From FPRI:
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1601.201104.gold.chinesesociety.html
UNDERSTANDING CHINESE SOCIETY
by Thomas B. Gold
There is a curse attributed to an ancient Chinese
philosopher which goes, "may you live in interesting times."
(I learned recently that this curse was likely made up by an
unknown foreigner and not a Chinese after all.) Yet, as I
prepared this presentation about Chinese society, I could
not help keeping my eyes on the unfolding political events
in the Middle East, and North Africa as well as post-
earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster Japan, and asking
questions at the very root of Sociology: what makes social
order possible? How do societies hold together, if they do,
in the face of inconceivable and unprecedented breaches of
their accustomed ways of doing things? How do the leaders of
these societies think about and try to plan for, to quote a
popular business book, "Black Swans" - highly improbable
events?
So I thought I would start this presentation on
"understanding Chinese society" with an exercise of trying
to put myself in the shoes of China's leaders, who just
completed two big political meetings-the National People's
Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative
Conference-where they defined how they see themselves and
the tasks ahead. They, too, were also observing and
analyzing the turmoil in the Middle East, North Africa and
Japan while keeping an eye on their own rapidly changing
society.
What conceptual tools do China's leaders draw on to
understand their own society? I see three main components:
The first is the Chinese tradition, which is both this-
worldly and practical. There are two streams of note. One is
Confucianism which stresses the middle way, harmonious
society, knowing one's role in society and performing it
well, hierarchy, mobility through education and self-
cultivation, and enlightened officials who also serve as
moral exemplars. The other, harder, stream is Legalism,
where the ruler relies on severe laws and harsh punishments
to maintain power and order. There is no idea of an
impersonal legal system or concept of everyone being equal
before the law.
The second component is a Leninist one-party dictatorship.
This is not just a typical military strong-man dictatorship,
but is a system led by the Chinese Communist Party, (in
theory) a disciplined, centralized and enlightened (through
the study of Marx, Lenin, and Mao) vanguard committed to
leading the masses to socialism and then communism.
Third, the leaders see China as a developing country with a
large rural population, much of which is still poor and
concerned with ensuring the basic necessities of life. In
this view, "human rights" means food, shelter, clothing, a
job and health care.
So putting this together, as China's leaders see it, theirs
is a large, populous developing society without a tradition
of Western-style democracy, but rather a population which
requires and looks to a strong central authority to provide
order, set an example, and take care of their basic needs.
As they look around the world, what do they see?
They see the former socialist bloc which experienced state
and economic collapse, where the communist parties lost
power. The parties lost legitimacy and were undermined by
the rise of civil society from below, as well as contagion
and interference from the West. They now see long-time
dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa being
overthrown by mass movements (the "Jasmine Revolution") led
by youth using the Internet and social networks. It is the
twenty-first century version of the movements which brought
down communism in Eastern Europe (and almost China) from
1989 to 1991.
What lessons do they draw from this? They cannot lose
legitimacy; they cannot permit their people to organize
outside Communist Party control, especially using the new
tools of telecommunications. They must demonstrate the
Party's commitment to modernization, an improving standard
of living and effective leadership. Besides words, they need
to keep the economy growing to provide jobs and incomes so
people will be busy working and consuming to improve their
material lives, and have no interest in-or time
for-politics. They have to control the Internet and other
sources of information about the turmoil going on outside.
And finally, they must not allow the growth of social forces
outside Party control which might challenge its monopoly on
political power.
At the March 2011 meeting of the National People's Congress,
the chairman of the Standing Committee, Wu Bangguo, stated:
"On the basis of China's conditions, we've made a solemn
declaration that we'll not employ a system of multiple
parties holding office in rotation." He ruled out the
possibility of separating executive, legislative and
judicial powers, adopting a bicameral or federal system. "If
we waver, the achievements thus far in development will be
lost and it is possible the country could sink into the
abyss of internal disorder."
Outsiders do not often realize or fully appreciate that
China is far from monolithic and, with the rapid economic
development of the past 30 years, has become an increasingly
complex and difficult society to manage.
There are many forms of inequality and diversity. To tick
off a list:
* Geography: China is huge with a wide range of climate
and topographical conditions.
* Natural Resource Endowment, especially as regards
water (the North is dry, the South is wet) and the
presence of valued minerals, many of which are deep in
the interior regions.
* Levels of Development, particularly between the
coastal areas and the interior.
* Urban, suburban and rural residence. The hukou system
still provides advantages to those with official urban
residence permits.
* Income and wealth as a result of the reforms. Much
of this has derived from corruption. You see
conspicuous consumption at the same time as beggars
living on the streets, even in the frigid Beijing
winters.
* Guanxi (connections) to powerful officials and
families, as well as connections to the outside world.
* Links to modern technology, such as the Internet and
cell phones.
* Real and virtual links to the outside world.
* Age: This is more than just a "generation gap,"
because of the dramatic lurches and shifts in
development strategies since 1949. Different age
cohorts have been raised with different sets of tools
and expectations. People in their 50s and above
expected the Communist Party to take care of them while
younger groups have been raised to be entrepreneurial
and take initiative. Many older people have had trouble
adapting to the new society's norms and engaged in
noisy protests in the early 2000s.
Many of these forms of inequality intersect, with ethnicity
and gender being prime axes.
The Chinese government no longer tries to homogenize the
population but to "harmonize" what it acknowledges are
differing and legitimate interests. However, "harmony" has
become code for old-fashioned suppression of perceived
challenges, and, in popular cynical parlance, to "be
harmonized" means to be subject to coercion. The leaders,
especially with the events of early 2011, have become
particularly concerned with order and not letting what
outsiders see as minor protests spiral out of control.
Another important area of diversity in Chinese society is
ethnicity. Officially, there are 56 ethnic groups, with the
Han comprising 92 percent of the population. The other 55
groups vary widely by their numbers, standard of living,
physical and cultural (such as language and religious)
similarity to the Han, geographical location (such as remote
areas or close to cities), whether or not they have cross-
border brethren (such as ethnic groups in Central Asian
countries as well as China; Mongols, Koreans, many of the
groups in the Southern border regions); whether or not they
are part of global diasporas (such as Koreans and Tibetans),
and whether or not there is a strong separatist movement
among them, in particular, the Tibetans and Uighurs who also
enjoy a degree of international support.
March 2011 marked the fifty-second anniversary of the
Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule and the flight of the
fourteenth Dalai Lama to India, and the third anniversary of
violent and violently suppressed demonstrations in Tibet
against what many see as harsh Chinese rule. This also
includes what is seen by some as a strategy by the Han to
encourage Han migration into Tibet so that the Tibetans and
their culture will be increasingly marginalized and rendered
powerless. This happened in Inner Mongolia and is occurring
in Xinjiang. The new Beijing-Lhasa railroad is seen by some
as an instrument to speed up this process as well as to
facilitate the extraction and removal of valuable resources
from Tibet and the movement of troops in.
At the March 2011 meeting of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile
in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama announced that he would
relinquish his political role while retaining his spiritual
one. He planned to pass the political role to a new leader
to be elected at the conference. He has tried to build
effective institutions to survive after he has gone. He also
declared that he might break with the traditional lengthy
process of selecting a new Dalai Lama through reincarnation.
The Chinese leadership said this was all a trick by the
Dalai Lama to install someone while he is still alive to
prevent Beijing from managing the succession, as it did in
1995 with the second most powerful figure of Tibetan
Buddhism, the Panchen Lama. Bizarrely, the atheistic
communist government has declared that the new Dalai Lama
must be identified through traditional reincarnation, which
they hope to manage.
There is a very active Tibetan diaspora, and the Dalai Lama,
winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, is an internationally
revered figure, which puts the Beijing leaders in a very
difficult spot as they continue to condemn him.
Another notable minority nationality is the Uighurs, one of
several Turkic Muslim groups in far west Xinjiang, the area
of the Silk Road. They do not have a charismatic leader on
the order of the Dalai Lama but there is a foreign-based
independence movement. The Chinese have made efforts to
connect this with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, and some
Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan and remanded to the
U.S. prison in Guantanamo. There has been sporadic violence
in Xinjiang as well, with July 2009 witnessing a
particularly bloody episode.
Finally, turning to education, this has traditionally been
seen as a route to upward mobility in China, with no
barriers to students of any age who work diligently. From
the dynasties through the present, China's education system
has been based on rote memorization and regurgitation of
approved texts. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)
the education system became a literal and figurative
battleground, and intellectuals were violently persecuted.
With the adoption of the Four Modernizations at the end of
1978 as the guiding strategy for development, education
received new emphasis and investment as the third priority
after agriculture and industry, but before national defense.
China now has nine years of compulsory free education.
However, this has not yet become universal and there remain
problems of funding, particularly in the rural areas where
officials charge illegal fees. The system has become
increasingly stratified, with key schools at every level
offering superior facilities. The government has
dramatically expanded higher education and many
universities, and some high schools, have links and
exchanges with institutions abroad and are beginning to
offer programs in English to attract foreign degree-seeking
students.
While education provides a channel for mobility, the same
sorts of inequality found elsewhere also exist in China.
Students from families possessing more wealth and income,
are able to provide better nutrition and health care, an
environment for study, tutors, extracurricular enrichment
activities, access to the Internet, foreign contacts and
even study abroad, which all serve to reinforce existing
inequalities. None of this is unique to China.
While Chinese students score extremely high on standardized
tests and are doing well enough to test into top
universities abroad, there is great concern that the
traditional pedagogy-stressing memorization and teaching to
the test-is not producing the kind of innovative and
creative graduates able to lead China's economy into the top
ranks. There are now problems of tightening labor markets
even for college graduates in China. This has resulted in
the so called "ant tribe" of job seekers. There are an
estimated 100,000 of them in Beijing alone.
In conclusion, China is a diverse society characterized by
increasing complexity and dynamic change. It is in the
process of a difficult and dangerous transition with no
clear end point or guidelines. The leadership watches the
events unfolding in other countries with which they share
many characteristics, and are concerned to maintain control
and order, even if this attracts condemnation from abroad.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/).
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1601.201104.gold.chinesesociety.html
UNDERSTANDING CHINESE SOCIETY
by Thomas B. Gold
There is a curse attributed to an ancient Chinese
philosopher which goes, "may you live in interesting times."
(I learned recently that this curse was likely made up by an
unknown foreigner and not a Chinese after all.) Yet, as I
prepared this presentation about Chinese society, I could
not help keeping my eyes on the unfolding political events
in the Middle East, and North Africa as well as post-
earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster Japan, and asking
questions at the very root of Sociology: what makes social
order possible? How do societies hold together, if they do,
in the face of inconceivable and unprecedented breaches of
their accustomed ways of doing things? How do the leaders of
these societies think about and try to plan for, to quote a
popular business book, "Black Swans" - highly improbable
events?
So I thought I would start this presentation on
"understanding Chinese society" with an exercise of trying
to put myself in the shoes of China's leaders, who just
completed two big political meetings-the National People's
Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative
Conference-where they defined how they see themselves and
the tasks ahead. They, too, were also observing and
analyzing the turmoil in the Middle East, North Africa and
Japan while keeping an eye on their own rapidly changing
society.
What conceptual tools do China's leaders draw on to
understand their own society? I see three main components:
The first is the Chinese tradition, which is both this-
worldly and practical. There are two streams of note. One is
Confucianism which stresses the middle way, harmonious
society, knowing one's role in society and performing it
well, hierarchy, mobility through education and self-
cultivation, and enlightened officials who also serve as
moral exemplars. The other, harder, stream is Legalism,
where the ruler relies on severe laws and harsh punishments
to maintain power and order. There is no idea of an
impersonal legal system or concept of everyone being equal
before the law.
The second component is a Leninist one-party dictatorship.
This is not just a typical military strong-man dictatorship,
but is a system led by the Chinese Communist Party, (in
theory) a disciplined, centralized and enlightened (through
the study of Marx, Lenin, and Mao) vanguard committed to
leading the masses to socialism and then communism.
Third, the leaders see China as a developing country with a
large rural population, much of which is still poor and
concerned with ensuring the basic necessities of life. In
this view, "human rights" means food, shelter, clothing, a
job and health care.
So putting this together, as China's leaders see it, theirs
is a large, populous developing society without a tradition
of Western-style democracy, but rather a population which
requires and looks to a strong central authority to provide
order, set an example, and take care of their basic needs.
As they look around the world, what do they see?
They see the former socialist bloc which experienced state
and economic collapse, where the communist parties lost
power. The parties lost legitimacy and were undermined by
the rise of civil society from below, as well as contagion
and interference from the West. They now see long-time
dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa being
overthrown by mass movements (the "Jasmine Revolution") led
by youth using the Internet and social networks. It is the
twenty-first century version of the movements which brought
down communism in Eastern Europe (and almost China) from
1989 to 1991.
What lessons do they draw from this? They cannot lose
legitimacy; they cannot permit their people to organize
outside Communist Party control, especially using the new
tools of telecommunications. They must demonstrate the
Party's commitment to modernization, an improving standard
of living and effective leadership. Besides words, they need
to keep the economy growing to provide jobs and incomes so
people will be busy working and consuming to improve their
material lives, and have no interest in-or time
for-politics. They have to control the Internet and other
sources of information about the turmoil going on outside.
And finally, they must not allow the growth of social forces
outside Party control which might challenge its monopoly on
political power.
At the March 2011 meeting of the National People's Congress,
the chairman of the Standing Committee, Wu Bangguo, stated:
"On the basis of China's conditions, we've made a solemn
declaration that we'll not employ a system of multiple
parties holding office in rotation." He ruled out the
possibility of separating executive, legislative and
judicial powers, adopting a bicameral or federal system. "If
we waver, the achievements thus far in development will be
lost and it is possible the country could sink into the
abyss of internal disorder."
Outsiders do not often realize or fully appreciate that
China is far from monolithic and, with the rapid economic
development of the past 30 years, has become an increasingly
complex and difficult society to manage.
There are many forms of inequality and diversity. To tick
off a list:
* Geography: China is huge with a wide range of climate
and topographical conditions.
* Natural Resource Endowment, especially as regards
water (the North is dry, the South is wet) and the
presence of valued minerals, many of which are deep in
the interior regions.
* Levels of Development, particularly between the
coastal areas and the interior.
* Urban, suburban and rural residence. The hukou system
still provides advantages to those with official urban
residence permits.
* Income and wealth as a result of the reforms. Much
of this has derived from corruption. You see
conspicuous consumption at the same time as beggars
living on the streets, even in the frigid Beijing
winters.
* Guanxi (connections) to powerful officials and
families, as well as connections to the outside world.
* Links to modern technology, such as the Internet and
cell phones.
* Real and virtual links to the outside world.
* Age: This is more than just a "generation gap,"
because of the dramatic lurches and shifts in
development strategies since 1949. Different age
cohorts have been raised with different sets of tools
and expectations. People in their 50s and above
expected the Communist Party to take care of them while
younger groups have been raised to be entrepreneurial
and take initiative. Many older people have had trouble
adapting to the new society's norms and engaged in
noisy protests in the early 2000s.
Many of these forms of inequality intersect, with ethnicity
and gender being prime axes.
The Chinese government no longer tries to homogenize the
population but to "harmonize" what it acknowledges are
differing and legitimate interests. However, "harmony" has
become code for old-fashioned suppression of perceived
challenges, and, in popular cynical parlance, to "be
harmonized" means to be subject to coercion. The leaders,
especially with the events of early 2011, have become
particularly concerned with order and not letting what
outsiders see as minor protests spiral out of control.
Another important area of diversity in Chinese society is
ethnicity. Officially, there are 56 ethnic groups, with the
Han comprising 92 percent of the population. The other 55
groups vary widely by their numbers, standard of living,
physical and cultural (such as language and religious)
similarity to the Han, geographical location (such as remote
areas or close to cities), whether or not they have cross-
border brethren (such as ethnic groups in Central Asian
countries as well as China; Mongols, Koreans, many of the
groups in the Southern border regions); whether or not they
are part of global diasporas (such as Koreans and Tibetans),
and whether or not there is a strong separatist movement
among them, in particular, the Tibetans and Uighurs who also
enjoy a degree of international support.
March 2011 marked the fifty-second anniversary of the
Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule and the flight of the
fourteenth Dalai Lama to India, and the third anniversary of
violent and violently suppressed demonstrations in Tibet
against what many see as harsh Chinese rule. This also
includes what is seen by some as a strategy by the Han to
encourage Han migration into Tibet so that the Tibetans and
their culture will be increasingly marginalized and rendered
powerless. This happened in Inner Mongolia and is occurring
in Xinjiang. The new Beijing-Lhasa railroad is seen by some
as an instrument to speed up this process as well as to
facilitate the extraction and removal of valuable resources
from Tibet and the movement of troops in.
At the March 2011 meeting of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile
in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama announced that he would
relinquish his political role while retaining his spiritual
one. He planned to pass the political role to a new leader
to be elected at the conference. He has tried to build
effective institutions to survive after he has gone. He also
declared that he might break with the traditional lengthy
process of selecting a new Dalai Lama through reincarnation.
The Chinese leadership said this was all a trick by the
Dalai Lama to install someone while he is still alive to
prevent Beijing from managing the succession, as it did in
1995 with the second most powerful figure of Tibetan
Buddhism, the Panchen Lama. Bizarrely, the atheistic
communist government has declared that the new Dalai Lama
must be identified through traditional reincarnation, which
they hope to manage.
There is a very active Tibetan diaspora, and the Dalai Lama,
winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, is an internationally
revered figure, which puts the Beijing leaders in a very
difficult spot as they continue to condemn him.
Another notable minority nationality is the Uighurs, one of
several Turkic Muslim groups in far west Xinjiang, the area
of the Silk Road. They do not have a charismatic leader on
the order of the Dalai Lama but there is a foreign-based
independence movement. The Chinese have made efforts to
connect this with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, and some
Uighurs were captured in Afghanistan and remanded to the
U.S. prison in Guantanamo. There has been sporadic violence
in Xinjiang as well, with July 2009 witnessing a
particularly bloody episode.
Finally, turning to education, this has traditionally been
seen as a route to upward mobility in China, with no
barriers to students of any age who work diligently. From
the dynasties through the present, China's education system
has been based on rote memorization and regurgitation of
approved texts. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)
the education system became a literal and figurative
battleground, and intellectuals were violently persecuted.
With the adoption of the Four Modernizations at the end of
1978 as the guiding strategy for development, education
received new emphasis and investment as the third priority
after agriculture and industry, but before national defense.
China now has nine years of compulsory free education.
However, this has not yet become universal and there remain
problems of funding, particularly in the rural areas where
officials charge illegal fees. The system has become
increasingly stratified, with key schools at every level
offering superior facilities. The government has
dramatically expanded higher education and many
universities, and some high schools, have links and
exchanges with institutions abroad and are beginning to
offer programs in English to attract foreign degree-seeking
students.
While education provides a channel for mobility, the same
sorts of inequality found elsewhere also exist in China.
Students from families possessing more wealth and income,
are able to provide better nutrition and health care, an
environment for study, tutors, extracurricular enrichment
activities, access to the Internet, foreign contacts and
even study abroad, which all serve to reinforce existing
inequalities. None of this is unique to China.
While Chinese students score extremely high on standardized
tests and are doing well enough to test into top
universities abroad, there is great concern that the
traditional pedagogy-stressing memorization and teaching to
the test-is not producing the kind of innovative and
creative graduates able to lead China's economy into the top
ranks. There are now problems of tightening labor markets
even for college graduates in China. This has resulted in
the so called "ant tribe" of job seekers. There are an
estimated 100,000 of them in Beijing alone.
In conclusion, China is a diverse society characterized by
increasing complexity and dynamic change. It is in the
process of a difficult and dangerous transition with no
clear end point or guidelines. The leadership watches the
events unfolding in other countries with which they share
many characteristics, and are concerned to maintain control
and order, even if this attracts condemnation from abroad.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/).
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