The Useless Tree

Ninety Years of the Chinese Communist Party

Ninety years ago today, the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai.  There's a big celebration in Beijing, and Chinese media are in overdrive reporting on the successes of the Party.  To round out the picture a bit, I thought it would be a good day to remember the Great Leap Forward, which is, in my opinion, the greatest failure of the CCP and Mao Zedong. 

To keep things in historical perspective, here is Roderick MacFaquhar in a review of Frank Dikotter's book:

Nevertheless, a verdict can be passed on Chairman Mao. He seemed to relish being compared to Qin Shi Huangdi, the harsh ruler who welded warring states together into China’s first empire, but with such draconian measures that he has been excoriated by Chinese historians down the ages. On one occasion Mao admonished Marshal Lin Biao for implying that the CCP had treated intellectuals less oppressively than the emperor had! But Mao can rest easy. He will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured.

Justifying, or just plain ignoring, "the worst man-made human catastrophe ever" poses something of a problem for CCP apologists.  Notice how The China Daily deals with the Party's "several serious mistakes" in an article today:

The "Great Leap Forward" came about largely because, faced with oppressive pressure from the world powers, Chairman Mao Zedong believed China would risk being "dismissed from the earth" if it did not reverse its backwardness rapidly, the book reads.

In the same way, Mao had intended to build an ideal socialist society by starting a sweeping "cultural revolution", Xie writes.

"Good intentions, however, failed to yield good results; they were followed by wrong methods and actions," Xie  [Chuntao, deputy director of the Party history division of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee] said.

But even in those tumultuous years, the CPC was leading the way with economic and diplomatic changes that had long-lasting implications.

The country successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, ended its dependence on oil imports in 1965, resumed its legal seat in the United Nations in 1971 and signed the Sino-US Joint Communique the following year.

To overcome the ensuing hardship, senior CPC leaders went through thick and thin with the masses. A well-known anecdote goes that, in addition to reducing his salary, Mao gave up his favorite dish of pork braised in brown sauce during the famine years and had only a bowl of cornmeal porridge for supper on his 69th birthday.

While it may be true that Mao and the Party leadership did not intend to oversee a massive, man-made famine, Professor Xie elides the full scale of the event, failing to mention that we are talking about the death by starvation of something like 30-40 million people in four years.  And wasn't that big of Mao: while millions of people are starving to death because of failed policies that he obstinately clings to (and crushes those, like Peng Dehuai, who tried to put a stop to the starvation), he gives up his favorite pork dish on his birthday.  Now, there's empathy for you....

It should be noted, also, that the PRC could likely have developed an atomic bomb, etc., without starving millions of people to death.  The ends of certain developmental outcomes do not justify the means of mass death.  And Prof. Xie is wrong when he says, later in the article, that PRC leaders have been good in owning up to past mistakes.  Full and free debate about the Great Leap continues to be repressed in China.  Yang Jisheng's book, Tombstone, is still officially banned, so his views, like this point from the preface (sub. required), cannot be widely discussed in China:

In the chapter on population loss, readers will see that I consulted many types of
material, from both China and abroad, to confirm that some 36 million people died of starvation in China from 1958 to 1962. Because starvation also caused a drop in the birth rate, there were also an estimated 40 million fewer births in China during those years than would ordinarily have been the case. Together, that is a total of 76 million lives lost to famine in those four years.

None of that will be mentioned in today's celebrations, but they must be remembered, and factored into any historical assessment of the CCPs ninety years.

But on a more light-hearted note, one of the best overviews of CCP history I have seen today is Jeremiah Jenne's post, "It's a Mad, Mad 90th Anniversary," which views party history through the lens of Mad Men.  Among his many great points he gives us this:

Apart from the whole Mao was “70% correct, 30% incorrect” blather which the Party has been clinging to like a crazy shut-in on an episode of Hoarders, there’s also a growing tendency to excuse the worst excesses of the 1958-1976 period as simply “Mao being Mao.”  Like a kindly but eccentric drunk uncle who gave out candy to little children but also did to 5-10 for putting the candy store owner in a coma with a 2×4.  I’m don’t count myself among the “Mao the Monster” crowd, but give the guy his due: He presided over some of the rockiest and most destructive events in 20^th century history, and whether he was the mastermind or a dupe is kind of irrelevant.[7] As bad ideas go, having this guy run your country is up there with hitching a ride with Ryan Dunn or hiring R. Kelly as your baby sitter.

Whatever his other qualities as a political visionary, poet, revolutionary general or connoisseur of stewed fatty pork, when that many people die on your watch and the NEXT guy (or the next, next guy – sorry Hua) watches as the country embarks on a historically unprecedented period of economic development…that’s not good.  That’s not even 30% not good.  That’s like 70% sucks and 30% really, really sucks and all the Red Songs in the world aren’t going to change those numbers.

He also suggest that Hua Guofeng had a sort of Taoist career in Chinese politics....hmmm, I'll have to get back to that.

In sum, let's keep it real for the ninetieth anniversary....

Just how Confucian was the Han Dynasty? And what does that suggest for today's Confucian revival?

It is generally understood that, following the Qin repression, Confucianism was revived and given government sponsorship under the Han Dynasty.  The conventional wisdom goes something like this:

Under the rule of Emperor Wu 漢武帝 (r. 141-87 BCE), Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, a philosopher who combined cosmologic speculation with the Confucian view on the state, convince the emperor to adopt Confucianism as the sole state doctrine. All other schools were not further considered as worth being sponsored by the state (bachu baijia 罷黜百家 "driving out the hundred schools").

Or this:

By the time of Wu Ti (140-87 BCE) of the Former Han dynasty (206 BCE-24 CE), however, Confucianism had recovered from this blow and the destruction that civil war inflicted on its classics and learning. Confucianism intertwined with the doctrines of the yin-yang and the Five Elements and even with the popularly apocryphal writings, in which Confucianism was interpreted in religious, mystical and prophetic terms, and Confucius himself was taken as the 'uncrowned king'. The syncretic Confucianism was eventually promoted to be the supreme doctrine of the state, acting as the orthodox ideology, at the expense of all other traditions.

Now, both of the sources quoted above recognize certain complexities in the coalescence of Han Confucianism, but I was somewhat surprised in reading a rather new book, Lives of Confucius by Michael Nylan and Thomas Wilson, at how questionable the standard account is.  I am not a historian by training, so maybe this is really not all that new, but this passage, among others, caught my eye:

 But if from the Analects and the writings ascribed to Mencius and Xunzi, Kongzi's two most important disciples..., we glean a "Confucian" political program, it would have to include the following measures: (1) a host of redistributive mechanisms by which surplus wealth would be transferred from the very richest to the very poorest, based on the understanding that stable government depends upon the provision of economic and educational opportunities to the populace; (2) a general bias against war, unless all diplomatic methods have failed to remove a dictator from office; (3) a combination of sumptuary regulations and penal laws that identify and reward the most virtuous members of society, but punish with corresponding severity the most privileged members of society who engage in self-interested and antisocial conduct; and (4) the general principle that all "others were approached as if treating an important guest"....

No part of the forgoing political program was advanced in the Western Han or Eastern Han.  Indeed, the Han founder was famous for having pissed in the hat of a classical scholar spouting pious injunctions at him, and Han Wudi - the emperor most credited in Chinese history with the exaltation of Kongzi - also went down in history as the ruler whose foreign wars of aggression bankrupted the Han house and turned many locals against the idea of a centralized empire. (73-74)

It seems, then, that while the Han may have sponsored Confucianism, or invoked it to shore up state legitimacy, they did not really practice it.  And this suggests that we should not use terms like "supreme doctrine of the state" or "sole state doctrine" or, as I have done on various occasions, "state ideology."   All of those terms suggest that "Confucian" principles might somehow have guided policy, and Nylan and Wilson are arguing that that is pretty much not the case.  Indeed, those authors go further in undermining the notion of a consistent "Confucianism" in early imperial China:

Moreover, no coherent system of thought that may be labeled "Confucianism" existed until a foreign dynasty, the Mongol Yuan, enshrined one conservative strain of Song thought called "True Way Learning"... as the single basis for the civil service exam in 1313, though these same conservatives were already seeking to control the content of the examination questions earlier, in the Southern Song. (71)

"No coherent system of thought"... ouch.  Looks like The Master was a useful puppet for powerholders, with little real political impact on statecraft. Rulers used "Confucian" priciples when it served their interests, and ignored them when convenient.

And that brings us to the contemporary revival of Confucianism.  The past tells us that powerful centralized states in China have been able to present themselves as "Confucian," without living up to Confucian ideals.  They have been "Confucian" only in their words, not their deeds.  Of course, this does not mean that there were no individuals who conscientiously enacted Confucian teachings - there were plenty of them.  But "Confucianism" (whatever basket of principles and ideas that term might connote) was not the "supreme doctirne of state."  I suspect Legalism had more influence on day to day political decision-making...

And that could be a model for the Chinese Communist Party.  It can encourage the revival of Confucianism, wrap itself, when useful, in a shroud of Confucian legitimacy (perhaps the robes are available at your local Confucius Institute), but not really adhere to a consistent or coherent Confucian ideology in terms of actual policy and politics.  It worked for the Han, maybe it can work for the CCP.

Indeed, by Nylan and Wilson's criteria, it appears that "Confucianism" is remerging in a China that is rather un-Confucian. Let's quickly consider their four aspects of a Confucian political program

1) redistributivism - not so much these days in China, where economic inequality is bad and getting worse.

2) aversion to war - the Vietnamese do not believe the PRC has embraced a Confucian stance here: the memories of 1979 are still too fresh and the current tension in the South China Sea too immediate.  It must be said, however, that the PRC is much less belligerent than the US (I just finished Andrew Bacevich's new book), but it's continuing military build-up, in the face of growing domestic inequality, would give a Confucian pause.

3) justice - while severe penalties are handed out to certain high visibility corrupt officials and high living nouveau riches, the legal system remains biased in the direction of powerholders and there are no sumptuary laws to constain the most conspicuous of consumption.

4) general social civility and respect - this is hard to determine: to what extent does this have to apply to fulfill a "Confucian" standard?   These kinds of stories suggest some problems here...

In any event, it may be the case that Confucianism sets too high an ethical standard for any society, at any historical time, to meet.  And that could raise a problem for political authorities who want to invoke Confucius as a source of state legitimation - the standards that he sets could be turned against rulers who do not live up to them, something that has happened at various times in the long arc of Chinese history (I'm looking at you Hai Rui).  But the Han got away with contradicting the Confucian principles they sponsored; indeed, they got away with it for a long time and even emerged historically with a reputation for upholding "Confucianism."   Maybe that is what the CCP has in mind as it encourages Confucianism today...

(portrait of Confucius by Wu Daozi, 685-758, Tang Dynasty)

More on Understanding China

I've been away for a bit, giving lectures in Chicago and Milwaukee, and that, and other things, have distracted me from blogging.  But I received various responses on the last post below and those replies have sparked some other thoughts on this topic; so here goes:

On the question of whether foreigners can ever really know "China," we should recognize that there are certain barriers to understanding.  Language is one.  Learning the language opens a door to wider understanding of China, and it takes time, a fairly long time, for foreigners to learn Chinese. When I started out learning Chinese, thirty years ago, there weren't that many of us in the advanced classes (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981, there were only five of us in fourth year Chinese!).  At that time, relatively few Americans had the capacity to engage China and Chinese culture in its own language.  There were, of course, Americans then who through not only linguistic but also historical and philosophical and political study, knew a great deal about China.  But that capacity was somewhat limited.

Now, we have a rather different situation.  Many, many more American college students study Chinese and travel to China.  And Chinese language learning proliferates at the elementary and secondary levels.  On this important dimension, we have to say that the US now has much greater capacity to understand China than ever before.

Yet, precisely when more Americans are learning Chinese and living and working in China, we have strong assertions that Americans cannot understand China.  Why?

First off, we should recognize that there continue to be misunderstandings.  That is inevitable on both sides of the relationship.  There are cultural differences and sometimes those differences, on both sides, will distort and cloud perceptions and knowledge.  But that's not the whole story.

Something I have noticed is the similarity here between China and Japan.  It is fairly common in Japan (and perhaps it was more common, especially in the nihonjinron boom of the 1980s) to say that linguistic and cultural particularities make it difficult, if not impossible, for outsiders to truly understand Japan.  And, again, there are certain barriers, though they are not insurmountable.  There is a lot of great scholarship and understanding, on the part of some Americans, of Japan and Japanese culture.  There is some misunderstanding and distortion as well but that does not mean it is impossible for outsiders to understand Japan, just that they have to work carefully at it.

In thinking further about Japan, we can see how history and politics inform claims about the possibility of understanding.  Japan was the first Asian country to modernize on its own terms, outside of colonial or semi-colonial control, or even, after 1895, extraterritoriality.  It changed rapidly and extensively after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.  And that transformation was deeply destabilizing culturally.  The national identity that emerged, at the turn of the twentieth century, placed Japan in a unique position globally: at the crossroads of East and West, taking from both and positioning itself as the leader of a modernizing Asia.  Ultimately, cultural nationalism fueled Japanese imperialism in the region, the defeat of that imperialism and unconditional surrender in the wake of US nuclear assault.  Post-war Japanese identity thus, in the 1950's and 1960's sought to downplay the earlier assertions of Japanese cultural uniqueness, which had been appropriated by militarists to rationalize imperialist expansion. 

It was not until economic success produced a dynamic Japanese "model" in the 1970s and 1980s that cultural nationalism was significantly reasserted.  Economic success provided a new basis for cultural particularism, removed from the old imperialist militarism.  And so, we get many more statements of "Japanese uniqueness" and the impossibility of foreigners truly understanding Japan.  Although this attitude seems to have subsided somewhat in the new millennium, it is still to be found (interesting pdf on the topic here, which states, among other things: "...nihonjinron has also taken a different direction over the years as it includes a sense of a liberal view and an idea of negotiation. It may still hold a sense of nationalism, but it has been compromised due to Japan’s declining economic power as well as its new generation which is less interested in Japanese tradition and culture.")

So what does this imply for China?  A similar political-economic dynamic could be at work.  China's rapid modernization of recent years has brought cultural transformation and destabilization.  What does it mean to be "Chinese" now?  That question is more open and more contested than at just about any other time in Chinese history.  While that can be liberating for some, it can be rather disorienting for others.  And out of that struggle comes a desire, in some quarters, for clarity and closure, for a clearer sense of knowing, precisely, what it is to be "Chinese."  Since the "West" is often blamed as the source of destabilizing change that brings cultural inauthenticity, creating walls - ontological walls, epistemological walls, philosophical walls - between "China" and the "West" is a means of establishing temporary (and, in the end, illusory) calm in the socio-cultural storm.  Chinese know who they are, and they are not Western, and Westerners cannot really know what it means to be genuinely Chinese: this is a reaction to the massive economic and social and cultural changes that have been sweeping China in recent decades.  That's why we have a strong "the West cannot understand China" sentiment today.

As the comparison with Japan suggests, I do not buy Chinese exceptionalist arguments, just as I do not buy American exceptionalist arguments.  Yes, each national history and culture unfolds in its own particular way.  But those processes are not each sui generis; they are subject to similar global economic and political forces and there are similarities in those national trajectories.  There might be specific national experiences of modernization, but they are all expressions of broader dynamics of modernization.

Understanding China - or not

On Monday, Vice-Premier Wang Qishan said, in an interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on The Charlie Rose Show:

It is not easy to really know China because China is an ancient civilization and we are of the Oriental culture. The United States is the world's number one superpower, and the American people, they're very simple people.

The point about Americans being "simple" (or "innocent") sparked some discussion among my colleagues in Chinese politics, with some seeing it as a rather obvious put down coming from one of the very top leaders of the PRC.  And perhaps that is what it was meant to be: a sign of growing PRC confidence - some might say arrogance - about its position in the world.

But regardless of whether this was a calculated insult or not, I want to think a bit more broadly about Wang's assertion.  Is it possible for non-Chinese people to understand China?

Obviously, I have a certain professional bias here, and I am happy to point that out right up front: I have made understanding China, or at least understanding some part of "China," my life's work. Clearly, I believe that it is possible for Americans to understand China, just as it is possible for Chinese to understand America.  But there is more to say than that.

The first thing is that interior knowledge, or knowledge that is generated from within a culture or society by members of that culture or society, is not the only valid knowledge that can be produced about that culture or society. 

Yes, insider knowledge can be valuable and important, but it can also be biased and obstructed by political and economic interests.  Think about the Great Leap Forward.  For about twenty years knowledge of the full extent of the horrible famine that was created by the failure of Maoism was distorted and denied by CCP leaders.  Even when the politics changed, and some analysis of the famine was allowed in China, the discussion has remained truncated by politics: Yang Jisheng's book, Tombstone, is still banned.  Thus, many, many - indeed most - Chinese people cannot gain full knowledge of a critical aspect of their modern history.  And this has nothing to do with Wang's claim that China's "ancient civilization" and "Oriental culture" are somehow inscrutable.  The problem is not cultural complexity; it's politics.

Of course, even when political restrictions are not as powerful as they are at present in China, other sorts of biases and distortions can plague insider knowledge.  Nationalism is everywhere a culprit.  Think of the US now, where right-wing ideologues work hard to shape history to their political agenda.  This kind of problem is to be found in all locales, occidental and oriental alike.

The point is that there is no one perspective, inside or outside of a culture, that will yield uniformly valid and reliable knowledge.  Knowledge is always a product of the interaction and collision of multiple sources and perspectives.  That is why it is so important, insofar as the production of knowledge is concerned, to try to maintain as open and free-flowing an environment as possible.  Distortions and obstructions are inevitable; the only way around them is through access to more information, more analysis, more points of view.  And that is a reality that Wang Qishan avoids mentioning: the intellectual environment in China today is seriously restricted, and getting worse. The paranoia about anything "Jasmine" has reached absurd proportions.

If there is a problem with knowledge about China, it is less a matter of how some Americans get things wrong (which is obviously true: some Americans do get some things wrong; and at times many Americans get some things wrong); the much larger problem is the limitations on knowledge within China itself.

None of this is to suggest that exterior knowledge - knowledge about a culture or society produced by people outside of that culture or society - is somehow superior.  It is not.  Outsiders face their own cultural biases and political obstructions.  And intellectuals can get caught up in theoretical frameworks that distort interpretation.  Alan Baumler, over at Frog in a Well, provides a good example of this problem in his critique of Francis Fukuyama's new book.  What came to my mind, in reading that critique, was Samuel Huntington and his infamous "Clash of Civilizations" analysis.  I have blogged on Huntington before.  Suffice it to say here that in his "Clash" argument, he gets Japan wrong, and in getting Japan wrong he gets East Asia, China included, wrong, as well as the whole notion of "civilization" wrong.  His error is, at base, rooted in political outcomes (i.e. Meiji Restoration and, ultimately, democracy in Japan) that do not fit his notion of "Sinic" civilization.

So, exterior knowledge, just like interior knowledge, can be infected by political bias and not hold up to scrutiny. 

On the other hand, there is outsider knowledge that does stand up well to scrutiny.  I think of some of the books and articles I use in my classes.  For example, Merle Goldman's From Comrade to Citizen tells us something true about political opposition and political consciousness in the PRC.  And, if you are uncomfortable with her central argument about the emergence of "rights consciousness," you can look to Elizabeth Perry's critique.  Both of them are outsiders, yet each has something valid to say.  

Sometimes outsiders get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, just like insiders.

Bottom line: unlike the implication of Vice-Premier Wang's statement, I don't believe interiority or exteriority, in and of themselves, grant an a priori advantage in generating valid and reliable knowledge about a particular culture or society.  What matters is the quality of the argument itself, not its source.  I was trained as a political scientist, so I have a certain sympathy with falsificationist tests of empirical correspondence.  In other words, evidence matters.  And prior knowledge might have to change in light of new evidence or better explanations.  I'm not a hard-core positivist, but, at the end of the day, those old standards are still helpful in evaluating conflicting interpretations, whether they come from the inside or the outside.

The problem for Vice-Premier Wang, of course, is that not all interior knowledge is the same.  He seems to be holding himself out as someone who, by dint of his insider status,"really knows" China, in all of its ancient and oriental complexity.  But Liu Xiaobo and the signers of Charter 08 are also insiders, and they have a rather different understanding of China.  As does Ai Weiwei.  The list could go on and on.  And that's the problem for Wang and the CCP leadership.  Not all insider knowledge fits the Party's political interests, which is why they come down so hard on interior dissent: it is not only politically dangerous; it is ontologically dangerous.

One last thing: when discussing knowledge about China, we should not assume the object of that knowledge is a singular, unified, consistent and unchanging thing.  China is a very large place with significant differences in terms of class and region and generation and political status and ethnicity and many other dimensions.  What I experience when I am in Shanghai is not what I experience when I am in Dazhai, Yunnan.  There may be common threads that run through various aspects of "China," but there are disjunctions and contradications as well.  This is true culturally and historically.  What "China" was in the past is open for contestation.  The China of Confucius is not the China of Qinshihuangdi and is not the China of the Qing Dyansty nor the China of the Great Leap Forward.  Thus, knowledge of China must vary, and be variable, because China varies both over time and in time. 

Culturally, I think it is safe to say that there is a greater variation in expressions of "Chinese-ness" now than at any time in Chinese history.  And that makes "really knowing" China more difficult.  "China" and "Chinese" are now many things, more things than Vice-Premier Wang might want to admit. 

So, he is right in one way: we should all be humble in recognizing that none of us will be able to understand it all.  But he is wrong in another way: he should not presume that he, as cultural and, more importantly, political insider, somehow knows best.

Killing Chinese People

Frank Dikotter has a new book out about the Great Leap Forward, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe.  I haven't read it yet (mine is on order) but early reviews are in.  Here's Jonathan Mirsky:

In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine [Edgar] Snow didn't bother to see. Most died of hunger, over two million were executed or were beaten or tortured to death, the birth rate halved in some places, parents sold their children, and people dug up the dead and ate them.

The cause of this disaster, the worst ever to befall China and one of the worst anywhere at any time, was Mao, who, cheered on by his sycophantic and frightened colleagues, decreed that before long China's economy must overtake that of the Soviet Union, Britain and even the US. Mao suggested that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill,' and declared that anyone who questioned his policies was a 'Rightist', a toxic term eventually applied to thirteen million Party members.

Here is Jonathan Fenby:

...By digging into the records, Dikötter provides a detailed litany of the degree of suffering the Great Helmsman unleashed and the inhumane manner in which his acolytes operated. Horrors pile up as he tells of the spread of collective farms and the vast projects that caused more harm than good and involved the press-ganging of millions of people into forced labour. As the pressure mounted to provide the all-powerful state with more and more output, the use of extreme violence became the norm, with starvation used as a weapon to punish those who could not keep up with the work routine demanded of them. The justice system was abolished. Brutal party cadres ran amok. "It is impossible not to beat people to death," one county leader said.

Some contemporary Chinese nationalists try to rationalize the Leap as somehow necessary for China's modernization and ascent.  That is rubbish.  It was a totally unnecessary assault on Chinese farmers and citizens.  Dikotter's book reminds us that Mao did vast damage to the country and its people.  The Chairman was a deeply inhumane man and ruler, one whom Mencius would certainly denounce:

"There's plenty of juicy meat in your kitchen and plenty of well-fed horses in  your stable," continued Mencius, "but the people here look hungry, and in the countryside they're starving to death.  You're feeding humans to animals.  Everyone hates to see animals eat each other,and an emperor is the people's father and mother - but if his government feeds people to animals, how can he claim to be the people's father and mother?" (1.1)

We might amend Mencius' words here.  What Mao did was tantamount to feeding people to the Party,  he killed them to maintain the power of the CCP, the institution he led, that gave him  his power, and which carried out the horrible work of the GLF.

Laozi's Biography

It seems that there is a new biography of "Laozi" published in China.  I haven't seen it yet, but Francesco Sisci reports that it is a "quasi-novel" by Yu Shicun.  That sounds about right - quasi-novel - to me, but I am one of those who believe that there was no historical person named "Laozi."  A legend, yes; a real live person, probably not (see the disucssion at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for background).  

Sisci describes the opening of the book:

Laozi parts ways with Confucius, as they have different interests in the world and in their thinking. Laozi moves west from the great plains of central China to the borders of the Chinese civilization, and to the state of Qin, because "if the sun rises from the East, people came from the West", reasons Laozi.

In the state of Qin, where customs and manners are still not as corrupted as in the smaller and more ancient states of the central plain, the local people are struck by Laozi, a man with white hair but still with the face of a boy, untouched by the passing of time. They talk with him and then are sure that this man can help them to be great.

It makes a certain sense that Yu would have "Laozi" go to Qin.  After all, Han Feizi appropriates Daoism to lend a mysterious aspect to his otherwise unadorned authoritarianism.  But there is reason to question that appropriation. Perhaps it signals a kind of weakness in Daoism: its indeterminacy allows it to be taken and used by other thinkers who rather clearly trample upon the wuwei and ziran spirit of the Daodejing.; Personally, I think it is a misappropriation, a distortion of the politics of the DDJ.

Sisci also writes:

On the other hand, Yu doesn't neglect modern scholarship, which reveals that Laozi was no pacifist nor some kind of ancient hippy. He was a philosopher of politics and war.

Yu presents Laozi as talking to the Qin king (not emperor as at the time Qin had not unified the empire) and his warriors. Warriors need a religion or a great ideal to be warriors. They need a deep sense of life and death to face death and give death without turning into a beast or a demon that seeks death for the gory pleasure of blood.

I would take some exception here.  While it is certainly true that the writers of the Daodejing are philosohers of politics and war, the text has a very strong pacifistic aspect to it.  They are not hippies, but neither are they offensive realists.   Throughout the text war and weapons are shown to be ineffective and futile.  Passge 31 is a good place to start:

Auspicious weapons are tools of misfortune.  Things may not all despise such tools, but a master of Way stays clear of them.

The noble-minded treasure the left when home and the right when taking up weapons of war.

Weapons are tools of misfortune, not tools of the noble-minded.  When there's no other way, they take up weapons in tranquil calm, finding no glory in victory.

To find glory in victory is to savor killing people, and if you savor killing people you'll never guide all beneath heaven.

We honor the left in celebrations and honor the right in lamentations, so captains stand on the left and generals on the right.  But use them both as if conducting a funeral:

when so many people are being killed it should be done with tears and mourning.  And victory should be conducted like a funeral. 

This is not an absolute pacifist position.  Sometimes war is unavoidable.  But it should be treated as a last, last resort and even then never glorified.  This is certianly not the Qin approach to warfare and expansion.   "Laozi" - and by this I mean a person conscientiously attempting to live the ethos of the Daodejing - would not provide counsel to warriors to make them more effective fighters.  He, or she, would counsel them not to fight in the first place.  Notice how Ames and Hall gloss passage 31:

Warfare ought not to be glorified.  It is always a losing proposition, and there are no victors.  Although on occasion unavoidable, it is nothing better than methodical state-sanctioned killing.  Even in the event of victory, triumph on the battle fields should never be confused with proper seasons of celebration, but instead should be treated as what is it: a state funeral properly marked by grief and mourning.

I don't think Qin mourned upon victory.

To get back to Sisci's piece, I found this passage a bit odd:

This spiritual quality in Laozi is more important than the strategic interpretation of yielding to greater force to find the right moment to strike or than the strategic idea that there is not one weapon - one technology, we would say now - to win all battles. One needs to adapt one's army to circumstances, the weather and the terrain.

It's odd because it sounds much more like Sunzi than "Laozi." Now, there may well be a certain Daoist influence in Sunzi, but he is a strategist and commander with a set of goals and methods quite distinct from a more typical Daoist.  This could be another example of a conceptual appropriation of Daoist ideas.

Ultimately, Sisci makes an interesting point:

Laozi, then, is bound to be influential in China – possibly more so than Confucius – and also abroad. Then the Chinese government, wishing to expand its soft power, ought to consider going beyond simply teaching the Chinese language in the Confucius Institutes scattered around the world and perhaps move to Tao Institutes, teaching Laozi and the basics of Chinese reasoning. In the process of teaching, the Tao Institutes would also help to reveal what foreigners do not grasp about basic Chinese ideas.

Maybe Daoism can become more influential in China, and elsewhere.  And I am all for Tao Institutes.  But let's hope the Daoism that emerges is more in keeping with the true spirit of the Daodejing, and Zhuangzi, and not the Legalist-Daoist distortions put forward by some contemporary nationalists... 

Beauty and Power on China's Silk Road

A piece I wrote for the Kyoto Journal just came out, and it is available on-line here.  It is based on some posts I did here a couple of years ago, with some nice pictures added...

This Day...

..twenty one years ago..  The PRC government tries to eradicate the memory but recollection cannot be stopped.  Here is a cartoon that ran in the Guangzhou newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily on June 1st, which was recognized as "Children's Day", an obvious allusion to the iconic "Tank Man" photos:

 

The image was taken down very quickly from the paper's website but it has been preserved - Roland, as usual, has it saved.  The fact of its publication, however, suggests that the protests of 1989 live in the memory of Chinese people.  Global Voices has some of those memories. 

Below the fold are some of my memories, from a post I wrote in 2006:

Materialism in Chinese Society

Another week goes by and still I have not caught up with blogging... Oh well, all I can do to rectify the situation is: blog...

Last wee Kai Pan, over at china/divide put up a short post entitled: "Is Chinese Society Materialistic?  Are Chinese people?"  He is really just raising some questions, not making a sustained argument.  But I want to take up some of the questions he asks.  Let's take this excerpt:

I'm not saying that materialism as a bonafide concept isn't arguably observed in modern Chinese society. I'm just not sure its a meaningful or unique observation. Frankly, anything with statistically significant pervasiveness that could be attributed to materialism in Chinese society I can see with similar statistically significant pervasiveness in many other societies.

I think he's right in the sense that materialism in China is not unique to that society or that people.  Clearly, complaints about materialism in American society are legion.  But the comparative point is less significant here than the historical and cultural interpretations.

The observation that China is now a materialistic society, or is more materialistic than some time in the past, might imply that Chinese society, in some timeless, essentialist way, should not be as materialistic as it is now, or, at least, was not significantly materialistic in the past.  And I think that assumption is likely wrong.

To be most blunt about it: I think Chinese society has always been materialistic.  Thus, while it might be, for particular historical and economic reasons, more materialistic now, that variation is more quantitative than qualitative.

There is a stereotype of "traditional China" out there that imagines a society of upstanding Confucian gentlemen and their families, carefully observing the aversion to profit and commerce that the Sage preached, interspersed with irregular collections of Daoist aesthetes, huddled in their caves renouncing the world.  This is almost certainly wrong.  More accurate, I believe, is a picture of a thriving entrepreneurial society, driven by strong commercial interests and a skill for adapting existing technologies to solve concrete problems. This latter view would explain how the imperial state was able to maintain and reproduce an extensive bureaucracy and a sophisticated civilization: it needed a strong material, economic foundation which provided the resources for political centralization, military power and cultural hegemony.  The Chinese Empire, for much of its history, especially after the economic transformations of the Song, was a wealthy and prosperous place.  And wealth and prosperity are not produced by reading the Analects or the Daodejing.  Wealth and prosperity are created by people, often following material incentives, who pursue wealth and prosperity - one of the aspects of "materialism" that we are considering.

Yes, it's true, when confronted with Western imperialism the Chinese empire did not measure up in certain areas of military technology and tactics.  Perhaps the self-imposed relative isolation of the Ming (and I say "relative" because China has never been wholly cut off from the world economy) after Emperor Yongle contributed to China falling behind Europe's economic growth and transformation (I will defer to better informed historians on this point).  But even recognizing all that, Chinese society has always held within it a powerful materialistic, commercial dynamic.  Imperialism did not extinguish Chinese materialism, it just channeled it in new directions.

This was true going way back, to the time of Confucius himself.  We can read Confucius and Mencius as prescriptive, pointing out to readers what Chinese society should be, not what it actually was.  They were pushing against the materialism that then existed in Chinese society.  Same with the great Daoist texts.  Think about passage 12:

The five colors blind eyes.  The five tones deafen ears.  The five tastes blur tongues.  Fast horses and breathtaking hunts make minds wild and crazy.  Things rare and expensive make people lose their way.

That's why a sage tends to the belly, not the eye, always ignores that and chooses this.

"Things rare and expensive" are a problem: the pursuit of luxury and wealth distracts people from the natural unfolding of Way (Dao).  In other words, materialism, of a sort, was present and problematic (at least from Daoists) in early China.

So when materialism in present day China is lamented, we should resist the temptation to conjure up a past of marvelously spiritual and organic and Confucian-ethical Chinese society.  Perhaps China is more materialistic now than it was a hundred years ago.  But that is not to say that traditional Chinese society was somehow not materialistic at all.  Quite the contrary, it is more likely that a kind of materialism produced much of what we associate with Chinese civilization....

Mao Thoughts

A random confluence....

I am running a group independent study in connection with my Nationalism in East Asia class.  Three students could not fit the class into their schedules; so we work off the syllabus and meet once a week to discuss various topics.  They have read the sources I have mentioned here below: Ernst Gellner, Liah Greenfeld, Benedict Anderson. 

In comparing Gellner and Greenfeld, we were mapping out the very different perspectives they take.  Gellner is all trans-historical objectivism, arguing that the logic and power of modern industrialization creates an impersonal demand or need for a homogenization of culture at a scale larger than that found in agrarian society and, thus, nationalism is born.  It hardly matters what particular definition any specific national identity assumes; something like national identity is simply historically necessary.  Greenfeld, by contrast, is all contingent subjectivity.  "Nation" is created by a particular social group at a particular historical moment in a particular cultural and linguistic milieu.  Its definition as a "sovereign people" precedes what we usually consider modernization, and, pace Gellner, she argues that nationalism produces modernity, not the other way round.  Although, once created, it goes on to spread around the world, it was not historically destined to arise and dominate.  The world could have turned out differently, something that Gellner would seem to reject.

In any event, we were reviewing these points of difference and one of my students looked up and said: "Greenfeld is like Mao."

Wow.

I had worked with this student on Maoist ideology last semester a bit.  And I had presented and discussed Maoism with my class then, too.  But I had never thought to make this connection.  What did she mean?

It is all about subjectivity and, in a sense, creativity.  In more orthodox, non-Maoist, strains of  Marxism materialism matters.  Social and cultural and political change are driven by transformations in the mode of production.  More particularly, as Deng Xiaoping emphasized after the passing of Mao, the forces of production (i.e. the productive and technological capacities of the economy) are key.  If the economy is poor and underdeveloped, that will shape the politics, culture and society.  Mao fundamentally rejected this view - to horrible effect during the Great Leap Forward.  He was impatient with a stricter materialism (which suggested that China could not reach "socialism" or "communism" for many decades) and he emphasized the relations of production: the social organization and motivations of people.  Indeed, he went further and embraced a voluntarism that asserted the sheer will of the people could hasten material progress.  Millions and millions of people died as a result of his fatal detachment from a more realistic materialism.

My student was not suggesting that Greenfeld was a Maoist in any political sense.  Rather, If Maoism focuses on the creative (and destructive) potential of willful human agents in history, who can construct "objective" facts on the ground, then Greenfeld shares, to a degree, that point of view.  She does not view nationalism as the ineluctable outcome of the material and structural transformations of industrialization, as does Gellner (who somewhat ironically works hard to try to distance himself from Marxism).  Rather, she sees nationalism as the invention of determined and willful and creative agents in a particular historical context.  In that way, Greenfeld is like Mao...

OK, I don't expect any of you out there to really get a kick out of this.  It is just a peculiar crossing of two strains of thought that I had never seen crossed or thought of crossing.  A random confluence.

For a reminiscence on his biography of Mao, with some insights into the publishing industry in the PRC, this post today by Ross Terrill over at The China Beat is instructive....

Mao is strangely in the air this week....