The Inscrutable, continued


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It used to be a commonplace, before such things became politically incorrect, to refer to the Chinese as “inscrutable”, paradoxical. Yet evidence still abounds that to the western mind (one that would prefer to iron out, or deny, paradoxes), if not also to the Chinese, China remains a paradox. Niall Ferguson is only the latest of many to return from the middle kingdom talking up the fantastic economic activity he has just witnessed, only to pronounce in the next worried, unbelieving, breath that it is perhaps likely serious woes will soon befall the country. How can China be a global economic leader without a healthy domestic financial network or without free speech? In other words, how can China continue to grow economically without being a well-integrated national community with a more or less free internal market in matters economic and intellectual?

One asks because most of the history of industrialization in the west was centered and dependent on national economies and cultures. It is true that some historians have recently moved beyond the nation state as the primary unit of their analysis and now relate their studies to a larger story, for example that of the Atlantic world as a region of many interdependencies among disparate peoples. And it is true that historians inclined (wrongly, I think) to see victimization as a primary causal force in history argue that imperialism and slavery played an essential (though of course immoral) role in Atlantic history as a form of early industrial capital accumulation. Yet the economic value of empires to their founding nations has often been a point of debate over the last two hundred years. As arguments in favor of free trade put it, in a world that trades and travels more or less freely, there are no good economic incentives for empires. There are only pressures for societies to become well-integrated, law-bound nations that compete globally through specialization in certain industries, while developing a productive, self-ruling workforce. Cell phone Finland, for example.

This is not to deny that, in their time, the former European colonies served key political functions that one cannot readily value. Indeed, it is a mistake to think of nations or empires (whichever China is or is becoming) as primarily economic units. Eric Gans puts the question this way:

Was modern colonialism a fundamentally economic process, as Lenin affirmed in his 1916 Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism? [Nicholas] Boyle hints at the contrary when he refers to the colonies as providing an outlet for "the disturbed, the displaced, and the ambitious" from the homeland. The economic value of colonies is not a simple given; French colonialism was conducted on the assumption that they cost more than they brought in. They provided for the exportation, not primarily of goods, but of resentments, both literally and symbolically. Not only could the dissatisfied make their fortune in the colonies, but the metropolitan population’s self-image was raised by its participation, however remote, in a master-slave relationship with "subaltern" peoples.

Yet if empires have their economic costs, it is often remarked that today’s fast-rising China is more of an empire of many distinct regions, ruled by a corrupt, inefficient, and autocratic hierarchy of officials, than a western-style nation state. China is booming, in large part because of its success in serving western markets, in comparison with the desires of colonized “Chinese” “consumers”, the majority of who remain disenfranchised and impoverished. Where the former western imperial powers eventually enfranchised their industrial workforces and let them share in the symbolic aura of being colonizers, not colonized, something different seems, so far, to be happening in China.

To the extent there is now a Chinese middle class and consumer market, it seems to be at least as much an extension of western markets and firms – KFC, Carrefour, VW, Walmart - as it is a specifically Chinese consumer culture. The Chinese, while certainly patriotic in their ways (as the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations show), are not exactly the equivalent of western nationalists who, during the west’s industrialization, were often fixated on their own language, history, and culture. Niall Ferguson, as have many visitors (and intellectual property lawyers), remarks how keen the Chinese are to adopt foreign ways:

Another critical factor is the rising number of Chinese people who are learning English. I had not expected this, having rather believed the voguish line of a few years ago that our children would all have to learn Mandarin or perish. The reality is that in the major economic centres, English is ubiquitous. Street signs are in English as well as Chinese. Advertisements nearly all feature European models and at least one line of English. And young people are eager to try out their language skills. One keen freshman at Beijing University assumed I must be a visiting professor and asked if he could sit on my classes. I had been on campus less than 30 minutes.

China’s desire for foreign culture was brought home to me by a recent commenter at Belmont Club; "Yeo" told of a Chinese-Singaporean who, when on business in China, at first naturally tried to speak in Mandarin (the Chinese call it Putonghua, the common language). He was given a cold shoulder, perhaps seen as just another tiresome Chinese trying to forge a relationship. But once he started speaking English, all of a sudden he was cool, a model of desire. Similarly, I remember being surprised by photos of Beijing cops with “Police” printed in English on their jackets, something you would not see in, say, nationalist Italy or Germany.

My limited perspective, for what it’s worth, is that Chinese industrialization, whatever the many protectionist trade measures China early on put in place for the domestic market, is now highly dependent on the outside world, not simply as a market for their products and as a source of investment and technology, but more importantly as a means of externalizing certain internal cultural, generational, or political tensions. My analogy is to the role that colonies played for industrializing Europe - places where the unhappy could escape literally or imaginatively; western culture today provides a space in which Chinese desires and resentments can be productively recycled back into the global exchange system. In this respect, the Chinese are not unlike the Japanese before them, though the Chinese seem to be taking their embrace of things western further, in lieu of any well-developed, specifically Chinese popular culture emphasizing freedom or democracy.

One sees this here in Vancouver where it is quite common to meet Chinese who have immigrated in frustration with policies and the widespread corruption at home, and often with the positive purpose of getting their children into western universities; they do not want the kids to become overly western, but yet want them to become some kind of person they could not readily be in China. And then there are the immigrants who appear to be from families doing very well at home because they come with money, immigration being in part a way for mainland Chinese to get some of the family wealth into what is thought to be more secure environments. They seem to settle into a rather leisured life, exploring consumer society. One of the potential problems with China’s future is that there are often no relatively quick and safe ways for the newly wealthy to reinvest their profits. As Ferguson puts it:

The relatively new stock market, meanwhile, is tiny in relation to the scale of the manufacturing sector. The result is that the allocation of funds for investment and credit is not done on the basis of meaningful competition and relevant information, but through personal connections that maximize returns to a powerful few, rather than general economic efficiency.

If you will allow that one can see the universe in a grain of sand, a way of summing some of this up came to me as I reflected on my relationship with a Chinese woman (in light of another brilliant Eric Gans essay).

In our meeting of two quite different civilizations, I am the overly intellectual westerner, an heir of many who have followed after Plato in building decontextualized, self-contained, worlds of language. We heirs of Plato tend to think of ourselves as rational individuals out and about in search of some objective truth about humanity or society. Sarah (the name she much prefers when in Canada) is the Confucian, focused not on detached objectification, but on the performative uses of language; she is easily offended by what she calls my “useless words”, my uncommitted concepts and declarations that are not sufficiently prescriptive of appropriate actions or pragmatic knowledge. For her, the many uses of English words can be frustrating.

As I understand it, the Confucian assumption is that words should have a proper and certain relationship to the world. And one should act accordingly. It is not that the Chinese don’t see the paradox or ambiguity that underlies all our choices (our choices emerge from paradox because they are less the product of the rational individual mind that the westerner idealizes, as the outcome of a larger human struggle to reconcile our shared and competing desires with reality). But rather the Chinese implicitly (sometimes explicitly) accept paradox and just move on, inscrutably. And they sometimes steamroll opponents in the way of their proper desires, proper according to how they understand the rules of society. Because Confucian rules are meant to guide and guarantee proper conduct in face of paradox, Chinese immigrants like to joke, half seriously, that after ten years in a new land, the conscientious immigrant will either be duly rich, or lost, confused, and mad.

In contrast, the westerner wishes to deny or overcome paradox as he objectifies the world as a problem that can be solved in the hands of our rational - individual and collective, democratic - will. With such instincts in mind, I create problems for Sarah. For example, in making an invitation, should I wish to point out Sarah’s freedom to follow her desires, I only create for her confusion. In her mind, if an invitation is to be tendered, it must be done forthrightly; to make even slight reference to the recipient’s inevitable freedom not to accept is a sign of an uncertain, not genuine, invitation. It is a confusion of two desires where one should reign. She, through the ways of her culture, intuitively sees the inherent paradoxes of our shared and competing desires that I have recently learned to embrace but still wish to forget when I am talking up our freedom. She does not try to objectify paradox – while the Chinese have the concept, they don’t have a specific word for it – nor does she dwell on the eastern wisdom literature that gently embraces the paradoxical. Rather, she simply wishes a “Confucian” guidance through paradox, by following rules and many little social rituals.

And yet, it now seems to me that she also needs something of the new possibilities for “rational” self-assertion offered by life in the west, not that she will ever become western like me.

On the larger scale, I wonder if the many Sarahs in China’s Confucian culture are discovering a new way to do market capitalism; or are they destined to relearn the lessons of western industrialization and the concomitant need for rational, democratic, nation building? During their industrialization, the western nations promoted modern languages and cultures as the ethical basis for full membership in the national economy, a geographically bounded communications network in which developed not only a popular but also a high culture that elaborated universal values through the national lens, and together led all humanity in our unfolding self-understanding. But what China’s recent rise to prominence in a now more definitely global economy and communications network has to teach us about our common humanity remains inscrutable in its yet mostly quiet pragmatism.

A Confucian empire will continually and forever prescribe appropriate ways of acting within its domain. Notably, in traditional Chinese thought, there is no conceptualization of China before the rise of the first kingdom on the Yellow River; human society was always conceived in terms of classical kingdoms, which no doubt limited how people saw the possibilities inherent in the origins of human history. And, to leap to today, whatever the many differences internal to the present kingdom, whatever the import of western (e.g. Marxist) ideas about history or anthropology, it seems there remains considerable resistance in Beijing to imagining a Chinese history in which a renegade province like Taiwan might go – but in fact it already has gone - its own way politically. Yet the fact that Chinese people constitute one of the world’s most widely flung diasporas does not seem to be similarly problematic. The recent Chinese emigrants I know remain proud Chinese, yet their resentments of the powerful few at home give witness to some strong centrifugal energy. That energy is not apparently a threat to Beijing which now allows a sizeable emigration among the educated middle classes; rather it is only any reconsolidation of that energy around any competing “Chinese” state that would constitute a problem to minds that inherently acknowledge, and wish to control, the paradoxes of a desire that falls into unstable competition with those from whom it is first learned in mimesis.

The universal, non-violent, solution to the competition that flows from our mimetic desire is to allow people new freedoms, i.e. new ways to differentiate themselves, and become new models of desire for everyone else. But can the centrifugal energy witnessed by the Chinese diaspora be given sufficient space within China itself? Many Chinese increasingly are exposed to the desires and freedoms (at least for some) on which their present economic transformation depends, and they now only bow half-heartedly to the emperors of Beijing at a time when Chinese all over the world are part of a global economy still led, disproportionately, by relatively small western nations and their dynamic social and political technologies. What might be the mimetic attraction to the Chinese of a country like Canada that, the educated among them are increasingly aware, is filling up, in places like Vancouver, with their Chinese brothers and sisters?

The present solution, as mentioned, seems to lie in China’s importing, on a very large scale, western culture, especially in the domains of consumer culture and technical know-how, and for some in matters spiritual; and to have all this made available in stark juxtaposition with the limited possibilities inherent in the Chinese polity. There are limits to China becoming like the western Judeo-Christian nations whose industrialization was fuelled and mediated by millennial visions of their destiny. China’s official and unofficial ambitions, it seems, are less cultural and largely limited to wanting the world to acknowledge its proper political centrality and its technological modernity; beyond this there is little vision for perfecting humanity of the sort that led the building of, say, New England or modern Germany, and that briefly and unhappily reigned in China under Mao, a figure the likes of which I doubt China will see again.

I readily exasperate Sarah because I think too much about our place in the long sweep of history, and tend to forget my proper and pragmatic ends as an ordinary man, here and now. And yet so far she sticks with me, as I help open an alternative world to the one she loves but has left in frustration. She would like this alternative world to be made coherent to her Chinese mind, but it can’t simply be China, however fast China “modernizes”, industrially. Nor can it be a radically futuristic west. Paradoxically, it has to be a place where the resentments built up in her old Chinese world - where family, officials, and cronyism ruled her politically - can be recycled into new pragmatic possibilities, not grandiose dreams.

While some people worry that the Chinese empire, facing various demographic crises, will wish to expand its borders - a not unreasonable fear in certain places - the more likely and interesting possibilities to my mind will see Chinese people continuing and increasingly needing to access and import the outside world. They will thus clarify both Chinese peoples’ common humanity, and China’s essential political or ethical differences, the middle kingdom(s) that cannot become like the western nations living in a history shaped by their open and progressive recycling of their people’s loves and resentments, in idealistic anticipation of a Messiah or secular, “end of history”, equivalent.

While the Chinese elites now want their children to be familiar with most things western, while they want everyone in Beijing to learn English for the Olympics, they will always have a problem when the two worlds collide. They want knowledgeable, freethinking, internet-savvy Chinese, as long as the young don’t mix up their two worlds and question many of the ancient rituals underpinning Chinese society. Yet it is reasonable to ask whether China can continue to grow as a poorly integrated “nation” of provinces paying tribute to the political center while largely focusing their own sociability and trade either locally or abroad.

To some extent, it no doubt can, and they will help free us of certain western nationalist blinkers in doing so. Yet all humans carry the intuition of the moral (not practical) equality of those who share in the human exchange of language; this leads me to think that the present widespread resentments of China’s officialdom will not go away and must be addressed. Furthermore, the growing geopolitical role of the Chinese state in going abroad to marshal natural resources for Chinese industry and consumption suggests a growing political necessity and hence freedom (the imperative to invent new ways) that will be contested not simply globally but internally in China. (Will we one day see Chinese protesting their country’s dealings in, say, Sudanese oil with chants of “not in my name”, or “more oil for Sichuan”?) This will entail calls for rationalization in a common national interest that competing parties will need ever more openly articulate, or they will break apart. And as more and more people access western modes of consumption that not only satiate but breed ever more desires, desires that will have to be mediated to some extent politically, beyond the processes of commerce, it seems likely that romantic western notions of a rational individual and democratic will, will gain some ground on Confucian ways of deferring conflict.

Chinese who want to, will find in their past (and with the help of western historians) a country with many divisions. Yet my impression is that the unifying idea of the middle kingdom has much of Chinese history behind it, and mitigates against any group of renegade provinces or other combination of entities finding powerful new identities around which to organize themselves and effectively contest the center’s power. One does not know whether the Chinese state’s fierce response to the Falun Gong spiritual movement (or to Taiwan) – Falun Gong seems to be a weak center of opposition, rather inarticulate about the nature of its identity – is a sign of the state’s weakness or rather of the weak possibilities for Chinese organizing themselves against the state. Perhaps only a major and widespread conversion to western religious ideas - not simply a conversion to abstract concepts like “democracy” and “freedom” that lack pragmatic specificity, but a conversion that speaks to people’s intuitive assumptions about what it means to be a human being (imagine a widespread Chinese conversion to a faith in which the sacred is located, Christlike, in every person) - will change this problem of limited political identities in China.

Until then, it may well be that Chinese people will have to find ever more ways to just forget the emperor's China while remaining in his home. The Confucian family, and its networks of friends and officials, may continue to focus much of Chinese consciousness. This will limit how China can develop economically. Perhaps it can never rationalize its intricate webs of personal connections into a national marketplace, and will have to develop a specialized role in the global economy accordingly. The various regions of China may remain industrial powerhouses without ever taking a lead, culturally or ethically, on the world stage.

Yet if I am right that western culture and knowledge will have to be continually provided Chinese consumers and producers on a large scale, we may be engaging China in ways that are setting the stage for some major geopolitical clashes over our shared direction, clashes that will make our recent complaints over Yahoo’s censorship of its Chinese internet services seem very minor indeed. Can our present eroding and reworking of the boundaries between two very different cultures work politically? And what about us westerners? How are we going to change if we must continually interact with successful, demographically weighty, half-western, half-Confucian societies? I suppose I had better learn to become more pragmatic, less wordy, and accept that my friendly attempts to objectify the inscrutable Chinese may only be pulling me further into a new dance of cultures. It twirls and whirls, and where it goes no mere westerner or Chinese knows.

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