China's Rising Economy And The West's Rising Harping. Coincidence Or Connection?

China wouldn't be rising without the West, period. Our high tech, our capital, our expertise and plenty of turncoats willing to give it all away to the PLA/CCP with only the promise of future potential contracts.

I agree with jms above. Many Westerners continue to view China through the prism of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 18 years ago. China has changed enormously since then, and as Randall Peerenboom documents in his book, China Modernizes, China today actually scores very well on most human rights indicators, sometimes even out-performing some developed countries in some areas. It's also the most gender-equitable country in the whole of Asia, according to a number of studies, and is recognised as such by the UN, yet many Westerners continue to view gender relations as having not progressed very far beyond the days of foot-binding. It seems to me as though these popular, more marketable images of China, continue to be plugged, despite being so out-of-date.

Instead of seeing the political system in China for what it is - a market-preserving federalism based on a one party system, media commentators in the West continue to describe it as a "Communist" "regime", sometimes even throwing in adjectives like "totalitarian". The CCP is hardly monolithic, or totalitarian. In terms of police states, China, once again, ranks way down the list of police states in those studies that I am familiar with, behind Britain (the average citizen in London is now photographed on average 3,000 times a day, thanks to CCTV).

I lived and worked in China for a little over five years, and what stuck me most about the place was its normalcy.

Tao, Buddha, and God?

Give me a break. Just because you cling out to some out-dated religious belief, does not mean you are somehow superior to an atheist such as myself. Being a religious person does not imply you are excluded from having the following problems: alcoholism, drug addiction, and child molestation. It does not mean you have some sort of moral superiority over me... LOL.

China is not some god-less heathen country that is going to hell faster than you can say hand basket. The ruling party is becoming more and more tolerant to religion. Religion is opiate for the masses. It keep people under control, and "harmonized." Typical ignorance, and typical religious fundies thinking. I'm holier than thou while everyone else is going to hell.

I don't have a problem with anyone being religious. But come on, religious fundies are so weird and illogical at times.

LOL... Animals? All I see is religious fundies acting like animals.

China's per-capita GDP is US$6200. I used to live in a US$6200 per-capita GDP state -- the Republic of Korea where I've been since 1990. Human rights weren't all that good here then either, and they've become much better since.

Americans ought to remember that it wasn't all that long ago that we were pretty atrocious on human rights in some respects. We used to keep slaves, for Christ's sake, and allow people to be murdered for not knowing their place.

Slavery is not an American invention, and the US moved on and improved itself in many ways, often painful and difficult. The inability to change due to "tradition" is not just China's problem, it is the problem of the entire "developing" world even though many of these societies are much older than the west and therefore have no real excuse.

I'm not sure what the retort "You're just jealous!" says about the mindset of the person making this retort?

The general existential principle is: "Who am I? I am THEY." This is the basis for conformity: People try to find affirmation of themselves in seeking approval of others, hence, conformity and the race to be "more like you than you are." "I'm better than you because I've got more of what defines you than you do" (i.e, typically more material junk).

So if someone in response to a criticism that he/she has engaged in human rights abuses responds "Oh, you're just jealous!", this suggests that the speaker doesn't really think that he/she is being criticized, but that the person making the criticism actually admires the human rights violator.

Perverse result....

MAJ: I can tell you the difference between the so-called police state in London and the police state in China is what is considered acceptable behaviour. One may be filmed in the UK but it is only in China that I have had police come into my appartment to do a "safety inspection" when a protest just happened to be going on across the road. Also, there is something unsettling about seeing the size of your file on the wall at the local police station in China.

Greg: The reason people were bored by the Congress was because it lacked transparency and failed to provide a genuine forum for policy debate. These are not good things. The absence of any real change in China's political system, given the transformation of the society, is bizarre, and a source of frustration not only to western human rights activists and democracy advocates, but also to a very large number of local politicians and political thinkers.

nh,

True, but so what?

jms,

I do not believe those are the last two things on the minds of the average Chinese. I think those things are on the minds of many Chinese, but they are not yet front and center.

I agree that the West is uncomfortable dealing with China, but I think the reasons are different from those you have given. I think much has to do with our great love of democracy and freedom, so much so that we feel we are somehow tainting ourselves by doing business with those who are not yet at our level on this yet. It just does not seem morally pure. And yet, does not a part of us recognize that democracy and freedom takes time? We should be comfortable with China's evolution because it is likely to be very similar to what we have seen in Korea, Japan, Singapore and will see in Vietnam.

Pfeffer,

Please expound.

Brendan Carr,

I completely agree.

nh,

Wow. That's a new one. I did not know the inability to change is confined to emerging countries. What about a country like Korea, which has undergone an amazing transformation?

Steven Blayney,

You have lost me. It sounds deep, but I'm not getting it. Probably my fault seeing as how this is the second time on one post and also seeing as how it is nearly 6:30 pm on a Friday and I am still in the office....

Duncan,

I completely agree. Very nicely done.

Dan - thanks for your thoughtful response. I ask this of you though: Britain, a place I'm very fond of, having lived and taught in London for a few years, is indeed more democratic than China. True. I never claimed otherwise. But parliamentary democracies can nevertheless double up as police states, just as one-party states can offer their citizens impressively high levels of freedom. The world is full of paradoxes, is it not? This is a point that Randall Peerenboom makes about China too, incidently.

JL/CLB - I agree, my statement is somewhat of an over-generalization -- the Chinese certainly are concerned about justice and equality in society and they do fall under the umbrella of democracy and human rights.

However, what I was trying to get to is that I do not believe the average Chinese have the level of political consciousness to think about democracy and human rights in the western sense (esp. in terms of people's relationship with the government). China has never had the Enlightenment, or the likes of Locke, Rousseau and Mill. The average Chinese may lament on societal ills such as rampant corruption but they rarely associate them with the inherent defects in China's political system. They don't seem to have the analytical ability/training to make the connection. The picture that the western media paints of China is that the average Chinese is constantly yearning for democracy and the right to vote when in fact most seem to simply carry on with their daily lives and make the most out of the circumstances that are thrusted upon them.

My second point is really I think it's time the West develop a new analytical model in dealing with societies that are different from the West. The Crusade and the Cold War have been over for a while, it's the global internet age now, let's drop the childishly simplistic good vs evil model, democracy has become a slogan rather than something of substance, it's time we challenge ourselves to think outside of the box instead always viewing the West as the point of reference.

\"But parliamentary democracies can nevertheless double up as police states, just as one-party states can offer their citizens impressively high levels of freedom.\"

Yep! This is something I discover since coming to USA. Chinese streets are safer both from criminals and police!!!!!! USA is not the land of gold as I before imagined.

jms - I partly agree with what you have to say in your last comment above, though when you say that the Chinese "don't seem to have the analytical ability/training to make the connection" between the defects of their political system and rampant corruption, etc., well, you run the risk of coming across as being a little ethnocentric. They are capable, and they do see the connection. What do you think the Tiananmen Square protests were about?

Most middle class Chinese are not dying of thirst for democracy, as you correctly say, but not because they are incapable of understanding democracy, but because they do understand democracy - they know that it is not some magical panacea, they know that corruption is rampant in democracies just as it is in China, they know that human rights abuses are carried out by democracies, that democracies go to war in spite of majority opinions, and that trying to democratise too soon, before mean incomes reach at least US$8,000, would mostly likely lead to disaster, as it has for most countries that have tried to introduce parliamentary democracies without first achieving all the necessary requisites.

jms - have you ever stopped to consider that it is the Enlightenment project itself, which is flawed? The Chinese recognise it as such, as do many in the developing world. The ideas of the Frankfurt School are well understood in China. Translations of Adorno are easily available in most mainland bookshops, as are translations of those post-structuralist thinkers who developed similar critiques, like those of Foucault for example. Allow me to indulge by explaining, though I apologise to those readers who are not interested in the topic, as to do so will require considerable length.

I believe that the over-critical attitude that many foreigners have towards China's system of governance stems largely from their strong faith in the legacies of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, which of course made valuable contributions to our modern ideas about democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, and the rational pursuit of truth.

I too of course, strongly admire Enlightenment values (most people do) but I recognise that the tradition has led to a number of serious failings, all of which, as Theodor Adorno argued, stem from its undialectical vision.

The Enlightenment, despite its noble values, has repeatedly led its faithful down the road to making dangerous, universalising abstractions, its rigid, instrumental Reason often suppressing differences that lead to systematic violence.

In their Dialectics of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that "where scientific rationality was initially used to attack religious, superstitious and mythical dogma in the name of free inquiry, tolerance and an open society, soon enough scientific rationality was unleashed against those ethical values that had inspired its use in the first place. 'Knowledge' became divorced from 'information', norms from facts, and the scientific method increasingly freed from any commitment to liberation, transformed nature into an object of domination. Reason, once the great liberating force, became 'instrumental'."

When viewed this way, the Enlightenment can be seen as "the progenitor of a society in which the manipulation of others by an all powerful state represents the high point of rationality, in which human subjectivity and individualism and creativity are necessarily squashed in the name of efficiency and instrumentality. Not liberation but the concentration camp, where inmates find themselves reduced to the numbers tattooed on their arms, becomes the logical extension of the Enlightenment. Its legacy is therefore not the promised progress, but barbarism and the subordination of subjectivity to the 'culture industry', capitalist forms of thinking and the 'totally administered society'." The post-structuralist thinker, Michel Foucault, also espoused this general line of argument, in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish.

Whereas many see the Enlightenment as the movement toward freedom and democracy, I agree with Adorno, who sees it as leading to the development of modern states, which in turn develop systems of control and bureaucratic administration that extend greater and greater control over the individual - in fact, as I explained in an earlier comment on this very thread, I think that countries like Britain, Australia and the United States in many ways more closely resemble police states than does China, though China, as it develops, is quickly catching up.

Adorno, unlike most of today's postmodern thinkers, was a Marxian who sought to rehabilitate projects of coherency. He argued precisely the opposite to what postmodern deconstructionists advocate. In his view, deconstruction can only do just that - deconstruct the system. It cannot genuinely get outside the system. For that, argued Adorno, we need to add an extra distinct dimension to our knowledge. It is not that we need to dismantle systems, but that we need to interweave them with an alternative. We have to not deconstruct, but to reconstruct our knowledge.

We live in a world of paradox, and so Enlightenment needs to recognise such paradox in order to be truly enlightened. Reason, to be reasonable, must counterbalance itself with its opposite. This is a universal phenomenon - there is never any unity without internal opposition.

Without such internal opposition, Reason itself simply becomes a question of power: the object of Enlightenment knowledge simply subjects the Other to itself. When, for example, English farmers occupied Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they stripped away from Nature its aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans invested in it - values which we today could benefit greatly from, as many of today's environmentalists argue, like Canada's Dr. David Suzuki, for example.

As Yvonne Sherratt points out in her book, Adorno's Positive Dialectic, "Enlightenment to be enlightened, needs Subjects who can communicate rationally, and to do so, they need not attempt to transcend their own humanity, but rather, they need to be so intensely receptive to their world that they can be, in one moment fully rational and in the other, fully absorbed." Failure to do so in my view can only result in the formation of views that are fundamentally ethnocentric, and that are hence potentially dangerous.

Indeed, it has been the Enlightenment's undialectical, half-baked concept of Reason that has led not only to the ethnocentrism of Europeans, but also, consequently, to so much of the world's suffering. Even today, Western countries continue to glory in spreading Enlightened religion and democracy to the "backward native cultures", and their colonial adventures they justify by their Enlightened superiority - an alibi for the conquest of developing countries.

Enlightenment thinkers may very well have promised a steady progressive improvement in manner, morals, technology, and general social well-being, but the harsh reality is that the world even today continues to suffer from unprecedented levels of state sponsored violence and economic exploitation. Just look at what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq right now - imperialist adventures, justified using Enlightenment values: we must save the good people of Iraq from the tyranny of dictatorship, and help them to install a wonderful democracy modelled on our own. The history of the 19th and 20th centuries is the history of such violent conquests and hypocrisy, and the 21st century doesn't look like shaping up to be any better.

"What was and is at issue," as Lyotard has quite rightly observed, "is the introduction of will into Reason." Enlightenment, rather than being the great demistifying and emancipating force promised, has instead turned out to be its very opposite, because it argues that we can cover or encompass the world through our reason and our language.

Only by adopting a more dialectical approach to Reason, can we Westerners gain a deeper, fairer, more balanced set of attitudes towards China and its system of governance. We need to more fully absorb ourselves into the Chinese mind, into the Chinese way of seeing and doing things, if we want to be able to make more rational, more reasoned, more Enlightened judgements about China, its people, and its institutions.

jms - there is some emirically-verifiable evidence to support the argument that a fair majority of China's growing educated middle class do not thirst for democray, and that they view it as something unlikely to solve China's problem - though it is, admittedly, quite out of date now. In 1990, the Taiwanese scholar, Tianjian Shi, conducted the first (and as far as I know to date the only) scientifically valid national sample survey conducted in China on the political behaviour and attitudes of its people.

Tianjian Shi, whose research was discussed a few years ago at the 32nd Sino-American Conference on Contemporary China in Taiwan, found that after decades of market-oriented reform and rapid growth in China, the "interest" of ordinary citizens in democratic reform and democratic institutions "remains shallow" and that "a large minority believe that democracy will not solve China's problems, and only a very small fraction favour multi-party elections to choose national leaders."

Shi, commentator Minxin Pei and other participants in the conference, offered explanations for the current lack of popular pressure or apparent preference for democratic change, the most important of which they identified as being "the populace's emphasis on economic development over democracy (with nearly half declaring development more important and only one-fifth saying democracy was more important)." The second most significant factor they identified was "popular satisfaction with the substantial increases, compared to pre-reform era baselines, in civil liberties other than democratic participation," followed by "the Party's continuing dominance of organised politics and capacity for manipulating public opinion."

jms - the argument then, that the majority of Chinese mainlanders are ready for democracy, simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as you quite correctly pointed out, and the claim that the majority currently want multi-party elections is simply not supported by the existing empirical evidence either.

The Chinese, quite understandably, are not at all keen to follow the path of all of those other developing countries that have fallen victim to Enlightened attempts at introducing to them parliamentary systems of democracy.

Mark Anthony Jones -- wow, I've read some on the Enlightenment, but definitely not as much as you have. Anyhow, I need to clarify that I did not mean to imply the Chinese are inherently incapable of analytical thinking or understanding democracy. I was really referring to critical thinking skills -- which are mostly learned in schools and we all know on the whole Chinese schools do not encourage critical, creative thinking. Also, when I refer to the average Chinese, I am thinking of the ones (maybe 900 million or so) who do not live in major cities, who do not have internet access and whose primary concerns are food on the table and roof over their heads. The students in Tinananmen Square certainly are not the average Chinese -- they are the intellectual elites.

I agree with you that we need to get to know China for what it is first before we superimpose our own political/cultural context upon it. Better understanding promotes better communication and I hope through that we can positively influence China's development. Ultimately we all share an interest in the peaceful rise of China and Asia.

MAJ:

If you had done your homework, you would realize that the CCP is a product of the enlightenment and not necessarily a reaction against it. Ever heard about the May Fourth movement?

And although eighteenth century enlightenment thinkers talked about civil liberties and freedom of expression, many of them did not advocate democracy, but enlightened despotism. One of Voltaire's primary targets was the church and he held China in high esteem, because he believed that the Chinese autocratic state was the embodiment of a secularized government.

The Eight Gorges Dam project, the "Go West" campaign and the Olympics are all guided by an almost blind faith in reason. It is not the other way around. The CCP attitude towards national minorities, look stumblingly similar to Rousseau's ideas of the "noble savage." And Foucault's writings can also be read as a critique of the CCPs combination of progressive reforms with ruthless repression. Many Chinese do read him that way.

Dear JL - thank you for your thoughtful criticisms. I agree that it is impossible to generalise 1.3 billion people, and that it is foolish to make sweeping conclusions based on the findings of only one survey. Most of the Chinese individuals that I personally know share the sentiments expressed by the majority of the respondents to Shi's national survey, so it was easy for me to find his research convincing. Still, I should nevertheless treat his finds with more caution, as you say.

I was not implying that the Chinese do not want reform though. I was simply pointing out that many Chinese, possibly even a majority, (if Shi's survey is anything to go by), are in no great hurry to democratise, in the sense of establishing some kind of parliamentary system of government, based around multiple parties. This is something many are happy to wait for, until China develops for itself the necessary requisites. There are also many who are not particularly impressed by the performance of Western democracies, which often fail to live up to their own rhetoric and promises - this I think, is a growing sentiment, and is partly a response to post September 11 developments.

MAJ:

You didn't really respond to what I said, but I can respond to your two points:

1) Yes, many Chinese view democracy critically - as do many of us who are appalled by civil rights violations in the US and Europe after 9/11. No system is perfect.

But are Chinese afforded the luxury of criticizing their own government, using the whole intellectual arsenal of the Frankfurt school and others? Ever heard about the "Freezing Point" incident last year? That was a on-line magazine that was closed after publishing philosophy professor Yuan Weishi's criticism of the way history is taught in China. The level of tolerance in China is still very low.

Sure, no one is expecting China to have free elections tomorrow. But why such ruthless repression against dissidents? Why the tight media controls? Why is China leading the world in executions? The CCP has made it very clear that it will not tolerate any challenge to its authority. Now that is Gramscian hegemony for you.

2) Westerners (whatever that label is supposed to mean) do consider the downside of the enlightenment project. In fact all the big names you have mentioned are Westerners. Do we see a similar self-criticism emanating from China? Where? Who is taking up the torch of Lu Xun, Hu Shi or Cai Yuanpei today?

Yes, your native country has mistreated its indigenous population. But the difference between Australia and China is that you are allowed to say that in Sidney, but not in Beijing. Please let me know when a Chinese director is allowed to produce a counterpart of the movie "Rabbit-proof fence". That will be a day to celebrate.

"The West was happy to be patient with South Korea, and other similar states, so why not apply the same degree of tolerance to China? It is, after all, following the exact same developmental course as all of the other East Asian countries (even where human rights are concerned)."

Because South Korea, Japan and SE Asia aren't busy running down a list of bones to pick and scores to settle with neighbors over very old territorial disputes and the western barbarians due to alleged 150-400 years of humiliation.

nh: I do not engage in ideals, lofty or theoretical, that explain "why Chinese people don't deserve to have their voices heard or have their rights fully addressed by any level of the Chinese gov't". I find that accusation ridiculous, revolting, and offensive. I suggest you go back and read what I really wrote.

And I totally agree that there are certain advantages to democractic accountability. Trouble is, that just does not exist in China right now. So back to the point I really made: The priority for most is putting rice on the table. Sad to say, but even after 30 years of reform and opening up, for the majority that is the issue.

"Shame on those who support totalitarianism because it benefits their own pocketbook."

I'm a teacher. I can't afford a pocketbook. Don't support totalitarianism, neither.

MAJ

I am saying that you didn't respond to my argument, because for all your talk about a dialectial understanding of enlightement and reason, your argument seems to be very much of a one-way street and I don't see any evidence that you have considered trends in Chinese intellectual history in the twentieth century. You do not reflect on the fact that there is much more diversity in the Chinese intellectual tradition that you would admit. There were people in the 1920s who rejected Western rationality - but espoused fascist ideas. And there were others that argued for intellectual freedom and a Chinese enlightenement. What happened to all of them in your argument about what represent the "Chinese way"? Do you think the discussion of a Chinese democracy started in 1990 and that the PRC of today somehow is represents the quintessence of Chinese culture? That is very much the way your comments come across. Is Taiwanese democracy somehow "less Chinese" than mainland dictatorship? If that's what you think, please elaborate. If you don't think so, then most of your arguments about the Enlightement simply do not hold water.

Furthermore, could you give us a single example of someone that recently argued that China should have free and multi-party elections now, tomorrow? And can you give give us any examples of anhyone trying to force China to conform to Western standards? No one has that kind of power over China anymore. The fact that China gets a lot of negative publicity is a consequence of increased interaction, not of some neo-colonial agenda to force China into the fold of the West. It's not just China-bashing...

Dear Amban,

Looking at the first paragraph of your comment above, all I can say is this: you have read way too much into my comments. I'm sorry if they read as being too one-sided to you, but nowhere have I ever suggested that there is "a" Chinese way (in fact, I made a point of saying that it is both impossible and silly to try to generalise 1.3 billion people), and nowhere have I ever suggested that discussions about democracy among the Chinese started in 1990. I have never suggested that Taiwanese democracy is less "less Chinese" either: in fact, I have never once compared the two. I'm sorry, but I really don't understand how it is that you can read so much into my comments. Perhaps you have quite a vivid imagination? It would seem so. Taiwan, like most other Asian democracies, didn't introduce democracy until it reached a mean income of around US$8,000. The mainland may very well follow the East Asia Model - it has certainly been following the model to date - perhaps, like the others, it too will introduce democracy once it has all the necessary requisites. Only time will tell.

There may very well be great diversity among the Chinese in terms of their intellectual tradition, and that diversity continues today. So what? That's surely something that doesn't need spelling. These are blogs comments, not journal papers. Imagine how much longer my comments would need to be if I was expected to introduce every possible thread into my pattern? The point that I was originally making remains valid as far as I'm concerned. What matters today is how a significant number of Chinese feel about democracy, and why? That's what I was discussing. Nowhere did I suggest that only one view exists among them, both at present and historically.

As for the evidence that you asked for: again, you seem to have misread me. I did not say that there are others out to "force" Chinese into introducing democracy now, I argued that there are many who "argue" that the CCP should introduce democracy now. You can find such people over at the Peking Duck website for starters. And the President of the USA, George W. Bush, recently, and quite explicitly, argued that China ought to introduce democracry, and without delay - he said this in front of Hu Jintao during a speech he delivered at the Sydney APEC Forum a few months ago. Not the first time he has said this, either. And judging from the look on Hu Jintao's face, it was hardly a diplomatic move on Bush's part.

Enough of the knit-picking Amban. You have raised some interesting criticisms, which I appreciate, but I don't have time to respond to knit-picking, especially when so much of it focussing on things I DIDN'T say.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

MAJ:

"There may very well be great diversity among the Chinese in terms of their intellectual tradition, and that diversity continues today. So what? That's surely something that doesn't need spelling. These are blogs comments, not journal papers. Imagine how much longer my comments would need to be if I was expected to introduce every possible thread into my pattern?"

Sure. But what threw me about your thread is that you find all the time in the world to introduce thinkers who have had said little or nothing directly related to the prospects of democracy in China (at least as far I am aware). But when you get challenged on that, you say "so what"?

not very convincing. I still think we should ban China goods and push for human rights.