MCLC: Chinese fascism's global consequences

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: Chinese fascism's global consequences
***********************************************************

Source: Truthout (2/5/12):
http://www.truth-out.org/chinese-fascisms-global-consequences/1327694358

Chinese Fascism's Global Consequences
by: Roland Farris, Truthout | News Analysis

I wake up this morning to the sun slicing warm, golden slits through
the barred windows of my little apartment in Dali Old Town, one of
southern China's most beautiful and relaxing cities. It isn't the
ample sunshine that wakes me up, however, it's the rousing military
band music that wafts in from across several courtyards and makes its
way into our otherwise quiet corner of existence. The music itself
wouldn't be so remarkable, even given its oddly archaic marching-band
sound, like some fragment of mid-20th century authoritarianism that
got trapped in the stratosphere and recently settled down back into my
ear.

What is remarkable is its ubiquity. It is the same music I battle to
suppress from my on-campus apartment in one of China's major cities.
It is the same music that blasts every morning at precisely 7 AM and
again at 4 PM on my top-level university campus. To me, it is
increasingly the sound of China.

Accompanying the music is a voice calling out callisthenic exercises
in a cadence that would be almost cheery if it didn't carry such grim
undertones of mindless conformity. "Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba,
Er, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba," the high-pitched male voice
encourages the often-absent students. This is a real-life equivalent
of the "physical jerks" in Orwell's "1984." Twice a day, on the mark,
speakers across the campus blast out this music. Students at my
university are obliged to participate at least once a week. There
seems to be a club for those who want to show particular enthusiasm. I
am told that these exercises along with their uniform marching music
are obligatory daily routines on all school campuses up until the end
of high school. Failure to show sufficient enthusiasm in one's daily
jerks is grounds for academic penalties. This aspect of living and
studying in China is something that it seems is often missed in the
excessively positive and business-oriented coverage given by the
mainstream media, and it is part of a troubling trend that I am most
able to witness in the education system - but which extends to every
facet of life in the Middle Kingdom.

There was a time when China was referred to as a society which was
Communist or Post-Communist; today, the terms Authoritarian Capitalist
or Capitalist with Asian/Chinese Characteristics are more common.
However, there is a new term that appears to be increasingly
applicable to the operation of the Chinese state and its impact on the
lives of Chinese people and, above all, the education of Chinese youth
born in the 1990s. It is increasingly clear that China is the most
powerful, mature and internationally accepted fascist state in global
history and its status as such should cause us all a great deal of
concern.

To call China a fascist state is nothing particularly novel. In March
2010, the Taipei Times published an editorial by a J. Michael Cole
[3], which refers to the writings of Umberto Eco and Robert Paxton to
match accepted definitions of fascism with the socio-political
realities in China. Cole points to the realities of emphasizing the
role of the nation in all matters, including sports; a sense of
national grievance as the core of national identity; the paranoid
control of any potential opposition; and the rise of Han Chinese
racism. Cole is right in much of his analysis. But for all its
correctness, his analysis from Taipei cannot compare to the horror
that is the lived reality of watching this fascist state unfold before
one's very eyes in the center of Chinese power in Beijing.

Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as "a form of political
behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline,
humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy
and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist
militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with
traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of
internal cleansing and external expansion."

As an educator trying to inculcate a sense of global citizenship in
young Chinese, these characteristics are far too common in my
encounters with the minds of Chinese youth. The most succinct example
of such indoctrination came when one of my "International Education"
students became angry about a discussion concerning global
environmental degradation. Despite the fact that the documentary which
framed our discussion focused on a wide range of global environmental
issues and that it in fact made no reference to China, she insisted
that I was shaming Chinese people by talking about the environment.
She followed on to insist that since China had been humiliated by
foreign powers with advanced weaponry, they had no choice but to
develop as quickly as possible better weapons so that they could
regain their dignity and territorial integrity. The rapidity with
which a discussion of global environmental issues jumped to a rant on
Chinese national humiliation is telling: As anyone who has spent time
face to face with regular Chinese people is aware, one never knows
exactly what will trigger such mental leaps.

It becomes clear very early on to those who venture outside the venues
of the rich, powerful and tactful, that the education system is rife
with lessons in national humiliation, social Darwinism and the cult of
the nation. Students are taught that, prior to recent history, China
was the dominant power in the world, with 5,000 years of uninterrupted
power and prosperity. Any attempt to engage in a discussion concerning
the correctness of referring to the various pre-national
ethno-cultural entities that contended for the territory of what is
now called the People's Republic of China in nation-state terms is met
with hostility. Never mind that, until 1949, the geographic
nation-state known as "China" today had not really existed, that a
series of different ethnic and cultural groups, coexisting in separate
kingdoms, speaking different languages and carrying on different
customs, competed for supremacy much the same way that various
European nations competed until recent times. When I try to impress
that arguing for an imagined 5,000-year-old Chinese empire which must
be re-established is akin to Italians insisting on the restoration of
the Roman Empire, I am met with a wall of stubborn and often hostile
refusal.

Social Darwinism has reached the level of state religion in modern
Chinese society, with the ubiquitous phrases expounding the importance
of "developing oneself" and "using one's advantage" to prove one's
fitness over others. There is usually a racial overtone to such talk,
with the Han Chinese cast as the dominant race in the globe that - due
to national complacency - were recently overtaken by hairy barbarians
from the West, but will eventually reinstate their domination over the
globe. Those of other ethnic origins, particularly of African descent,
are often spoken of in condescending, almost sub-human terms, as a
kind of hapless helper race to be valued for their physical strength
and musical talents, but otherwise to be "managed" by one of the
superior, more "developed" races. Such views are not implicitly
conveyed, but explicitly, in the form of an overtly racist natural
history taught in the school system wherein Chinese physical
characteristics of reduced body hair and physical size are taken to
indicate a higher level of racial development over hairier and
supposedly more physically robust Europeans and Africans who only
recently became civilized and so bear the characteristics of a harsher
lifestyle. My students unflinchingly express a condescending affection
for Africans, with statements such as, "I like black people, because,
since they are closer to animals, they are really good at sports."
There is a widespread belief among average Chinese that Africans and
Chinese are not able to produce offspring together and, therefore,
effectively constitute separate species.

Another key indicator of fascist state organization is the
militarization of the youth, which is an integral part of the Chinese
education system - and indeed of Chinese working life. All university
students in their freshman year are obliged to enroll in five weeks of
military training and indoctrination, most of which consists in
standing still for long periods of time, marching for hours on end
from 5 AM until 1 AM, shouting, "Yi! Er!" over and over and
mass-rehearsed and largely useless hand-to-hand combat drills. While
some schools provide riflery and first-aid training, the purpose of
the training is largely to inculcate in the students a sense that
their education is part of the nation's strength rather than their
individual personal aspirations. Such training begins in middle school
and is a yearly event all the way up until the first year of
university, after which it ceases. There truly is nothing scarier than
18-year-old boys dressed up in ill-fitting military uniforms running
around with plastic truncheons.

While Chinese rarely express an open desire for imperialist expansion,
an ideological sense of the inevitability of such expansion is a
hidden part of national political consciousness. Rather than being
self-admitted expansionists, Chinese expansion is instead expressed by
characterizing foreign nations as "part of China" which must one day
be reconquered and brought into the fold of the motherland to redress
the historic injustices of foreign domination by restoring territorial
integrity. The fact that these Asian nations are not part of the
People's Republic of China (PRC), as they are supposed to be, is yet
further ammunition for a sense of national grievance and humiliation.
Press university students on the matter and one will quite easily be
told that not only Taiwan and Tibet, but Mongolia, the Koreas, much or
all of South-East Asia, Japan and most of the Philippines are somehow
"part of China." The argument relies on obscure racial and cultural
connections that somehow make these independent nations part of a
larger Han empire that - while never having existed in the past as a
national entity and, even on a cultural level, has no basis in
linguistic and genetic links - must one day be re-established for
Chinese dignity and territorial integrity. So, while Chinese will say
that China is a "peaceful country" which does not have imperialist
aims, such peace and nonaggression is contingent upon the restoration
of the territorial integrity of an imagined (Han) Chinese empire that
would consume a significant amount of the nations surrounding the PRC.
I learned of this while discussing Chinese history with some students,
who, after vigorously extolling the truth of what they were taught,
then insisted they were "not nationalists," since such desire for
"reintegration" is a return to an (imagined) historic norm rather than
a national expansion into new territory.

Fascist states have long relied upon their competitive advantage in
attracting foreign investment. Authoritarian control of the labor
force and national policymaking makes good business sense. Such was
the case with Italy and Germany during the inter-war period and such
is the case with China's dizzyingly rapid rise today. The ability of a
totalitarian fascist state to control the labor force, suppress
dissent and put investment over social welfare makes such states
highly attractive to businesses. Such is the case today with China.
Coca-Cola's CEO inadvertently demonstrated the fascist nature of the
Chinese state when he lauded [4] the "one-stop shop in terms of the
Chinese foreign investment agency," wherein the federal and local
Chinese government agencies are competing for investment, with their
population paying the cost in terms of reduced labor rights and
environmental protections.

Chinese will often accept this as a necessary part of their national
development, a development which seems increasingly to benefit only
those with power and connections and to increasingly marginalize the
common people. One need not look merely at the statements of business
leaders, but much mainstream media attention has praised the
"efficiency" of the Chinese fascist regime while deriding the
clumsiness and inconvenience of states which remain nominal liberal
democracies.

The issue of Chinese fascism is one which the people of the world must
pay much greater attention than they have to date. Too much emphasis
is placed on the economic power of China without thought to the
origins of this power and the long-term sociopolitical consequences it
may have for the globe. The very effective media and information
control mechanisms of the CCP, yet another indicator of a fascist
state, exacerbates this issue. Only those such as myself, who operate
in the education system and other front-line social roles, have the
contact with life in China to see through the smoke and mirrors
deployed by the government against any legitimate mainstream
information-collection system, be it journalists or business people.
Both of these groups are carefully watched and have their information
pre-packaged, with stringent and well-documented efforts to prevent
access to undesirable information and coercive measures to discourage
its dissemination where it is found. Only those teachers, students and
volunteers unimportant enough to go under the radar, such as myself,
are able to get the real story and get it out without significant
danger to ourselves. It is high time the world started paying
attention to these stories below the gloss and sheen of
state-sponsored and state-monitored mainstream media outlets which,
for various reasons, are unable or unwilling to suffer the
consequences of getting and reporting the truth about the Chinese
state.

If the Chinese fascist regime is permitted by the international
community to continue its rise to prominence, then the consequences
will be borne by the people of democratic nations and we have already
seen the early stages of this global trend. A powerful fascist state
of such maturity and size in the world will increasingly come to
determine political debate in nominally democratic countries as the
economic advantages of such a regime draws more and more financial
resources away from less "efficient" political systems. If China
continues to be able to use its fascist state apparatus to attract
investment at the cost of liberal democratic nations, then the
characteristics of these nations will tend toward increasing fascism
in an imitative defensive response.

This trend is already far advanced and if it remains unchecked by the
active engagement and protest of constituent peoples in the form of
actively entrenching our essential social and political norms of
individual rights and egalitarian application of the rule of law, then
we will witness the slow erosion of the democratic freedoms that were
fought for nearly 70 years ago. It is no longer adequate to harp on
about "human rights." The necessity of economically isolating regimes
which fail to meet certain normative political and legal standards is
of paramount importance to the long-term survival of the idea of
pluralist government which protects a measure of individual freedom.

Failure to do so will result in an inevitable process of
socio-cultural decline which will prove hard to reverse in the short
to medium term. Democracy is messy and individual freedoms are
inconvenient for the operation of the socioeconomic system we use to
organize the globe. That we recognize this does not logically lead to
the conclusion that we should submit to the dilution of those freedoms
out of a misplaced desire for expediency. The reason we pursued
increasing market freedoms in the past 70 years was ostensibly to
spread democratic and individual freedoms. If we now find that the
means have come into conflict with the end, it is time to come back to
the drawing board, lest in our pursuit of the material well-being that
underpins a society which can afford educated, independent individual
life, we end up creating the conditions for subsuming all individual
freedom and development to fascist ideals of national power and undo
all the achievements of 70 years of struggle and sacrifice.