China General Discussion

[anvi]

China sending ships to those waters just to appease a few protestors in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen is really quite silly.  Despite some mild fusses, nobody made much of a deal out of those islands until they were identified as possible oil exploration targets in the late '60's.  The U.S. military has actually used one of them, with the permission of the Japanese government, for training exercises in the last few decades too.  Chinese protestors have intermittently grown hot and bothered about Japan and boycotted Japanese goods since the May 4th movement in 1919.  But, despite the fact that the islands sometimes, as a proxy, inspire hostilities that are over other stuff, China is not going to get in any real skirmish with Japan over them.  They're really not that stupid.  Even with their constitution and self-defense forces provisions, Japan has outstanding air force technology (they make most of our warplane electronics and wing tech), and their naval armada, I'm told, is larger than the British fleet.  They also give lots of annual aid money to China and were the first international helpers on the scene after the terrible earthquake in Sichuan in 2010.  So, for all the aggrieved chest-beating, China is not really going to throw down over those tiny islands.  Both countries have much more important things to worry about. 

[anvi]

Chinese civil wars generally cost tens, hundreds of millions of lives.  It's easy for us sitting in comfy chairs by the glowing lights of our computer screens to wish for the overthrow of a regime, especially when we don't have to suffer the costs.  Sometimes the satisfaction of fulfilling our own political ideals comes at too great a cost for others.  Just a thought.

[anvi]

Beet, China and Syria are two different situations, their political circumstances and demographics and recent histories are quite distinct--I don't think the same dynamics obtain in both societies. 

[anvi]

Beet, I don't like the current standing committee either, neither do I like the autocratic and repressive ways that the government cracks down on speech, political dissent or certain kinds of religious practice.  Nobody is saying they approve of any of these things, and practically none of the Chinese friends or students I have approve of them either.

But what you're talking about is bringing about a political change in China through violence or mass rebellion.  That's a decision that the Chinese populous makes, not you.  Since the late '70's, the bulk of Chinese in the largest urban areas have felt, on the whole, that their lives have improved because of party governance, in terms of their economic well-being, their educational opportunities and in terms of their political lives (neither they nor their children have to worry about struggle sessions and neighborhood searches in passing anymore).  On top of that, rural economic reform was one of the first things the new regime in the late '70's and early '80's did, ending collectives, allowing farmers to develop side-industries and so forth.  In the last several decades, though many farmers have seen their production decline to the breaking point, in many cases they blame it on getting crowded out on the market and not because of government policies, and in any event, education has become more widely available to them in the last twenty-five years too. 

Now none of this is to deny that there are problems, and the Chinese populous not only knows about them and complains about them frequently, but they also often stage anti-government protests on a sustained basis when the problems appear to them to be stark or really threatening (factories poisoning water-stores in the countryside, for example).  But the appointment of a lackluster standing committee is not going to provoke the populous at large into a rebellious mood--as long as they are at least perceived to continue to attend to steps that result in economic development, and as long as they're perceived to stand strong for Chinese interests in international relations--given the legacies of the 19th and 20th centuries--, they're not going to get that riled over that.  They don't really expect the CCP to undertake dramatic government structural reforms.  If you find that disappointing, then blame the Chinese populous.  They don't, in the aggregate, maintain this stance out of ignorance nor out of some stereotypical cultural values regarding social harmony.  They don't believe or trust what government leaders say about many things, but they're not about to risk stark means which would constitute a major threat to their own lives and the lives of their families if they still see the balance of their circumstances as either favorable or tolerable and in the absence of anything which strikes that balance in the decisively opposite direction, it will stay that way.

And that lack of expectation is another element of CCP rule that explains the party's staying power.  The government does indeed help bring about such results by controlling the media and creating "nationalist diversions" at crucial times of political upheaval (think of how the Japanese "takeover" of Diaoyu Dao was made into a big deal at the very time when Xi disappeared and Bo and his wife were being dealt with).  In certain senses, protest and not outright uprising has been the most effective means of prompting government change, as the government has to large degrees accommodated such protests over the long run.  They have accommodated on hukou policy by relaxing restrictions, on "private schools" for urban migrant workers, on legally codifying more and more regional exceptions to one-child policy restrictions, and so on.  There is a nice collection of essays that illustrates this strategy of government accommodation to protest in edited by Mark Seldon and Elizabeth Perry called Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance in the Routledge series on Asia's Transformations that details a lot  of this quite well.  The government might just kill people who start a rebellion, but, depending on the conduct of the protest, they might accommodate protestors in various ways, and this latter fact, to me, at least partially explains why protests have become so prevalent in modern China. 

I agree with most of the sentiments you're expressing, Beet, but on the ground level, China is not Syria, and you that fact is too important to dismiss with a terse analogy that doesn't fit.  As fas the top leadership in China has been perceived by most of the populous in the last thirty years, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were not even close to being perceived by the Chinese populous like Qaddafi or Asad were in Egypt and Syria, and even if people either don't know him yet or who don't think highly of him, Xi Jinping isn't perceived to be on a par with these other figures either.       

[anvi]

I appreciate your points, politicus, and I understand what you're saying  But it's hard for me to see a scenario where an attempt to violently overthrow the government would not invoke a civil war in China.  There are lots of people, many of them in industry, many with nationalist sentiments, and so forth, who have various but important things at stake in the current system.  I'm also not sure I'd like to see a military overthrow, since members of the PLA are not, to my knowledge, fans of democratization.  And, while the following is in no way meant to be a comment about any people's "ability to govern themselves," democracy is not like wallpaper; one doesn't just put it up in the form of certain institutions and expect it to function well immediately.  The development of democracy also requires a socialization process in which people of different cultural heritages have to imbibe lots of basic assumptions about citizenship for which there may not be many precedents in the culture in question. That's not a statement about any fixed cultural essence or innate ability of certain peoples, since I don't believe in either of these at all.  It's about process, I think.  And there is also something to be said for allowing societies do develop democracies according to their own precedents, values and goals. 

In a certain way, maybe having a lackluster regime like this one will enhance the likelihood of popular discontent, if they are really not only as politically anti-reformist but also economically incompetent as I am hearing.  If they do a bad job, it might prompt a change in course.  Other only superficially political reformers like Wang Yang and Wen Jiaobao might actually, by virtue of their very competence, ensure the persistence of the political status quo for a longer period.

In any case, it's perhaps just not in me to call for massive civil unrest that would inevitably result in incredible personal devastation for so many people, which furthermore has no guarantee of succeeding, just to witness the furthering of what my own political ideals are.  And revolutions are a tricky business too; lots of things can go wrong with them, lots of things can be made worse, and those things are especially prone to happen without the social transformations that building a democratic culture and not just a democratic polity require.  Sun Zhongshan, in some inexact and general but important ways, was right about some of these issues, but his ideas were overtaken after his death by the fervor of the Guomindang and Gongchandang parties, which were, as it happens, both revolutionary parties.   

[anvi]

Well, Beet, I'll just say a few things briefly.

it's very easy to find incidents of setbacks, halting change, reversals of course, and all the rest of it, in CCP's China.  The CCP often handles things in profoundly regressive and repressive ways; there is no arguing with that.  I'm not justifying the way they are handling things, and I too wish China had a far more democratic government now than it does.  But, even were China to be governed by a democratic polity now, the 1.5 billion person population, the 135 million and rapidly growing numbers of migrant workers in China, the cronyism in private and public sectors, all of them would still present enormously difficult challenges that could not be solved immediately or easily, or free of pain to everyone. Just changing the leadership and overhauling the institutional structure of the Chinese government is not going to result in stories like the ones you linked immediately disappearing from those media outlets or there continuing to be terrible difficulties associated with them.

I'm not pro-CCP.  But I am anti-millions of people dying to get rid of the present crop.  If that disappoints you, I'm sorry.  But, then again, I don't get to decide that matter any more than any poster on this thread.

Beet, you respond much more quickly on a thread where someone argues with you than you do on a thread when someone's trying to defend your position.    Just teasing.

[anvi]

Frodo, it's really hard for me to predict that.  There are a lot of political theorists in Singapore and even in mainland China writing about the need to establish culturally Chinese forms of democracy.  One of those theorists, in mainland China, is named Jiang Qing, and he is an advocate of a kind of tricameral legislature in a parliamentary system with familiar forms of upper and lower house being elected and majority parties choosing a prime minister, while a third house, so so-called "House of Junzi" (Noblemen), constituted of people who have passed updated Confucian-style civil service exams, would serve in a policy advisory and approval role.  I don't think his works have been translated into English though.  There is another theorist in the Philosophy Department at the National University of Singapore named Sor Hoon Tan who several years ago wrote a book called Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction, in which she suggests that the development of democracy in China will have to begin with community and region-level cooperative associations and then work its way into municipal, provincial and then national levels of government, so that the populous can become socialized into and learn how to decide matters of importance to them through collaborative deliberation.  She is often invited to China to give talks, though, and her book has just been translated into Chinese as well. There are other political theorists in mainland China who write more superficially and vaguely about developing democracy in China too, but these two are probably the most serious academic advocates, in my view.

But this is all on the level of theoretical works.  The problem with the CCP is that they just maintain very tight control of municipal and provincial political processes, and even though there is marked factionalism within the party, the selection process of new generations of leadership is the result of a combination of influence and power-peddling and "inbreeding" at the highest levels.  I concede freely that it's hard for me to see, even among people like Wang Yang, how that insular system can unravel without literally being cracked open.  But the potential costs at this point, given the sheer numbers of people with so much at stake in the system, including the PLA, would, in my view, by incredible and not obviously worth it.  Revolutions in China in the past century have been utterly disastrous, and have never produced their intended results.  Will a thoroughgoing political restructuring happen in China in the next fifty years?  I don't know, but at the moment, I don't honestly see a path to it.  I wish something like what Tan talks about could slowly unfold, but I'm not terribly optimistic that it will.  

[anvi]

Beet,

What we are talking about is that a transition of China to a democracy would, as far as anyone can tell now, require an overthrow of the CCP.  There are, for me, several things that follow from that fact.

First of all, while the value of democracy for mainland Chinese people might indeed be great, so great that after 50 years, they would be as unwilling to part with it as Indians, they have to get there.  And the manner of China's getting there is nothing like India's.  India was colonized for a century and during the period had quasi-democratic governmental structures established.  When the British left, the Indian politicians collaborated on setting up their own representative system; it didn't require a revolution as a total political transformation of China would.

In the case of an attempted revolution, who do you think the PLA is going to line up with?  To whom are their fortunes and prospects staked?  Sure, some of them might break away or refuse to defend the government, just as the first PLA units sent to break up the Tiananmen protests refused to attack the protestors in order to disperse them, but units were eventually found who did it quite swiftly and repulsively.  The PLA has an active force of about 2.5 million, with more in the form of reserves and paramilitary groups.  The possibility that a revolution in that country could "end with little or no loss of life" is nil.  Really.  Absolutely nil.  It's not just fear-mongering, it's numbers.

There is a dimension of this problem that is very personal to me too.  I have many close friends in China, my girlfriend's mother and family live there, my former stepdaughter lives there.  Many of these people live in Beijing and environs.  They have in some cases labored hard their entire lives and are trying to maintain their health in their retirement, in others they are getting educations, trying to build livelihoods and improve their circumstances.  I am not particularly anxious to watch them have their lives put at grave risk in the middle of a national bloodbath and at the mercy of a revolutionary attempt that has every possibility of failing tragically in the attempt, and in any event suffer incredible hardship, if the circumstances are not dire enough to warrant it.  And a lackluster and somewhat regressive standing committee are not, to my mind, dire enough circumstances.  When you talk like you are talking in this thread, you give me the impression that, in the tendrils of your "rule of logical reasoning," the fates of people, real individuals on the ground, are not as important to you as your political ideals, and that bothers me.  

I had a number of friends who were active participants in the Tiananmen protests of '89.  They were there in the square for several months, they were committed young people at the time, they were there when the bullets, grenades and tanks came and fled into the night as their friends got mowed down and thrown into shackles for months on end.  They have since told me tons of stories about two of the leaders of the reform movement, Wang Dan and Chai Ling, and their feelings about how things unfolded and what has happened since.  Wang at the time, despite his devotion to the protests, when it became clear that a crackdown was immanent, urged his fellow protest leaders to disperse the crowd; people had been there for months, sanitary conditions were deteriorating rapidly, people were getting sick, and he thought that, by focusing national attention on the need for reform for months, the movement had done all it could for now and should live to continue the struggle.  Chai Ling, on the contrary, cowed her followers in the square to stay, even if the crackdown happened, and even predicted in interviews that the crackdown would happen, that much blood would be shed, and that it had to take place.  Chai got her way.  But, just before the onset of the attack on the students, Chai Ling fled, leaving those that had voted at her urging to face down the coming horror behind to fend for themselves, and came to the U.S. to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Wang, who had tried to persuade his fellow protestors to disperse before anyone was hurt, stayed in the square despite his cals not being heeded, was injured, watched his friends die, and spent months in prison before being released to study in the U.S., even though he dreaded leaving his parents behind.  My own friends, who were there in the square, still burn with rage about Chai's betrayal, and speak fondly of Wang's loyalty.  They wonder now if any young people in China could demonstrate Wang's fortitude and leadership.  But, to a person, they all conclude now that remaining in the square only to be slaughtered by the armed forces was not worth it.  Some acknowledge that at least some of the reforms they had been calling for were carried through in the following ten years, though you can bet that all of them hate the CCP with a bitter resentment for what they did.  But they also, again to a person, testify to me that it was naive of them to ever believe that this iron-fisted regime would ever back down in the face of only a few thousand protestors, even when literally the whole nation had overtly, vocally and financially supported their cause.  They say pursuing reforms through other avenues is much more likely to work out in the long run, even though the intermediate period will be persistently difficult, and even if they don't, conditions, even in the worst of circumstances, are better for people if they can work hard and carve out hope for themselves in their daily lives.  

Beet, these friends of mine are from China, they suffer modern China's difficulties far more than you and me.  In thinking about my own position on this issue, I'm compelled to take their word over yours.

[anvi]

You think I'm invoking the experiences of my friends from China to show off "heated self-righteousness" and defend the CCP?  Ok.  I'm invoking them because they've actually had experience with this that they think they learned some important lessons from, things I myself, at least, wouldn't have learned by sitting in a chair and reading books, which is mostly all I do.  I'm also invoking them because I happen to care about the welfare of people I know and love there.  If you consider such concerns illegitimate and irrelevant varia of this kind of discussion that are just an indulgence in self-righteousness, then fine.

What it's decidedly not is an excuse to "defend" the CCP.  I'm hardly arguing that China would not be better off if the Standing Committee or the entire CCP were gone right now.  I agree entirely that it would be.  Probably most Chinese people would agree too.  I just think you're really underestimating the great costs, and incredibly great risks of failure, of a revolution there, and a more careful estimation of these ought to be part of the equation.  JMO

[anvi]

I am actually interested in learning more about the development of modern Chinese pedagogical approaches to education.  I've done seminars and partial classes on traditional and modern educational systems in China and have taught in Japan for a stretch of about a year and a half, but have not really looked into the origins of the model of "teacher lectures, student just memorizes" very much, a model that has taken root in much of East Asia.   

The establishment of Western-style universities, with modern curricula, dates back to the late nineteenth century, and the Confucian civil service exams were abolished nationwide in 1905.  Of course, scientific and technical learning (li ke) have since that time been of foremost in mainland education in different contexts, while the humanities (wen ke) have fallen somewhat into the background.  But I wonder if the active-teacher, passive student roles map onto that change in some significant way.

Even though, in classical Chinese education, the content of study was largely humanistic and focused on the texts of antiquity which did have to be committed to memory, from everything I can tell, the pedagogical roles of students were very active ones in much of Chinese history.  The Confucian texts that students had to master were themselves significantly in the form of shoter or longer conversations between teachers and students, where students are represented as questioning, challenging, doubting, and sometimes even being better than their teachers.  The medieval ("Neo") Confucian records of the most prominent Song and Ming dynasty teachers are also in the literary form of conversations.  Moreover, the process of writing the Confucian civil service exams often required lots of student creativity, at least at certain periods of the exams' histories.  The students not only had to write at least semi-original commentarial essays, but also compose their own poems in the requisite styles and write practical essays on how to implement certain political principles in solving administrative problems of various kinds.  So, in many periods of classical China, students were required to be both active and creative in interaction with teachers and examinations, despite the fact that they were studying and reading, and surely were still expected to memorize and master, "the classics" as their content.  This kind of pedagogical pattern can be seen prolifically in Tang and Song Buddhist literature as well.

My point, I guess, is that modern individualism is not the only context in which the expectations that students should be active and creative can thrive.  Based on my studies of classical Chinese education, the relatively passive postures of students strike me as a departure from, and not consistent with, classical Chinese pedagogical practice.  So I wonder, and intend to find out somehow, whether or to what degree the roles of teacher and student we see in Chinese and East Asian classrooms now actually comes out of the movements here that led to the adoption of modern and, in origin, largely foreign content like the sciences, technical training and so on.  I'm hardly sure that such is the case, but based on my much greater familiarity with classical Chinese education, I do suspect that something like this is what happened.   

[anvi]

That story about Xi Jinping quoting the classics in support of his policies is a good demonstration of how ideologically strange and contorted modern China's political leadership is with the culture's heritage.  Of course, it's not uncommon for leaders to superficially quote classics in support of their own agenda; that's done in every country.  Plus, the state subsidization of Confucian revivalism has been going on since the 80's.  But Xi's invocation of Legalists like Hanfeizi is a little chilling--Hanfei declared that in a "legalist" (fa jia) state, everyone should be subject to the law but the ruler himself.  It's also odd to laud both Legalist and Confucian principles given that they have virtually opposite attitudes towards resorting to law as a first solution to social problems.  The traditional political synthesis known as "inner Legalism and outer Confucianism" represented an inclination for rulers to socialize the common people with Confucian teachings but use harsh punishments inside the court to control mischievous ministers.  Of course, Xi may in a way be signaling to the more conservative Maoist actors in the leadership that he will be strict with Hong Kong by citing Legalists like Hanfei, since Mao himself was an overt admirer of Hanfei's political thought.  It's just that modern political and financial interests in China play fast and loose with their tradition, and that often results in lots of incoherent associations of tradition and modernity.

How surreal that play can get is very visible sometimes.  In the summer of 2010, I was invited to present a paper at a national and international conference of Daoism scholars in Zhengzhou.  The conference was not organized by an academic institution, but by a private entrepreneur who thought the promulgation of Daoist principles could be productive for business practices ().  The conference was held on the top level of a shopping mall complex the guy owned, and adjacent to the conference site on that level was a practice shooting range for commercial hunters.  When we went inside the facility where the conference was held, the walls were pasted from one end to the other with CCP political slogans about the virtues of communism ().  And up we went, one by one, to give our academic papers on various traditional Daoist texts, while our televised images were broadcast on big screens on the street in front of the building, so that everyone could see that this was where all the foreigners hung out in Zhengzhou.

I actually love to go to mainland China, but sometimes the place is just flippin' weird.  Xi Jinping walking around quoting Hanfeizi and Confucius in support of a supposedly coherent political agenda is just another example of that.