The Useless Tree

Romney Fails the Confucian Test

First, let me stipulate: all politicians evade and dissemble and lie.  And that happens in all regime types: democratic and authoritarian. But within that broad reality, and focusing here on the American political experience, Mitt Romney is setting a new standard for - how shall we say? - insincerity, in the current US presidential race.  And that, from a Confucian point of view, is a failure of the first degree.

Romney's basic problem is that his earlier political experience, as Governor of my state, Massachusetts, yielded policies and decisions that are labeled "moderate" in the American lexicon.  Health insurance legislation; a ban on assault weapons; an effectively pro-choise stance on abortion: all of these things suggested a kind of centerist, moderate, perhaps even pragmatic, Republican.  And all of that meant he would not fare well with the national, southern-dominated, GOP, which is much more conservative.  But Romney wants to be President, and he wants that so badly he is quite willing to not only disavow his earlier positions but to try to claim that he was never really a moderate to begin with.  Thus his implausible reinvention as a "severe conservative."

And, so, as the Rebuplican primaries unfolded, we were presented, time and again, with the spectacle of Romney trying to find whatever words would work to attract conservative voters.  He went beyond flip-floppping to etch-a-sketching.   It was, and continues to be, obvious that he will say anything, anytime, regardless of what he has said or done in the past, to please whatever audience he happens to meet.

It is, therefore, not at all surprising that he has shape-shifted again during the debates with President Obama.  His performances have been veritable festivals of lies and distortions and prevarications.  In subsequent TV ads he has gone bilingual in his fabrications.

He is the very definition of insincere.  And that's a problem for Confucius.

Analects 1.8, contains a passage (which is very closely paraphrased as a stand alone passage in 9.25) that reads:

...above all else, be loyal and stand by your words.  Never befriend those who are not kindred spirits.  And when you're wrong, don't be afraid to change.

Romney gets all of this wrong.  He is not loyal to his words: he says stuff that he does not mean and he does things that are contrary to his words.  He obviously works very hard to befriend people who do not believe what he believes - or, at least, that is what his courting of conservatives appears to be.  But it's hard to know because of his consistent insincerity.  And, as suggested by his flipping and flopping and flipping on health insurance legislation, he has changed his views and pronouncements when we was right.  What a mess!

For Confucius, matching words and actions is very important.  Indeed, actions speak louder than words.  Idle promises and post hoc rationalizations, in which word and deed are mismatched, are to be avoided. 

The Master said: "The ancients spoke little.  They were too ashamed when their actions fell short of their words." (Analects, 4.22)

Adept Hsia asked about the noble-minded, and the Master said: "Such people act before they speak, then they speak according to their actions." (Analects 2.13).

Again, this is a problem for most politicians.  But Romney, in his denial of his actions as Massachusetts Governor, seems especially shameless in this regard.

Romney, however, probably doesn't care what a Confucian perspective might reveal.  He is, after all, at something of a disadvantage in Confucian terms.  As a life-long, successful, and fairly ruthless businessman, he does not cut a figure that a Confucian would necessarily respect at first encounter:

The Master said: "If profit guides your actions, there will be no end of resentment." (Analects 4.12)

Humane government is not like a business and experience in business has little to do with what is necessary to be a noble-minded political leader.  A Confucian would not vote for him.

Confucius in Church

That's the title of a piece in The Global Times a couple of days ago, reporting on a class, held under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in which Chinese Christians read The Analects and contemplate parallels between Confucianism and Christianity.  Intellectually, this could be an interesting conversation, but, politically, I wonder if it is an effort to centrally control the definition of "Chinese culture."

The intellectual project leads quite naturally to certain similarities between the two faiths (as I have written before that I do not generally view Confucianism as a religion but it might be a "faith" or sorts).  The golden rule and all that.  But I would hesitate to accept this line of thought:

"We believe there are similarities between the Analects and the Bible, but Confucius didn't express such thoughts thoroughly," said Shi. He believes that by talking about proper timing for everything, Confucius was in essence talking about following the will of God or Heaven. "We believe that Confucius, like all other human beings, was instinctively pursuing God, or a higher power, and looking for the ultimate answers," he [Shi Hengtan from CASS] added.

I don't think Confucius was talking about following the will of God.  Tian, Heaven, doesn't quite function like a God or gods.  It is too diffuse.  It is not really a place of redemption.  The article goes on to state that most scholars of Confucianism in China would reject this idea.  Of course, most of them, as well as myself, are not attempting a Christian reading of the texts.  Maybe that is how we should leave it: if you look for God in Confucianism you may find it, but that doesn't mean it has to be there, nor that that is the understanding that Confucius and his early disciples held.

Politically, the article made me think of the desire to centrally control culture.  That desire runs deep in imperial China, when state power was linked to cultural orthodoxy.  And it was certainly a key feature of Maoist China, when socialist apparatchiks enforced a bland and narrow socialist-realism in place of the old state-Confucianism. The post-Mao period has seen a much greater degree of cultural freedom, and a subsequent efflorescence of religious belief and practice.  But the desire for centralized political control of culture remains, and is perhaps getting stronger as the society becomes more culturally diverse.

Thus, the fact that it is CASS, a branch of the state, that is organizing these classes raises a question of motivation.  I am willing to take Shi Hengtan at his word when he says the main purpose here "is to help Christians learn and understand traditional Chinese culture."  But then there is this idea:

"Christianity in China has yet to be better integrated into Chinese culture, and that's what we are trying to do," said Shi.

What is meant by "integration"?  I imagine Chinese nationalists will be uncomfortable with this insofar as they see Christianity as an alien, Western force aimed at subjugating China.  I see the issue rather differently, starting with the question of what is "Chinese culture"?  I think we should take a broad view of that concept, recognizing the many different sources and strands of culture that have emerged in and moved through China over the centuries.  Thus, at this point in history, I think we should not make a distinction between "Christianity" and "Chinese culture."  Christianity has been in China for centuries and has been absorbed into "Chinese culture," just like Buddhism before it.  Yes, Buddhism has had a more extensive cultural presence in China but it came from elsewhere and was adapted over time.  Similarly, "Islam" is a part of Chinese culture. Chinese muslims should not be considered as somehow outside of "Chinese culture."

If thought of that way, there really is no need to integrate Christianity into Chinese culture, especially no need for such a project to be carried out through the agency of the state.  But the state, and ultimately the Party, wants to control the definition and development of "Chinese culture."  State agents take it as their duty to orchestrate cultural production and expression in a manner that serves state interests.  Cultural heterodoxy is a poltiical problem.

It should be noted that this impulse to control culture is by no means peculiar to China.  We see it in the axieties of American conservatives bewailing the decline of "American culture." 

But centralized political resistance to cultural change is more pronounced in the PRC because there are fewer formal limits on state power. 

So, let Christians read Confucius, and let Confucians read the Bible, and everyone should read Zhaungzi.  It's a big, wide globalized cultural world out there that can be approached and experienced in myriad ways.  Trying to hold on to static definitions of "Chinese" or "American" culture is intellectually stultifying and, ultimately, futile.

A Vain and Flawed Confucius

China Heritage Quarterly, a marvelous publication from Australian National University, has a special double issue on an early 20th century Chinese publication, The China Critic.  There's a lot of great stuff there.  But one piece has gotten some play on my twitter feed, and deservedly so: Lin Yutang's "Confucius as I Know Him," a satirical little essay on the foibles and flaws of the great sage.  It is a fun read - fun, at least, for those who have read a little Confucius.

Lin references The Analects and Shiji to draw a rather unflattering portrait of Confucius. The sage could be spiteful, as here:

Let us begin with some examples of his practical sense in the Confucian Analects. Even if not everything recorded therein was true, it was at least what Confucius' own disciples said of him. The Third Chapter tells us that once Ju Pei went to call on Confucius. Confucius disliked the fellow and told him that he was ill, which is the oriental equivalent of your 'not at home'. A Western gentleman would stop there. But Confucius went one better. When Ju Pei was just outside the door, he purposely took a mandolin, and not only played on it but also san[g] in order to make the visitor realize that he was in the house after all. When we read the empty praise by his disciples that Confucius was always polite and well-poised' we must, therefore, take it with a grain of salt.

It continues in that vein.  Lin makes many humorous flourishes, as we might expect from a writer who worked to introduce western notions of "humor" into Chinese texts and contexts (he actually coined the standard Chinese translation for "humor" -
幽默).  Confucius, it seems, was rather particular in his eating habits, causing Lin to remark:

Think of a German wife trying to serve a German supper without the help of the delicatessen! Is it any wonder then that Confucius' wife, who was married to him at below the age of nineteen, found it hard to submit to this family discipline?

And, yes, Lin reminds us of Confucius's marital failings:

According to Li-ki [Liji, Classic of Rites], a series of chapters or books compiled by the Confucian followers, and recognized as one of the Confucian classics, the Confucian family held a record of three divorces in three successive generations: Confucius, his son and his grandson. In the case of Confucius' daughter-in-law, she ran away to marry someone else, but this does not alter the question that his son's marriage was a failure.

Confucius himself, as I have said, was a man of fine feeling and extremely good taste. His love of music was well known: when he heard the old music of Shun, he was spiritually so upset that he forgot the taste of meat for three months. No one who was not sensually something of an epicurean or who was not capable of surrendering to the music with all the force of his emotions, could speak of music in the ecstatic fashion that he did. But he was an epicurean not only in music, in his love of curios, his passion for the antique, but also even in the personal matters of eating and clothing. My suspicion is that it was his over-refinement in the matter of food that caused his divorce.

And there's more; read the whole thing.

It's important to recognize that Confucius was not perfect.  He may not have lived up to the standards of behavior that he preached.  And that is instructive.  As I say to my students regularly: it's hard out here for a Confucian (yes, that is a popular cultural allusion).  But that doesn't mean we shouldn't take the philosophy and ethics seriously.  We should.  We just shouldn't expect most people to be perfect Confucians all the time.

The piece is also interesting in what it shows us about Lin Yutang.  He's a fascinating guy.  An early-to-mid-twentieth century modern bicultural interpreter and translator.  By that I mean, an intellect positioned between China and America who worked to bring ideas and cultural practices from each to the other.  Confucius, thus, poses something of a problem for him. "Confucianism,' in its sprawling historical presence, is at once both a source of inspiration and an obstacle to cultural modernization.  Thus, Lin pokes fun at the outmoded foppishness of Confucius, but tries to preserve something of the tradition:

But with all his shortcomings, inconsistencies and often unscrupulous conduct, Confucius remained a very charming character. The charm lies in his evident sincerity of purpose. When a man is sincere, we can excuse many of his evident faults.

I suspect Lin tried to hold on to that view in relation to his acquaintances in his own time.

The Olympics and Selective Westernization

I think it is safe to say that the Olympics, as a concept and "movement," emerged in the modern era as a European project to universalize certain values of competition and character-building.  A Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, revived a Greek ideal, a latter day version of the Hellenism that was so common to the consolidation of a modern "Western" identity.  It has proved to be successful beyond the wildest dreams of its inventors.  This year, 204 countries have sent athletes to London to compete.  And no country has been more successful than the PRC, sitting today atop the gold medal count.

The PRC government has obviously made Olympic victory a national priority.  It has spent extraordinary sums of money, and created a vast sports training system, to achieve very impressive results.   

It is odd, then, that certain strains of anger and resentment have emerged in the Chinese media.  Yes, some unfortunate things have happened to Chinese athletes.  I think the statements questioning Ye Shiwen went too far.  The badminton and bicycling complaints, however, are hardly the stuff of a global anti-China conspiracy.  Shit happens - just ask the 1972 US men's basketball team.  Get over it and move on.  Indeed, it should be easy to move on: China has been fabulously successful at this Olympics.  Why dwell on the negative, much of which seems just to be bad luck, when there are so many fantastic victories, like Feng Zhe on the parallel bars:

Feng’s routine was filled with intricate combinations, yet he did them with the precision of an artist and the rhythm of a musician. He held his handstands for what seemed like forever, looking like a statue, and there wasn’t even the slightest hesitation as he went from one skill straight into another. 

While I hesitate to make too much of the Olympics - I don't think they mean anything in terms of real global power and influence - I can't help but notice the irony in the PRC government, which regularly tells us that it resists "Westernization" and cherishes unique Chinese cultural accomplishments, expending of so much wealth and national energy to show the world just how well it can "Westernize" by succeeding in a European-inspired endeavor to recreate and romanticize an imagined Greek past.  Yes, yes, I am perfectly aware of postcolonial theory... but it's still ironic. (I'm using scare quotes for "Westernization" because most of what is refered to by this concept is about modernization)

Putting so much emphasis on athletic competition, and using the vast amount of resources to ensure victories, is certainly not a Confucian virtue.  Confucius himself thought that "gentlemen" - junzi: 君 子 - noble-minded persons who live morally upright lives, should not strive for winning sporting contests in archery:

The Master said: "The noble-minded never contend.  It's true that archery is a kind of contention.  But even then, they bow and yield to each other when stepping up to the range.  And when they step down, they toast each other.  Even in contention they retain their nobility." (3.7)

子曰：「君子無所爭，必也射乎！揖讓而升，下而飲，其爭也君子。」

The Master said: "People's strength differs.  So, in archery, shooting through the target-skin isn't the point.  That is the way of the ancient." (3.16)

子曰：「射不主皮，為力不同科，古之道也。」

Putting those two together sounds rather like the old saying: it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. 

It's hard to imagine Confucius sitting in the stands, waving a flag and yelling "jiayou!"  And he would certainly see the cost to some athletes, in terms of the damage done to family relations, as in the case of Lin Qingfeng, as simply and completely unacceptable.  Most likely, he would rather the money spent on Olympic preparation go to the preservation of historical and cultural relics and to social programs to ease economic inequality.  

But, of course, the Olympics are hardly the only aspect of contemporary Chinese society that is un-Confucian...

Let me be clear: I think China's Olympic success is fine, though the excesses of training regimes and gold-medal obsessions are a bit much.  I have no problem with Chinese people engaging in any aspects of cultural modernization that they like.  Indeed, I think the development of sports in China has opened up new avenues for the cultural expression of Chinese-ness - and that's great.  I imagine beach volleyball would have been considered "spiritual pollution" in the early 1980s; now, it's just fun and exciting.

I don't expect modern Chinese society to be Confucian.

What bugs me, however, is when sanctimonious Party ideologues argue that "Westernization" is anathema to Chinese culture and unsuited to Chinese realities, when, in fact, the Party embraces those aspects of "Westernization" that serve its power interests (global capitalist trade and finance; Westphalian notions of sovereignty; Monroe Doctrine-like claims to the South China Sea; deals with Hollywood producers; Olympic victories) and reject those that would challenge its political hegemony ("Western" multi-party democracy).  The worries about "Westernization," on the part of CCP elites, is not about cultural authenticity, it's about a narrower concern with maintaining the political power of a one-party state, which itself is a rather "Western" idea.  

Let's be honest guys.  There's plenty about "Westernization" that you like; it's just that democracy thing you're trying to avoid.

Mao Zedong and the PRC's Olympic Gold Anxiety

First of all, let me send out congratulations to all the Chinese athletes at the London Olympics.  There have been many outstanding accomplishments, gold and non-gold, for a truly great team.

And much has been made about the gold rush.  Over at CDT is a roundup of various stories that look into the PRC's "Olympic fetish for first."  Take this op-ed from the Party-managed Global Times :

There are people who blame institutional problems for China's gold medal obsession.

They argue that the existing system purely pushes athletes to get the gold medals and the public should never worry about gold medals that much.

There are certainly problems here. But that's no excuse for giving up the pursuit of the top.

It identifies the problem - "gold medal obsession" - and begins to think through the reasons it exists.  The title of that same op-ed, "Historical weakness creates China's gold medal fixation," suggests a longer-term dynamic at work, as do these lines:

China was known as "the sick man of Asia," torn by war and poverty. Liu Changchun, who was the first Chinese to participate in the Olympic Games in 1932, was sponsored by the warlord Chang Hsueh-liang as the first representative of war-torn China.

Liu arrived only three days before the opening ceremony, after a nearly month-long journey from Shanghai to Los Angeles. Finally, he was eliminated in the preliminary round.

China didn't win its first Olympic medal until 1984. It is understandable that China puts such weight on gold medals.

But notice: there is a rather significant stretch of time between 1932 and 1984.  A lot happened in China then, including the revolutionary victory and political domination of Maoism.  The op-ed alludes only indirectly to the "Red sun that never sets:"

 During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), China deliberately lost games or conceded points to other countries in international competitions as part of a diplomatic sports policy of "friendship first, competition second."

This approach actually showed no respect for athletes from other countries. It was a perverted notion of sportsmanship.

There is much more to be said here.  Indeed, an argument came be made that the destruction wrought by Maoism on China from 1958-1976 is the primary determinant in the PRC government's current obsession with winning Olympic gold now.

Mao actually supported sports and physical culture.  What might be the first article he published was on the importance of physical exercise in strengthening the nation.  So, it was not too surprising when the newly established PRC sent athletes to the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.    But it seems that the division with Taiwan created a "two Chinas" problem that caused the PRC to stay away for the 1956 games in Melbourne and thereafter until 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid.

In the interim Mao and Maoism had metastasized into a political movement hell-bent on destroying counter-revolutionaries and those taking the "capitalist road."  The Great Leap Forward devastated the country.  Millions died.  Administrative structures were destroyed.  While sport may have been the least of the losses, it, too, was fundamentally damaged.  How could an effective national sports system be maintained when people were starving?  In an article (pdf!), "Sport, Maoism and the Beijing Olympics," Dong-Jhy Hwang and Li-Ke Chang point out that the GLF was a "...considerable setback for sport
and physical education...".  And they go on to analyze the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution:

Following on the heels of the Great Leap Forward, the developmentof sports in the early stage of the Cultural Revolutionwas affected by disruption of competitive sports, the dismantling of the training system, the closure of sports schools, the discontinued participation of Chinese teams in overseas competitions, and the condemnation and persecution of outstanding athletes as offspring of the bourgeoisie.

In short, Maoism devastated sports in China. 

Essentially, then, due to political decisions at the highest levels of power in the PRC, China was cut off from the Olympics for thirty years, a time period of significant improvement in sporting technologies and efforts around the world.   What had held China back was not that it had been, in the previous century, the "sick man of Asia," but that Mao and the Party leadership denied the country systematic development of sports infrastructure and competition.

The current PRC government is running to catch up and surpass the "West" in Olympic competition, not simply as pay-back for 19th century imperialism, but also to further bury the destruction of the Maoist period.  Indeed, my sense is that it really has more to do with the latter than the former, because the latter is the thing that animates so much of post-1979 PRC but is also the thing that cannot be fully confronted.

Every time a PRC athelete kisses a gold medal, he or she is proclaiming to the world that Mao Zedong was wrong.  They have succeed in something Mao rejected - not sport in and of itself, but "bourgeois, Western" sports competition.  They have rejected the old "friendship first, competition second" dictum, and embraced the competitive and materialist culture that Mao struggled against. 

But, of course, you can't say that in the PRC today, when Mao's mausoleum is being put forward for "World Heritage" status....

Gu Kailai Proffers a Confucian Defense

 The scandalous story of Gu Kailai, wife of disgraced Chongqing boss Bo Xilai, is back in the news, with the formal announcement of charges being filed against her for intentional murder a British man.  I don't want to get swept up in the hoopla surrounding this rather sordid affair, but one aspect of it stands out for me: she is indirectly invoking Confucian principles in the first reports of her planned defense.

Here's a story from The Telegraph in London:

...the statement added that as a result of the row, Mrs Gu had begun to fear for her son's safety.

"Investigation results show that BoGu Kailai, one of the defendants, and her son surnamed Bo had conflicts with the British citizen Neil Heywood over economic interests," the short dispatch said.

"Worrying about Neil Heywood's threat to her son's personal security, Bogu Kailai along with Zhang Xiaojun, the other defendant, poisoned Neil Heywood to death," it added.

The idea that protecting a family member might be grounds for ignoring the law is time-honored in the Confucian tradition.  The locus classicus of this concept is Analects 13.18:

Speaking to Confucius, the Duke of She said: "In my village there was a man called Body Upright.  When his father stole a sheep, he testified against him."

"In my village," said Confucius, "to be upright was something else altogether.  Fathers harbored sons, and sons harbored fathers - and between them, they were upright."

葉公語孔子曰：「吾黨有直躬者，其父攘羊，而子證之。」孔子曰：「吾黨之直者異於是。父為子隱，子為父隱，直在其中矣。」

If the law threatens family solidarity, then the latter should be defended against the former.  

This is a vexing concept for Confucianism, one that could be used to justify nepotism and corruption of various sorts.  It stands in the way of a more universal application of the rule of law.

But it seems to me that Confucius did not really mean for this to protect murders.  Notice in the example that the crime is stealing sheep.  This might have been fairly serious, but it pales in comparison of homicide.  If Gu Kailai participated in the murder of Neil Heywood, she is guilty of killing someone else's family member, robbing that other family of a loved one to whom they owed a certain filial duty.  On Confucian grounds, we must take murder more seriously than sheep stealing.

Mencius takes up precisely this question (7A35).  When asked what Shun, the legendary uber-filial sage-king, would have done if his father had been accused of murder, Mencius replies that Shun, who was then king of "all under heaven," would not have attempted to overrule the authority of the duly appointed justice minister, but he would have given up his kingdom and fled with his father:

"Casting all beneath heaven aside meant no more to Shun than casting aside an old sandal," said Mencius.  "He would have stolen away with his father on his back, and gone to live beside the sea.  He would have lived out his life happily there, forgetting about all beneath Heaven entirely."

舜視棄天下，猶棄敝蹝也。竊負而逃，遵海濱而處，終身訢然，樂而忘天下。

Shun seems to be evading the law, not contradicting it, as Analects 13.18 suggests.  We might imagine that if the authorities caught up with him and his nefarious dad, he would have yielded and allowed his father to be taken into custody, because he continued to recognize the legitimacy of the law.   Or maybe not.  Maybe Shun is pretty much the same as the men in Confucius's village, willing to subvert the law in the name of family.

In any event, Gu and her lawyers are likely invoking family ties - concern for her son's safety - to create a sense of virtue about her actions.  She was desperate to protect her son, and had to go to extremes to do so....or, at least, that is what they want us to think.  This might get some traction among some Chinese, and it might provide sufficient mitigation to keep her from the death penalty, but it will not be enough to find her not guilty.  That has already been determined.  Her case is a top political priority for the CCP leadership, and they would not let charges be publicized and legal procedures move forward without knowing precisely what the outcome would be ahead of time.  She is facing very serious punishment.

And I think it's safe to say that Gu is no Shun....

The Chinese Political System is not a Meritocracy

Daniel A. Bell has a piece today in the CSM, arguing that the PRC political system is, basically, a meritocracy that holds lessons that might correct the flaws of US democracy.  Bell is a philosopher and he tends to operate in normative terms (i.e. what a meritocracy ought to be; what a democracy ought to be; how the ideal of meritocracy might improve democracy).  I do not want to engage with the normative questions because there is a rather glaring empirical problem: the current Chinese political system is not a meritocracy by the definition Bell puts forth.  And I think we could push a bit further to say that, in fact, the imperial Chinese system was not a meritocracy either, if we consider a somewhat broader definition of that term.

Bell gives us his definition of meritocracy right up front:

Political meritocracy is the idea that a political system is designed with the aim of selecting political leaders with above-average ability to make morally informed political judgments. That is, political meritocracy has two key components: 1) The political leaders have above-average ability and virtue; and 2) the selection mechanism is designed to choose such leaders.

He goes on to report that various methods of rigorous recruitment into the Chinese Communist Party have moved the Chinese political system toward this ideal.  But there is much evidence that leads to the opposite conclusion: that the very nature and structure of the CCP vitiates the possibility of realizing meritocracy.

I should point out here that various writers and scholars have delved deep into the study of CCP, and their work demonstrates that personal gain and loyalty to the existing power structure are the animating features of the contemporary CCP.  It is not about "morally-informed political choices;" it is about gaining power and advantage.  Richard  McGregor's book, The Party, and Minxin Pei's work on the "trapped transitions" are good starting points for understanding how the PRC polticial system actually operates.

To return to Bell, notice that his definition of meritocracy focuses on "morally-informed political choices," which is to be expected, given his normative focus.  We might also define merit more in terms of technical competence (i.e. promoting people who have the technological and scientific skills necessary to answer complex modern questions).  For now, we will just focus on Bell's normative definition; but we will have reason to return to the other definition later, when considering some broader, historical aspects of the issue.

Contrary to Bell's normative aspirations, the CCP is currently not an organization that recruits and promotes and rewards people for making the best "morally-informed political choices."  We can see this at both the top and the bottom of the political heirarchy.

The case of Bo Xilai, whom some will want to mimimize as exceptional, is quite instructive.  Bo rose to the top fo the political system, the Politburo, and was aiming for the very, very top, the Standing Committee.  He got there by building a personal empire of connections and payments and coercion.  He was quite willing to distort the law to his own purposes of personal power:

Bo’s enormous power as the top Communist official in Dalian manifested in other more sinister incidents. After Dalian-based journalist Jiang Weiping wrote three anonymous articles in a Hong Kong publication that criticised Bo for his role in a corruption scandal, he was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of subversion and stealing state secrets. He served nearly six years before he was freed and fled to Canada.

Persecuting journalists who are trying to tell the truth about corruption is not a  "morally-informed political choice."  

And things got worse, much worse, when Bo took power in Chongqing and initiated an anti-crime campaignto burnish his political image:

"The anti-mafia campaign in Chongqing wasn't based on the rule of law," says lawyer Li Zhuang, who represented an alleged gang member. "It was an anti-mafia campaign for political purposes. It overrode the law, it ignored basic legal procedure and it even violated basic human morality."

When Li first met client Gong Gangmo, Gong told him Chongqing police had tortured him sporadically over a period of eight days and nights.

"They hung him from the ceiling, so he could touch a table with his toes, but he couldn't put his heels down," Li recalls being told. "He was hanging for a long time, so he soiled himself. An interrogator took him down, and ordered him to clean up the mess with his hands, and wipe the floor with his shorts. Then they hung him up again naked."

It should be noted that Bo's trangressions were illegal and immoral by the standards publicly espoused by the CCP in it's efforts to develop the "rule of law" in China:

“Even by Chinese Communist Party standards, this is unacceptable,” said Cheng Li, an analyst of the Chinese leadership at the Brookings Institution. “This is red terror.” 

If Bo's police chief had not desperately run to the US Consulate in Chengdu to get out from under the scandal, Bo might still be in power, moving toward the highest office.  The internal workings of the Party had been impotent in the face of his actions.  It was only when the story broke internationally, and the eyes of the world were able to see the truth of Chongqing, that the Party removed Bo.

Bo is unusual only in the scale of his abuse of power.  He got away with a lot because he had a lot of power.  But at lower levels of the vast Party machine, the interests of power regularly contravene morality.  Again, when I say "morality" here I do not need "Western" standards, but standards articulated by the Party itself.  This is what we see in the Chen Guangcheng case.

It was local Shandong party authorities who held Chen without charge, beat him and punished his family.  They did so to isolate and silence him so they could preserve their local power and, they thought, their reputations.  Obviously, these were not "morally-informed political choices."

We could go on to adduce other cases.  Suffice it to say, if the PRC political system were truly a meritocracy it would not have to routinely lie and distort in its efforts to maximize its power, as it did in the 2003 SARs outbreak, and the 2005 Songhua River spill, the 2008 Siquan earthquake school collapse scandal, or what now appears to be dissembling and evasion in reporting the truth about the Beijing flood. None of these are indicative of "morally-informed political choices."

Now, it must be said that there are, no doubt, many well meaning and ethically upstanding people working in the PRC's vast bureaucracy.  But the system, with its powerful material incentives for corruption and self-interest, does not live up to Bell's ideal of meritocracy.  It makes me think of Gandhi's response when asked about western civilization: "it could be a good idea."

Finally, if we think in more technocratic terms, a meritocracy that centers on promoting people with the best technical and scientific credentials, we might also find the current Chinese political system lacking.  We could debate that.  But thinking in these terms leads us to a conclusion about imperial China: when confronted with the challenges of Western technology in the 19th century it proved to be incapable of systemic adaptation and, thus, was lacking a certain technical meritocracy.  Mandarins and gentry were too wed to the old order, they benefited materially and politically too much, to concern themselves with change.  There were, of course, some Chinese leaders - Kang Youwei, Liang Qiqiao, countless entrepreneurs and activists - who tried to change.  But they were thwarted by a system that did not promote people with the technical expertise required to understand and manage the transformations that the times required.  Political and personal interest reigned supreme.... Come to think of it, that sounds rather like 2012 as well....

Bottom line: US democracy is flawed. There may well be some aspects of China's experience that could be useful in thinking about how to improve US politics and society.  But CCP meritocray is not one of them because it does not actually exist.

(illustration from Pigs Incorprated)

Education is a Dialogue

Just want to give a quick shout out to Mark Edmunson for his op-ed in yesterday's NYT: "The Trouble with Online Education."  With all the recent foofaraw recently about on-line courses and MOOCs, various people at various places (most notably the idiot Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia) are fretting about the end of colleges, and especially liberal arts colleges, as we know them.  I don't share these concerns.  Of course, there are serious problems with higher education in the US, and the rise of on-line courses does pose a certain challenge.  But, at the end of the day, there will always be a place for education via direct human contact between teachers and students.

Edmunson gets this rather clearly:

Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

He goes on to mention an ancient Greek thinker - "Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates." - a fairly standard move.  We could add to that Confucius, who similarly believed in the necessity of direct interaction in education.  Here's this from The Analects:

The Master said: "Out walking with two companions, I'm sure to be in my teacher's company. The good in one I adopt in myself; the bad in the other I change in myself. (7.22)

子曰：「三人行，必有我師焉。擇其善者而從之，其不善者而改之。」

We learn best when in interaction with others, not we we sit, solitary and passive, gazing at a screen.  And a certain passion and commitment is also necessary (which I will admist is often lacking in the 18-22 year old cohort):

The Master said: "Study as if you'll never know enough, as if you're afraid of losing it all. (8.17)

子曰：「學如不及，猶恐失之。」

That passion might be carried over to online learning.  But I still think Edmunson is right when he argues:

...You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.

The ideal of the university, of which the liberal arts college is a miniaturization, arose in medieval times, and it has survived the horrors of war, the deprivations of economic depression, and the transformations of culture.  But yet it persists.  I think we're still safe for a while.... 

A Confucian Constitution for China: Where's the Popular Sovereignty?

Daniel Bell and Jiang Qing have a short op-ed in today's NYT outlining what a Confucian political system for China might look like. This is a large and complex topic, and the brevity of the piece really cannot do it justice, so any critique must be limited: I'm sure Bell and Jiang have much, much more to say by way of elaboration of this topic.  But even in this roughtest of outlines, there seems to be something essential missing, at least to my mind: the notion of popular sovereignty.

Bell and Jiang suggest that regime legitimacy is not simply a matter of the "sovereignty of the people."  They then invoke a tripartite definition of legitimacy, drawn from a particular reading of certain Chinese classics, and arrive at a suggestion for a tri-cameral political system:

In modern China, Humane Authority should be exercised by a tricameral legislature: a House of Exemplary Persons that represents sacred legitimacy; a House of the Nation that represents historical and cultural legitimacy; and a House of the People that represents popular legitimacy.

The leader of the House of Exemplary Persons should be a great scholar. Candidates for membership should be nominated by scholars and examined on their knowledge of the Confucian classics and then assessed through trial periods of progressively greater administrative responsibilities — similar to the examination and recommendation systems used to select scholar-officials in the imperial past. The leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius; other members would be selected from descendants of great sages and rulers, along with representatives of China’s major religions. Finally, members of the House of the People should be elected either by popular vote or as heads of occupational groups.

At base this scheme rejects the centrality of popular sovereignty, by giving the "people" only one house, which could be blocked and legislatively defeated by the other two, more narrowly drawn elitist, houses.  It also conflates the ideas of legitimacy and sovereignty, which are not necessarily the same.

My sense is that this is wholly unrealistic in light of twentieth century Chinese history. 

When the Qing dynasty finally fell in 1911, China embraced the notion of popular sovereignty, and it has never relinquished that position.  Of course, historically, that ideal has been violated, sometimes with horrible irony, as in Mao's notion of the "people's democratic dictatorship."  But the key issue for the constitution of Chinese politics is not whether the people ultimately are the source of sovereign rule, but how the people's interests are best expressed: through either democratic or authoritarian representation.

A limitation of popular sovereignty in a new constitution would be experienced by many Chinese people as a give back of sorts. They, the people, have been recognized as the rulers of their own country for a hundred years now.  Moreover, the vast majority of countries in the world today accept, at varying levels of abstraction, the notion of popular sovereignty.  Even constitutional monarchies, like the UK, where a hereditary queen symbolizes the nation, generally constrain the monarch's power in the interest of popular sovereignty. 

For most of the world, China included, popular sovereignty is one of those facts of modern life that seem now inescapable.  We can complain about the inefficiencies of this or that particular arrangement of democratic politics (and, we must remember, there are many, many particular formations that democracy can assume), but it seems too much of a throw-back to a by-gone era to assert the idea that sovereignty somehow should reside in a specific group of individuals based simply on their hereditary status (descendants of Confucius?) or, even, there performance on some sort of exam.

The problem here is how we adapt traditional texts and ideas to modern contexts.  In China, there is a certain desire to construct a distinct modernity, one that includes aspects of Chinese tradition.  This is true for most places on earth.  But, of course, there is great tension and debate regarding just what aspects of tradition are worthy or useful to bring forward and preserve or refashion.  Virtually no one argues that foot-binding should be brought back.  Nor has the notion that Chinese culture and society are essentially agrarian been invoked to impede what has been, in the past three decades, perhaps the most extensive and intensive urbanization in world history.  Marxism, famously, has been used to define and structure the politics of the PRC: a non-Chinese ideology that is somehow culturally appropriate.  We could go on...

The point is: there is nothing definitive about any aspect of "tradition," a hopeless large and fuzzy concept.  A rejection of popular sovereignty is no more culturally necessary than is the return of footbinding. 

Bell and Jiang's argument is, then, simply political.  They are skeptical about how a "Western multi-party democracy" might fit contemporary Chinese circumstances, and likely believe that authoritarianism has suited China just fine.  They may also, I suspect, not like what China has become: a socially and culturally pluralistic and dynamic society that has moved away from tradition and toward various possibilities of modern politics and economics.  

But at this point China is simply what it is.  It is now, and has been for a hundred years, a political system founded - imperfectly to be sure - on the principle of popular sovereignty.  That political foundation is not un-Chinese.  It has been accepted and adapted into Chinese life.  To reject it now, if favor of an inchoate reinvention of supposed "tradition," would not be a return to an ideal Chinese past.  It would more likely spark a popular revolution, one is which the Chinese people would demand, again, to stand up.

(photo of P.C. Chang, Chinese representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights)

The US Supreme Court does the Mencian thing

As everyone knows by now, the US Supreme Court voted today to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA), thus allowing to stand President Obama's signature legislative action on health insurance.  In doing so, the Court also, unintentionally I suspect, ratified a Mencian approach to public policy.

A modern application of Mencius would support ACA.  A key point in the Mencian perspective, which is largely absent in the US debate on the issue, is that by extending health insurance to everyone, ACA facilitates the fulfillment of filial duty: sons and daughters can care for their parents more effectively.  How terrible is it for a child to face a parent's illness or incapacitation and not be able to secure necessary medical care!  Moreover, as Confucius suggests, children have a duty to maintain their own health so that parents will not worry abou them (Legge translation):

    Meng Wu asked what filial piety was. The Master said, "Parents are anxious lest     their children should be sick." (2.6)

    孟武伯問孝。子曰：「父母唯其疾之憂。」

There is, of course, much that is beyond our immediate control when it comes to health, and Confucius here is not blaming the victim, as it were, if some a medical misfortune occurs.  But we should take reasonable steps to avoid medical problems that might bring anxiety to our parents.  Widely available health insurance, which makes it easier to seek early treatment, does that.

And Mencius would understand health insurance as a government responsibility, to the extent that it creates social conditions conducive for the broadest possible realization of Humanity. In speaking with a bad king, who is ignoring the livelihood and health of the people, Menicus says (Bloom translation):

At present, the regulation of the people's livelihood is such that, above, they do not have enough to serve their parents and, below, they do not have enough to support their wives and children.  Even in years of prosperity their lives are bitter, while in years of dearth they are unable to escape starvation. Under these circumstances they only try to save themselves from death, fearful that they will not succeed.  How could they spare the time for the practice of rites and rightness? (1A7)

There is a correlation between wealth and access to health care.  The poor, if they fall ill and cannot secure the care they need, quite clearly have more difficulty in sparing "the time for the practice of rites and rightness."  It is harder for them to do the right thing.  And it is the king's - and by modern extension, government's - responsibility to make sure the "people's livelihood" is such that filial and social duties can be performed with the dignity they deserve.  All persons should be provided with certain minimal material conditions, as Mencius suggests here (Bloom translation):

Mencius said, "In years of abundance, most of the young people have the wherewithal to be good, while in years of adversity, most of them become violent.  This is not a matter of a difference in the native capacities sent down by Heaven but rather what overwhelms their minds.

"Now, let barley be sown and covered with earth; the ground being the same, and the time of planting also the same, it grows rapidly, and in due course of time, it all ripens.  Though there may be differences in the yield, this is because the fertility of the soil, the nourishment of the rain and the dew, and the human effort invested are not the same.

"Thing of the same kind are thus like one another.  Why is it that we should doubt this only when it comes to human beings?....."

We all start out, according to Mencius, with the same inherent moral capacity, the ability to do right in the world.  When people fail to do right, it is not because of some innate character flaw.  Rather, the environment surrounding them was not conducive to right action.  If each person receives the care they need, if the human effort invested in their growth and development is sufficient, then we can expect the best possible social outcomes. 

Not having access to medical care, for oneself or for a loved one, can clearly "overwhelm the mind" of otherwise good people.  Thus, there a general social duty, best enacted by government, to create conditions that ease the medical burden for as many people as possible.

Therefore, when contemplating the whole health care mess in the US, remember what Mencius says: think about the barley.