Middle
Kingdoms
Anthony Mansueto
China has always loomed large for the
West. Rome
expended so much of the wealth it extracted from its subject peoples on Chinese
Silk that it created a long term balance of trade deficit which ultimately
contributed to the decline and fall of its Empire. Christendom, in a very real
sense, came of age as a civilization only when it made direct contact with China, setting
in motion a prolonged struggle to overtake what had long been the
planet’s most advanced society. This struggle continued until the
industrial revolution finally gave the modern West the edge it sought. Indeed,
Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of
Nations was conceived as a strategy for helping England
achieve wealth comparable to China’s,
which was still regarded with envy.
Each generation in the West has had
its own China.
I came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For some in my generation China
represented a mysterious font of spiritual wisdom, the original home of a
Chan/Zen “sudden enlightenment” which rendered unnecessary the
long, hard work of study, meditation, and ethical action. For others, it
represented a socialism purer and truer than that built by the Soviet Union, one in which egoism would be overcome and a
new humanity forged on the anvil of revolutionary self-sacrifice. This was true
even for many who, like me, were never orthodox Maoists. I took Gramsci rather
than Mao as my theoretical point of departure, and preferred the Latin American
Left, with its willingness to engage directly the religious question, to the
Chinese Party which continued to uphold an official atheism. But the underlying
idealism and voluntarism which defined the Maoist problematic were nonetheless
present in the background. The movement of which I was a part hoped that by
some combination of philosophical/theological/political study and revolutionary
struggle a new humanity would be forged which was wise and selfless and, for
all intents and purposes, divine, achieving in a few short generations what
humanity’s great spiritual traditions had sought for millennia. (This was by contrast with the
technological utopia which lay behind Soviet socialism which, whatever it may
have said, also sought a kind of
divinity, but by means of
scientific and technological progress which eventually enable humanity
to transcend the bounds of finitude.) No mind that this “study and
struggle” actually involved mass brutality against some of China’s
wisest teachers (including many within the party itself) and a systematic
effort to destroy one of humanity’s great Civilizational traditions. Our China, like all
of the West’s, lived first and foremost in the imagination.
Soon, of course, China came to
represent something very different, what it still represents to most in the
West: the last and greatest of the “Asian tigers,” societies which
draw on ancient collectivisms (associated in the Western mind with a
“Confucian” culture) and a repressive modern state apparatus to
achieve success under global capitalism. Some regard this China as a
model, an antidote to Western liberalism with its systems of rights and
entitlements, which undermine competitiveness and governability. Others wee it
as a threat, concerned that its sheer size and rapid economic growth will allow
it to overwhelm Western civilization. For still others, it represents an
opportunity. For nearly all it represents the inevitability of capitalism.
But this too is a China of the
imagination, which has little to do with the complex living society which
includes fully a quarter of humanity. I have spent much of the past five years
engaging the realities of Chinese tradition and Chinese society, and what I
have found is complex and intriguing –and has little to do with the
imaginary Chinas of either the Left or the Right.
I first began to engage Chinese
culture as part of a larger scholarly project aimed at regrounding a
dialectical metaphysics of Esse and a
(radically historicized) natural law ethics. In order to do this I needed to
show that, contrary to the claims of the postmodernists, this metaphysics was
not at the root of the modern West’s technological/political utopianism
and its totalitarian temptations. I approached this problem by means of a
comparative historical sociology of metaphysics which showed that
“metaphysics,” as the postmodernists understood it, was not an
exclusively Western project, and that far from leading to technopolitical
utopianism and totalitarianism metaphysics had in fact grounded efforts to
limit exploitation and oppression to redirect surplus towards activities which promote
human development and Civilizational progress. And so I immersed myself in Chinese (as
well as Indian) philosophy and religion, and struggled to understand the
historic contexts of its development. I included in this investigation not only
the debates between Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, but also the Mohist and
Legalist traditions which are little studied in the West, even though they
probably provide a better context for understanding modern China than Taoism,
Buddhism, and Confucianism. The first was a frankly anticivilizational movement
with its base in the peasantry, which sought to eliminate the overhead
civilization involved. The second was a relativistic doctrine not unlike
Hellenic Sophism or the Indian Caravaka tradition which argued that meaning and
value are conventions and that human beings, being basically selfish, can be
restrained only by force and law. While actually existing Maoism was a complex
reality, it clearly incorporated much of the anticivilizational drive of
Mohism, even if it also drew on Buddhism’s no-self doctrine and the
distinctive metaphysics of interdependence which grew out of the interaction
between Buddhism and Taoism in China.
And most of what passes for “Confucian” culture in debates on the
“Asian tigers,” where it is not outright Legalist authoritarianism,
is in the tradition of the semilegalist Xunxi, who interpreted Confucianism in
a distinctively authoritarian and pessimistic way, rather than the humanistic
tradition of Mengzi or the Song dynasty dao
xue, which most contemporary Confucian scholars now follow. .
At roughly the same time my wife and
I made the decision to pursue an adoption in China. And so China became
personal. Adoption (and intercultural adoption especially) is, after all, a
reciprocal relationship. I undertook the obligation to pass on to my daughter
the traditions of a civilization which, however much I might respect it, was
not my own. And I experienced in a small way what the Chinese people live every
day: a life dependent in substantial measure on the decisions of a party and a
government which are, by turns, visionary and vicious, wise and magnanimous,
vain and small minded.
Soon these two different engagements
with China
began to run into each other in a way that has become inevitable in a society
which no longer distinguishes between the personal and the political. I began
to locate myself within Chinese debates in a way that I never would have had I
not taken on the responsibility of raising a daughter of China. I began
to react to news from China
not just as a political-theological leader and global citizen but as someone
whose life course depended, in some measure, on developments there. This was
particularly true when the pace of adoption referrals from China began to slow and it seemed that the
international adoption program, which China had embraced enthusiastically
under Jiang Zemin as a way of mitigating the contradictions generated by its
population policy, was now being questioned. The official explanation for the
slowdown is that China
no longer has nearly so many abandoned orphans, and that domestic adoptions
have increased dramatically. This would, of course, be good news, but it is not
credible. Deeply rooted social practices do not change over night, and those
familiar with China
report that most Chinese with the means to adopt will not accept the abandoned
daughters of peasants. And the proximity of the slowdown to the 2008 Beijing
Olympics can only be regarded as a cause for suspicion.
My wife and I, meanwhile, found ourselves
the object of attacks by critics of international adoption. Relationships with my
Chinese colleagues in many cases became strained. I recall one incident in
particular, at a conference on “Civilizations and World Orders” in Istanbul in May 2006, sponsored by a research institute
close to Turkey’s
governing moderate Islamic party. I mentioned to one of the Chinese scholars
present, with whom I had up until then had vigorous and animated conversations,
that my wife and I were planning to adopt from China. He ended the conversation
and removed himself as quickly as rudimentary etiquette allowed. The next day
he gave a paper on the foundations of Chinese foreign policy which stressed
that China
understands (and always has understood) herself as morally superior. Nothing is
more offensive than the idea that China might need something from a
morally inferior partner. Thus the pretense that the Chinese emperors of old
received “tribute” from the very nomadic hordes they were
appeasing; thus the profound sensitivity regarding international adoption at a
time when China
will be under intense international scrutiny.
While all of this was unfolding, my
wife and I encountered some health and financial problems which caused us to
put our adoption on hold. We frankly expected that between the changes in China and our
own difficulties it would never be completed. And then, in early December (on
the Feast of St. Nicholas, who made his
reputation giving dowries to impoverished young women), we received a call from
our agency. Apparently the Party in its wisdom had decided to give us a
referral in spite of our request for a deferral. The child had been abandoned
the day after she was born. The
Director of the Social Welfare Institute at Poyang, in Jiangxi Province,
where she was found named her Bo Xiao, which means “shakes with
laughter.” We had always planned to call her Tien,
“heaven.” Heaven shook
with laughter as we bowed to her wisdom and that of the Party and scraped
together the money for our long journey to China.
We have just now returned from China, the
adoption complete. While I do not believe that a travelogue can substitute for
formal social analysis, our journey provides a framework for outlining what I
have come to understand about what China is and where she is going.
First, it must be remembered that China is on the
front lines of the ecological crisis created by the modern industrial
technological regime. It was the introduction of new crops from Africa and the Americas (yams and maize) which led China’s
population to explode beginning in the seventeenth century, creating chronic
food self-sufficiency problems and accentuating a long standing tendency to
favor cheap human labor over new labor saving technologies. Many scholars now
believe that this is the reason why China, long humanity’s most
technologically advanced civilization, failed to industrialize until the latter
half of the twentieth century. When China did industrialize, it did so
at desperate and frantic pace, with perhaps even less attention to ecological
impact than the West. Many low lying regions of Eastern
China, furthermore, are especially vulnerable to the effects of
climate change, as the polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise.
It is always difficult to know if
unusual weather reflects the first stages of a global climate crisis or simply
back luck, but our journey to China
took us into the worst winter storms which South China
has experienced in at least half a century. Vast areas which ordinarily enjoy a
subtropical climate, growing oranges and tea as well as rice, were buried in
snow. Large populations which have never had to bother heating their homes
shivered in subfreezing temperatures for weeks. When we visited the Social
Welfare Institute from where our daughter had lived, the staff met us in heavy
coats, and were so cold they could not transact business. The children were
swaddled in so many layers of clothes that they could not move, the inside
temperature no higher than that outside.
There is much to question and even to
criticize in the political line of the Communist Party of China, and in the
policies of the government it leads, but it must be remembered that they have
been dealt a very difficult hand. This does not justify everything the party
its government do, but it does help to set their decisions in context.
Second, the cries of disappointed
ex-Maoists and the glee of neoliberal triumphalists notwithstanding, China remains
in a meaningful sense a socialist country. Its socialism is, to be sure, no
longer that of Maoist idealism which aimed at the creation of a new selfless
humanity. Rather, China is socialist because it is led by a Communist Party
which uses a creative interpretation of historical materialism to manage the
gradual and continuous reorganization of its social structure generally and its
economic structure in particular in order to catalyze the most rapid
Civilizational progress possible. At present the progress envisioned is
primarily scientific and technological, though the party is beginning to re-engage
older spiritual traditions. More specifically, the Communist Party of China
argues the level of development of the forces of production is still too low to
justify the kind of centralized planning attempted in the early stages of the
revolution, and argues instead that it is in the primary stage of building
socialism during which economic development remains the principal priority, to
be balanced by measures designed to address ecological imbalances, social
contradictions (especially that between the city and the countryside), and the
anomie and egoism which have accompanied industrialization everywhere on the
planet, while China reclaims at long last its place as a leader among the
peoples of the Earth. It would be easy to see this line as a cynical
justification for the continued monopoly of a party which presides over and
profits from what is essentially a low-wage industrial capitalist economy. But
the fact remains that this structure allows China to do things which the
capitalist West cannot. Sometimes these things are ill-conceived and even
profoundly destructive, like the Three Gorges Dam. Sometimes they represent an
ambiguous attempt to cope with an intractable problem, like the population
policy. And sometimes they are brilliant and visionary, like the construction
of 100 new green cities. But these are all things which would not happen under
capitalism.
In general, socialist structures are
good at catalyzing big, cutting edge projects but have difficulty mobilizing
the creativity of those who are not involved in these projects and in tapping
into the ordinary problem solving capacities individuals and small
organizations, capacities which are fundamental to identifying and taking
advantage of economic opportunities. It is in part for this reason that the
party chose to liberalize the economic structure. Clearly it needs to extend
this liberalization to civil society, allowing the emergence of rich network of
civic and religious organizations which can engage the problems of economic
development, political participation, and egoism and anomie in ways appropriate
to the realities of a complex and diverse civilization. But those who hope to
see the party’s leading role broken and China transformed into a
postsocialist society on the model of the former Soviet bloc are simply hoping
to cripple a competitor and potential adversary and open up new opportunities
for exploitation. China’s
socialist structure will allow it to address humanity’s big problems
(ecological crisis, poverty) and to undertake big projects (the creation of
world class artistic, scientific, and philosophical institutions) in a way the
capitalist West is finding increasingly difficult.
The biggest question for China is what
it wants to do with its enormous potential. “China” is no more a unity
than is the West. At a political level China has been held together since
the time of the Qin by an imperial structure which is far less centralized than
most outsiders imagine. At a cultural level China has been held together by a
common writing system which is shared by what amount to at least eight
different languages, as different from each other as French is from Italian or
German from English. This created a common literary culture. But China has no
common, widely shared Civilizational ideal of the sort which unified
Christendom, Dar-al-Islam, or the
modern West. The five great philosophical and religious traditions the debates
between which have defined the Chinese public arena –Taoism,
Confucianism, Mohism, Legalism, and Buddhism—differ among themselves
around the most fundamental
questions: the existence of a first principle in terms of which the
universe can be explained and human action ordered, the knowability of that
principle, the nature of human beings and human excellence, the nature of a
just society, and value of human civilization itself, China is not and never has been a
“Confucian civilization” even in the restricted sense in which the
medieval West was Catholic or the Abbasid Caliphate was Islamic. On the
contrary, China has long
been characterized by a deep pluralism of Civilizational ideals, a pluralism
which has been matched in the modern West only by the United States.
And this pluralism has been deepened in the modern era, as the two principal
variants of the modern ideal have joined those associated with the principal
Chinese traditions: the scientific and technological ideal of transcending
finitude by means of scientific and technological progress and the humanistic
ideal of transcending finitude by means of philosophical wisdom and
revolutionary political struggle.
Nowhere is the pluralism more
apparent in the regional differences in the way in which China has
accommodated the interaction between its competing socioreligious traditions
and their engagement in the modern West. In our recent visit to China we spent
time in three cities each of which illustrates a different variant of this
accommodation. Beijing
remains what it always was: an imperial capital which mobilizes public sacred
space for the purposes of political legitimation. At the center of Beijing lies
the Forbidden City, over the entrance of which hangs the portrait of Mao
Zedong, the founder of modern China and still regarded as “70%
correct” by the current party leadership. Once the exclusive reserve of
the imperial family, it is now open to the Chinese people. At the four cardinal
directions lie the great imperial temples, the most important of which, the
Tien An, or Altar of Heaven, was the site of the winter solstice sacrifice
performed by the emperor. Today ordinary workers and peasants stand in the
imperial spaces, marking the displacement of the old dynasties by the Communist
Party and building a symbolic identification of the people with the party. Beijing says “it is the people now who
mediate between Heaven and Earth, and it is the Party which guides them in this
sacred act.”
Surrounding the imperial center of
the city lie what remain of the hutongs,
the old Beijing
of courtyard houses, shops, and tea houses, built in the austere gray of the
common people and laid out in neat rows. Though many are being torn down to
make way for new development, these extend out the second ring road, where the
old city wall once stood. Beyond that rows of high rises and shops and then the
bleak factories of modern industrial China.
Nanchang, on the other hand, grew up as a
market town on the Gan river, China’s
principal North-South waterway. It was the site of an uprising the defeat of
which led to the Long March, and became one of China’s great revolutionary
cities. After liberation it was rebuilt in Soviet style. In the wake of China’s economic liberalization, its
downtown has become a commercial center appropriate to a metropolis of its size
(roughly 2 million) and doesn’t look too different from that of similar
cities in the US.
But beyond that the city is essentially a vast industrial park, with large
apartment complexes and high rise developments, some old and crumbling, others
new and shiny, built around one factory after another. Only in hidden corners
can one find evidence of the older Chinese traditions. The Youmin Si, for
example, a sixth century Buddhist temple destroyed by the Red Guards and only
recently rebuilt, hides between modern apartment buildings near the city
center, while a few tea houses, frowned on during the Cultural Revolution,
survive around the train station.
Guangzhou, finally, represents an “old China” very different from Beijing: that of the maritime Silk
Road. Roman merchants traded there as early as 165 BCE and it was
through Guangzhou that Islam entered China during
the Tang dynasty. The old city is a tangle of tiny streets filled with markets.
While the trade in endangered species has been cleaned up, a visit to the Qing
Ping market can still yield essentially anything else the heart desires, from
shark fins and bird nets to saffron or scorpions.
Here too the temples are hidden,
tucked in among the shops, but the scale of the spaces makes them into enclaves
of contemplative peace in what is still, first and foremost, a busy port city.
Hualin Si was reputedly founded by Boddhidarma, from whose teachings the Chan
(Zen) tradition flows. The Huaisheng Mosque, with its Guangta, or ancient
minaret, was said to have been founded by Abu Waqas, the uncle of the Prophet
Mohammed.
Beyond the old city, as elsewhere,
lie mile after mile of high rises. In all three cities these high rises mark
the New China, which shares much with the rest of hypermodern East
Asia, obsessed with technology and economic progress.
In between these cities stretches out
a vast countryside: mile after mile of grain fields: wheat and millet in the
North and rice paddies in the
South. These are interspersed in the south with orange groves in the lowlands
and tea plantations in the hill country. This countryside is densely populated,
with villages every few miles at the most. And every village seems to be
perpetually under construction, with small brick or concrete apartment houses
being the primary type of building. In the south there is no heat, in spite of
the fact that winter temperatures often fall below 5 C, even in ordinary
winters.
China’s public spaces speak a
society which is deeply unsure of its direction. It cannot abandon its imperial
tradition, because that and its writing system is all that holds it together.
It may not believe that the Party, standing in the place of the people,
actually holds the mandate of heaven, but it cannot speak this doubt without
fear of disintegration. Like the rest of East
Asia, China
has embraced modernity (and especially its scientific-technological form) at
just the time the West is questioning it. Every aspect of Chinese life, from
party documents to the decisions of individual economic actors (Chinese
students study almost exclusively scientific and technological subjects) speaks
a confidence in technology and technocracy which is unheard of anywhere else in
the world. And yet China
is also re-engaging her older spiritual traditions. Religious leaders now sit
in the National People’s Congress and Beijing University
is running classes for religious leaders on their role in creating a harmonious
socialist spiritual civilization. All of which is to suggest that while the
terms of the debate may be somewhat different China, like the West, is in a
period of Civilizational crisis. Like the West, it does not know what it is or
what it wants to be. The result is a certain amount of anomie but also a
significant potential for ferment and creativity.
This civilizational crisis drives, in
large measure, China’s
much criticized nationalities policy and its morally suspect foreign alliances.
Until China carves out a well defined identity for herself which can integrate
her competing civilizational ideals, ancient and modern, it will be difficult
for her to know what to do with Tibet and Xinjiang, where national struggles
are driven by ideals which are neither traditionally Chinese nor modern, which
are outside the sphere of China’s unified literary culture, and which
(with Mongolia) have historically been a source of attacks on China’s
civilizational centers. And until China
knows what she stands for she will not be able to handle challenges like that
presented by Darfur with the grace which
befits a people aspiring to global moral leadership. But of course the same could
be said of the United States.
It is for this reason that the task
of defining what is meant by a “socialist spiritual civilization,”
a phrase too often dismissed as either an empty moral platitude or code for
increased ideological control, is so important. This must become the object of
a lively and open debate in both civil society and the Party. The Party (which
is currently led by engineers) must engage social theorists, philosophers, and
religious scholars in this work. And it must include religious scholars and
institutional religious leaders not only in the National People’s
Congress but, following the lead of parties in Latin
America, in its Central Committee and Political Bureau.
When I wrote to the Chinese Center
for Adoption Affairs requesting permission to adopt a daughter from China, I
said that I brought to the task “a profound respect for the civilization
of China, both historically and in the present period … [and] regard with
great respect the achievements of the Peoples’ Republic of China and its
leadership in lifting millions out of poverty while rising peacefully to the
status of a great power, [as well as its] current struggle to transcend old
models of industrialization, old models of great power behavior, and old models
of social control, and to build a harmonious socialist society on the basis of
a profound spiritual civilization.” I also made a
commitment that “any daughter you grant to us will always be a daughter
of China and a sign of friendship and a bridge between peoples.”
Today I find myself not only the
adoptive father of a daughter of China, but in a very real sense an adopted son
of a civilization not my own. I hope that I can bring to both tasks the wisdom
and prudence they require. I cannot offer to the Communist Party of China the
“unconditional, militant, and political” solidarity which was the
litmus test of a committed anti-imperialist stance in the days of my youth. My
China, after all, is no longer just a China of the imagination, which alone
could be the object of such a solidarity. It is the real material and spiritual
China, with all its glories and all its failings. But I can listen and learn
and offer the aid and comfort of my arguments as together we address the
challenges and struggle to realize the potentials of our common home, the
Earth.
May Heaven always shake with
laughter.