by Guy Sorman
No more than 20,000 people in the entire country had taken part, but the effect was spectacular—for, as a general rule, no one demonstrates in China. Demonstrations in distant provinces remain invisible. Journalists and diplomats posted in Beijing wondered about the significance of the events. Were they spontaneous? Had the Party been involved? Was it the instigator or the moderator of popular sentiment? Were we witnessing the beginnings of a civil society that had escaped vigilant eye of the Party?
The debate among China-watchers was facetious. The Party watches over everything; it was unthinkable that the anti-Japanese demonstrations had escaped its notice. It must have orchestrated them, and the anti-Japanese message was intended more for the outside world than for the Chinese nation. That message was clear: the Chinese people are angry; fortunately, the Party is there to contain their anger. The idea behind the revival of Chinese nationalism was to cause concern in the West and to reassure it at the same time that the Party had things well in hand. It was the Party’s way of making everyone believe that a strong Party was good for all—the Chinese, the West, and the Japanese. Without it, there would be fascism and war all over Asia. The Western media, especially in France, swallowed the bait. Our columnists concluded that the Party was maintaining order in Asia, keeping the people’s anger in check.
Anyone in China at the time could see the Propaganda Department’s obvious manipulation. You had only to go on the Internet to be greeted by a flood of anti-Japanese slogans and images of the Nanjing massacre. In 1937, at the start of its second war with Japan (the first broke out in 1894), the Chinese alleged that Japanese soldiers cold-bloodedly massacred 300,000 civilians in Nanjing. Public exhibits about the massacre were held in all the large cities of China, displaying the same horrifying pictures found in all school textbooks of Japanese soldiers piercing Chinese children with their bayonets. At the National Museum of History in Beijing, a commemoration highlighted the number of victims. Posters reminded viewers that there were 300,000 victims and not 240,000, as the Japanese claimed. Just as the tension began to abate, the Beijing government raked up the issue again and decided that December 14 would be a national commemoration of the “First Day of the Nanjing Massacre.” No one in Japan denies that the massacre occurred. Historians dispute the number of victims and what led to the slaughter, but they are clear that there were no attenuating circumstances. Still, in China it was anti-Japan time, and every news bulletin referred to the Nanjing massacre and the glorious resistance of the Communist army against Japanese fascism. These reminders were all the more necessary as Mao had never fought the Japanese, preferring to save his forces for conquering China.
How justified is the Chinese government’s anti-Japanese tirade? The pretext for the demonstrations during the Year of the Rooster was the publication of a textbook in Japan that played down the Nanjing massacre. That the textbook was never distributed hardly mattered. Japanese leaders, including the emperor, have apologized to the Chinese people on several occasions for the atrocities. The Chinese authorities say that this is not enough, and whenever the Japanese express their regret, it never gets reported in the media. A Chinese who does not have access to the Internet is thus convinced that the Japanese have never acknowledged the massacre and that their schoolbooks deny it, which is untrue. The Party accuses the Japanese of refusing to “face up to their own history.” Coming as this does from the Party, the criticism is bizarre, to say the least. When has the Party ever faced up to its own history, or the Chinese people to theirs? It was left to the maverick Yu Jie to point out in the Hong Kong press in August 2005—when China was commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of “the victory of the Communist Party against Japanese fascism”—that “Mao Zedong had killed far more Chinese than the Japanese army.”
True, the Japanese did not go as far as the Germans in their self-criticism, but they refused to be compared to the Nazis and confess to genocide. Indeed, there is little comparison between Japanese imperialism and German Nazism, and the Nanjing massacre is certainly not the equivalent of the Holocaust. The Japanese also point out that they have given the Chinese considerable development aid as reparations. Not enough, says the Chinese Communist Party. Nothing will ever be enough—because it is not just the Nanjing massacre but the fact that Japan is a humiliating reminder of all that China could have become but didn’t. Japan, a small country that borrowed so much from China—script, Buddhism, architecture, court etiquette—has successfully synthesized identity and modernity without any revolution or civil war. Contrary to Marxist theory, it did not require a single party to develop or external enemies to fortify itself. For the Chinese leadership, Japan is intolerable. Were the people properly informed, they would no doubt take a more balanced view. While the anti-Japan demonstrations were going on, many academics tried to dissuade their students from taking part, condemning the Party’s manipulation of a complex history. A student in Beijing told me, “I hate Japan, but I don’t know why.” Yet many degree-holders want to work in Japanese companies in China, and 500,000 Chinese, qualified for the most part, are currently settled in Japan.
In a more enlightened China, xenophobia would be on the decline, but it is not in the Party’s interest that the Chinese become enlightened. The Party does all it can to fuel hatred of Japan, to build a patriotic ideology. Japan is necessary for its fifth legitimization.
Why Japan and not the United States? There is little danger in attacking Japan; the worst that can happen is that tourists will stop coming and investments will dry up—but the shortfall will be made up by others. The United States, however, is far too dangerous an enemy. American support remains indispensable for what in 2005 the Party called “peaceful growth.”
Neo-Confucianism is not an alternative for the Communist Party
“When the Party disappears, it will not be replaced by democracy. I will not let that happen.” Pan Wei, not quite forty years old, is a professor of political science at the Tsinghua University in Beijing. He doesn’t appear to have the stature to influence the course of history, but then, didn’t Mao Zedong start out as a librarian? On the Tsinghua campus—modeled along the lines of an American university—students dress like young Yankees. Most of them say they want to pursue their studies in the U.S. and settle down there. Every year, 60,000 Chinese students leave for the U.S., of whom only half return to China. The ones who return are vociferously anti-American and delight in anti-American demonstrations. History has been rewritten in Chinese textbooks. They speak of a hidden American hand behind the nineteenth-century colonial adventurism of the British and the French. Is the Party preparing young minds for a future clash?
Pan Wei belongs to a generation caught between two contradictory pulls. He is part of a breed of new intellectuals who have returned to China after spending ten years at Berkeley. Having learned “in the U.S. what was useful for China,” he came home with a political project called The Myth of Democracy, a critique of both the Party and democracy. Pan Wei says that democracy is chaos. Many Chinese think the same. They have been encouraged by the Propaganda Department to do so, and the widespread acceptance of this belief is its greatest achievement. Pan is categorical: “Democracy has led to chaos in Russia, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.” What about Japan? “It is an orderly country but not a democracy.” He talks of Japan, Russia, and other countries without any real understanding of them, as if they were names on a map. A common refrain in China is that Russia plunged into chaos because democracy came too soon, political reform preceding economic reform. Evidently, such discourse is intended to prove the superiority of the Chinese way.
My interlocutor is emphatic, assertive, and not open to discussion. He is a self-confessed neo-Confucian; I am not. Confucius saw things in black and white. Shades and humor were not for him. So Pan Wei doesn’t believe in smiling. He says: “The Party must quit for two reasons. The first is corruption, a supreme form of disorder in the Chinese tradition. And the second is the faulty economic model it has chos
en. China is lagging behind the West.” Pan Wei points to his computer. It has been assembled by Chinese workers and runs on American software. “Even if we managed to copy this software, Microsoft would come out with a new one better than our fake.” If the Chinese are to catch up with Western creativity, “they must be free to use their critical faculties.” I can’t but agree. However, Wei’s apologia for freedom does not include democracy. The years he spent studying in a Western institution convinced him that Western superiority was based not on democracy but on the rule of law. The Chinese are confusing the rule of law with the mode of selecting the ruling elite. China needs the former, but elections serve no purpose. From time immemorial, the Chinese have drawn their elite from the universities, a far more efficient method.
Democracy may not always guarantee the best leaders, but doesn’t it have a tempering effect, assuaging passions and ensuring the peaceful transfer of power? Pan Wei has heard all my arguments before. They aren’t relevant in the Chinese context: “The Chinese are a homogeneous people, without the class distinctions found in the West.” Concepts such as majority and minorities are not applicable to China, he says. Elections as a means of arbitration between social groups may be of some use in the West but are superfluous here.
“All you have to do is look around you,” Pan Wei says. “You will see that the brightest children in China come from all social strata and all provinces. They have sacrificed their youth to pass their university examinations and reach this point.” When the leadership of the future has been decided, what is the need for elections? But examinations are a test only of one’s book knowledge, not of one’s capacity to think independently. The same holds true for course content. Teachers do not tolerate contradiction; students must listen, not question. Consequently, Chinese universities are producing efficient robots rather than creative individuals.
Pan Wei remains unfazed. For him, society is a machine to steer in the right direction, not a body tormented by passion. Evidently, his elitist project is inspired by the mandarins who governed imperial China. The sinologist Étienne Balazs has given a wonderful description of this “celestial bureaucracy” that exercised absolute power: “officialdom.” Balazs writes: “Without the mandarins, the Chinese civilization would have faded away; but the peoples they condemned to live together may have been better off had they gone their own separate ways.” One could argue endlessly about the pros and cons of a celestial bureaucracy. It can, however, rule only over a closed universe. The moment it was exposed to the outside world in 1840, it crumbled.
How can one call oneself a neo-Confucian a hundred years after the fall of the Empire? The ideology to which Pan Wei subscribes is widespread in university circles, among company managers, and in the leadership of the Communist Party. Confucius is a much-misunderstood philosopher, indeed. First, he was the fountainhead of the Empire; then, under Mao Zedong, the cause of China’s backwardness, only to be rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping. Confucius would not have been able to identify with the Empire’s Confucianism any more than with today’s neo-Confucianism, whose Chinese credentials are, in any case, dubious.
In the seventh century of our era, during the early Qing dynasty, the first neo-Confucian movement took place, a revolt of the educated classes against the authoritarianism of the Manchu Empire. Basing their ideas on the writings of Confucius, the neo-Confucians wanted the sovereign to abide by the rules of good conduct and respect local autonomies. The movement, from which some modern-day democrats draw inspiration, was in essence liberal and directed against an empire that already rejoiced in its own efficiency. But Pan Wei and other neo-Confucians—rather, neo-neo-Confucians—have been selective in their borrowings from Confucius, taking only his ideas of a moral order and hierarchism. In truth, their ideology is made in America: its high priests are Chinese academics at American universities, especially Professor Du Weiming of Harvard and Professor Theodore de Bary of Columbia, and it borrows something of the fundamentalism of the American New Right. Neo-Confucianism offers a middle path between liberalism and Marxism. By subscribing to Confucianism, the neo-Confucians can criticize the Party in relative safety, criticize corruption—all the Chinese do—and reject liberalism as foreign. The middle path has the advantage of letting the new mandarins bypass democracy—which would only confer power on uneducated rustics, scorned by academics and apparatchiks alike.
Even if we accept Pan Wei’s project of a technocracy chosen on the basis of a competitive examination—after all, we in France have our mandarins, too—who would assume the role of leadership in a regime neither hereditary nor democratic? Mencius, a disciple of Confucius, suggested three methods that, Pan Wei maintains, remain valid for modern-day China. The sovereign can be nominated by a college of wise men. Pan Wei would lead this assembly of philosophers, of course; though hardly forty, he has studiously cultivated an older look and the grave mien of a scholar. The second method is for the chief in power to designate his successor. Co-optation is already the rule in the Communist Party, I point out. Yes, but it hasn’t been successful because Mao Zedong, the founder of the lineage, was Marxist, not Confucian. Mao’s error was to have introduced “foreign thinking in China.” A coup d’état is the third method: a bad sovereign is eliminated and replaced with a good one. Pan Wei, who has no wish to be behind bars, finds this superfluous, as the Party is not “all bad.” It has guaranteed social stability, reunified China, and won it international recognition. All that remains is to transfer power from the Communists to the neo-Confucians.
The ideal transition would be an interregnum, during which Communist leaders would willingly withdraw in favor of a college of philosophers. This college would nominate a good ruler to rid China of the deadwood of superfluous ideology and policing. A good ruler would not need to protect his regime, because the people would identify with him. Property would be privatized, for a good leader would not need a state-run economy. The public sector and planning are Western, not Chinese, ideas. The press could be free, religions acceptable, and the right of association recognized, for a good sovereign would have nothing to fear from freedom of expression. This wonderful project assumes that the Chinese people are inclined to unity. Does this mean the Chinese are distinct from the West? Pan Wei is clear: Chinese society wants to reconstitute itself into a virtuous community.
What will happen to rebels in a neo-Confucian regime? Implacable minorities will exist, but if the sovereign is good, they will remain minorities. Too many rebels are a sign of the sovereign’s failure to act. The example of Singapore comes to my mind: the great neo-Confucian apologist Lee Kwan Yu and his family continue to rule there, the opposition having been reduced to a single seat in Parliament. But the very mention of Singapore is an insult to Greater China: Pan Wei does not deign to answer.
Our conversation is turning sour. Fortunately, we manage to part ways courteously, neither of us losing face. We agree that under the Party, China combines the worst of socialism with the worst of capitalism. We also agree on three likely future scenarios: perpetual communism, liberal democracy, and neo-Confucianism. But what Pan Wei calls neo-Confucianism is called fascism in Europe. In both cases, adherents express themselves in the name of a superior order with the emphasis on morality and chastity. Is the neo-Confucian ideology more Chinese than socialism or liberalism? That is what Pan claims, but it is his way of staving off criticism. It will come as no surprise if the Communist Party embraces him in the name of the Three Represents. Like nationalism, neo-Confucianism poses no threat to the Party; it is just one of the masks that the Party wears.
The nostalgia for Maoism
Is He Qing a nationalist, a neo-Confucian, or a leftist? The Party calls him a leftist, though he describes himself as a conservative. This young man, who has authored a series of philosophical essays published in France and Hong Kong, teaches the history of art at Hangzhou. He Qing is sweeping in his critique of the Communist regime. He accuses the Party leadership of entering into a diabolical alliance with mul
tinational companies, sacrificing the welfare of the majority and Chinese civilization itself for the prosperity of a few. His words sound bombastic, yet they reflect a widespread sentiment among the post-Cultural Revolution generation of intellectuals. And so we must give He Qing a patient hearing.
In his analysis of China, he borrows a few elements from Confucianism and a great deal from Marxism and from the fashionable writers Pierre Bourdieu and Samuel Huntington, whose articles have proved useful to Chinese intellectuals seeking to deconstruct power. From Huntington, He Qing has taken the “clash of civilizations.” The different nations of the world will not converge toward democratic synthesis and world peace; the ultimate reality will be, instead, the differentiation of civilizations and their inevitable clash. Huntington has already foreseen a Sino-American war. In opening China to a global economy, the Party is ignoring the unique nature of Chinese civilization: capitalism runs counter to her value system. Which values are we talking about? Westernization, He Qing says, leads to materialistic individualism and contempt for the Other, whereas there is no place for egoistical efficiency in Chinese civilization, which stresses the relationship among subjects. Such inter-subjectivity is specific to the Confucian idea of the clan, the family, and the nation. Globalization will end up making the Chinese schizophrenic, since they will be forced to become efficient, as defined in the West, while remaining deeply Chinese at heart. For a fistful of dollars, the Party is selling the soul of the people.