Chan Akya has a notable piece in today's Asia Times, "Islam and the absence of Chinese terrorists." Akya makes a culturalist argument, suggesting that deep historical forces, manifest in various elements of traditional Chinese culture, especially including Buddhism, explain why contemporary Islam gives rise to more terrorist activity than does contemporary China.
This is an interesting line of inquiry. But the form that it takes in this article is, I believe, fundamentally flawed.
The major problem is that Akya is ascribing too much explanatory weight to ancient ideas. For example:
Very similar to the schism that developed in Islam between Sunnis and Shi'ites is the one that developed in Buddhism in the 1st century AD. Then, the arguments between the literal sayings of the Buddha and a theological expansion from those sayings laid the ground for the evolution of Mahayana (Greater Wheel) Buddhism, which is the version that thrived in India and was later exported to China and Japan. The older, and arguably truer, form of Buddhism was thenceforth cited as Hinayana (Lesser Wheel) and was primarily followed in countries such as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand).
After further discussing how Mahayana Buddhism interacted with indigenous elements of Chinese culture - Confucianism and Taoism - Akya returns to the idea that the earlier split in Buddhism is of central importance in understanding why terrorism is to be found in Sri Lanka and not in China.
Much is missing here, like the twentieth century. Or the broader historical process of modernization, which begins in earnest in China in the 19th century.
The China-Sri Lanka comparison is secondary to the China-Middle East comparison and, when considering the latter and the ways in which Islam has been interpreted by some to support terrorism, we really need to look at how more particular political struggles, shaped by the forces of economic and social change, have encouraged and allowed religious or philosophical systems of thought to be mobilized for violent purposes.
Ideas do not have political lives of their own, they are taken and used, and their meanings transformed, by political actors who seek power.
In the case of China, if we were to ask why we do not find there anything similar to Islamic terrorist movements, the first things we should focus on are not the 1st century Buddhist schism, but the twentieth century revolutionary struggle for power and its outcomes. Most immediately, the creation of the very highly centralized state apparatus, with effective reach into local communities, likely explains more of the absence of terrorism in China than does any ancient strand of thought. Chinese society has, since 1949, been very closely policed and politically controlled. Even peaceful political movements are quickly suppressed.
Moreover, that political centralization has been effectively tied to nationalism for decades now. Many Chinese - most Chinese? - are proud of their country and are willing to accept the state's claims that political authoritarianism is necessary to maintain social order. In short, there is no social "water" to support the "fish" of an underground terrorist movement. An al-Qaeda-like organization would thus be more effectively repressed by the state and by the society.
Compare this to contemporary Iraq - which is essentially state-less - or Afghanistan under the Taliban, or Lebanon or Pakistan. None of these places comes even close to the socio-political conditions of China, and they are major suppliers of terrorist foot soldiers.
Another line of explanation, before we consider the effects of ancient ideas, is the broader experience of modernization - by which I mean the inter-related economic, social and political processes of urbanization, social mobility, industrialization, bureaucratization, secularization and so on. China began to confront and be transformed by these changes in the nineteenth century and the process played itself out violently in the twentieth. Some of the earliest anti-modernizing violence was, of course, performed by the Boxer Movement. Indeed, the Boxers might be understood as a "terrorist" organization.
Long story short: the first half of the twentieth century was incredibly violent in China: it was attacked from without and it was riven by civil war within. In the midst of this there was plenty of "terrorist" violence, by Chinese against foreign invaders (in a classically asymmetric manner) and by Chinese against Chinese. Indeed, a classic statement of the terrorist mindset can be found in Andre Malraux' Man's Fate. Nothing in ancient Chinese culture limited or prevented wide-scale terrorist violence.
Again, compare to the contemporary Middle East. Although it is obiously a large and complex topic, I think that it it not too controversial to say that many places in the Middle East have not experienced, or are only now in the midst of, the tumultuous modernizing processes that China has already gone through.
I could go on. And I realize we could debate the historical interpretations endlessly. But I am quite confident in this conclusion: the absence of terrorism in China today has more to do with the political circumstances of the twentieth century than it does with the religious or philosophical conditions of the first century AD.
Confucianism and Taoism are, at base, pacifistic. Buddhism is also, though the Japanese were able to turn it toward state violence in the early twentieth century. These systems of thought generally support a rejection of terrorist violence. But they are merely systems of thought and, as such, they do not determine such historical outcomes like the presence or absence of terrorist movements. They have no force in and of themselves, but are given force by historical conditions and political activists.
Comments