Utopias

    Some fuzzy social science grabs the attention of China Daily:

No poverty and child labor; a life expectancy of above 80; everyone entitled to medical insurance and unemployment benefits; and the lowest monthly salary surpassing US$1300...

A dream you say? Well, that's what a research paper is depicting what China will look like in 2050.

China will undergo two social transformations before that year. The transformation will lead to a complete change of Chinese people's conventions and lifestyle cultivated from 5000 year ago. Social interests and roles will be totally reversed, according to a research paper released by a Chinese modernization research center.

The paper said during the first stage of the 50-year span (2000-2050), China is to transform from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and from a rural society to an urban one. In the second stage, the country will go from an industrial society into an information-based one and from an urban society to a balanced urban-rural one with suburban characteristics.

     Sounds great, doesn't it?  Too bad it's just a mixture of warmed over modernization theory from the 1950's ("with suburban characteristics") and the kind of vacuous optimism found in many a politcial stump speech ("everyone entitled to health insurance...")

UPDATE: HK Dave over at Simon's World links to a People's Daily story I missed.  It seems China is 80 years behind the West in terms of modernization.  80 years behind, but a utopia in 44 years: don't you just love bad social science.

     When I first saw this, I thought it might be a CCP-inspired image of an ideal future created to distract attention away from the growing social discontent in the PRC today.  But it is just too light-weight for serious ideological work.  The short newspaper piece doesn't even identify what organization published the "study."  All we hear of is a "Chinese modernization research center."   

FURTHUR UPDATE (2/10): Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian, does a fuller job in describing the report, which, it turns out, is from the Chinese Academy of Science, suggesting that it is supposed to be taken seriously as a vision of the bright socialist future.

    When Communists get serious about producing utopian images of the future to rationalize authoritarian politics of the present, they can be much more passionate.  My favorite is, of course, Marx's own vision:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

     If we could get there without hurting anyone, which is what Eduard Bernstein was all about, I would happily call myself a Communist.  But we probably can't, so I don't.
   
     Taoists, too, have a utopian vision, one that is not used to rationalize an authoritarian politics (not even by the Legalists who appropriate Taoism: they are quite happy to focus on the necessities of power).  Here is the penultimate passage from the Tao Te Ching:

Let nations grow smaller and smaller
and people fewer and fewer,

let weapons become rare
and superfluous,
let people feel death's gravity again
and never wander far from home.
Then boat and carriage will sit unused
and shield and sword lie unnoticed.

Let people knot ropes for notation again
and never need anything more,

let them find pleasure in their food
and beauty in their clothes,
peace in their homes
and joy in their ancestral ways.

Then people in neighboring nations will look across to each other,
their chickens and dogs calling back and forth,

and yet they'll grow old and die
without bothering to exchange visits.

    It sounds a bit lonely and isolated, but peaceful and content.  And it would require the dissolution of the modern state.  Not quite likely in the PRC, or just about anywhere else, by 2050.

Comments

[章志劢]

Though this sort of article is certainly consonant with a general theme of the 1990s and this decade. Finding Marxism to be losing its ideological rigor, the CCP has taken a page from Ronald Reagan's playbook to shore up its legitimacy. To whit: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" (Or "It's morning in China again.") Obviously not everyone feels this way (as the rising tide of rural discontent too clearly demonstrates) but for a large segment of China's urban elite, this is a powerful and persuasive argument. Four years ago I rode a bicycle and drank tea from a jar, now I've got an Audi and I get my Starbucks to go. Why complain?

[章志劢]

Just to clarify: the last line of my response was a kind of summary of the general feeling among China's new urban elite and not, obviously, meant to represent my own experience. (I'm actually from NH.)

[Sam]

Zhidong (am I reading your name correctly?),
I was thinking it harked back to the 1950's. More in the "I like Ike" vein. Although the Reagan thing captures some of what is going on, I see the transformation as being more fundamental, like what was happening with the expansion of suburbia, the explosion of consumer culture, and the construction of corporate structures in the US in the 50's and 60's. Although there is a postmodern element now in China that defies comparison with either period of US history.
Thanks for the comment.

[rap]

Hi there, could you explain to me the meaning of some of the "penultimate passage from the Tao Te Ching:"

Specifically, what does he mean by "less people", does he mean that we should all have less kids?

Also, is the message related to some kind of a globalisation theme where borders are useless?

[Sam]

rap,
I take "let people be fewer" to mean: accept smaller-scale units of political organization. In the Warring States, various leaders with fighting with one another over territory. They wanted to expand the reach of their governments and control more territory and people. This passage, coming after a series of others that speak to the nature of government, is saying: territory and population do not matter in terms of good government. Better to have small communities with radically decentralized power.
The globalization question is interesting. I would see this passage as being anti-globalization, since it is celebrating people so content in their local communities that the do not travel. This idea pops up in passage 47: "You can know all beneath heaven though you never step out your door." If people are not traveling, there is really no globalization.