The Useless Tree

Why Put Off Democracy?

      Premier Wen Jiabao wrote an article that has attracted some attention:

The Communist Party cautioned China's increasingly impatient reformers and intellectuals Tuesday that political liberalization and democracy are still a long way off despite the rapid pace of economic change over the past two decades.

The warning, in an article attributed to Premier Wen Jiabao in the official People's Daily newspaper, constituted the party's first known response to a bubbling up of political debate as China prepares for an annual session of its legislature and an important Communist Party congress that is scheduled for this fall.

      This is pretty standard stuff: the Party asserts that China is not ready for democracy because it is only in the "primary stage of socialism" - an ideological innovation from the 1980s - and must develop further.  It is a variation on the you-must-be-rich-to-be-democratic argument.   Ignore democratic India, this argument would say, or the fact that China has grown tremendously since the 1980s.  Ignore any counter-evidence because, ultimately, it is simply a matter of power-holders who do not want to relinquish power.

     But let me ask one of my usual questions: what would Confucius say?  It is true that Confucianism was used for centuries to rationalize authoritarian power.  When you read the Analects, however, as I am doing this week with my tutorial, you notice glimmers of a more democratic possibility.  I am not suggesting that imperial China could have somehow been more democratic.  It wasn't: end of story.  Rather, I believe that Confucianism holds within it elements that can encourage democratization in the here and now.  Consider the first two passages in chapter 13:

Adept Lu asked about governing, and the Master said: "Put the people first, and reward their efforts well.
When Lu asked further, he said: "Never tire."
(13.1)

When he was a regent for the House of Chi, Jan Yung asked about governing, and the Master said: "Depend on the lesser officials.  Forgive their minor offenses and raise up worthy talents."
"How will I recognize worthy talents and raise them up?"
"If you raise up those you recognize," replied the Master, "do you think people will let your ignore those you don't recognize."
(13.2)

     I especially like the second passage, which is more overtly political.  It suggests that in the recruitment and selection of political officers, the highest authority may not recognize all of the most talented and, thus, he should listen to the people and their recommendations.

     In a sense, democracy is a manner of listening to the people; it is an institutional arrangement that gives the people political voice.  It has been obvious since 1949 that the over-centralization of power in the PRC system routinely ignores the voice of the people.  And that is one of the primary reasons for the extensive corruption internal to Chinese politics.  The Party regularly fails to "recognize worthy talents."

    I would never say that democracy is perfect.  We all know that it can be systemically abused.  It can bring forth bad leaders.  But it also provides a mechanism for getting rid of bad leaders and, thus, offers greater promise for "putting the people first."  It is, then, closer to the Confucian ideal than the decrepit authoritarianism of a one-party dictatorship that demands that genuine democracy be postponed long into the future.

CCP Saves NYSE

     Yes, it seems to me that the Chinese Communist Party gave a very big helping hand to the New York Stock Exchange today.  Think about this for a minute:

The Chinese government is also a huge factor here. The government closely monitors the stock market. A large majority of listed companies are state-owned. The state also controls the brokerages and the biggest institutional investors. So naturally, the government has an incentive to prop up the market, and to prevent steep sell offs.

    And who controls the Chinese government?  The Party of course.  In small, day-to-day business, central party leaders probably are not involved in trying to manage the markets, though thousands upon thousands of party members are involved in the many, many decisions that feed into stock trading.  But when something big happens, and yesterday was very big on the Shanghai exchange, we can be fairly certain that higher level Party leaders intervene in response.  I think that happened yesterday.  I am guessing, of course, since none of us is  privy to such high-level Party matters; but I would bet that some very senior members of the Party in Beijing let it be known to Chinese "institutional investors" that they would be buying on Tuesday.  And buy they did. 

     The effect was clear on the Chinese exchanges:

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks both A- and B-shares, surged 3.94 percent, or 109 points to closed at 2,881.07 points.

The component index of the smaller Shenzhen Stock Exchange jumped 3.19 percent, or 248 points, to end at 8,039.70 points. Turnover on the two bourses totaled 136.08 billion yuan (17.01 billion U.S. dollars).

    While other Asian and European markets were down for a second day, the New York exchanges bounced back up.

     It is fair to say, then, that the Party's probable intervention likely bolstered the New York comeback.  I know: there are many factors that go into such events.  But had Shanghai and Shenzhen not gone up, there would have been more downward pressure on New York.  I think the CCP saved the NYSE, for Tuesday at least.

     Is there a Taoist angle to this?  Not really, except for a chuckle at the unexpected twists and turns of fate and Way.  I can hear Chuang Tzu laughing.  Who could have imagined thirty years ago that the CCP would be egging on Chinese stock investors in such a manner as to increase the profits of fat-cat New York capitalists?   The Tao works in strange ways, indeed.

     In the end, I think Richard Spencer gets it only half right when he argues that Chinese socialism spooked world stock markets.   The real irony is that Chinese Communists saved the world's largest stock market!

The Tao of Stock Markets

    A little upset today on world stock markets:

Stocks in the United States plummeted today after a surprising plunge in the Shanghai market provoked worries worldwide about the global economy and the valuation of share prices.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 416.02 points, or 3.3 percent, to 12,216.24, as all 30 stocks in Dow declined. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 50.33 points, or 3.5 percent, to 1,399.04. The Nasdaq composite index dropped 96.66 points, or 3.9 percent, to 2,407.86. This was the steepest one-day sell-off since September 2002. Asian and European markets closed sharply lower

 Ouch.  Yet it made me think of this part of passage 34 from the Tao Te Ching (this is from one of the Henricks editions):

The Way floats and drifts;
It can go left or right.
It accomplishes its tasks and completes its affairs,
and yet for this it is not given a name.

 We could also say that it goes up and down; it can crash by over 400 points in one day; it can plunge in Shanghai and take Frankfurt down with it.

     The high-tech electronics of modern stock exchanges divert our attention from the fundamental fact that trading is a reflection of fallible, and occasionally failed, human behavior.  The talking heads of the business news shows tell us that we can know where the market is going.  But, at a very basic level, we cannot.  Shit happens.  A herd mentality takes over.  Everyone starts selling so everyone must sell, even when only a modest correction is called for. 

    A big part of my retirement money is tied up in stocks.  But I will stay put.  Who knows if it is 1929 all over again (I doubt it) or just 1987, which I still have a clear memory of?  Who knows if I will even get to retirement?  Who knows if....whatever.

     The Way floats and drifts;
     It can go left or right...

UPDATE: Dan, over at China Law Blog, passes along some Tao-esque advice from Diligence China on how to respond to the crash: "aggressive patience."  Or, as the TTC would tell us: do nothing and nothing will be left undone.

Narcissism

 This review in the NYT caught my eye just now:

Vacuousness and self-absorption, it appears, never go out of style. In a new play with an unpublishable title, Michael Domitrovich introduces five 20-somethings who are awash in both — irritating people who could be from a Warhol posse or a Gatsby party but, alas, are present-day East Village types. New century, same narcissism.

 It's a play, with the odd and profane title, "Artfuc*ers".  Perhaps there is something redeeming about it, but I, for one, tire very quickly when confronted with depths of bourgeois angst.  This was always a problem I had with Woody Allen.  Who cares if he is neurotic and repressed? (though, in his case, the humor can carry you through).

    It seems the reviewer tired of this play as well:

Over all, though, the play has too many dishonest notes to feel genuine...
And a dismaying confessional collage late in the play, in which these insufferable characters blame their parents for their faults and behaviors, makes Mr. Domitrovich seem as if he’s too consciously writing for a 20-something audience, giving it what it wants to hear.

 So, I wish narcissism would go out of style.  Or, maybe better, I wonder if we could make an anti-narcissistic comedy out of passage 22 of the Tao Te Ching:

Give up self-reflection
and you're soon enlightened.
Give up self-definition
and you're soon apparent.
Give up self-promotion
and you're soon proverbial.
Give up self-esteem
and you're soon perennial.
Simply give up contention
and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

 Maybe this is what Napoleon Dynamite was suggesting.  In the end, the Taoist gets the girl.

UPDATE: This seems to be a theme in the news today.  Here's a story from the London Times:

...If Narcissism was a town, LA would be twinned with it. If you threw a soyburger on Sunset Boulevard, you’d hit a narcissist. Telling a jury that a psychiatrist in LA is a narcissist is like breaking the news to them that the Earth is round...

   And then there's this piece on today's AP Wire, Study: College Students More Narcissistic:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."    

     Reminders all of that sad truism of modern life: it's hard out there for a Taoist.

AND HERE'S ONE MORE, from the LA Times on the "narcissism report:"

Other trends in American culture, including permissive parenting, increased materialism and the fascination with celebrities and reality TV shows, may also heighten self-regard, said study coauthor W. Keith Campbell, psychology professor at the University of Georgia. "It's part of a whole cultural system," he said.

     It's bigger than all of us!

Why Modern Confucianism Must Embrace Gender Equality

   The gender bias usually associated with Confucianism, at least in its institutionalized traditional social orthopraxy, can be understood, in a modern context, to be inconsistent with its highest virtue of Humanity.  Quite simply, on its own terms, Confucianism should hold that women should be treated ethically the same as men. 

   There is also another reaons why modern Confucianism must be premised upon gender equality, and it can be seen in stories like this:

China grapples with its legacy of "missing girls:

BEIJING - China is asking where all the girls have gone.

And the sobering answer is that this vast nation, now the world's fastest-growing economy, is confronting a self-perpetuated demographic disaster that some experts describe as "gendercide" -- the phenomenom caused by millions of families resorting to abortion and infanticide to make sure their one child was a boy.

The age-old bias for boys, combined with China's draconian one-child policy imposed since 1980, has produced what Gu Baochang, a leading Chinese expert on family planning, described as "the largest, the highest, and the longest" gender imbalance in the world.

     The clear inhumanity of such "gendercide" must be rejected by modern Confucians.

LA

   I have fallen a bit behind in posting.  Yesterday, the combination of my class schedule (I had one regular class and then two tutorial sessions back to back to back) and some family issues (my aunt is back in the nursing home for some physical therapy) kept me from the blog.  And then I skipped town.  I just finished watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from the window of my hotel room in sunny and warm LA.

    I am here to give a talk - actually I will give the same talk twice - on political change in China to a group, a fairly large group, of alumni from Williams College.  There are several other faculty members here with me to give other talks.  It will be quite a circus of academic performance!  It all lasts one day, tomorrow, but should be pleasantly intense. 

     Here are some of the thoughts I will toss out tomorrow. 

     China has obviously changed a great deal in the past 25 years.  But Chinese politics still remains repressive and authoritarian.  There is little prospect for something like democratization any time soon (I am not expecting it, at least), but that does not mean that politics is not changing, and perhaps in important ways.

     I will suggest three categories to analyze political change in China:

     1) Institutions - this has changed the least.  The CCP is still very much in power; it dominates recruitment and promotion of virtually all significant political actors.  It does not tolerate political organization, even on a the most modest levels of civil society.  And it is resistant to change.  Indeed, as Minxin Pei argues (I assigned this article of his for my "classes" tomorrow), partial economic reform has created a neo-Leninist amalgam of party-state apparatus and economic entities (State owned enterprises, etc.) that is even more resistant to change, because party members use their positions to reap wealth from the country's economic growth, than might have been the case in, say, 1980.   

    2) Consciousness/Identity - I draw this idea from Merle Goldman's book, From Comrade to Citizen (I gave tomorrow's "students" a chapter from this as well) where she discusses the rise of "rights consciousness" in recent years.  She is not pollyannish; she recognizes the institutional obstacles that prevent the realization of political and civil rights. But she documents the ways in which more and more people are claiming their rights, and this is a significant change.  People conceive of themselves politically as individuals who have a certain standing and capacity.

    3) Practice/Behavior - by this I mean what people do, in their daily routines and in their political actions.  In recent years there has been an increase in protest behavior, people acting upon their new found rights consciousness.  There is also a great deal of popular cultural behavior that expresses individuality. 

      So, the question for tomorrow, and maybe for any of you who want to chime in here, is: can the institutional stasis continue to limit the growth of rights consciousness and the increase in individualizing political and cultural behavior that presses against regime restrictions?

     There will be a quiz...

Useless Arithmetic

    Almost missed this little piece in yesterday's NYT:

When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.

 Their book is titled, Useless Arithmetic, perfect for The Useless Tree.  "Nature is too complex" - a line that could come directly from the Tao Te Ching or Chuang Tzu.  Their humility is refreshing.

    They are not playing into the rigth-wing war on science, which emanates from either religious fundamentalism or political ideology.  Rather, they are pointing out the limits of scientific thinking and proposing other observation-intensive methods for discerning natural patterns and processes.  Thus, they are not debunking the obvious reality of global warming; indeed, they believe that mathematical modelling may keep us from attending to other, more obvious indicators:

Two issues, the authors say, illustrate other problems with modeling. One is climate change, in which, they say, experts’ justifiable caution about model uncertainties can encourage them to ignore accumulating evidence from the real world. The other is the movement of nuclear waste through an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, not because it has failed — it has yet to be built — but because they say it is unreasonable to expect accurate predictions of what will happen far into the future — in this extreme case, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years from now.

 Large chunks of the polar ice cap falling into the sea should tip us off that the atmosphere is heating up.  (And, by the way, I blogged on the Yucca Mountain thing here).

    "If you give up learning, troubles end" the Tao Te Ching (20) says.  In this instance, that might mean give up the abstract models and theories and concepts that take on a life of their own and distract us from opening our eyes and apprehending the complex and vast world around us.   The authors of Useless Arithmetic do not want to reject modelling altogether (they are geologists, after all), but they do want to downgrade the importance of theoretical formulas and return to human senses:

So the authors offer some suggestions for using models better. We could, for example, pay more attention to nature, monitoring our streams, beaches, forests or fields to accumulate information on how living things and their environments interact.

 Makes me think of the Tao-esque Walt Whitman:

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
   in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to
   add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Best Chinese New Year Pictures

   From Virtual China we find a link to these great pictures from rural China:

    

      

     Makes me happy!

Bad Shape

    One thing Sun Tzu talks about is "shaping" the enemy and keeping your own force "formless" (I'm at home just now and don't have my text handy for specific citations).  These ideas came to mind when I read this bad news today:

In a coordinated assault on an American combat outpost north of Baghdad, suicide bombers drove three cars filled with explosives into the base today, killing two American soldiers and wounding at least 17 more, witnesses and the American military said.   

     It struck me that the whole "surge" thing - not just the increase in US troops, but also the new deployment of US forces in smaller, less fortified outposts that are closer to Iraqi society and insurgents - could be an example of the US being shaped by its adversary.  Think about it.  The failure of earlier US strategy to provide security in Baghdad impelled the US to change its approach: the US was reacting to enemy, being moved by the enemy, being shaped.  Thus, the US has lost the strategic initiative.

     Moreover, the US has taken up a position that plays to the adversary's strength.  The insurgents are good at small-scale raids and suicide attacks.  It is more effective to defend against these assaults when US forces are sequestered in the large bases with lots of force protection.  In a sense, we are moving away from our strength and toward the enemy's strength.  It is not hard to conceive of a series of these sorts of attacks having a significant political effect - a sort of a mini Tet Offensive (even if the US wins militarily, it loses politically).  And, as a colleague of mine pointed out today, if they mount serveral coordinated simultaneous attacks of outposts and kill 30-50 US soldiers, which seems to be within their capabiity, the political context would transform further to the disadvantage of the US.

       I know there is a broader counter-insurgency strategy behind the surge.  But the ground in Iraq seems ill-suited to US success with this strategy.  By putting soldiers out there in more vulnerable positions, the US is allowing itself to be shaped by the insurgents; they are moving American forces in a way that serves their capabilities.  They can see the form of our force and attack it.  The time for the in-the-neighborhood, small-scale outposts might have been April 2003, before the civil war escalated, when order might have been restored and hearts and minds won.  At this point, the "surge" is not more of the same; it is a change for the worse that plays to the enemy's strength.

Deng Xiaoping and Confucius

      First, let me say Happy New Year!  I was remiss over the weekend getting a post up to mark the occasion, so here is a link to my post last year wishing everyone Fu for the New Year. 

     Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's death (I wonder what it means, if anything, in Chinese thinking to have the tenth anniversary of a patriarch's death fall on New Year's day?  Good luck or bad luck?).   The past decade has seen ever more intensified growth and transformation in China.  A question that comes to mind, then, is: have these changes gone beyond what Deng would have been comfortable with or would he be happy with the China of 2007.

     In the grand geo-political scheme of things I think he would generally be happy.  I understand Deng as a nationalist.  He was moved in the direction of "reform and opening" in the 1970s because he saw China as weak and backwards and he wanted a strong and respected country.  That has certainly come to pass.  China's economic growth now commands global attention and it has created a vast pool of financial resources which, among other things, has been used to build up the PRC's military power.  In 2007 we can say that the country has largely achieved what Deng had set out to accomplish in the 1970s: fuguo chiangbing - "rich country, strong army."

      The desire for national prosperity and strength  goes back at least to the nineteenth century, when China was besieged by internal dissolution and external assault.  The educated elite then watched as Meiji Japan embraced the same slogan - fukoku kyohei - and realized it in practice, much to China's disadvantage.  The upsurge of 21st century PRC power thus fulfills the long term aspirations of Chinese nationalists at the same time that it diverts historical attention away from the deep and tragic failures of Maoism.  For all of that, Deng, the nationalist, would be happy.

    Perhaps he would be uneasy, but not terribly worried, with the burgeoning inequality that has come in the wake of economic growth.  But he was, after all, the man who gave us the slogans "to get rich is glorious," and "let some people get rich first."  Sacrificing a sector of the population in the interest of national strength seems quite consistent with his thinking.  He did, it should be remembered, endorse the early phases of the Great Leap Forward and he did nothing to save Peng Dehuai at the Lushan plenum.

     He would also be supportive of the party's continuing repressive efforts to maintain its monopoly of political power.  He was never a democrat and, of course, expended a great deal of energy to impel the military to kill Beijing residents during the protests of 1989. 

    What would Deng make, however, of the revival of Confucianism that has accelerated since his death?  On the one hand, he came of age during the May Fourth period and studied in France, experiences that made him into a modernizing Marxist materialist.  For men of his generation and political outlook, Confucianism was the essence of "feudalism," the thing that had to be struggled against and overcome to make China strong again.  He was a committed socialist; thus, any inklings of Confucianism after the turn toward reform in 1979 could not, for him, be allowed to upset China's socialist modernization. 

     He would, therefore, almost certainly be against some of the more traditionalist manifestation of Confucianism - the schools that focus on rote learning and the anti-Marxist contentions of some New Confucian intellectuals.

     Other aspects of revived Confucianism would possibly be acceptable to him.  Although he would probably want to maintain some sort of socialist ideology at the center of state legitimization, he would likely agree that pride in China's past, of which Confucianism is an important part, is essential to national achievement in the present.  He might also like the idea of spreading Chinese "soft power" around the world with Confucius Institutes. 

     And he would likely be comfortable with some of the apparent contradictions of modernized Chinese Confucianism - like its invocation by rich entrepreneurs to demonstrate their neo-traditionalist virtue (can they be cut-throat capitalists by day and Confucian gentlemen in the evening at home?).  Confucianism in the service of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (read: capitalism) would be fine by Deng, even if it would make Confucius himself frown.

     On balance, then, I think he would be a bit nervous with how far Confucianism has come back, at least as a popular cultural discourse that displaces socialism in the public square, but he would generally accept it as long as Chinese power was growing.  If the Venerable Sage got in the way of nationalist purposes or party authority, however, Deng would be as quick to crush Confucians as was the first Qin emperor.