goes by, the Chinese approach to investment in Africa is likely to get much more sophisticated. Africa needs more investment. When people are too busy making money, they have less time to fight wars. Infact, Africa needs are unique set of skills that the West can no longer supply. The West does not do low cost manufacturing, the West does not manufacture refigerators, washing machines, microwave ovens, low cost motorcycles etc. The only thing the West offers are sophisticated financial instruments and hitech goods - of which Africans have no need for now.
Hu Jintao has been a brilliant strategist.
G de J,
You wrote:
“Finally, western investment in Africa is not limited to extractive industries. A sizable amount is in activities as varied as banking and consumer goods production. I can also think of reasons other than western curmudgeonliness why China may have been the only investor interested in taking a stake in a Nigerian bank.”
That was true probably twenty years ago. Does not hold today. The tragedy of the nineties is that MOST Western nations scaled back investment in consumer goods production and banking. (Barclays left Nigerian, Citibank limited itself to a small operation in Lagos, Blue Circle cement left, Xerox sold its business to local businessmen). The Chinese, Indians and South Africans swooped into this vacuum.
As we write, MacDonalds is practically being begged to invest in the Nigerian market (don’t want to). When the Chinese capture that market segment - we will hear another round of China bashing in the Western media.
KingJala: Thanks for your latest comments, with many of which I agree. Since we are in danger of straying some way from the original topic of this blog, I’ll make this my last response on Africa.
If African countries are to prosper, as we both hope, one thing that they must do is to get much more serious soon about lowering their trade barriers against each other. Failure to do so will prevent them ever becoming large-scale manufacturing bases and mean that China, which has vastly superior manufacturing productivity, will continue to export far more to Africa than it makes there. It will also much reduce Africa’s chances of getting more western companies to invest there.
Those who complain that western companies are ignoring Africa need to ask themselves why, when many of those companies are under attack at home for allegedly outsourcing jobs abroad, so few choose to set up in Africa. One explanation that can be immediately discounted is political bias. Whatever their faults, the vast majority of western (and Japanese) multinationals - unlike their Chinese rivals - are not answerable to politicians. You may be right that they are under-estimating Africa’s potential. If so, African countries need to do far more to show them that they are wrong.
Finally, the latest issue of China Economic Quarterly - one of Asia’s more serious analytical publications - names “How does China think?” as the worst new book on the country published recently.
Its main criticism is that, by talking only to Chinese “intellectuals”, without speaking Mandarin himself, Mark Leonard seriously mis-reads what is shaping political and economic developments in the country. I will not repeat here some of the CEQ’s more savage barbs, but basically I think its point is correct: Leonard vastly exaggerates the impact of Chinese thinktanks on government policy. I have had contacts with them over many years. In my experience, most follow rather than lead political thinking in Beijing, which listens much more closely to grass-roots opinion than to them. That, increasingly, is where the real story in China is happening today - but not in the form of official exercises in pseudo-democracy.
As a PS, I should perhaps add the CEQ’s three “best” recent books on contemporary China. They are:
China Into the Future: Making Sense of The World’s Most Dynamic Economy, edited by W. John Hoffman and Michael J. Enright
Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century, Kerry Brown (Anthem Press)
Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, Duncan Hewitt (Chatto & Windus)
All are written by mandarin-speaking authors who live or who have lived in China and base their insights and analysis on extensive first-hand reporting.
This article gets a little ahead of itself—the left-right split might be the harbinger of future political parties? Really?
There’s a feel to it that reminds one of all the pieces we used to read expressing awe that China is no longer a Maoist country but a booming market economy (still the requisite first article of reporters new to China). Still, it’s good to get the range of Chinese elite thought out there.
The NEXT time someone writes something about China’s intellectual diversity, I hope there will be more emphasis on the New Left. Leonard gives them some space–more than most people do–but then rushes on to the “China model.”
We need more on how struggles between subaltern groups and the business / government class are playing out in the heady spheres described here. So far, activism and “thinking in China” have been kinda kept separate.
Guy de Jonquieres,
Thanks for bringing me back to topic.
Western commentators are yet to grasp that China is not monolithic (they make the same mistake about Africa). There is a world of difference between Beijing and Canton, between the Southern Chinese and Northern Chinese.
Secondly, a regime that has consistently delivered 10 percent or more annual economic growth is unlikely to be unpopular. Westerners are are at the upper levels of Maslow’s heirarchy, so they over-estimate the importance of concepts such as free speech and democracy to people who have barely escaped poverty.
900 million are yet to escape poverty in China.
Most of the world’s poor (I was one of them I grew up in relative poverty), do not want democracy as much as they want good governance - i.e. food on their tables. India is touted as a democracy, but one cannot say that the Indian peasant is better off (literacy, healthcare, job opportunities) than the Chinese peasant.
Some Chinese dismiss Western calls for rapid democracy in China with statements like: “So you want us to become like India”. A rapid democratisation of China is more likely to lead to an India than to United States.
Most thinking Chinese have that fear.
I also think that tales of an impending implosion of China are exaggerated. The Chinese people have been through the Sino-Japanese War, Warlordism and the end of the Qing dynasty - all in one century. Remember that the Cultural Revolution was a very recent event.
You talked about Chinese ’soft power’. The rise in Chinese soft power is due to the inept foreign policy of the Bush administration - I agree. But the West (for the foreseeable future) is likely to be so engrossed by a fear of terrorism, that it is likely to forget that terrorism is not the major issue for most of the World’s population.
It is this fear that led the US to loudly promote AFRICOM as a major foreign policy initiative in Africa (this is particularly silly given the experience of US involvement in Latin America and doubly silly given the recent experience with colonialism). US policy in Latin America is still a Cold War relic - and this is not likely to change in the future.
There is a more practical aspect to the rise of Chinese ’soft power’ and it is economic. We sometimes forget that most of the economic growth in the developing world is due to Chinese demand. China is more important to the economic future of Central Asian Nations (the ’stans’), South East Asian Nations and Australia than the United States. Most commodity producers are banking on increases in Chinese (and Indian) demand - not US demand.
The US and EU are closed markets for Agricultural products. China is slowly granting market access to large scale Agricultural producers like Argentina and Brazil. It is a no-brainer, their ’soft-power’ will rise.
Dear Jagjala:
I agree with most of your points. I would only say that:
1) 10 per cent annual growth will only make a regime popular if its fruits are seen to be fairly distributed. But income inequality is growing faster in China than almost anywhere else. (Incidentally, most estimates put at about 300m the number of people in poverty in China, though admittedly definitions vary).Furthermore, there is mounting evidence of popular anger and protest at the predatory abuses and corruption of Communist party officials. These reactions - not the views of Chinese thinktankers who simply follow the line of different party factions - are why Beijing has shifted its policy stance. It did so because the leadership is worried that failure to deal with these problems could lead to growing public unrest.
2) On “soft power”, I would repeat that, to be effective in the long run, it has to be about more than just economics. And on that score, the jury is still out. Thabo Mbeki spoke for more than just himself when he raised doubts about how much Africa is actually getting out of China’s presence on the continent.
G d J,
Income inequality is a fact of life in any rapidly industrialising economy (that was the theme of most of Charles Dickens novels). China today mirrors England in the 1800’s.
The Chinese government has been more proactive than either the Indian, Brazilian or Mexican governments in dealing with rural - urban income inequality. (The favelas have existed in Brazil since the 1950’s and are not going anywhere, Mumbai and Calcutta slums still exist, thousands of functionally illiterate Mexicans still swim across the Rio Grande).
The ‘go-west’ strategy and the central development strategy of the Chinese government is aimed at just that. There has been massive investment in rural roads, railways and e-learning infrastructure. Infact, Wall Street is salivating over anticipated rural and urban healthcare reforms in China.
I agree Soft power is more than just economics - but economics is of supreme importance. Western policy in Africa is a combination of Wilsonian missionary zeal and wishful thinking, ‘Realpolitik’ is sorely lacking.
African Leaders are corrupt, have been corrupt and will be corrupt far into the foreseeable future. No amount of World bank/IMF driven conditionalities/sanctions will turn them into honest men. These men come to power by bribing the electorate (democracy) or by risking their lives (military coup, armed rebellion). They invested blood/money in a venture and would rather die (or let their citizens die) than forfeit the return on their investment.
No serious politician comes to power anywhere in Africa merely to serve the people. This is an unpleasant truth that the West pretends not to acknowledge. Men are not angels.
The result of imposing conditionalities/sanctions is that expenditure on education and healthcare is drastically reduced, hospitals close, health professionals migrate to Europe. AIDS and malaria cases increase. (Chinese investment in Zimbabwe - as deplorable as it may be, means that a few less children will starve).
The deeper problem in Africa is the legacy of colonial empires. Most African nations are mini Yugoslavias / Iraqs (arbitrary lines drawn to demarcate the limits of British vs French influence). A more perceptive US would have started by working with African ethnic groups to undo the mess created by the British and the French at the Berlin conference. (That is a topic for another day).
China does have a fine growing corps of social scientists who of course we can all hope will feel free to speak up more later. In specialized journals and on websites, Chinese academics can speak more freely than they can in public or in the popular press. Mao largely wiped out the social sciences, presumably because Marxist-Leninism made them superfluous, but the social sciences have been rebuilding since the early 1980s and the quality and volume of their work has been growing fast.
The idea of expert-advised focus groups is interesting. It can work as long as the advice comes on an issue the local Party boss does not feel strongly about, I suppose.
Always hard to understand what democracy means in China since the word democracy is used in China as an abbreviation for the people’s democratic dictatorship (renmin minzhu zhuanzheng) as well as in the western sense and poltical reform (zhengzhi gaige) is often shorthand for reform of structures (zhengzhi tizhi gaige) rather then “real” democratization. Progress towards democracy is glacial. Compared to Mao’s time people are much freer, but if one is to limit the comparison to progress or backsliding over the past five or ten years, the picture isn’t so bright. The 4/2008 issue of Fortnightly (banyuetan) the open circulation version of the Chinese Communist Party semimonthly magazine on p. 22 of an article on democratic reform mentions that in provincial level party committee elections during the elections for the 17th Party Congress, there were 26.4% more candidates than seats, an increase of 2.7% over the previous Congress elections.
Banyuetan also mentions p. 21 the November 15 White Paper on the Chinese Political System and the precedent breaking event of a Politburo standing committee member (didn’t say who) represented the CPC at the installation of the new 8 democratic parties in late 2007. (p. 21) . In the same article, Yu Keping of the Translation Bureau and author of “Democracy is a Good Thing” [translated at http://zonaeuropa.com/20070109_1.htm (rated one of the ten top Chinese articles of 2007, I have been told) is quoted as characterizing the Chinese political system since the beginning of opening and reform as “increasing democracy” 增量民主 I noticed over the weekend that the Brookings Institution will publish a collection of Yu’s writings in July 2008. http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2008/democracyisagoodthing.aspx?more=rc
Dear Jagjala:
Again, I agree with many of your points. However, your observations about income inequality are off target.
First, as a matter of record, growing income inequality is not an inevitable part of industrialisation. Almost all the earlier waves of Asian tigers - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - succeeded in growing extremely fast while maintaining a very tight range of income differentials. This is well-documented. The reasons why this has not been the case in China are too complex to go into here.
Second, and more to the point, the politics of contemporary China and Dickens’ England are totally different. There is abundant evidence that China’s leaders take the problem of income inequality far more seriously than you seem to: indeed, they appear absolutely terrified of allowing it to worsen because it could make real their worst nightmare of “social instability” and threaten their survival in power.
It is important to remember that, for the past 30 years’, the CCP’s claims to legitimacy have been based purely on its ability to keep raising living standards, year in, year out. But when a few people become very rich and more enjoy an improved standard of living, but millions of others feel increasingly left behind, the formula starts to break down. That is particularly likely in a country where there are few safety valves for popular dissent. That is why Hu has changed course sharply in the past four years to emphasise redistributional issues over “growth at any cost”. He and his colleagues didn’t need thinktankers and other followers of fashion to tell him that: the conclusion was forced on them by blindingly obvious political reality.
The interesting question now is whether the party can deliver. As always, in China, the answer depends on where you look and how you look for it. That is one of the great weaknesses of Mark Leonard’s book: that by focussing narrowly on only one - and in my view, not very important - part of its polity, he saw only a small part of the picture.
G d J,
Important point: The CCP feels accountable to the people - interesting because some democratic regimes like Bhutto in Pakistan and the PRI in Mexico did not really feel accountable to the people.
So that is good.
Can the party deliver? Both the Chinese people and the CCP really want to succeed. People tend to be more forgiving of their government when they see that their government is GENUINELY interested in improving their lot. Most Chinese feel that way about the people at the top - about the guys at lower levels, not quite sure.
The first phase of Deng’s transformation has succeeded brilliantly (Milton Friedman). The second phase is trickier and may involve a mix of local level democracy and redistribution of wealth.
The CCP has been extremely savvy in managing China - they dealt with the backlash after Tiananmen and managed the fallout from the Asian Financial Crisis brilliantly. They have a good track record, I won’t bet against them.
On balance, I think that China is less at risk of serious trouble than India. We seem to forget about Kashmir and Pakistan. There is a higher likelihood of India going to war over Kashmir than China going to war over Taiwan.
G d J,
Put yourself in the shoes of an average Chinese and ask yourself this question: ‘What are the alternatives to the CCP?’. It’s not like there is a Lech Walesa in waiting. The fourth of June movement hasn’t given rise to a prominent/responsible leader. There is no leader in exile, no real movement in exile. No one to fill the leadership vacuum.
11 March 2008
Chinese on Tour,
Chinese in Bondage &
a Memorandum for
Professor Milton Friedman
Burning in the Fiery Fires
of an Eternal Hell
I
t was a muggy summer evening (3 August 2007) and I raced to the bus stop in front of the Santa Maria Novella train station to catch the 20:30 ATAF (Azienda Trasporti Area Fiorentina) public transport to my home. Within two minutes, I could see the 2 CALENZANO bus coming on to reach the ten or so of us waiting in the heat. As the bus lurched to a stop, I was taken aback when I saw it jampacked and further bedazed when I reckoned that the occupants were all Chinese tourists—the first I had ever seen in Italy since coming here in 1983.
The Chinese stood out from the rest of the occupants. Firstly, they were Chinese. They were not dressed as elegantly as were the Italian passengers. They were young adults, students. They conversed in Chinese. It was most unusual. I had met before many Japanese tourists who had sojourned in hotels near my home, and they had been extremely gracious to me for pointing out the right bus stop for them to get off at their destinations. Japanese tourists are well-appreciated by Florentines because they shop in the elegant shops on Via Tornabuoni, and walking all about Firenze, one can see Japanese shoppers publicizing world famous brand names printed boldly on particularly beautifully designed shopping bags. Japanese are offered Tuscan smiles; no one in the bus beamed cordially at the happy-go-lucky Chinese students. In fact, some Florentines were disgusted by their presence.
After a couple of minutes scrutinizing the group, I approached one and asked, in English, where he had come from. He did not understand me, and was quite perplexed about why I had questioned him. I had with me one of my ads for English classes and translation work that my friend Lin Lai Hua had translated for me into Chinese, and I gave it to the bewildered chap. He immediately broke into a smile and called to a young lady to come to us so that she could interpret. He was anxious to know what I wanted to find out.
The miss was in her early twenties and was extremely exuberant and happy to answer the questions I put to her about the troupe. She told me she had studied some months in the United States, and she was particularly proud to tell me that her father was an economist and her mother a doctor. She emphasized, swelled with satisfaction, that her physician mother was very much respected and loved by her patients for the care she offered them. Her friends were Chinese students from poles-apart parts of China. There was a joie de vivre in her bearing which I construed as being both charming and innocent. She had nothing unspeakable to say about anything or anyone, and she was pollyannaish about her plans to continue studying languages so that she could work in the Chinese tourist industry. She loved to travel and meet people.
I tried to fix her in my mind along with those ideas I have gathered from my copies of China Today (www.chinatoday.com.cn) which the staff of the Chinese consulate in Firenze is pleased to give me when I visit with them. China Today is a wonderful magazine filled with extraordinary pictures of China and stories and statistics which reveal a great deal about the third largest country in the world, the nation with the most prodigious population, and where the most-spoken language has been mouthed now for millennia. In this publication, which I suspect is the best of its type, the reader is taken on a truly interesting and revealing journey of discovery. We see China’s Past and the importance it has played in the development of the people’s republic. But more importantly, there is a showcase of events and outcomes which clearly indicate that China has the desire to progress, modernize, care better for its people, and, genuinely momentous, join in with the rest of humanity in trying to make this world a better place for all of us. Like so many public relations’ efforts, China Today harps on what is so much pleasant to say about China and winnows out most of the seedy elements which we have come to know about this enormous mass of humankind. Why should it? Why should it not?
With the emphasis on progress, individual development and harmony in human relations, which is indeed crucial to understanding Chinese philosophy, I could see that both this young, high-spirited girl on the 2 Calenzano-bound bus, and my copies of the splendid China Today, offered me a particularly gratifying impression of China and its people. There is a verve imbued within the Chinese citizenry which is extraordinary. Their way of life is one of the most formidable on the planet. The Chinese have survived, it seems, perpetually, and now they are so sure of themselves, they feel confident enough to display their manner of doing things for all of us, in all parts of the world. Cotton tee shirts are no longer going to cost €1.00. The 2008 Olympics this year will be an economic and social watershed for this eastern Asia Goliath. It would be tragic for us to reject them and sad for them to spurn us. History has shown that men and women are to be more remembered for their conflicts than for their good will and community spirit. Who would know this better than the Chinese? How long have they been on our planet? Why would they want to possess nuclear weapons? Or not?
M
ulling over this inspiring encounter for days after, I could not help thinking about the Chinese settlement that I have seen maturate over the years in the city of Prato some five or six kilometres from my home. I worked on a daily basis in Prato in the mid-1980s, and I witnessed the arrival of the first Chinese—an infinitesimal social organization that would blossom and, in less than twenty years, subvert an 800-year-old textile industry, for hundreds of years ruled in feudalistic style, and plainly rescue Prato from its declining fortunes due in large part to its lack of commercial know-how and a dwindling birth rate, one of the lowest in the world. Without the Chinese immigrants Prato would have succumbed to a financial disaster never known before in its centuries-old history. The Chinese also permeated shoe and leather goods industries not far from Prato and in other parts of Italy. Nonetheless, a price, which would make NeoTheoCons proud, had to be paid—both by the Pratesi and the Chinese.
For all the years that the Chinese have thrived in Prato, they have done so as much as possible by themselves. They have had to contend with an often brutal reception on the part of the Italian community, and being victims frequently of racist confrontations, their self-imposed isolation is what would be expected. Sorry to say. Another obvious difficulty that complicates the state of affairs is the language barrier. Italians do not speak Chinese; the Chinese do not speak Italian. Chinese textile, shoe and leather goods employees come largely from the Zhejiang Province not far from Shanghai, and they speak a dialect not comprehended by many Chinese themselves. They lived in squalor in China and few even ever went to school. Without a doubt, the welcome I viewed and which was afforded to these people from rural China was far from Christian. And as I write this article, there is a great ethnic “wall” which separates the Pratesi and Chinese and keeps them so at a distance, there is next to nil community spirit existent between the two—after all these years.
The “invasion” of Chinese settlers has humiliated and instigated the Pratesi to reflect upon the demographic disaster their country is experiencing. Still, the Pratesi have done nothing to address this statistical tragedy and, rather, with their accumulated wealth, they have opted to live a nouveau riche lifestyle offering their children all the electronic and fashion amenities available, but failing to tender them the values of study and labour—qualities that form the basis of a prosperous and vibrant economic environment. There are no plans for Prato’s future, and if there were, no one would be interested in implementing them. And the Pratesi continue to blame the Chinese for changing a portion of their medieval city into a “Chinatown” which the Pratesi, from time to time, pass through in their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzs!
For their part, the Chinese have had to be clever and self-sacrificing. They are mind-boggling at being so. Obviously, not all Chinese workers are living a lower-rung existence. Many of them, the people in charge, have also progressed to where they own attractive apartments and expensive automobiles. But the backbone of the Chinese success in Prato is the “exploitation” of those Chinese migrants who have left their homeland to come to Italy to earn more than the pittance they grossed in rural China. This fact does not disturb neither the consciences of the people of Prato nor those of the Chinese “capitalists” bent on grabbing still another chunk of the Tuscan textile, shoe and leather goods commerce.
There are sweatshops dotted all over the outskirts of Prato, and beyond, where poor Chinese people work slave hours. They live and eat in the plants where they work, and on Sundays, their only free day, they sit on their bunk beds playing cards, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Because many of them are illegal entrants, they will not risk visiting the centre of Prato. They are formidable workers. Precise. Capable of working long hours. Quick learners. They are doing the work that the children of the Pratesi did for centuries, a drudgery that today these kids—if they existed even in any substantial number—no longer deem important to their frivolous lifestyles. The textile baton in Prato is slowly being passed to the Chinese. Is the end of the race approaching?
Ninety percent of Italian businesses are family affairs. Which means that a small enterprise is stacked with family members who work out among themselves child care responsibilities, rushes to the bank or post office, vacation days, visits to the doctor, and any other necessity that is, from habit, accomplished during work hours. A company will be open about ten-twelve hours a day to fill in the gaps created by family tasks, and complaining family persons in command return home stressed, depressed and pissed-off with the inefficiency of their ventures. When business is profitable, there are sighs of relief. When not, tranquillizer and antacid pills are reached for. These days, the pharmacies are swarming with nervous parvenus, their faces pale. Imagine your mother-in-law, brother, sister-in-law, grandchildren coming to visit you from school, your wife, your cousin…all dropping in to stopover with you while you are on the phone with a client in New York. A pause here, a breather there. You only wish they would all go away. But then, they would say you are not simpatico—a sort of Kiss of Death! You reach for your wallet to pay for a new sweater, a broken car window, a parking fine, medicine for your mother, tickets to Sunday’s La Fiorentina football match against Juventus, your wife’s mammogram, a video game for your favourite grandchild…they keep darting at you—even in your sleep. With all this stress, you try to trust that when the father of George Bush II, George Bush I, flew in private jet from Milan to Lugano, Switzerland a few days after the 9 September 2001 tragedy to patch up a bit the capitalistic system, he didn’t get hold of your secret Swiss bank account number which one day Italian internal revenue authorities (they are not simpatici) might bargain for to keep you out of jail and your weak-kneed Italy on its feet. With all your fifs (funny inside feelings) and acts of simpatia, you, Italian small businessman or woman, par excellence, are emotionalising yourself right out of business! You are in via d’estinzione and so frail you are not even cognisant of the fact!
But Chinese businessmen and women in Prato, whose kids work their asses off and study, will remember small-time Italian factory owners the most for their teaching skills. If you visit an Italian firm it is not that it is overcrowded with family every minute of the day. (Worse, it is the idea that your mother-in-law just might drop in the next hour!) Clients, having first preference anyway, usually know when to pass by: at lunchtime, after hours, never when school is out. Those damn little monsters! Interestingly enough, all visits by clients and tertiary workers (once Italian but now Chinese) are accepted at work tables in the factory and not in the administrative offices at the back of the factory or on the floor above it where a sister (she handles the accounting) is also babysitting a three and four-year-old who are screaming their lungs out. When the Chinese came to Italy to work, they were given free lessons on how to make elegant shoes, beautiful leather bags, exquisite jackets and whatever watching employees go about their trades while the owner was busy on the phone or looking for a mop to give to his wife so she could clean the bathroom floor. The Chinese studied well. They did not sit twiddling their thumbs in some waiting room at the company’s entrance. They memorized tools, learned by heart work techniques, put to memory production processes…and, miraculously, in twenty years came to shine as workers—expert workers. One day when I arrived at one manufacturer’s concern, his wife was furious with the workmanship of a product of theirs which had been allotted, I thought, to Chinese artisans. I suggested that she should have patience with the Chinese because they were learning. Time would be needed. This infuriated her the more: “This work wasn’t done by the Chinese! It was done by the Italians!” She went on to explain to me that when a Chinese person makes a mistake, he or she runs back to their workshop to adjust the problem. An Italian would not even think of doing such a thing. If the order calls for 30 stitches, the Chinese will comply meticulously. The Italian will 28-29 it. She told me point blank: “Here, we prefer to work with the Chinese!”
But why? € € €, naturally! Or at least, most importantly! Sure, the Italians get the well-done Chinese craftsmanship. However, they obtain it at an outlay which is unbelievably subdued—at least for now! With these low to the ground fees, brand name companies and cheats are lining up to do business with the Chinese. There are three ways, that I know of, that these exquisitely-manufactured dirt cheap products are sold in the marketplace: the famous-name brands sell a Chinese-made bag in their posh boutiques for $1,500; an outlet sells the same bag for €300; and, a poor Senegalese man will plod through sands along the beaches in Versilia selling the same handbag for €50-100! And no one is the wiser!
Except the Chinese! (Professor Milton Friedman—and I know you are dead and burning in the Fiery Fires of an Eternal Hell for being such an economic imbecile while you were on Earth—who is more ignorant than an Italian small businessperson? A Wall Street banker in the “shadows!”) The most palpable conclusion that we may deduce from this economic heartbreak is this: Why should the Chinese (it is said there are about 15,000 in the Prato area, perhaps the largest Chinese colony in Europe) remain in Italy and take all this Italian crap any longer when they can bring all that they have learnt back to China and craft their own articles? That would leave a large chunk of the Italian economy is disarray. Why should one buy a GUCCI bag for $1,500 when a GUCCHANG bag, of the same quality, could cost $500? Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary!
But how have the Chinese not lucked out, you might ask? The Chinese have been put up against an incredibly stubborn resistance to their presence in Prato and still more so in Rome. And, to compensate, they have closed in upon themselves. They have been treated worse than the black men from Senegal. And, with their numbers, the Chinese have been forced to create a huge emotional barricade to keep themselves away from the Italians. Many will argue that twenty years is a very short time for a people to incorporate themselves into an unfamiliar culture. This is true. But it is also accurate to say that twenty years was enough for the Chinese to dominate that same society (Prato) and bring it to its economic knees. There is no compassion coming from the Chinese. (There was never any empathy exuding from the Italians.) As a consequence, the Chinese have lost out on a great opportunity to sort themselves out with, at least, the Italians. And I find this, personally, distressing and inopportune.
P
rofessor Milton Friedman, I wish to tell you now why you have been condemned to the Fiery Fires of an Eternal Hell. Your stupidity on our Earth was such that there was not a Chinaman’s chance for you to be admitted to Cloud Nine. You poor soul! You were so lacking in intellectual acuity! When your brainstorm took off at the University of Chicago, you pursued a way of influencing the whole world with your Kick Ass Economy and sorted out the most sordid collection of bagmen, Republicans, dictators in Southamerica, murderers in Africa, and even socialists in the ex-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to bring to fruition your heinous conniving. What a magnificent coming together of powerhouses and powerful ones. You mesmerized them with your intelligence and wit, and you convinced all that being a hard-nose was the only way to get underprivileged people off their butts and into the honky-dory times of Kick Ass Economy. Don’t give them a fishing pole to catch fish with; make them make their own poles and who cares what happens to them if they don’t. Just as Ayn Rand would recommend. And Alan Greenspan! And all the other Twenty-first Century Robber Barons in your entourage of nitwits. You and your Chicago Boys pissed off hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, and if you were alive today, you would not be able to visit any of the countries on this Earth where your daft Kick Ass Economy wrought havoc and ruined people’s lives with abandon. Even John Kenneth Galbraith was not as foolish as you! He quested after a softer touch. JKG (“The responsibility of a government is to make sure that the underprivileged have enough to eat and a job to perform so that they do not disturb the rich. Only a stupid conservative is really conservative;” [my translation from the Italian]), unfortunately, was a sort of capo mafioso. He wanted to take care of his turf in a generous manner, but he forgot that half the world lives on two scanty dollars a day. JKG was both near-sighted and patrician. In a Southamerican dictatorship, he would have been called “benevolent!” But unlike you, MF, JKG had an uncanny insight into economics which, if you had listened to him, might have enabled you to bargain for a place in a Forgiving Purgatory and not the Fiery Fires of an Eternal Hell where you are at this moment burning in perpetuity! (Ha! Ha!! Ha!!!) JKG made the interesting deduction that the success of Kick Ass Economy was its failure. Let me explain. JKG, MF, believed that a successful capitalistic system needed a political arrangement ruled by a few people, a hierarchy (I call it an olisocism) which would “lead” its people along with the hope that they would eventually come up to the level of the more prominent and intelligent members of its “ruling class.” Depending on the quality and preparation of that upper crust, a nation’s achievements or its breakdowns would be graded. The Affluent Society, without a doubt, reflected the responsibilities that the “oligarchy” retains towards its hoi polloi. You, MF, thought otherwise. You did not want to hang around waiting for the masses to get an MBA, so you took on an aggressive appearance and put your Chicago Boys to work around the world inculcating them with the values of the Kick Ass Economy which you thought, as any other messianic cult leader would, could tilt the globe. Your farce went well for a long while until you met up with the Chinese and the Russians. The Russians bit hook line and sinker all the bull that that phoney Jeffrey Sachs dealt them, but they then pulled up Kick Ass Economy stakes and went their merry way. The Chinese? No, they decided to go along with the doctrinaire Kick Ass Economy because they knew that they had the enormous chance, the people numbers, to kick Kick Ass Economy out of the capitalistic ballpark for once and for all. MF, you goofball, you gave them the idea! If JKG’s brain wave that the success of capitalism was its failure could be totted up logically (Karl Marx: “If you give them enough rope, they will hang themselves”), then the only way of promulgating capitalism’s vicious success (your notion), and subsequently shove it down the throats of the Robber Barons and olisocists (really limp-wristed capitalists), was to embrace Kick Ass Economy’s best features. If you figure that 15,000 Chinese immigrants sent to Prato, most of whom cannot even read and/or write, could destabilize an 800-year-old industry in twenty years, imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese Boys might do throughout the world! (Western Europe is a demographer’s nightmare; and, the US Census Bureau [2000] reports that the largest European ancestries have decreased in population, while African American, Hispanic, and Asian ancestries have increased. Clash of Civilizations? With whom? European Geriatrics’ Wards?) MF, who needs Weapons of Mass Destruction when we have Weapons of Mass Production! The Chinese agreed to play by your rules. Remember, MF, how the United States of America, The Grand Ship, broke through storms and icy waters to open up the front for Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom all of whom basked in the wake that The Grand Ship spearheaded for them? The Grand Ship did all the “dirty work.” Dirty? If you don’t believe me, ask the Africans, Asians, and Southamericans. Ask them what they think of Kick Ass Economy. Do you in all honesty accept as true the idea that this “Big 7” is loved and respected? And, so what if the Chinese Boys take up on Kick Ass Economy? Who is going to point the finger at them? Mother Teresa? That half-wit Professor Peter Navarro at the University of California? An old Chinese warrior once said: “Don’t kill off your enemy with your own arms—use his.” Once you, MF, were King of the Mountain. But no more. You simply forgot one very important corollary which, as far as I know, had its origin on Madison Avenue: IT PAYS TO BE NICE! Milton, you were far from being simpatico! And you are burning in the Fiery Fires of an Eternal Hell for being so stupid! Do you think I will win the Nobel Prize for Economics? You did!
ASJ
Anthony St. John Casella Postale 38 50041 Calenzano FI Italia 3356047381
5 January 2008
Article likes this is a complete waste of time. Years ago when Edward Said published his Orientalism, certain western people may “suddenly” found that they are with such shallow understanding of oriental culture, probably just like Mr Mark Leonard in Beijing at the first time.
That shock likely turned to a shame and also a guilt based on past colonialism and imperialism which the modern term may be globalism.
If culture could be different, language could be a reflection. How come China has “intelligentia” is still a question for me. BTW, it is only a man who buffed and claimed his grandfather translated the great obsolette Capital Vol 1 and alleged to have thousands of non-illiterate people working for him probably everyday using western IT tunnelling technologies to browse corrupted western web sites that banned by the great China firewall. If this group of people literally means the same type of people called intelligentia in western culture, I would deeply regret my learning in English and western education.
If there was a time with freedom of thought in China, that was 2000 years ago before a bloody emperor stipulated the monopoly of confucianism. Education and learning are different. My vulgar understanding of Marxism told me that education could only produce false class consciousness and unnecessary idealogies. It is a brain wash. Confucianism is only an idealogy. If any Chinese believes it, how come we have so many flake and posionous products, pointing fongers, betryal and corruption. Think! Idealogy always come with an angel face.
Me myself as a Chinese, well versed in Chinese language, seldom read Chinese books and articles, simply because it is a waste of time to read contemporary Chinese. The best part of Chinese culture has gone, hundreds of years ago. Why I now pay people to read their propaganda is my problem.
Again, the so called debate among intellectuals, for me, is like masturbation. How stuffy in such environment and the young “learned” people have to get a leash out. Please ask them, ever their boss has taken their ideas seriously. You’d understand their frustration.
In response to Anthony St. John’s comment…
…a boring, insulting, arrogant diatribe devoid of cogent argument. Stop intellectually masturbating pixels and remove the bag of chips from your shoulder. Milton Friedman was a kind, decent man I had the pleasure to be acquainted with. You have a problem with exploitation and disruptive movements of labor in the global marketplace – the cause of these lies not in MF’s thought which emphasized the rights and responsibilities of individuals and the utility of the marketplace, but in the nationalistic restrictions on trade, capital and labor that prevent the long-term natural allocation of efficiencies that match each and all to their competitive advantage and give a real picture of the deficiencies of human action and compassion on a universal scale (something your EU could do a lot to correct). Exploitation is the result of a market system consciously predicated on nationalism rather than universalism – capitalism is simply an algorithm which can be construed to run for the benefit of some groups or all peoples and is not the cause of the injustices here. Barriers to trade allow national groups to entrench their market position at the expense of both efficiency and other, developing, peoples. Nationalistic capital controls allow countries to create wealth from no-where, borrow more than they produce and spend more than they can pay back and together all such nationalistic market controls create unnatural migratory movements as people respond to the inequitable distribution of opportunity. The picture is apparently bigger than you care to consider.
Apologies to other commentators for going off topic, I didn’t feel I could let that pass. I will post on Mark Leonard’s article shortly. I found it interesting and provocative, though have much to dispute.
Guy and Kingjaja,
I’m probably a bit late but i really enjoyed reading your discussion. A few comments your latest post, kingjaja:
Your point about having no alternative to the CCP is most definitely true. Many intelligent people are less than satisfied with the current system but see no other alternative. Similarly, many poor people are even more disatisfied, especially with local corruption, but either accept it (”mei ban fa”) or protest local injustices with the hope that the central government will come to their aid.
Granted, i know very little about India, but i see china having more imminent problems (though i’m not relating this to democracy/autocracy, just observation). War over Taiwan still remains a possibility, especially looking at shifts after the Tibet situation going into the election in Taiwan. But the reason why its less likely than India fighting over Kashmir is precisely because it would be ten times more costly/disastrous (fighting over Kashmir tends to stay contained while it would be impossible to contain a fight over taiwan).
Furthermore, there are so many internal social problems that the CCP has to deal with on a daily basis, as evident by the riots in Lhasa as well as thousands of protests every year. Most of these incidents stay rather contained and (definitely excepting tibet) focused on local issues but if any of them were to spread or burst out of control…i dont even want to think about what would happen.
I’m Chinese, and I agree with the broad strokes of this article. It paints a far more nuanced and accurate picture than the handful of sceptics on this comment thread allow. Clearly, there are self-hating Chinese too, as evidenced above by the chap who finds ‘nothing of value’ in contemporary Chinese culture or intellectual output. With some hyperbole, he places the end of Chinese intellectual foment 2000 years ago — how utterly absurd a suggestion that is, I leave you to judge.
What I find most interesting in articles like these (articles on China that go beyond the one-dimensional monolith view advanced by most Western observers) is the tension and hostility it evokes. It’s as if our friends in the West can’t quite believe that a new power is on the ascendant, awakening after two centuries of stupor. They feel the simultaneous need to (a) play down China’s advances, preferring instead to take the view of Chinese cultural inferiority; and (b) bristle at perceived Chinese malignity. If one takes the long view, however, one would realise that China has been an economic and military superpower for much of its history. Given the gravity of the country’s vastness, the eventual return of the country to its position as an economic superpower is only natural. What need NOT follow is military hegemony or conflict with the West - I sincerely believe that the Chinese psyche is too historically conscious to make the same mistake the Japanese did, having ourselves suffered under the hegemonic yoke of Imperial Japan not 50 years ago.
The latent reactionaries who typically evince a yellow peril fear of the Chinese behemoth need to get a grip. You perceive us ineluctably as a threat. You feel that conflict is a matter of time, and that it could be an existential one. You are wrong.
It is perhaps an intuitive fear for some of you. But what you need to know is that you should fear nothing or perhaps fear us less, because ideological zeal is no longer a driving force in Chinese politics. We are all technocrats now. The Communist Party survives only to ensure internal stability and territorial integrity (as against the depradations of outside world). Ultimately, China is a nation of pragmatists you can do business with. That’s the bottomline. Germany and Japan became engines of global growth after their defeat by the allies and subsequent post-war recoveries. With China, I think the West can skip the ‘war’ part and get straight to doing business.
Living in Beijing I can say unequivocally that I’m not surprised that the ancient historical scholars are more respected than current international relations experts. China can do little other than draw on the halcyon glow of its past for inspiration as its immediate history is smeared with the ability of its own to kill its own. That is a lesson few talk about.
Interesting country though. Feels like living in an experiment. I’d much prefer Beijing to handle global warming than D.C.
What a load of waffle.
China has embarked on an orgy of material and pecuniary acquisition without it seems any idea of the pitfalls. Tapping into the western production process without any reference to the western intellectual tradition is a recipe for disaster that has global ramifications and if China is to show she is more than just another insatiable consumer then they have a lot more thinking to do.
Jen,
You forget that India fought Pakistan in 1999 (the Kargil war). China has never taken military action against Taiwan and with the election of the KMT it seems even less likely.
5 String:
“What a load of waffle” accurately describes your own clueless remarks. Western intellectual tradition permeates the periphery of all thinking, not least of all economic thought: the tension between the kinder, gentler welfarism of Hu Jintao’s inchoate ‘Scientific Development Concept’ vs the unbridled ‘growth at all cost’ capitalism of the Deng era is the same debate that plays itself out in the West on different terms but in very similar contexts. The very concepts of Marxism, “leftist”, and “rightist” are Western in origin. And China, the last time I checked, is nominally socialist; another Western concept.
You seem to resent China’s capitalistic success. And for that I pity you. Ideological dragons like you would have been first in the line of reactionaries opposing Deng’s reforms in 1978. Far from being “disastrous” those reforms have dragged millions of Chinese out of poverty. Still, the sanctimonious Westerner in you would prefer that a third world country starves while you indulge your ideological scruples. No thanks.
Another point about Western intellectual tradition: you suggest that it is necessary, but you seem to have slept through history. The Japanese are not consciously Western in outlook, but have done well enough. Likewise the South Koreans. And Taiwan. And Singapore, which trumpets ‘Asian values’. Are all these countries ‘disastrous’ in your view?
Your remarks are as superficial, shallow, and gormless as they come.
Charles Frith, take off your Westerner’s spectacles. If you doubt the ability of China’s past dynastic emperors to kill one’s own you need only start with Qin Shihuang, a tyrant and anti-intellectual of the first order. Or Mao, of whom the less said about the better. The current bunch are truly tame by comparison. It was not 50 years ago that America was a deeply racist, segregated nation (which in many ways it still is), but it behooves the serious commentator to note the strides that the U.S. has taken in alleviating its racial injustices and other instances of historical shame such as slavery. Do we say that Americans have nought but its halcyon days to look to because of its immediate history? Of course not. That would be unfair (as are your views on China). Get some perspective, and take the long view.
Dispatches : Undercover In Tibet
8pm , Channel 4
Monday 31-03-2008
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/undercover+in+tibet/1824047
Which one respected British newspaper TV critic has described as :
” This timely report on the grim realities of life in Tibet under Chinese rule was filmed undercover by Tibetan exile Tash Despa and
director Jezza Neumann ( China’s Stolen Children ). It leaves no doubt that cultural genocide is being enacted by a brutally oppressive regime. A very different picture from that painted in BBC4’s A Year in Tibet “
My working definition of a useful expert is someone who is appalled at his or her own ignorance of the subject, but even more appalled by other people’s ignorance. Much of the above makes me feel almost like an expert on Chinese intellectual life; and I do not even read Chinese! Happily, Sima Qian and David Cowhig remind me of how little I understand (and BWLK reminds us of a centuries old Chinese tradition of how to excoriate “useless” intellectual debates).
The form of Chinese intellectual controversy is conditioned by the fact that (I think, Sima Qian will correct me) open disagreement with official doctrine has sometimes been a misdemeanour and sometimes a crime - and always likely to bring down official disapproval - in China ever since the time of Qin Shihuang to thousand years ago. Debate has often been lively since then, so much so tha that Chinese are accustomed to assuming that open disagreement with the official line is a sign of clumsiness and inability to argue effectively. Any worthwhile contributor to the debate can make his point with impact without open quarrels with authority. The result is style of debate that is highly allusive (when Sima Qian mentions Qin Shihuang in conjunction one is invited to remember aspects of Mao which still are not admitted by the official line, not juat the deaths which are more or less acknowledged) and which takes for granted the use of statements which can be read in more than one sense (see David Cowhig’s note on “democracy”). Our style of argument descending from Socrates is very different.
It has been evident for a generation that sometime in this century China is likely to become the most important power in the world. The rest of the planet needs interpreters of Chinese intellectual life who read Chinese fluently and have depth of background in Chinese culture. I very much hope that Prospect will lead in giving them some of the space that we need them to have.
St Trinians, having seen the same documentary on Channel 4 and without intending to appear as an apologist for the CCP, I feel that the programme like many other single issue documentaries churn out by the media failed to give the whole picture in not giving the context of many of the policies which is said to be causing a Tibetan “cultural genocide”. Had many of these policies been explored further, free from value judgements and our own western cultural sensibilities, one can see that they are not specifically designed to target Tibetans per se, but can be found all over China where relevant because of perceived national imperatives.
For example, the policy of reducing Tibetan nomadic grazing on the grasslands is also mirrored in Inner Mongolia, Xingjiang and other parts of China where the nomadic lifestyle remains prevalent. The intention is to reduce soil erosion, desertification and the resulting dust storms and lost of arable land caused by overgrazing due to the increased demand for meat because of increased affluence. Of course the contrary perception of the policy’s intention being to increased urbanisation and better social control may as equally be valid as that it is a drive towards development and environmental protection.
The issue of forced sterilisation, however abhorrent, is also not limited to Tibet alone. Whilst China’s minorities are exempt from the one child policy that is imposed on city dwelling Han Chinese, unless of course they can pay the fines, there remains a cap on how many children each minority family can have based on individual families’ circumstances. In most cases, where a minority family have more than two children a ban is imposed, but in the Tibetan situation the policy fails to account for the still common practice of brothers in one family sharing a wife/wives and the perceived affluence of the Han Chinese and their supposed ability to pay the fines and private tuition.
On the issue of religious beliefs, our own experiences in the West, being predominantly based on the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism and is only now struggling with Islam within our own society, often pale in comparison to China’s complex experience of religion. As well as the home grown belief system of Taoism, Confucianism, ancestral worship and a heavenly hierarchy, the Han Chinese preferred ascetic tradition of Zen Buddhism were historically often in conflict with Tibetan Lamaism and the perceived corruption born out of the indulgences of a Tibetan theocracy. It also didn’t help that because of a shared nomadic tradition, Tibetan Lamaism was also the adopted state religion of the Mongol Yuan and Manchurian Qing minority dynasty, which stood in stark contrast to the agrarian origins of the majority Han Chinese. And whilst Islam was never perceived as an ‘invader’ religion, Christianity was associated with Western imperialism and colonialism.
Further considering the many cult-like revolutions that have toppled dynasties, it is not surprising that today’s CCP, like past dynastic governments, are wary of religion, while the majority of Han Chinese’ attitude towards Buddhism and religion down the ages is perhaps best described as ambivalent pragmatism. But the irony is that many of us in the West, disillusioned with the Churches are increasingly turning to Buddhism as a solace against modernity.
Consequently, the restriction on the number of Buddhist monks and nuns in Tibet also applies to other Buddhist temples in other parts of China. It is as much about pragmatic prevention of challenges to authority as it is about how many ideologically perceived ‘non-productive’ members a society can support in its unrelenting quest for development and modernity.