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.