When China Rules the World (35 page)

The challenge of the West from around 1850 was an entirely different proposition: key aspects of Western culture, notably its scientific orientation and knowledge, were patently superior to traditional Confucianism and plunged it into a deepening crisis as the Chinese reluctantly sought some kind of reconciliation between traditional and Western values. Between 1911 and 1949 virtually no institution of significance (constitution, university, press, Church, etc.) lasted in its existing form for more than a generation, such was the gravity and enduring nature of China’s impasse. The Western challenge decentred Chinese assumptions. Eventually, when all else had failed, the Chinese turned to Communism, or more specifically Maoism, which involved the explicit rejection of Confucianism. Yet during the Maoist period, Confucian values and ways of thinking continued to be influential, albeit in a subterranean form, remaining in some measure the common sense of the people. Even now, having succeeded in reversing its decline and in the midst of modernization, China is still troubled by the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures and the degree to which it might find itself Westernized, as we saw in the discussion amongst the students in Chapter 5. Somehow, however, through the turbulence, carnage, chaos and rebirth, China remains recognizably and assuredly Chinese. As it moves once more into the ascendant, its self-confidence inflated by its recent achievements, China’s search for meaning is drawing not simply on modernity, but also, and as always, on its civilizational past. Confucian ways of thinking, never extinguished, are being actively revived and scrutinized for any light that they might throw on the present, and for their ability to offer a moral compass.

For many developing countries, the process of modernization has been characterized by a crisis of identity, often exacerbated by the colonial experience, a feeling of being torn between their own culture and that of the West, linked to an inferiority complex about their own relative backwardness. The Chinese certainly felt a sense of humiliation, but never the same kind of overwhelming and hobbling inferiority: they have always had a strong sense of what it means to be Chinese and are very proud of the fact. Such is the strength of Chineseness, indeed, that it has tended to blur and overshadow - in contrast to India, for example - other powerful identities such as region, class and language. This sense of belonging is rooted in China’s civilizational past,
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which serves to cohere an enormous population otherwise fragmented by dialect, custom, ethnic difference, geography, climate, level of economic development and disparate living standards. ‘What binds the Chinese together,’ Lucian Pye argues, ‘is their sense of culture, race, and civilization, not an identification with the nation as a state.’
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To describe China in terms of a nation-state, thus, is largely to miss the point. ‘China is a civilization pretending,’ Pye argues, ‘to be a nation-state.’
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The consequences of the fact that China is really a civilization-state are manifold.
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The civilization-state generates, as we shall see later, a very different kind of politics from that of a conventional nation-state, with unity, rooted in the idea of civilization rather than nation, the overriding priority. As a civilization-state, China embodies and allows a plurality of systems, as exemplified by Hong Kong, that is alien to the nation-state, which demands and requires a much greater degree of homogeneity. The civilization-state has engendered distinctively Chinese notions of race and ethnicity, with the Han race regarded as more or less coterminous with ancient Chinese civilization, as we shall see in the next chapter. The civilization-state embodies a far more intimate relationship not simply with China’s relatively recent history, as in the case of the average nation-state, but, most strikingly, with at least two millennia of history, such that the latter is constantly intervening in and acting as a guide and yardstick in the present. And it is the civilization-state which serves as a continuous reminder that China is the Middle Kingdom, thereby occupying, as the centre of the world, a quite different position to all other states. The term ‘civilization’ normally suggests a rather distant and indirect influence and an inert and passive presence. In China’s case, however, it is not only history that lives but civilization itself: the notion of a living civilization provides the primary identity and context by which the Chinese think of their country and define themselves.

If the notion of civilization helps to explain how China’s past bears on its present, the fact that it is a continent in size and diversity is critical to understanding how the country functions in practice. There is an essential coherence to the life of the great majority of nation-states that is not true of China. Something major can happen in one part of the country and yet it will have little or no effect elsewhere, or on China as a whole. Major economic changes may appear to have few political consequences and vice versa. The traumatic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example, had surprisingly little impact on the country as a whole. Of course, there are always effects, but the country is so huge and complex that the feedback loops work in strange and unpredictable ways. That is why it is so difficult to anticipate what is likely to happen politically.
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It also perhaps helps to explain a particularly distinctive feature of modern Chinese leaders like Mao and Deng. Whereas in the West consistency is regarded as a desirable characteristic of a leader, the opposite is the case in China: flexibility is seen as a positive virtue and the ability to respond to the logic of a particular situation as a sign of wisdom and an indication of power. Such seeming inconsistency is a reflection of the sheer size of the country and the countless contradictions that abound within its borders. It also has practical benefits, enabling leaders to experiment by pursuing an ambitious set of reforms in a handful of provinces but not elsewhere, as Deng did with his reform programme. Such an approach would be impossible in most nation-states.

Instead of seeing China through the prism of a conventional nation-state, we should think of it as a continental system containing many semi-autonomous provinces with distinctive political, economic and social systems. There are huge variations between what are, in terms of population, nation-sized provinces. The disparity between the per capita incomes of different provinces is vast, the structure of their economies varies greatly - for example, in their openness to the outside world and the importance of industry - their cultures are distinct, and the nature of their governance is more diverse than one might expect.
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In many respects, the provinces should be seen as akin to nation-states.
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In fact China’s provinces are far more differentiated than Europe’s nation-states, even when Eastern Europe and the Balkans are included.

It would be impossible to run a country the size of China by centralized fiat from Beijing. In practice, the provinces enjoy great autonomy. Governance involves striking a balance between the centre and the provinces. Of course everyone recognizes that ultimate power rests with Beijing: but this often means little more than feigned compliance.
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The provinces and cities accept Beijing’s word, while often choosing to ignore it, with central government fully aware of this.
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Although China has a unitary structure of government, in reality its modus operandi is more that of a de facto federal system.
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This is true in terms of important aspects of economic policy and is certainly the case with the maintenance of social order: the regime expects each province to be responsible for what happens within its borders and not to allow any disruption to cross those borders. The fundamental importance of the relationship between Beijing and the provinces is well illustrated by the fact that the dominant fault line of Chinese politics is organized not around the idea of ‘progress’ - which is typically the case in the West, as evinced by the persistent divide between conservatives and modernizers - but around the question of centralization and decentralization.
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Whether or not to allow greater freedom to the media, or to expand or restrict the autonomy of the provinces, is the dominant pulse to which Beijing beats. One of the key reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping, as discussed in the last chapter, was to grant more freedom to provincial and local governments as a means of encouraging greater economic initiative. The result was a major shift in power from Beijing to the provinces which, by the nineties, had become of such concern to central government that it was largely reversed.
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The most impoverished area of debate on China concerns its politics. Any discussion is almost invariably coloured by a value judgement that, because China has a Communist government, we already know the answers to all the important questions. It is a mindset formed in the Cold War that leaves us ill-equipped to understand the nature of Chinese politics or the current regime. In the post-Cold War era, China already presents us with an intriguing and unforeseeable paradox: the most extraordinary economic transformation in human history is being presided over by a Communist government during a period which has witnessed the demise of European Communism. More generally, it is a mistake to see the Communist era as some kind of aberration, involving a total departure from the continuities of Chinese politics. On the contrary, although the 1949 Revolution ushered in profound changes, many of the underlying features of Chinese politics have remained relatively unaffected, with the period since 1978, if anything, seeing them reinforced. Many of the fundamental truths of Chinese politics apply as much to the Communist period as to the earlier dynasties. What are these underlying characteristics?

Politics has always been seen as coterminous with government, with little involvement from other elites or the people. This was true during the dynastic Confucian era and has remained the case during the Communist period. Although Mao regularly mobilized the people in mass campaigns, the nature of their participation was essentially instrumentalist rather than interactive: top-down rather than bottom-up. In the Confucian view, the exclusion of the people from government was regarded as a positive virtue, allowing government officials to be responsive to the ethics and ideals with which they had been inculcated. We should not dismiss these ideas, inimical as they are to Western sensibilities and traditions: the Confucian system constituted the longest-lasting political order in human history and the principles of its government were used as a template by the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese, and were closely studied by the British, French and, to a lesser extent, the Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. Elitist as the Confucian system clearly was, however, it did contain an important get-out clause. While the mandate of Heaven granted the emperor the right to rule, in the event of widespread popular discontent it could be deemed that the emperor had forfeited that mandate and should be overthrown.
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