Understanding China

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Among modern nations, China is unique. It’s not just the twenty-first century’s single most populous nation. It’s also the oldest, biggest and most venerable conglomeration of people capable of being considered a nation. (India is less populous even today. More important, it never even qualified as a nation until the Brits knit it into a single whole through colonization and Mahatma Gandhi forced its wholesale liberation in the middle of the last century.)

Over a millennium ago, China led human civilization in almost every aspect. At that time, Russia was a loose conglomeration of peasants arrayed around the occasional duke’s or knight’s castle or warring monastery. Europe was similar. North America was sparsely inhabited by native tribes without written languages.

Besides its age and uniqueness, what’s most striking about today’s China is its near-total reversion to type. Take away the trappings of modern terminology—including the incongruity of calling top-down state capitalism a “Communist” system—and what do you have? You have the age-old Chinese Empire dressed up in modern garb.

Last year Xi Jinping unilaterally removed term limits on his rule, declaring himself “Chairman,” a term previously used only for Mao, an absolute tyrant. In so doing, Xi made himself China’s latest Emperor in all but name.

Xi didn’t even have to re-create the old Mandarin administrative system. It already existed, nationwide, in the form of the Chinese “Communist” Party (CCP), some eighty million strong.

How does the CCP differ from the Mandarins in China’s Imperial Age? Mostly in ways that augur stronger, and perhaps better, central control. Today’s so-called “Communists” are more numerous, better educated, vastly more acquainted with science and technology, and better connected by modern technology than were the Mandarins of old.

The Old Empire once had a practical proverb: “Heaven is very high, and the Emperor is far away.” This practical reality permitted a good deal of local independence and control, at times akin to “our federalism.”

But modern technology makes the New Empire radically different. Emperor Xi can talk personally with (and chew out) anyone in China by real-time video. And he can show himself personally anywhere and everywhere in China, replete with pandemic mask, in less than a day.

So China’s New Empire is not just the Old Empire in modern garb. It has four things the Old Empire never could have imagined: modern communications, modern transportation, modern Science, and (as part of Science) modern economics.

China’s so-called “Communist” economy did not rise in a mere two generations from near-universal poverty to today’s global near-dominance by following the dictates of Marx and Engels. After Mao died in 1976, China took off like a rocket, fueled with Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism and an insatiable thirst for Western ideas and education. “I don’t care whether the cat is black or white,” Deng famously said, “as long as it catches mice.”

But make no mistake about it. China did not and will not copy Western notions of democracy in any significant way. Whether the West’s expectations to the contrary were forlorn but rational hope or mere wishful thinking is hard to tell, even today. But “democracy”—in the sense of majority rule, the rule of law, and citizens’ rights to govern themselves by their own lights—is simply not part of China’s DNA.

Maybe there are too many Chinese to manage a democracy. (Maybe there are too many of us Americans, too, which is why we’re now suffering the least sane, most consistently corrupt, and most incompetent simulacrum of democracy in any developed nation.)

Anyway, China has never had anything like Western democracy, except for the brief anomaly of Sun Yat-Sen and the Nationalists around the turn of the previous century. Nor has China ever had anything like the three seminal events of the Western Enlightenment.

China had nothing like Magna Carta—the world-historical written agreement that settled a near-battle-royal between King John and the Barons. Instead, China had a longstanding and ever-adaptive accommodation between the Emperor and the Mandarins, in which all shared power as practically necessary, but the Emperor’s predominance was mostly presumed.

Except for brief invasions, China also had nothing like the world’s muscular, proselytizing religions, Christianity and Islam. So it never experienced anything like the West’s Protestant Reformation, which recognized individual thinking and personal conscience and reduced the abstract, doctrinal supremacy of an all-powerful Church.

China’s congenital approach to what passes for “religion” there is decidedly secular. As close as China ever came to the world’s muscular religions was Confucianism. But Confucianism is nothing like Christianity or Islam. It’s a practical recipe for paternalism, ancestor worship, and submission to authority, with nothing supernatural in sight.

After observing (at a safe distance) the centuries of brutal religious wars in Europe, not to mention those in the Middle East, which still plague us today, China desperately wants to keep things that way. That’s why it comes down so hard on the Falun Gong and the Uighurs.

Finally, China never had anything like the Anglo-American rule of law, which grew out of Magna Carta and ultimately produced the Nuremberg Trials. In contrast, the “law” in China is simply a recording of the government’s current thinking, which is intensely practical and always flexible.

That’s why China’s Xi could reduce the once-nine-member Central Committee to seven members and marginalize it as a policy-making body in a mere handful of years. Like Britain, China has no written constitution.

It’s also why the National People’s Congress looks so strange to us, with its prolonged, televised sessions of massed functionaries applauding Xi, and its routine near-unanimous votes. The National People’s Congress is not a real legislature at all. It’s a means for the Emperor to communicate in person with his top-level Mandarins, aka “Communist” Party leaders, so as to manage understanding of and buy-in for his unilaterally decreed policies.

So what’s the bottom line on China? For us in the West, it’s simple but sobering. China is an ancient Empire now thriving after a two-century slump wrought, in large measure, by Western colonialism. It’s an Empire utterly foreign to the West, in ways both good and bad.

Except under the Khans, China has never entertained dreams of global or even regional conquest. Instead, it has been content to tolerate (and occasionally to nurture) “near abroad” buffer states like Vietnam and North Korea. Since World War II, in which it was butchered by Japan, China has participated in only two wars, both by proxy and both close to its borders—in Vietnam and Korea.

In comparison, we Americans have fought in Korea, in Vietnam, in Kuwait and Iraq (in Gulf I), in our two longest wars ever (in Iraq and Afghanistan), and even in Grenada. And far from being mere border-protection wars, most of these were fights to extend power and abstract ideology halfway around the world. For most of a millennium, China has done nothing of the kind.

Over the centuries China has succeeded in assimilating (mostly peacefully) some sixty different ethnic and linguistic groups into what it calls “Han Chinese” culture. It’s now trying to teach them all Mandarin as a spoken language, while nearly all of them already know the Chinese hantsu ideographs that make Chinese writing unique.

Insofar as China is concerned, the assimilation of Tibetans and Uighurs is just part of an ancient process that China has managed effectively, if not always humanely, over millennia. For China that gradual but relentless assimilation is as natural and inevitable as the tides.

We in the West can deride and rail at China for this approach to nation-building. We can invent science-fiction myths like the “Borg” (“You will be assimilated!”) to dramatize our cultural antipathy to what the Chinese have been doing for centuries. But it seems to have worked for them. And can we honestly say—especially as they suffer and die from poverty and neglect in large numbers during the current pandemic—that the way we treat our own Black and Brown people is vastly superior?

To me, the trick to understanding and dealing with China begins with its written language. It’s non-alphabetic characters are so numerous, complex and cumbersome that they require most students to devote most of their youths just to learning to read and write—a process that essentially ends at about age eight for students of alphabetic languages.

Chinese hantsu do not lend themselves easily to abstract thinking. So despite its huge population, China has not been in the forefront of the advances in theoretical physics and biology/medicine that have transformed our world for the last century and a half.

Likewise, China has failed to develop a government under or tradition of the rule of law, perhaps because the rule of law depends on deductive reasoning in the abstract. On the other hand, China doesn’t have a whole lot of abstract “thinkers” who believe that “freedom” means refusing to abide the minor inconvenience of wearing masks in the middle of a pandemic.

What China has developed is an intensely practical society. Its reasoning is not abstract or deductive but depends on practical cause and effect. “If we do this, they’ll do that.” “If we don’t do this, they’ll do that.”

Take Hong Kong, for instance. Most of the world is aghast that China just took a big step to assimilate Hong Kong, imposing a vague and overbroad Mainland security law not just on Hong Kongers, but on foreign residents and visitors to Hong Kong as well.

To Westerners, that step was a gross breach of Britain’s 1997 handover agreement with China, which was supposed to preserve a “one-nation, two systems” approach until 2047. But this breach of abstract principle didn’t bother China. What mattered to China’s leadership was practicalities.

By the terms the agreement, it’s now just two years shy of halfway to China’s inevitable assimilation of Hong Kong. Whenever that assimilation came, it would let China do whatever it wanted with Hong Kong, even by the agreement’s own terms. So that ultimate assimilation was just over a single generation away.

As a result, Hong Kongers were getting restive, especially youth just starting families. They knew that, according to the letter of the agreement, their kids would be living under Mainland Chinese law in the primes of their lives. So they wanted change now.

But the change they wanted is anathema to the Emperor and his Mainland. They want a unified China, if only to expunge the shame of having had pieces of their country carved out by Western colonial powers for two centuries. They want at all costs to crush any move toward independence, let alone secession, for Hong Kong. So they had to nip the restiveness in the bud.

If they had sent in the People’s Liberation Army, there would have been a bloodbath (cause and effect). The whole fiasco would have looked a lot like Tiananmen Square: it would have been a black mark for China and a disaster in international diplomacy. It would have further alienated Taiwan and solidified international support for Hong Kongers, the Taiwanese, the Tibetans and the Uighurs. It would have made assimilation far more difficult, and the difficulty would have only grown with time.

So China instead chose a practical path. It put immense pressure on the Hong Kong government to adopt China’s proposed draconian security-extradition law. That law has converted Hong Kong, overnight, into a Mainland Chinese satellite, effectively cutting the agreement with Britain 27 years short. But what better practical alternative did China have?

Now many Hong Kongers will leave their beloved home, as will many businesses. But the same thing happened 23 years ago, as a vast exodus of Hong Kongers inflated real-estate values around Vancouver. The world adapted, and the sky didn’t fall.

Hong Kong will lose a lot of good and smart people, who will have to adapt to colder foreign climates. But life will go on. There will be no massacre, no war. Eventually, many of the exiles, being Chinese after all, will serve as willing or unwilling business and social ambassadors for the Mainland. A few will form foreign centers of resistance, but China couldn’t have helped that.

Given the realistic options available, and its goal of eventually re-acquiring a foreign enclave once divested through forced colonization, what other choice did China have? And what other choice does the West really have? Hong Kong is small and overpopulated, and any attempt to save it by force of arms would only kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Can we really say this kind of practical reasoning is as bad as that of foes who plunge into war or terrorism because they think God wills it, or because some abstract principle like Communism requires it?

And what can we Americans say in defense of our own extreme veneration for the written word? We have a whole class of jurists, called “originalists,” who think our most fundamental law just parrots what people alive in 1791 wrote about nuclear weapons, cyber-bullying, the Internet, modern jihadism, sex-change operations, clean hospital abortions and vaccines—none of which existed in their time. How, pray tell, does that specious reasoning differ from the Taliban or Christian fundamentalists seeking wisdom in the words of ancient scriptures written over a millennium ago?

We Americans allow corporations, sexual predators and scoundrels like our president to silence good people with non-disclosure agreements. Most of all, we still live under a grossly non-representative governmental structure, with an outmoded Electoral College and a Senate in which over half our population has only 18% of the votes. We do so, because, unlike Britain, we have a written Constitution that can’t be changed except by Herculean effort.

The Brits’ democracy has lasted far longer than ours—over eight centuries, if you count from Magna Carta. Ours could end this year or next, if we are foolish enough to re-elect Trump or allow him to steal the presidency. If that happens, the USA would have lived as a democracy less than 245 years, or about one-third as long as Britain’s already has lasted.

So as we Americans try to throw off the yoke of the worst presidency in our history—something akin to the reigns of Nero, Caligula and Commodus combined—we ought to be a little humble and circumspect. Our much-vaunted system hasn’t been working so well recently, whether in making basic common sense, or in applying science to fight the pandemic.

We don’t have to like China, and we don’t have to honor its not-so-infrequent inhumanity. But we do have to respect its achievements and success as the oldest and most populous continuously operating empire in human history, and as a force in human history to be reckoned with, including the present.

Trump’s puerile attempts to demonize China are just one of his many evil stupidities. They’re one that could bring on the Apocalypse in so many ways, military or economic. That’s a kind of cause and effect that all sane people everywhere should seek to avoid.

We have to live with China, and we’re not always going to get our way. So we’d all better start thinking hard about how to get ourselves out of the the moral, medical, economic and social slump we find ourselves in. A weak nation—which is what we’re becoming fast—will provide no counterweight to China.

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