MCLC: Tocqueville in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Lawrence <klawrence at chinainstitute.org>
Subject: Tocqueville in China
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Last week, the MCLC list featured a WSJ article about Yang Jisheng reading
Hayek; this week, Dissent magazine features an article about de
Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution having a broad audience in
China. Maybe the neo-cons should open a think-tank in Beijing.

Kevin
 

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Source: Dissent (5/22/13):
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/tocqueville-in-china

 
“Tocqueville in China”
by Rebecca Liao

One of the most vibrant intellectual discussions in China this year began
with a tweet on Weibo, China’s premier micro-blogging service and anointed
online town square. Economist Hua Sheng had just met with Politburo
Standing Committee member Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption czar,
charged with fixing the country’s most important political problem. As
Sinologist Joseph Fewsmith reported, Hua breathlessly tweeted after the
meeting:

<<I went to the sea [海, an apparent abbreviation for 中南海, the seat of
Communist power] to see my old leader. He recommended I read Tocqueville’s
The Old Regime and the French Revolution. He believes that a big country
like China that is playing such an important role in the world, whether
viewed from the perspective of history or the external environment facing
it today, will not modernize all that smoothly. The price the Chinese
people have paid is still not enough.>>

Hua’s self-congratulatory reporting on social media would spur the
cheapest propaganda campaign the Chinese government has instituted in
years—one that is part of a tradition of intellectual suggestion by senior
Chinese leaders, usually through sharing current reading lists. Wen
Jiabao, China’s previous premier, popularized Marcus Aurelius’s The
Meditations by revealing that he had read it over a hundred times. And
since Wang plugged The Old Regime late last year, Tocqueville’s tome has
been front and center at the bookstore of the Party School of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of China, where China’s future leaders
are trained. The curious and ambitious in China are reading it, too,
making it one of the country’s best-selling titles in the last few months.

Wang is perceived as a frank, pragmatic, and highly competent and
thoughtful leader. He made his name running the Beijing Olympics, dealing
with the outbreak of SARS in 2003, and shepherding China’s economy in the
last administration. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the discussion
he engendered about Tocqueville and modern China has been so simple, only
producing a couple uncomfortable yet ultimately straightforward takeaways.

The general consensus in China is that the book offers two main historical
lessons applicable to the country’s tenuous domestic situation. One, the
French Revolution burst forth not when France’s economy was at a nadir and
the central government strong, but when there was relative prosperity and
political reform. Two, it is the nature of revolution that those who carry
it out become what they most despise once in power. Such aphoristic
caveats against both reform and revolution have been repeated for the last
few months and treated as novel and significant each time.

Still, reform-minded Chinese can take comfort in the fact that the new
treatment of Tocqueville is so misguided as to be useless. Like France,
China’s path out of feudalism involved the subdivision of land among the
peasantry and the general enrichment of the underclass. New economic
rights brought additional burdens like taxes, legal obligations, and a
more involved civic role, though not necessarily a sense of civic duty.
Political dysfunction stemmed from the monetization of government offices.
(In France’s case, the government sold administrative positions and
entrenched those who held them much more explicitly.) Rural elections were
little more than a ritual, but peasants clung to them as an outlet for
political action even as they gladly embraced centralization at the upper
levels of government. Any democratic gains made by replacing birth with
money as the passport to power met with great resistance from the
traditional social hierarchy, at the top of which sat an increasingly
irrelevant aristocracy.

But the differences are vital. The lack of a meaningful vote in China has
pushed people at the grassroots to assert themselves through
demonstrations and riots. Not all make international headlines the way an
uprising in the village of Wukan did in 2011 because most do not result in
the demonstrators’ demands being met. Still, compromises between villagers
and officials are not uncommon and indicate a healthy demand for Communist
Party accountability.

And while the princeling class, comprised of the offspring of powerful
Communist Party officials, may seem to be post-revolutionary China’s
version of pre-revolutionary France’s aristocracy, the princelings are
more evenly matched, both politically and socially, by a faction of cadres
without prestigious family backgrounds. Neither group is immune from the
uncertainties or demands of political life, and patronage within the CCP
hierarchy can cross faction lines. Though from humble birth, Wang Qishan
married into a princeling family and was mentored by his father-in-law.
And princeling status by no means assures political survival. Bo Xilai,
whose father Bo Yibo is one of the Eight Immortals in Mao Zedong’s
original circle, was deposed in spectacular fashion last year from his
position as Party Secretary of Chongqing and awaits trial.

This is not to say that a spirit of egalitarianism guides China. There is
no shortage of influential voices calling for reform. However, the
overwhelming tone is not righteous indignation in support of the
disadvantaged but practical concern that a vastly unequal society will not
survive. Even members of China’s liberal intelligentsia feel the need to
constantly answer to the country’s pragmatic approach to reform. The
pre-revolutionary French elite, however, for all their disdain for the
lower classes, expressed a passionate sympathy for the peasantry. The
revolutionary ideas of French intellectuals gained traction among an
already receptive audience. As much as the Chinese Communist Party would
like to believe that an unbridled love of liberty is the greatest threat
to its existence, the truth is that many of its critics are also trying to
protect against chaos.

Perhaps it is thanks to the absence of such liberal fervor that The Old
Regime was not disqualified for consumption by the normally
hyper-sensitive party cadre—despite the book’s affirmation of liberty as
the antidote to a rotting post-revolutionary society.

Fascination with Tocqueville’s book is curious in other ways as well. In
its urgency to find a solution to China’s complex problems, the CCP fails
to acknowledge that it occupies the same contemporary world and shares the
same modern revolutionary tradition as those looking to overhaul or depose
it. If reform jitters had the leadership looking for possible sources of
revolution within Chinese society, it did not have to look further than
China’s own past. Why reach for a reference as distant as Tocqueville?

What most distinguishes modern China from Bourbon France is the Communist
Party’s staunchly conservative and technical approach to reform.
Tocqueville marveled at how France’s pre-revolutionary government, “which
was so overbearing and despotic when all was submission, lost its presence
of mind at the first show of resistance, was alarmed by the mildest
criticism, and terrified at the least noise.” The government was so
enthusiastic about reform that, in the thirty to forty years leading up to
the French Revolution, it invested heavily in public projects, leading to
debts to outside contractors that could not be repaid. Laws were loosely
enforced to stave off popular resistance. The government remained
functional and absolute at the highest levels, but organizational friction
severely hampered the activities of day-to-day administration. Frustration
with dysfunction grew into a more serious objection to injustice as
government continued to offer moral rationales for its policies.

In contrast, the Chinese government is known for its administrative
prowess, given credit for much of China’s economic growth. The central
authority tightly controls the core economic indicators by managing
resources, policies, and, in some cases, national projects with an eye
toward pursuing growth efficiently. At the provincial level, there is
flexibility and policy experimentation, with successful results sometimes
adopted nationally. The bureaucratic infrastructure that runs the country
undergoes reorganization when administrative functions need to be
streamlined. Most recently, the National People’s Congress in March
reduced the number of ministries under the State Council, China’s cabinet,
from twenty-seven to twenty-five. Among other changes, the controversial
(and corrupt) Ministry of Railways was split into two to separate
oversight of trains and railways from the government’s commercial
interaction with the industry. According to Xinhua, China’s chief news
agency, the latest round of restructuring is the seventh in the last three
decades.

This is not to say that the bureaucracy is robust: corruption
significantly retards government functions on all levels, and the legal
and regulatory infrastructure tends to play catch-up with new social and
economic developments and demands. Still, the country’s leaders are on the
whole confident they will make the structural adjustments necessary to
remain on track for economic preeminence by 2030.

Such faith comes from a belief in the Chinese governance tradition rather
than the institutions themselves. Pan Wei, a leading scholar of Chinese
politics with a traditionalist bent, sums up the sentiment nicely, writing
that meritocracy is

<<[t]he greatest contribution that China has made to the political
civilization in the world…Today, both the government and party officials
must go through this process of examination and evaluation. As to
accountability, this meritocracy is not inferior to electoral democracy.>>

When naming the virtues of their current system of governance, the Chinese
make sure to mention that Voltaire was a great admirer of Imperial China’s
centralized system of rule by the mandarinate, which shares much in common
with the meritocracy that the Communist Party aspires to be. Tocqueville,
who also appreciated a well-run authoritarian system, was of a different
mind. To him, the Imperial Chinese system

<<produced subjects rather than citizens. The consequences extended far
beyond the political realm, creating a society characterized by
“tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability
without force, and material order without public morality.”>>

And yet, judging by his nostalgia for an enlightened and civic-minded
aristocracy, the Chinese might wonder if Tocqueville would appreciate the
current incarnation of what he found unimpressive the first time around.
He strongly implies that if an enlightened sovereign had been at the head
of state, France’s reform program would not have been so thoughtless and
therefore disastrous. It is a testament to their self-doubt that the
Chinese have not identified themselves as this special case despite their
pride in the governing infrastructure they’ve built over the last thirty
years.

The Old Regime, then, is a pep talk more than a warning. Tocqueville’s
conservative admiration of a learned aristocracy with a healthy sense of
noblesse oblige is ultimately a validation of the party’s pride in (still
maturing) modern Chinese governance—which it considers to be its greatest
strength and ticket to holding power in perpetuity. The lesson the Chinese
leadership wishes to learn is that as long as they prevent themselves from
becoming the bumbling administrators that pushed France toward revolution,
all will be well. This message could not be more welcome as the Chinese
have watched communism, whose authoritarian regimes looked briefly like
the future in the middle part of the last century, cede its revolutionary
mantle to liberal democracy.

Still, the worry of collapse persists. China’s insecurities are sustained
by the feeling that while it lives by the mantra that universal political
truths should not exist, the international consensus is that they are in
fact inevitable. Mao Zedong never shared Vladimir Lenin’s conviction that
communism should be spread throughout the world and the proletarian
dictatorship hastened. Aside from an initial bout of enthusiasm for
foreign revolutionary groups in the 1950s and ’60s, China’s active support
for international communism has been motivated more by anti-imperialist
sentiment. Its involvement in the Korean and Vietnam wars were defensive
measures against perceived geopolitical encroachment by the United States.
Its consistent courtship of rogue and Third World countries reveal just
how its leaders perceive its relationship with the international community
and, by extension, its vision as a country. In a speech given in 1943 on
the dissolution of the Comintern, the international communist organization
devoted to facilitating worldwide revolution, Mao stated,

<<Revolutionary movements can be neither exported nor imported. Despite
the fact that aid was accorded by the Comintern, the birth and development
of the Chinese Communist Party resulted from the fact that China herself
had a conscious working class…The internal situation in each country and
the relations between the different countries are more complicated than
they have been in the past and are changing more rapidly.>>

On a visit to Mexico in 2009, President Xi Jinping echoed the same
commitment to non-interference: “Well-fed foreigners have nothing better
to do than point fingers at China. But China does not export revolution;
we do not export poverty and hunger; and we do not interfere in the
affairs of others.” A significant part of China’s opposition to Western
liberalism, then as now, is based as much on ideological disagreement as
it is on the presumption of universality.

Nevertheless, more than ever, China’s government has a long-term interest
in not casting itself as the alternative to the West, lest it acknowledge
and validate the momentum of liberal capitalism. Even as China’s
leadership encourages nationalism, it believes that a foreign policy based
on balance of power is far preferable to aggression. It hardly matters
that the global elite have turned their gaze eastward as
liberal-capitalist democracy suffers from political and economic
stagnation. The China Model, a blueprint for successful state-controlled
capitalism, has its admirers outside of China. Few Chinese, though,
seriously suggest that other countries should try to imitate it.

Not that a similar exercise hasn’t been tried recently: former U.S.
president Bill Clinton met in 1999 with European leaders for a conference
entitled, “Progressive Governance in the 21st Century” to discuss the
“Third Way,” the middle ground between socialism and capitalism. Slavoj
Zizek’s lament on the proceedings still rings true today:

<<The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no
Second Way, no alternative to global capitalism, so that, in a kind of
mocking pseudo-Hegelian negation of negation, the Third Way brings us back
to the first and only way.>>

Liberal capitalism looks all the more permanent as it remains impervious
to serious reform and rebuffs critics and protest with seemingly little
consequence. Doomsday scenarios are merely used to stock the cocktail
armory of the Davos Man. The workers in Solidarity, the opposition Green
Movement in Iran, the salaried bourgeoisie in Tunisia and Egypt, the
jobless in Spain and Greece, the rioters in Bangkok, and the protesters at
Tiananmen—among many others—rose up to obtain what they felt they were
owed. But with few exceptions, their demands have been assimilated into a
cry for more liberal democracy—for a rightful place in the global
capitalist order, not socialism.

In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, a chorus of pundits
joked that China may be the one to save capitalism, and they weren’t so
wrong. China finds itself in a position not unlike that of its
geopolitical foes at the advent of widespread communist revolution:
questions abound about the country’s place in history and foreign values
that are anathema to its traditional way of life. China’s elites view
liberal democracy with the same wariness and disdain that many Western
capitalists felt for communism in the latter’s heyday. The CCP may be
quite happy to replicate the outcome of that rivalry.

Rebecca Liao is a corporate attorney and critic based in Silicon Valley,
founder of The Aleph Mag <http://thealephmag.com/>, and contributor to the
Atlantic, the LA Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Tea Leaf
Nation, and the New Inquiry.