by Eva Hoffman
Nicolau Sevcenko is a public intellectual and journalist currently teaching at Harvard University as a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Author of nine books and numerous articles in the Brazilian weekly magazine Carta-Capital, Sevcenko has written on history, linguistics, music, technology and politics, with a particular emphasis on Brazil’s national and cultural history.
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China in Search of Harmony
Shu Sunyan
‘The idea of a Harmonious Society will be China’s biggest contribution to humanity.’
So said a senior Chinese minister, addressing a Cambridge University audience recently. He seemed to place it above our four great inventions – paper, gunpowder, printing and the compass. And right now China is gripped by Harmonious Society mania. It is on the lips of every Party official, in every single government document and on the billboards of every Chinese city, town and village. It is in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, and in the dreams we dream.
Apparently the Communist utopia is no more, and a Harmonious Society is now China’s ultimate goal. Besides, a harmonious China would pose no threat to the world.
This idea seems nothing but extraordinary at first sight, coming from the country with the world’s longest history of authoritarian rule. And it comes at a time when many people – in China and overseas – believe that this is the dawn of a new China, and the Chinese themselves should be joyful and ready to take part. After all, the Chinese characters for ‘democracy’ (民主) mean ‘putting the people in charge’, just like the Greek original.
So the big question is, what is meant by a Harmonious Society? Has China come up with something even better than Fukuyama’s End of History?
The Chinese government thinks so, and there is no shortage of scholars desperately trying to prove that harmony has long been at the heart of Chinese philosophy and political thought. The Book of Changes, one of our earliest written books, dating back 2500 years, is all about harmony between man and nature. It centres on the concept of yin and yang, the balance of opposites – moon and sun, night and day, heaven and earth, men and women. ‘Yin and yang are the way of the world,’ says The Book of Changes. With harmony between men, politics will be unnecessary – everyone will have the same goals; with harmony in the family, society will be prosperous; with harmony between states, there will be peace on earth.
Two and half millennia on, The Book of Changes is still the work mostly frequently consulted when the Chinese want their fortunes told. And the concept of harmony is deeply rooted in popular Chinese culture, commonly finding expression in our idioms. ‘Harmony brings money’, or ‘we might both prosper if we live in harmony’ – that is enough to stop anyone fighting. Even, after a long winter, ‘a spring breeze brings the air of harmony’. To describe an amicable person, we would say, ‘He is all harmony’. And when we describe a successful person, we say he has three harmonies: heaven is on his side, i.e. he has the right timing; earth is on his side, i.e. he is in the right place; and he has the support of his fellow men. Being in the right place at the right time is important, but nowhere near as important as the harmony of people. For every Chinese who wants to get somewhere in the world, this is the first precept to learn.
Harmony between heaven, earth and men is most clearly and eloquently expressed by Laozi in his Daode Jing, The Book of the Way. The Way is the law of nature, the balance of yin and yang, which gives rise to everything. Understanding this law of nature is called virtue. Once we understand it, we are at one with nature; and the relationship between men should be no different. Therefore Laozi advocates a Utopia where men should also follow his vaguely defined law of nature, which he calls ‘the Way’. ‘Returning to nature is the Way. Ignorance of it will lead to wanton action and disaster. But knowledge of this eternity will enable one to be tolerant, fair and unselfish. A man with these qualities will be the leader who understands the law of heaven and earth, and who rules as just and fair-minded as heaven is all encompassing of everything under the sun. This is close to the Way. With the guidance of the Way, peace and stability, longevity and eternity will prevail.’
Laozi’s idea of harmony was too daring for the Chinese rulers, although it is always somewhere to retreat for the Chinese – personal refinement, detachment and consolation for those who perhaps are not so successful. Confucius, a contemporary of Laozi, was more influential. Born in 551 bc, when China was a collection of rival and unruly warring states, Confucius was horrified by the violence and chaos he saw. He roamed the warring states to preach moderation and restraint. The Middle Way, one of the Confucian classics, gives especial importance to achieving harmony through balance and moderation. ‘With this harmony, heaven and earth will do what they are supposed to do, and everything will prosper.’ Dong Zhongshu, the man who revived Confucianism, put it unambiguously: ‘Not too tough, not too soft, this is the best government. If this is not the Middle Way, what is? Those who can govern by the Middle Way, their virtues will spread. Those who can look after themselves this way will enjoy extreme longevity.’
But even if it could be argued that harmony was this strong in the Confucian tradition, it had all but vanished 700 years after his death, when he was elevated to be the supreme teacher of the nation. His thoughts were made the only ideology of the day, and remained so for the next two thousand years. If there was one book that any educated Chinese read, it was The Analects, the sayings of Confucius compiled by his students. But in truth it was not harmony, but order that was the catchword for Confucius. And the essence of this Confucianism is li, ritual. If society can be organised according to li so that everyone knows their place and behaves appropriately, there will be order, which is the Confucian term for ‘harmony’. The emperor should be benevolent, the officials loyal, the children filial, the father kind, and women chaste. So benevolence, loyalty, filial duty and chastity were deemed to be the essential Confucian, and therefore Chinese, qualities for two thousand years, providing an ethical basis for a strong and stable government.
In this hierarchical ordering of society, the emperor had a special role, as the fulcrum connecting heaven and earth; as such his position was central to underpinning Chinese society. It was in the emperor’s interest to make sure that Confucianism was not just a set of philosophical thoughts but social, moral and political obligations, permeating every single aspect of Chinese culture and society. It became the highest principle of imperial China and could not be broken, like a law of nature. If anyone stepped out of line, they could expect condemnation or ostracism; infringing the moral code incurred heavier punishment than breaking the law. With everything laid out so clearly, no wonder the Chinese used to say, ‘With half a copy of The Analects, the emperor could rule the world.’
This hierarchical order is not what Confucius meant by harmony, some scholars argue. They have drawn attention to the original meaning of the Chinese characters for harmony. They refer to the vibrations of an instrument used as a tuning fork. The implication was that music is composed of different voices, each sounding its correct note. If everyone sings the same note, that is unison, not harmony. Of course they found support for this liberal interpretation in The Analects: ‘Gentlemen can maintain harmony even if they disagree; unrefined souls cannot, whatever they may say.’
Sadly unison, not harmony, has been the rule throughout China’s long history. The first emperor who unified China in the second century ad decreed that all roads should have the same width and that all coins, weights and measures should be the same everywhere. And everyone had to have the same thoughts. Most books from previous times were burnt; scholars who dared to express different opinions were buried alive. Fast forward to the twentieth century: the last emperor abdicated in 1911, but in a few decades Mao became a new emperor in all but name. He even boasted that the first emperor buried only 460 scholars, while he sent over one million intellectuals to labour camp. They were encouraged to speak their minds in 1957, but when they did, he could not bear the cr
iticism. His Little Red Book was all you could have on your shelf in the decade of the Cultural Revolution – a decade during which the Red Guards burnt nearly all the existing copies of the classics, including Confucius’s.
In between the first and the last emperor, unison rather than harmony was made possible by another unique Chinese invention, the Imperial Exam. Seeing how effective Confucianism was in providing an ethical basis for a strong and stable government, the imperial rulers decided to use it as the essential criteria for selecting officials to run the country. Such is the origin of the Imperial Exam. Every three years the exam took place at district, provincial and national level in the Confucian Hall in every town and city in the country. Successful candidates went up to the next level, and the final winners were rewarded by the emperor to become the elite who ran the country at every level. Although the content of the exams varied throughout the ages, just Four Books and Five Classics, all attributed to Confucius and his disciples, were the core of the exams, and, in the last 700 years, their only content. Winning the Imperial Exam and holding office became the goal of almost every Chinese scholar, and rote learning of the Confucian classics was fundamental to success in the exams. Texts of over 400,000 characters had to be thoroughly memorised if a candidate was to have any hope of success, even at the district level. This meant that the local elites and ambitious would-be members of those elites across the whole of China were taught with the same values to be dedicated believers in Confucianism.
No other country in the world allowed itself to be ruled by bureaucrats selected on such a strict and restrictive basis. Not only that, for 400 years, these works had to be interpreted according to a single source, a commentary by the fifteenth-century Zhu Xi, whose most famous remark was ‘Preserve the heavenly order and annihilate all human desires’. Even that was not enough. Each answer had to have the same number of paragraphs (eight), the same length – 700 characters – and the same prescribed form for the beginning, middle and end. The Imperial Exam may have kept China as the world’s longest lasting continuous civilisation – but how stifling, and at what a cost.
The Confucian grip on Chinese art, literature, music and culture was no less complete. Calligraphy, literature, music and painting had always been regarded as the required qualities of the educated elites, rather than separate disciplines. They were partly what made them junzi, men of integrity, which is the Confucian ideal of a morally correct person. In them Confucianism found its most eloquent and powerful advocates throughout history, for they contributed the core of China’s literary and artistic outpouring. Some of the most accomplished calligraphers, poets, painters, novelists and musicians were also high officials and prime ministers who had come top in the Imperial Exam. Even today, we can admire their writings carved on stone steles in temples, monasteries and imperial burial grounds. But they normally created their best works of literary and artistic merit after they were sent into exile for taking initiatives, speaking their minds or criticising certain government policies – the Confucian taboos. It was no coincidence that the peaks of artistic creativity in Chinese history were in the fifth, the tenth and the fourteenth centuries when China was in total chaos from uprisings or changes of dynasty, or when China was ruled by the nomadic people from the north, as during Chinggis Khan’s conquest of China. During those times, the Confucian grip was broken and the educated elites were freer to think beyond their Imperial Exams and the Confucian orthodoxy. But these times were few and far between in Chinese history. For most of the time, Confucianism reigned supreme.
Yet it is this very Confucianism that the Communist Party has made the core of its harmonious society. A Confucius mania is stalking the land. Confucian classics are prominently displayed in bookshops; Confucian MBA courses for the new rich are mushrooming; a blockbuster film on Confucius’s life and teaching, starring the famous actor Fat Chow from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, is guaranteed a massive audience. Confucius from the Heart by Yu Dan, a professor of Media Studies in Beijing, has had a record ten million sales in China. She tells us how Confucianism is relevant to the modern world and can make us happy. ‘The higher state requires that a person must not only accept poverty peaceably… they must also be possessed of a calm, clear inner happiness, the kind of happiness that cannot be taken away by a life of poverty.’ Or ‘true peace and stability come from within, from an acceptance of those that govern us’ – surely this is music to the government’s ears.
It is not enough that China relearns the Confucian lessons. The world has to do so too. To that end the government is opening Confucius Institutes around the globe, like the branches of the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institutes or the British Council. Of course it helped when a Nobel physics laureate announced that ‘If humanity wants to survive in the twenty-first century, it must draw from the wisdom of Confucius 25 centuries ago’.
This is not the Confucius I grew up to know. In 1974, as a Red Pioneer in primary school, I joined a nation-wide campaign against Confucius. I never knew of his existence until then and it puzzled me why he had suddenly become the enemy of the people two and half thousand years after his death. The headmaster told us that Confucius had wanted to bring back slavery and his Analects were the manifesto of his reactionary scheme, ‘full of poison, complete nonsense, and totally unreasonable’. ‘Restrain yourself and comply with rituals – that is benevolence,’ Confucius told his disciples. How ridiculous. This was during the Cultural Revolution when Mao called on the Red Guards to rebel and turn everything upside down. To prove their loyalty to Mao, the Red Guards from Beijing Teachers’ University ransacked the cemetery where Confucius, all his 72 direct descendants and over 100,000 blood relatives have been buried for the past two and half millennia. They smashed the stone steles bearing the inscriptions of successive emperors who came to pay their homage. They blew up the tombs and stole all the valuables to fund their revolutionary activities, leaving the skeletons hanging on poles. To desecrate an ancestor’s tomb is the most heinous of crimes for the Chinese, and that was just what was done to Confucius.
We did nothing so daring in our school. The Confucian temple in our city – there used to be one in every Chinese city and town – had already been ransacked at the height of the Cultural Revolution. But we had to join in – it was simply not good enough to sit there and listen to the teachers listing Confucius’s crimes. So I wrote a paragraph every week to put on wall posters, finding fault with a saying of Confucius, mostly from the Analects. The trouble was the Analects were in classical Chinese and we had no idea what the words meant (classical Chinese is like English before Chaucer). So the teacher had to tell us what to say. One criticism is still clear in my head to this day. An important thought of Confucius was that ‘everyone should be educated’. But the teacher told us that he charged the students ten slices of dried beef for teaching them. How could the poor afford it? Under Communism, children of peasants and workers could all go to school. Down with Confucius! I ended every essay with this declaration.
This was not the first attack on Confucius in our history. In 1919 at the end of the First World War, the May 4th Movement completely rejected China’s Confucian tradition. The movement was an angry response to the Versailles Treaty, which gave the German concession zones on Chinese territory to another imperialist power, Japan, despite China’s having fought alongside the Allies during the war. This seemed the final insult after the British gunboats which forced their way into China, the Opium War, the unequal treaties, and the division of China into interest zones run by warlords bankrolled by all the Western powers. How had China fallen so far, become so weak? The Emperor could not be blamed; he had abdicated in 1911. It must have been Confucianism which had dominated China for so long.
A key figure in the May 4th Movement was Lu Xun, the most famous writer in modern China and the most uncompromising critic of Confucianism. He was a trainee doctor but decided to give it up. ‘Medical science was not so important after all… The most important thing was to
change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote a literary movement.’ He tried to prescribe what he thought would be the cure for the ills of society and the lethargic mentality of the people.
Diary of a Madman is Lu Xun’s most well-known story. It tells of an unnamed man slipping into madness. He came to believe that his fellow-Chinese were all cannibals. ‘It has only just dawned on me that all these years I have been living in a place where for four thousand years human flesh has been eaten.’ He looks up the history of cannibalism in history books, but all he finds are the two phrases, ‘Confucian virtue and morality’ and ‘cannibalism’. This is reminiscent of another fierce critic of the Confucian tradition, Danzhen of the Qing Dynasty: ‘The so-called moralists are no different from brutal legalists. While the latter kill by law, Confucianism kills by morality.’ In Chinese history, cannibalism implies a society whose values have lost all morality, and for Lu Xun to assault the entire basis of Chinese tradition using this metaphor was a powerful indictment indeed.
Lu Xun and the May 4th Movement also directed a scathing attack on the treatment of women in the Confucian tradition. Women had their feet bound so they could find a husband, but it also made them unable to escape from arranged marriages. Later on a woman’s position became so extreme that if she so much as glanced at another man, she was considered to have shamed the family and should blind herself or even commit suicide. Then her clan would erect a chastity arch for her, many of which still stand in towns and villages across China. In one county alone in Anhui Province along the Yangtze River, over 65,000 women were commemorated this way.
The Movement uncompromisingly rejected China’s Confucian tradition. In its place they called for science and democracy. Only Dr Science and Dr Democracy could cure the ills of China so that it could be rejuvenated and take on the Western powers on their own terms. They were unwilling to accept the norms and assumptions of Confucian culture. So instead of the veneration of old age and wisdom, they praised youth and individualism. The May 4th Movement also campaigned to change the language that had always been the preserve of the elite, and use ‘plain language’, colloquial Chinese as it was spoken by ordinary people. On the central Confucian virtue of moderation, Lu Xun had this withering verdict: ‘Moderation was merely a codeword for tolerance of abuse and turning a blind eye to corruption.’ Other values, such as freedom, liberty and the rule of law, were also hotly debated. ‘Human rights and science are the two pillars of modernity,’ declared Chen Duxiu, the founding father of the Chinese Communist Party. It is worth noting that the May 4th Movement was a crucial catalyst in the birth of the Chinese Communist Party, and science and democracy were very much part of the vocabulary of the early Communists, including Mao.
China’s search for modernity in the twentieth century has been long and arduous, full of struggle and bloodshed, from 4 May 1919 to the students’ movement in 1989 when the government opened fire on its own people. We have learned how difficult and painful reform can be – republicanism, nationalism, Fascism and Communism each seem to have brought more suffering to the Chinese. Now we are at a crucial juncture again. Chinese economic reform has been with us for 30 years. Great gains have come, but we also see corruption at every level, cut-throat competition, extreme concentration of power in the Communist Party, huge unemployment, absent social services, environmental decay, a mounting gap between the rich and the poor, the hinterland and the coastal provinces, and the city and the countryside, and glaring limitations of the rule of law – an intervention by the Communist Party secretary can easily overturn a court’s verdict. People feel uncared for and no one gives a damn. They are puzzled, confused and angered. When they look for solace they find the much discussed ‘spiritual vacuum’. Chinese society is on the brink of major upheaval. It is in desperate need of harmony.
The Harmonious Society is a commendable ideal not only for China, but for any society. It could even be the ultimate goal for mankind. The question is: how is China going to get there? Surely Confucianism, with its skewed emphasis on hierarchical order and stability based on obedience, is unlikely to lead us away from the rule of men to the rule of law, and ultimately the harmonious society we all seek. As we say in Chinese, it is a bit like ‘looking for fish on the roof’.
Perhaps we could start by looking again at the Chinese characters for harmony (和谐) – they may mean ‘tuning instrument’ but the first character actually signifies ‘rice’ and ‘mouth’, the second ‘speak’ and ‘each’. This can be simply construed as saying everyone must have enough to eat and everyone must be able to speak their mind – just like Roosevelt’s freedom from want and freedom from fear, the basic human rights. We seem to have had the right idea long ago. As China is leaving want behind, is freedom from fear too much to hope for, to ask for?
What if Chinese people begin to take the concepts of the Harmonious Society seriously, as they surely will? If they are genuinely allowed to speak their minds and make their voices heard, as our ancestors told us to do when they devised the characters for harmony more than three thousand years ago, we are already a step closer to the harmonious society.