When China Rules the World (36 page)

The state has consistently been seen as the apogee of society, enjoying sovereignty over all else. In European societies, in contrast, the power of government has historically been subject to competing sources of authority, such as the Church, the nobility and rising commercial interests. In effect government was obliged to share its power with other groups and institutions. In China, at least for the last millennium, these either did not exist (there was no organized and powerful Church) or were regarded, and saw themselves, as subordinate (for example, the merchant class); the idea that different sources of authority could and should coexist was seen as ethically wrong.
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The nearest to an exception were the great teachers and intellectuals who, though always marginal to the centre of power, could, under certain circumstances, be more influential than ministers, acting as the cultural transmitters and guardians of the civilizational tradition and the representatives of the people’s well-being and conscience - even, in tumultuous times, as the emissaries and arbiters of the mandate of Heaven. Only two institutions were formally acknowledged and really mattered: one was the government and the other the family. The only accepted interest was the universal interest, represented by a government informed by the highest ethical values, be it Confucian teaching or later Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In reality, of course, different interests did exist but they were not politically recognized and did not press to be so recognized: rather they operated out of the limelight and on an individualistic basis, lobbying government and seeking personal (rather than corporate or collective) favours which might give them exemption or advantage. Not even the merchant class were an exception to this. In the Confucian order they ranked last in the hierarchy and in practice have never sought to break ranks and organize collectively. That apolitical tradition remains true to this day. They have seen themselves as a bulwark of government rather than as an autonomous interest seeking separate representation. This was the case during the Nationalist period, following the Tiananmen Square tragedy, and is exemplified by the manner in which they have been indistinguishable from government - indeed, an integral part of it - in post-handover Hong Kong. Given this lack of any kind of independent tradition of organization either in the Confucian period or more recently in the Communist period, it is hardly surprising that China has failed to develop a civil society.
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That may slowly be changing but the burden of history weighs heavily on the present, whatever political changes we may see.

Throughout the debate and struggles over modernization, from the late nineteenth century until today, the Chinese have sought to retain the fundamental attributes of their political system above all else; indeed, the political system has proved more impervious than any other sphere of society to Westernizing influence, both in the imperial and Communist periods. This is in contrast to most developing societies, where government has often been strongly linked to modernizing impulses and leaders were frequently drawn from the Westernized elite - as in India, for example, with the Nehru family. That was never the case in China, with leaders like Mao and Deng having had very little contact with the West. To this day, even over the last three decades, the ability of China’s political world, unlike other institutions, to survive relatively unchanged is remarkable, a testament to its own resilience and the place it occupies in the Chinese psyche.

Chinese politics has traditionally placed a very high premium on the importance of moral persuasion and ethical example. Public officials were required to pass exams in Confucian teaching. They were expected to conform to the highest moral standards and it was to these, rather than different interest groups or the people, that they were seen as accountable. In the Communist period, Confucian precepts were replaced by Marxist (or, more accurately, Maoist) canons, together with the iconic heroes of the Long March and socialist labour. This commitment to ethical standards as the principle of government has combined with a powerful belief in the role of both family and education in the shaping and moulding of children. By the standards of any culture, the highly distinctive Chinese family plays an enormously important socializing role. It is where Chinese children learn about the nature of authority. The word of the parents (traditionally, the father’s) is final and never to be challenged. In the family, children come to understand the importance of social hierarchy and their place with it. Through a combination of filial piety, on which the Chinese place greater stress than any other culture, a sense of shame, and the fear of a loss of face, children learn about self-discipline.
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In a shame (rather than a Christian guilt) culture, Chinese children fear, above all, such a loss of face. The Chinese family and Chinese state are complementary, the one manifestly a support for the other. It is not insignificant that the Chinese term for nation-state is ‘nation-family’. As Huang Ping suggests, in China ‘many would take for granted that the nation-state is an extended family’.
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Whereas in the West the idea of popular sovereignty lies at the heart of politics, it remains largely absent in China. The concept of the nation-state was imported from Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century, with a section of the Chinese elite subsequently becoming heavily influenced by European nationalism. There was, though, a fundamental difference in how national sovereignty was interpreted. In the case of European nationalism, national sovereignty was closely linked to the idea of popular sovereignty; in China the two were estranged. While national sovereignty was accorded the highest importance, popular sovereignty was replaced by state sovereignty.
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That was not surprising. First, as we have seen, there was a very powerful tradition of state sovereignty in China but no tradition of popular sovereignty. Second, nation-statehood was acquired at a time when China was under threat from the Western powers and Japan. In such circumstances, the overwhelming priority was national sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. The birth of the Chinese nation-state took place in entirely different conditions from those of Europe. The European nation-states were never obliged to contend with a threat to their national sovereignty from outside their continent, as China, in common with more or less every country outside Europe, faced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Predictably, the colonial threat served to reinforce and accentuate China’s enduring strong-state complex.
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The imperialist threat and the domestic political tradition thus combined to infuse China’s emergence into nationhood with the twin concepts of national sovereignty and state sovereignty.

One of the most fundamental features of Chinese politics concerns the overriding emphasis placed on the country’s unity. This remains by far the most important question in China’s political life. Its origins lie not in the short period since China became a nation-state, but in the experience and idea of Chinese civilization.
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The fact that China has spent so much of its history in varying degrees of disunity, and at such great cost, has taught the Chinese that unity is sacrosanct. The Chinese have an essentially civilizational conception of what constitutes the Chinese homeland and the nature of its unity: indeed, there is no clearer example of China’s mentality as a civilization-state. The Chinese government has attached the highest priority to the return of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, even though they had passed out of Chinese hands (in the case of Macao and Hong Kong) a very long time ago. Furthermore, little or no weight has been given to the preferences of the people who live there.
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Their belonging to China is seen exclusively in terms of an enduring and overriding notion of Chineseness that goes back at least two millennia if not longer: all Chinese are part of Chinese civilization, and therefore China.
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Choice is not an issue.

Great weight is also accorded to political stability. Like Confucius indeed, Deng Xiaoping, as cited in the last chapter, was in no doubt about its importance: ‘[China’s] modernization needs two prerequisites. One is international peace, and the other is domestic political stability . . . A crucial condition of China’s progress is political stability.’
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The priority attached to political stability is reflected in popular attitudes.
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In a recent survey, stability was ranked as the second most important consideration, far higher than in any other country.
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The priority given to stability is understandable in the light of China’s history, which has regularly been punctuated by periods of chaos and division, usually resulting in a huge number of deaths, both directly through war and indirectly through resulting famines and disasters. The country lost as much as a third of its population (around 35 million people dead) in the overthrow of the Song dynasty by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. It has been estimated that the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century cost China around one-sixth of its population (25 million dead). The civil unrest in the first half of and mid nineteenth century, including the Taiping Uprising, resulted in a population decline of around 50 million. Following the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was continuing turbulence and incessant civil war, with a brief period of relative calm from the late twenties until the Japanese invasion, and then, after the defeat of the Japanese, a further civil war culminating in the 1949 Revolution.
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Given this history, it is not surprising that the Chinese have a pathological fear of division and instability, even though periods of chaos have been almost as characteristic of Chinese history as periods of order.
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The nearest parallel in Europe was the desire that consumed the continent after 1945 never to wage another intra-European war. The huge price China has paid in terms of death and bloodshed is in part perhaps the cost of trying to make a continent conform to the imperatives of a country, while Europe has paid a not dissimilar price for the opposite, namely bitter national rivalry and an absence of continent-wide identity and cohesion.

In Western eyes, the test of a country’s politics and governance is the existence or otherwise of democracy, with this defined in terms of universal suffrage and a multi-party system. The last fifty years have seen a huge increase in the number of countries that boast some kind of democracy, though important areas of the world, notably the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and, of course, China, are still, at least in practice, exceptions. There is little doubt that some kind of democracy is a desirable system if the circumstances are ripe and if it can take serious root in a culture. If, however, democracy amounts to little more than an alien transplant, as has been the case in Iraq, where it was imposed via the barrel of an Anglo-American gun, then the cost of that imposition, for example in terms of resistance, alienation or ethnic conflict, is likely to turn out to be far higher than any benefits it may yield. Democracy should not be regarded as some abstract ideal, applicable in all situations, whatever the conditions, irrespective of history and culture, for if the circumstances are not appropriate it will never work properly, and may even prove disastrous. Nor should it be seen as more important than all the other criteria that should be used to assess the quality of a country’s governance. For developing countries in particular, the ability to deliver economic growth, maintain ethnic harmony (in the case of multi-ethnic societies), limit the amount of corruption, and sustain order and stability are equally, if not rather more, important considerations than democracy. Democracy should be seen in its proper historical and developmental context: different societies can have different priorities depending on their circumstances, histories and levels of development.
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Very few countries, in fact, have combined democracy as it is now understood with the process of economic take-off.
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Britain’s Industrial Revolution took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even by 1850, however, only around one-fifth of men had the right to vote. It was not until the 1880s that most men gained the right, and not until 1918, over 130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that women (over thirty) won the same right. Broadly speaking this picture applies to other West European countries, all of which experienced take-off without democracy. In fact the most common form of governance during Europe’s industrial revolutions was the monarchical state, absolutist or constitutional. The American experience was significantly different. By 1860 a majority of white men enjoyed the right to vote, but most blacks did not acquire it, in practice, until 1965, while women only won it in 1920: during America’s economic take-off, thus, only a minority enjoyed the right to vote. In Japan, universal male suffrage was not introduced until 1925, well after the economic take-off that followed the Meiji Restoration.
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In sum, the right to vote was not established in the developed world, except for a very small and privileged minority, until well after their industrial revolutions had been concluded (white men in the United States constituting the nearest to an exception). The European powers, furthermore, never granted the vote to their colonies: it was still seen as entirely inappropriate for the vast tracts of the world that they colonized, even when it had become an accepted fact at home. The only exceptions in the British case were the so-called dominions like Australia and Canada, where shared racial and ethnic characteristics were the underlying reason for the display of latitude. It was not until after the great majority of former colonies gained independence following the Second World War that they were finally able to choose their form of governance. Much hypocrisy, it is clear, attaches to the Western argument that democracy is universally applicable whatever the stage of development.