The Useless Tree

Organizational Psychology Confirms Confucius: Helping Others is the Best Way to Help Yourself

Just saw this piece in the NYT: "Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?"  This graf gets at the main idea:

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. [Adam] Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

It brought one of my favorite Analects passages to mind, 6.29 (Hinton):

Adept Kung said: "How would you describe a person who sows all the people with blessings and assists everyone in the land? Could such a person be called Humane?"

"What does this have to do with Humanity [ren] " replied the Master. "If you must have a name, call this person a sage.  for even the enlightened Emperors Yao and Shun would seem lacking by comparison. As for Humanity: if you want to make a stand, help others make a stand, and if you want to reach your goal, help others reach their goal. Consider yourself and treat others accordingly: this is the method of Humanity.

To be truly Humane - 仁 -  we need to work to help others reach their goals.  We can't just "assist others."  We have to assist them to advance in their lives. 

And to think of it: it only took about 2,500 years for organizational psychology to confirm that....

American Daoism

Sometimes I despair that some of my favorite books - the Daodejing and Zhuangzi - seem wholly irrelevant to the materialism and competitiveness of contemporary American life.  And then along comes an article like this: Living With Less. A Lot Less.  In it, Graham Hill (no, not that Graham Hill, whom I remember from my childhood; this Graham Hill) writes:

We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.

There isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it seems the reverse may be true.

He goes on to argue that his life has improved since he has pared down his possessions.  He lives in a 420 square foot studio apartment.  The last line of his piece captures a Daoist-like sensibility, though he quotes no Daoist texts: "My space is small. My life is big."  Indeed, it brings passage 9 of the DDJ to mind (Hinton's translation):

Forcing it fuller and fuller can't compare with just enough, and honed sharper and sharper means it won't keep for long.

Once it's full of jade and gold your house will never be safe. Proud of wealth and renown you bring on your own ruin.

Just do what you do, and then leave: such is the Way of heaven.

持而盈之，不如其已；揣而銳之，不可長保。金玉滿堂，莫之能守；富貴而驕，自遺其咎。功遂身退天之道。

Hill is a Canadian, but he is speaking to Americans, North Americans, more generally.  Indeed, he is speaking to the modern world, for the fetishism of commodities is embedded in global capitalism.  And, in that, he is showing, without explicitly meaning to, that Daoism certainly has something to say to all of us now.

Indeed, this message might be more apt than ever, at least in the US in the aftermath of economic crisis.  The economy is obviously bad.  Many talented people don't have jobs.  Most of us have to do with less than might have been the case a few years ago before the 2008 crash.  But maybe that is OK.  Or, as passage 22 of the DDJ states:

In little is contentment.  In much is confusion.

少則得，多則惑

Daoist Gun Control

The Daodejing takes a dim view of weapons.  Passage 31 begins (Legge translation):

Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Dao do not like to employ them.

夫佳兵者，不祥之器，物或惡之，故有道者不處。

This is not simply an anti-war message, though the Daodejing can be seen as generally anti-war.  The aversion to arms runs deeper. Weapons distort our humanity.  They take us away from allowing Dao to unfold as it will; they are instruments of coercive intervention that often do more harm than good.  In a well-ordered society, as in passage 80, they are unnecessary (Eno translation):

Though there be armor and weaponry, they shall not be deployed.

雖有甲兵，無所陳之.

Weapons bring out the worst in people.  They make us think that we can easily dominate others, take what we want without fear of reprisal.  They instill a false sense of power: yes, a gun would allow me to kill a person right here and now, and the fear of that sort of violent death may well cause that person to do what I want right here and now.  But this is a false power because, over time, that coercive force will reach its limit, or it may even inspire counteractions that are more powerful.  A gun may facilitate a victory today, but it cannot bring victories forever.

The wretched "debate" on gun control in the US misses most of this.  Gun zealots hold an impoverished view of society, one that presumes the complete absence of civility.  All they can think of is violent attack against their persons that they believe they can somehow prevent with a firearm.  They resist data that suggest gun ownvership brings an increased likelihood of accidental harm and suicide.  Due to the power of the gun lobby, advocates of stricter regulation are reduced to the narrowest proposals for limiting the availability of fire arms.  Thus, American society is flooded with guns, and grows coarser because of it.

Guns also undermine democracy.  Think about it: democracy requires freedom of expression.  Open, rational debate, with the possibility of peacefully persuading others of your position is the ideal.  Firearms distort that process.  The coercive potential they represent can silence people, weakening the give and take that democracy require.  Interestingly, although not a treatise on democracy, the Daodejing seems to understand this in passage 36 (Hinton):

Fish should be kept in their watery depths: a nation's honed instruments of power should be kept well-hidden from the people.

魚不可脫於淵，國之利器不可以示人。

This statement will not doubt enrage gun owners who resist reasonable regulation.  They will see in it a conspiracy on the part of state power-holders to dominate the population. But that ignores the prior point that state power-holders themselves should not rely upon weapons.  The point of passage 36 is that "soft and weak overcome hard and strong" (柔弱勝剛強).  Fishes find natural comfort in the depths; and people will find their best natural expressions when weapons are not ostentatiously displayed.

Americans can learn something from the Daodejing here: weapons weaken our humanity.

chart source

Zero Dark Sunzi

I saw "Zero Dark Thirty" last night, a bracing film.  I am also reading Sunzi with my students here; so, it seems quite natural for me to bring these two texts together.

As a movie, "Zero Dark Thirty" is quite good: absorbing story-telling; persuasive cinematography; some taut performances.  But I agree with those, most notably Steve Coll, who argue that its claim to verisimilitude sends it into politically problematic territory: the film exaggerates the role of torture in the capture of bin Laden, Also, its ambiguity toward torture, which might reflect something in the historical moment, leaves open a justification for its continuing use. The film-makers are attempting to walk a fine line between journalism and fiction, but by intimating the former they assume a responsibility for the political interpretation of the film that might not attach to a fuller embrace of fiction.

But what would Sunzi think?  At first, he would agree that torture should be generally eschewed.  He straightforwardly states, in 2.19 (Griffith translation): "Treat captives well, and care for them."  To which Chang Yu, a later commentator, adds: "All soldiers taken must be cared for with magnanimity and sincerity so that they may be used by us."  Not much ambiguity there.

Notice, too, in chapter 13, "Employment of Secret Agents," (13.17) he states:

It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you.  Given them instructions and care for them. Thus double agents are recruited and used.

Something like this failed spectacularly in the movie, when the apparent double agent blows himself up at Camp Chapman.  But the possibility of such failure does not lead Sunzi to accept the costs associated with torture.

It might be argued that the importance that Sunzi places on "foreknowledge"  and intelligence could offer a limited rationale for torture.  He accepts the necessity of killing a secret agent who might prematurely divulge information to the enemy (13.15):

If plans relating to secret operations are prematurely divulged the agent and all those to whom he spoke of them shall be put to death

Rough treatment,indeed. But this applies to spies working for you, not to detainees you have captured from the enemy. And execution for a breech of military discipline is not the same as torture. Sunzi recognizes the crucial importance of good and full intelligence, but he shies away from an explicit endorsement of torture as a means of intelligence-gathering, even though we might assume such practices were known to him in his own time.

It might be the case that Sunzi would tolerate a momentary, exceptional breech of his general treat-prisoners-well stance.  But that is not what US policy was during the Bush administration. Torture was routinized and systematized and bureaucratized.  It was not the exception but an established practice. As Coll points out, we do not know how widely it was actually used, because so much information remains classified, but we do know that Bush's lawyers laid the legal basis for regular use of torture by US agencies.  And that is what must be struggled against.  Sunzi, too, would reject the way in which Bush tried to normalize torture, reducing it to a banal evil.

One aspect of the movie that Sunzi would applaud is the more mundane and prosaic practice of intelligence gathering.  A woman searching through old files make a key connection that mattered.   A host of neighborhood spies painstakingly chart the movements of bin Laden's courier to finally locate the house where he is living. That sort of detailed knowledge of local conditions and possibilities - the shape of the battlefield, as it were - is very much in keeping with Sunzi thinking: "Those who do not use local guides are unable to obtain the advantages of the ground." (7.11)

As to whether, ultimately, it was worth it to kill bin Laden, Sunzi might agree that it was.  He tells us that our strategy should be aimed at attacking the enemy's strategy (3.4).   A commentator, Li Ch'uan, adds a story to illustrate this point.  It recounts how a general agree to talks with an envoy of his adversary.  Presumably, it was understood that such an envoy would be granted safe passage.  But the general, K'ou Hsun, killed him.  When asked by his staff why he did it, he replied that the envoy was the enemy leader's "heart and guts, his intimate counsellor.  If I had spared [the envoy's] life, he would have accomplished his schemes, but when I killed him [the enemy leader] lost his guts."

A similar logic may have applied to bin Laden and al Qaeda: to rob the organization of its "heart and guts" could effectively counter its strategy.

Confucian Constitutionalism in defense of Freedom of Expression

The Southern Weekend censorship row (good reports can be found here, here, here, here and here) has cast light on the limits of political reform in China.  I am one of those who sees this, initially at least, not as a potential breakthrough of liberalization in the wake of a leadership change, but, rather, as a reminder of precisely the opposite: how even the most modest possibilities of change (we are talking, after all, about an editorial that called for adherence to already extant constitutional principles) will be blocked by a Party leadership obsessed with holding on to its hegemonic power.  I think Bill Bishop gets it generally right:

Mr. Xi increasingly looks to be a staunch Dengist, meaning he believes in pursuing major economic reform while maintaining the unchallenged rule of the Communist Party.

Loosening controls on the media flies in the face of the Party’s decades of focus on ideological work and propaganda control. One or more midlevel officials involved in this mess may need to be sacrificed for expediency, but significant change is unlikely.

The only caveat I would add here is that "major" economic reform is now a political question: what is required is weakening the power of state-owned enterprises and vested interests to open the way for increased consumption and dynamism in the economy.  And it is not clear that Xi is willing to take on such "major" economic reform.

But there is a somewhat smaller, less prominent, aspect of this affair that I want to discuss: a statement put out by a group of Confucian scholars that defends constitutionalism and freedom of expression.  It is entitled: 中国儒者就《南方周末》新年献辞事件告天下书 ("Declaration by Chinese Confucians on the "Southern Weekend" New Year's message incident").  I haven't yet found a complete English translation; so, I'll just refer to a few passages of it, to provide a sense of what it is about.

Before that, though, I should say that this heartens me.  Previously, I had not been particularly impressed with the efforts of contemporary Confucians to craft constitutional answers to the PRC's political problems.  They tend to be too deferential to centralized authority, unwilling to argue forcefully for protections of individual liberty against instrusions by the state.  In the book, A Confucian Constituional Order, Jiang Qing, a prominent PRC Confucian thinker, defends freedom of speech only as an afterthought, in response to a critic.  It seems not to be a central concern of his. Thus, it is notable that Jiang takes the lead in the statement on Southern Weekend; his name is first among the dozens of signers.  Good for him.

The declaration is straightforward.  After noting the editorial interference that occurred at the paper, it asserts:

由此可见，《南方周末》的新闻自主权遭到严重侵害，其作为社会公器的功能被严重弱化。

From this we can see, the news reporting autonomy of "Southern Weekend" has suffered a grave assault, such that its capacity to serve the public good has been gravely weakened.

The presumption here is that newspapers should be autonomous from poltiical authority in order to serve a broader public good.  The words they choose are insturctive.  自主权 suggests an "ability to make one's own decisions," but implies  "autonomy"  自主, with a slight hint of "sovereignty" 主权.  The latter is obviously not meant to be taken literally.  The Confucians are not calling for a dissolution of state sovereignty.  But they are saying that media should have considerable autonomous power.  Of course, newspapers, or any media, in China do not have that kind of independence. The Party very carefully and extensively oversees what can be circulated. Thus, although the Confucians' statement might be taken as a call for a return to the status quo (the presumptive problem being that in this particular case political authorities overstepped their bounds by interfering with the paper), it is actually a potentially more radical statement of freedom of expression.  That is further suggeted by this sentence:

我们认为，凡此种种严重侵害媒体自主权和国民表达自由的行为和制度，有悖中华优良政治传统与现代法治精神。

We belieive that these sorts grave infringements on the conduct and institutions of media autonomy and national freedom of expression are contrary to China's excellent political traditions and the modern spirit of rule of law.

Thus, they claim freedom of expression (表达自由) as an aspect of "China's excellent political traditions."   This suggests that standard Communist Party propaganda and media control are contrary to Chinese tradition, and thus lack a certain Confucian legitimacy.  They make this point even more forcefully in the next sentence:

国民自由表达各种意见，包括直接批评当政者，作为一项政治价值和宪制原则，始终内在于中华文明的优良政治传统中。

National freedom to express every sort of opinion, including direct criticism of power-holders, is a political and constitutional principle that has always been inherent in the excellent political traditions of Chinese civilization.

Notice: "direct criticism of power-holders."  This is precisely what is not allowed now.  This is a statement that fundamentally rejects current political practices and institutions in the PRC.  It is a defense of thoroughgoing reform.

The invocation of "constitutional principles" here dovetails with the petition signed last month by 70 scholars that called for the realization of principles, including separation of power and freedom of expression and more genuine representation, that are included in the extant state constitution of the PRC.  By calling attention to the divergence between what is stated in the current constitution and how the CCP actually rules provides some rhetorical leverage for reformers, to which the Confucians are now adding.

Confucians quite naturally - if they are adhering to the principles of Confucianism - should find themselves in opposition to the CCP.  And, indeed, Confucians, in the post-Mao era, have voiced various sorts of critques of Party rule.  Jiang Qing has been rather direct in rejecting Marxist-Leninism:

“…we are naturally drawn to the following conclusion: ruxue [Confucianism] should replace Marxism-Leninism and revive its orthodox historical position, to become the orthodox thought representing the lifeblood of the Chinese (Zhonghua) nation and the national spirit in mainland China today.”   (John Makeham, Lost Soul: “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse, pp. 262-263)

But these sorts of criticisms are usually expressed in academic settings or publications, away from the glare of national poltiical attention.  What stands out about the Confucians' declaration on the Southern Weekend incident is its public and political character.  They are intervening in the public sphere at a significant moment to put forth an argument that fundamentally rejects the CCP's conception of political power. 

My sense is that this will not have all that great a political impact, at least in the near-term.  Party leaders are not going to shake in their boots because a few dozen intellectuals come out with a critical statement, even one as scathing as this.  One could imagine Xi Jinping asking the quesiton that Stalin was said to have asked about the Pope: "how many divisions do they have?"   Intellectuals and journalists in China do not have power.  But they could be influential in how others understand power and how power-holders use their power at critical junctures.

Daoist Thoughts on Newtown

When confronted with horrible, senseless crimes like the massacre of innocent children in Connecticut last week, I find myself turning back to the Daoist classics for reflection. It is not that I find answers in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi.  There are no answers, really.  Rather, the old books simply remind us of certain enduring truths that circulate around the terrible things that can happen among humans.

The first thing to note, however, is the overwhelming sorrow that descends upon all of us, parents in particular, when confronted with this horrific scene.  My heart aches for the families caught up in this maelstrom.  I hope they will find a way to absorb and live beyond the grief and loss they now experience.

The needless and violent death of any individual is appalling, of course.  But when children are the victims, boys and girls only six or seven years old, the outrage is even more pointed. Their innocence shocks the conscience. Their lives are still so new, so wonderfully open and bright, that we intuitively feel they should be spared the depredations of the adult world. We want to shield them, to give them a chance to grow and learn.  And now, for these twenty in Newtown, all that has been shot down. An excerpt from passage 55 of the Daodejing (Lynn translation) gets at the tragedy here:

One who has profoundly internalized virtue is comparable to the infant. Wasps, scorpions, adders, and vipers do not sting or bite him. Fierce animals do not attack him.  Birds of prey do not seize him.

Wang Bi, a third century commentator, expands upon this passage:

The infant is free from craving or desire and so commits no offense against the myriad things.  As a result, no poisonous creature commits offense against him.  It is because one who has profoundly internalized virtue does not commit offense against others that others do not try to make him lose his wholeness.

The infant, in other words, in her freedom from desires and wants beyond the most elemental, is a model for us all.  Much of the pain and suffering of human life, the adders and vipers that bite us, emerge from adult avidity: status, money, power. Young children have not yet learned to want such things. And Daoism holds them up as an ideal, a hint for how adults might make their own lives better.  

It is especially cruel, then, when adults violently harm the children who should be resistant to our harms.

Sadly, children come to unnatural deaths all too often, all around the world. It is a consistent and extensive failure of humanity.  In the US, however, this failing takes a peculiar form: the prevalence of gun violence.  It is a baleful and lethal historical legacy.  We, as a society, venerate guns, we seem to worship them, as Gary Wills suggests:

The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

Daoism immediately sees the terrible folly here: we have taken an unnecessary and inanimate thing and invested it with near magical qualities.  And from that has flowed innumerable harms and sorrows.  Passage 31 of the Daodejing (Ivanhoe and Van Norden trans.) opens:

Fine weapons are inauspicious instruments; all creatures find them repulsive. And so one who has the Way does not rely upon them.

We don't need guns. They simply make the persistant failures of humanity ever more violent and deadly.  They are central to the tragedy of Newtown.  And until we learn the lesson of their futility we will unnecessarily repeat the offense of harming and killing those who should be resistant to our harms.

Has Wen Jiabao Failed the Confucius Test?

Everyone's talking about the big NYT piece on the vast wealth of the family of China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao. At one level this is utterly unsurprising.  This is how the PRC's political economy works. Those people who stand at the intersection of state and market in the partially-reformed Chinese economy are in a position to make billions of dollars (and, yes, it is ultimately about dollars, a globally convertible currency, as this article suggests).  And high level political leaders and their children and spouses and family members are very often the ones who push themselves into those positions.  We see the same pattern with Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai. That's how they roll at the top of the PRC system.

The difference in the case of Wen Jiabao is that he has presented himself, and has been presented by the PRC media, as a man of modest means and tastes.  He was famous for wearing the same plain overcoat for years on end.  He styled himself a man of the people:  "Grandpa Wen" comforted victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and personally apologized for the transportation havoc wreaked by the 2006 New Year's bilzzard.  Earlier this year, he made a plaintive appeal for some sort of political reform.

In all of this there is a resonance with Mencius: the righteous leader, working to secure the people's basic livelihood while personally maintaining a frugal and simple lifestyle.  Perhaps Wen somehow abosrbed Confucian-Mencian values somewhere along the way -  though it is hard to know how a person who came up through the Party apparatus, beginning in the Cultrual Revolution, might have been able to practice Confucian benevolence.  Or maybe the "Grandpa Wen" thing is bascially a political act.  It's hard to know in the opaque world of Chinese politics.

But let's give Wen the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he has, at least in the post-Mao era, been trying to live a morally good life in something like Confucian terms.  It is not an easy thing to do in contemporary China.  He is embedded in a system driven by powerful material incentives.  Money and corruption and power fuel the party-state machine.  And those create behaviors and outcomes that contradict Confucian morality. 

We should not, therefore, expect that Wen might have been able to transform the system in a Confucian-Mencian direction.  But if he were to have moral effect anywhere, it might have been in his family life.  Were he serious about setting an example of a moral ruler, he would have done so, first and foremost, in his relationships with his immediate family.  And that is precisely where, based on these new revelations, he seems to have failed the Confucian test.

Any judgment here, however, relies upon assumptions about just what Wen knew and when (if you'll excuse the unavoidable pun) he knew it.  The NYT story suggests he was generally in the dark about the fortunes being amassed by his mother and wife and son:

The prime minister’s supporters say he has not personally benefited from his extended family’s business dealings, and may not even be knowledgeable about the extent of them.

On the other hand, there are some hints that he was aware of what was going on:

While it is unclear how much the prime minister knows about his family’s wealth, State Department documents released by the WikiLeaks organization in 2010 included a cable that suggested Mr. Wen was aware of his relatives’ business dealings and unhappy about them.

“Wen is disgusted with his family’s activities, but is either unable or unwilling to curtail them,” a Chinese-born executive working at an American company in Shanghai told American diplomats, according to the 2007 cable.

I think he did know.  You don't rise to the top of the PRC poltiical order wtihout being a very shrewd and sharp individual.  He certainly was in a position to know if he wanted to know.  If that is true, and he did know that his famly was using his public position to amass personal wealth (which he will ultimately benefit from), what could he have done?  More than simply make public statements against corruption like this:

   In the winter of 2007, just before he began his second term as prime minister, Wen Jiabao called for new measures to fight corruption, particularly among high-ranking officials.

“Leaders at all levels of government should take the lead in the antigraft drive,” he told a gathering of high-level party members in Beijing. “They should strictly ensure that their family members, friends and close subordinates do not abuse government influence.”

The speech was consistent with the prime minister’s earlier drive to toughen disclosure rules for public servants, and to require senior officials to reveal their family assets.

Whether Mr. Wen has made such disclosures for his own family is unclear, since the Communist Party does not release such information. Even so, many of the holdings found by The Times would not need to be disclosed under the rules since they are not held in the name of the prime minister’s immediate family — his wife, son and daughter.

These are just words.  And we know that, from a Confucian perspective words alone are not enough.  If words do not match actions - in this case the continuation of family wealth-making off of Wen's position - then more meaningful action should be taken.  A person trying to fulfill Confucian morality would be willing to resign from the postion that is the root cause of the corrupt behavior.  In Mencius, Shun, the exemplary sage-ruler, faces a situation where his family obligations conflict with his official duties and:

Shun would have regarded abandoning the realm as he would abandoning an old shoe. (7A.35: Bloom).

Maintaining the moral fiber of the family comes first.  In the example of Shun, the moral  problem is more dire: his father has committed murder.  But the principle extends to other circumstances as well, especially if the office itself is the source of immoral family behavior. 

Wen Jiabao, if he were truly a Mencian exemplarly ruler, should have resgned to stop the corruption he could affect.  He didn't.  And in that, he has not lived up to the standards of Confucian morality.

Actually, America Must "Lead from Behind" in East Asia

Aaron Friedberg has a piece in The Diplomat today: "America Cannot 'Lead From Behind' in East Asia."  It is a critique of what he takes to be a shift in US policy toward China, a softening of the US "pivot" toward Asia.  I think he is overstating things, and avoiding some more important issues.

Friedberg complains that recent trips to the region by Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Panetta have sent a conciliatory signal to Beijing that could undermine the US commitment to its allies - Japan, South Korea, the Philippines - and thereby weaken the American counterbalance to Chinese power in the region.  But two key points, which Friedberg ignores, suggest that a period of rhetorical softening does not undermine the broader strategic orientation.

First, the US pivot to Asia has, at its core, a redefined deployment of US military power globally.  In managing reductions in military spending, President Obama has identified Asia, and obviously the military rise of China, as the key strategic issue of the future and has come up with plans to shift US military power, especially naval power, in that direction:

Panetta said: “By 2020, the navy will re-posture its forces from today’s roughly 50/50 percent spilt between the Pacific and the Atlantic to about 60/40 split between those oceans. That will include six aircraft carriers in this region, a majority of our cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships, and submarines.” The objective would be to “rapidly project military power if needed to meet” the US security commitments in the region, despite China’s fast- growing military might.

It takes a long time to effect these kinds of changes, but as a short-term, symbolic gesture to signal the new US stance, a small contingent of US Marines has been stationed in Australia.

Now, we can argue about the merits of this change in policy (it seems sensible given the growing significance of the Chinese military) and we can disagree about the quantity of resources the US should focus on Asia, but what seems incontestable is that this policy remains in place.  The US is in the midst of planning to redeploy its global military power in roughly the way Panetta originally stated.  The rhetorical shift by Clinton and Panetta is just that, rhetorical.  They are using words to ease the way for the underlying strategic shift.  On the face of it, it does seem a bit absurd to argue to the PRC that the pivot is not about them.  It obviously is.  But diplomacy often involves this kind of spin.  What matters, however, are not the words, but the actions.  Thus, I think Friedberg is wrong.  I don't think the change in rhetoric reflects a change in policy.  He would have to show us how the undelying policy has, in fact, materially changed, and he doesn't do that. 

Secondly, this is a time for more conciliatory speech.  The islands disputes that have heated up of late between China and Japan, and China and the Philippines, have roiled regional relations.  Friedberg seems to think that now is the time for the US to come out and clearly state, in a show of strength, that it will commit itself to war against the PRC over islets claimed by Japan and the Philippines.  He writes:

Having sought at first to stiffen their spines, Washington now aims to put some distance between itself and its allies in Asia, reminding them that it takes no stand on the ultimate resolution of their maritime disputes with China.  A striking case in point is the administration’s repeated refusal to clarify whether it would come to the aid of the Philippines in the event of an attack on its forces in the South China Sea.

In the first place, regarding the China-Japan dispute, the US has, since at least 1971, taken the position that it has no position on the determination of ultimate sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands.  So, it would seem that Friedberg believes that precisely now, in the midst of the worst tensions over those conflicting claims in recent decades, is the best time for the US to change a long-standing policy in a manner that would obviously inflame Chinese passions more.  That strikes me as rather ill-considered.

Regarding the Sino-Philippine dispute, Friedberg must realize that the US must be careful in its statements, so as not to leave the impression that it is giving a carte blanche to its ally.  War with China would be a grave matter for the US, and we should not cede the decision over the commitment of US power to that end to politicians in other countries, even good friends like the Philippines.

Now, Friedberg might want to argue that the US has a Mutual Security Treaty with the Philippines and that we should be willing to clearly state our willingness to go to war to live up to that treaty.  But the treaty language itself (sometime Wikipedia is good!) is actually rather fuzzy:

Article IV

Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

There is no clear commitment there for the US to go to war over the Scarborough Shoal.  Recognizing the danger of a Chinese take over of those rocks is rather different than a clear commitment to defend them.

Long story short: Firedberg is making more out of a diplomatic softening of a relatively consistent US policy than is warranted by the situation at hand.  Moreover, he is also miscalculating likely Chinese responses.  If the US raises the rhetorical heat, - Friedberg seems to yearn for "muscular, martial rhetoric" - what would the PRC do?  My sense is that in a time of more passionately mobilized popular nationalism, PRC leaders would most likely feel it necessary to demonstrate their resolve to assuage public opinion.  More US chest-thumping, particularly at this moment, really will not accomplish anything tangible in terms of US interests.  Best to keep the rhetoric happy and continue to pivot strategically.

But there is a bigger issue here, one that Friedberg elides, and that is the clear limitation of US power.  Neocons - and Friedberg is, at least, a fellow neocon traveler from his days as Dick Cheney's foreign policy guy - never want to recognize that the US is limited in what it can do in the world.  They have not learned from the failure in Iraq.  And the failure to manage regime change there came well before the financial crisis of 2008, which has cut the economic rug out from under US power more generally.  Friedberg seems oblivious to the new global (it is not just a US problem!) economic realities:

Even more important, it [the US] needs to make costly, long-term investments in the military capabilities that will be needed to counter China’s own.

This, of course, requires a broader budgetary policy, one that would, you know, actually raise the revenues to cover such costs.  It might be unfair to demand that Friedberg, a foreign policy specialist, solve that rather big problem.  But it is a very, very big problem, and I would have more confidence in Friedberg's analysis if he weren't an active member of the Mitt Romney campaign.  Romney has no answer for the crushing financial problems facing the US, because his, and his party's, ideological stance against taxation make a solution impossible.  So, Friedberg cannot be taken seriously here: he says that costly investments are necessary, but he has no plan for doing that in a way that preserves US economic power, which, after all, is central to US power more generally.

And that is why the US, ultimately, must "lead from behind" in East Asia.  Now, Friedberg and other neocons deploy "lead from behind" as a critique.  It is, for them, a sign of weakness, an unwillingness to step up and do the manly stuff of leading from the front.  But that fundamentally misconstrues what leading from behind is all about.

We can get a better sense of it from the Daodejing (the invocation of which, I imagine, Friedberg would also take as a sign of weakness).  Consider this excerpt from passage 66:

Oceans and rivers become emperors of the hundred valleys because they stay so perfectly below them.  This alone makes them emperors of the hundred valleys.

So, wanting to rule over the people, a sage speaks from below them, and wanting to lead the people, he follows behind them,

then he can reign above without weighing the people down and stay ahead without leading the people to ruin.

It should be noted immediately that this is not presented as a recipe for surrender.  Rather, the writers of the DDJ are here telling a leader how to be effective in his or her leadership.  The "sage" wants to "rule over the people" and "lead the people."  The sage seeks to "reign above" and "stay ahead."  This is all about subtle but effective leadership.

And what is that effective leadership?  It is based on an understanding of evolving circumstances and context.  The leader tries to get some understanding of where the "people" are naturally going and then he or she facilitates that organic process.  An attempt to to impose a "solution" or "goal" that is wholly external to the particulars of the context is likely to fail.  Rather, effective leadership works with what is possible in the immediate moment.

In terms of the US in East Asia this might suggest careful, incremental steps, not imprudent and aggressive moves. Let the situation develop.  Indeed, there is a natural response taking shape already.  The PRC is over-playing its hand in its territorial assertiveness, creating a greater likelihood that other countires in the region - Vietnam and Indonesia as well as Japan and South Korea and the Philippines - will move in a counterbalancing direction.  This is a long game.  The PRC will, undoubtedly, gain in power.  But that gain will shift the strategic context in ways that will limit PRC power.  The US does not need to force the issue.  It can maintain its close ties with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, continue its strategic ambiguity on particular island claims, cultivate closer relations with Vietnam, quietly redeploy naval assets in an economically more efficient manner, and preserve its own recources as much as possible. 

Leading from behind does not mean doing absolutely nothing.  It is, rather, an approach that values contextual prudence over impulsive intervention.

The US tried to force its will militarily in Korea in 1950 after the status quo ante had been regained, and it failed horribly.  It tried to impose a "solution" in Vietnam and it lost ignominiously.  It invaded Iraq in 2003 to very bad results.  In these cases the US led from the front in a "muscular, martial" style.  How many of these kinds of failures do we have to suffer before the virtues of leading from behind are made evident? 

And if quoting the Daodejing seems a bit too mushy, how about Sunzi:

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious. (3.24)

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....

Busyness: It Doesn't Work

People are talking about the article that ran in Sunday's NYT: "The Busy Trap," by Tim Kreider.  It's a fun piece, but Kreider misses an opportunity here: the obvious link to Daoism.  Obvious, at least, for those of us who think Daoist thoughts....

Here is Kreider's defense of idleness (which is something close to the heart of anyone willing to defend uselessness):

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done...

He goes on to quote Pynchon, which is all well and good, but, come on... how about a little Daodejing here:

To work at learning brings more each day.  To work at Way (Dao) brings less each day,

less and less still until you're doing nothing yourself.  And when you're doing nothing yourself, there's nothing you don't do.

To grasp all beneath heaven, leave it alone.  Leave it alone, that's all, and nothing in all beneath heaven will elude you. (48) 

If you do nothing, there's nothing you don't do.  Or maybe a passive voice gets at it better here:  there's nothing that is not done.  That classic Daoist notion of wu wei - 無為 - "doing nothing," can suggest a certain activity: nothing is doing.  That is, something is happening - indeed we could say everything is happening - when you are doing nothing....  how's that for a defense of idleness!

Kreider also points out:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

He points out the futility in this, but an even stronger refutation can be found in Zhuangzi:

Once we happen into the form of this body, we cannot forget it.  And so it is that we wait out the end.  Grappling and tangling with things, we rush headlong toward the end, and there's no stopping it.  it's sad, isn't it?  We slave our lives away and never get anywhere, work ourselves ragged and never find our way home.  How could it be anythings but sorrow?  People can talk about never dying, but what good is that?  This form we have soon becomes others, and the mind vanishes with it.  How could it be called anything but great sorrow?  Life is total confusion.  Or is ti that I'm the only one who's confused? (2.3)

It is important to remember here that Zhuangzi is not a morose Scandinavian existentialist. The apparent futility of our lives, to him, is not cause for depression and sadness and suicide.  Rather, it is simply a reminder not to get caught up "grappling and tangling with things."  Just chill, he might counsel.  Things will work out.  Amazing things will happen, along with the bad stuff. But it will all add up to a meaningful life on its own terms.  Just don't try to do too much or set overly grand expectations because, ultimately, busyness doesn't work....