As someone who knows little about China, and who tends to get confused listening to all the things said about the world’s next superpower, I found this article by Christian Caryl useful. It’s a review of seven books by various China-observers (some with more expertise than others) and raises an interesting question about whether “culture” is a good indicator of how countries turn out, or whether cultures change as nations develop.
In one corner, people like Martin Jacques argue that China’s “Confucian values” make it alien to the West, and that the world is set for the mother of all culture clashes:
Jacques believes that these fundamentally non-Western values, coupled with long-held Han Chinese beliefs in their own innate cultural and racial superiority, challenge Western assumptions about the primacy of individual rights and the principles of institutionalized conflict that lie at the heart of democratic systems. And this, in turn, means that we are now embarking on an era of “contested modernity,” one in which Western nations no longer impose their own values on the world at large.
Others though say there is nothing immutable about culture, and that China in the long-run is likely to increasingly resemble other parts of East Asia, where development has led to increased individualism and greater democracy. Cultures change. Japan for example was once defined by its “samurai militarism”, but today is one of the most pacifist nations on earth:
Modern-day Japan clings, with remarkable consistency, to a pacifist ethos that is reflected in both popular sentiment and its official constitutional arrangements—an outcome that would have been impossible to predict if all you had read were the books of the authorities on pre-war Japanese culture (like the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, approvingly cited by Jacques).
Japan may still seem intransigently unique to many outsiders, but in fact no other country in the world has endured more in the way of radical social change over the past 150 years—unless you count the other East Asian economic success stories like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore. No one who knows them would argue that these societies, even after decades of headlong modernization, essentially mimic the United States or Western Europe; yet the claim that they somehow embody unsullied, hierarchical “Confucian” values is, by now, a very hard one to make.
You could say the US was much more influential in Japan and Korea after the war than it is in China now. But the point seems to hold, especially when you look at what is happening on the ground. Where economic development is fastest (eg in development zones like Shenzhen), there are more signs of individualism and the state becoming accountable. Books such as Peter Hessler’s reveal real Chinese who are starting to think for themselves, and a Communist state increasingly under pressure.
Knowing little about China or Confucianism, I’m not going to write off Jacques completely – but Caryl’s take on things makes more sense to me, and has the advantage of being based on real reporting rather than theorising. Caryl’s conclusion sounds right – China’s development is unlikely to extend out in a straight line, whatever Confucius says:
The dynamism and volatility of the society depicted by Hessler, one might conclude, do not have a great deal in common with the grand, “classical” ideological systems presented by more high-altitude observers like Jacques and Ford. China may not be on a road to Jeffersonian democracy, but the Party has a great deal of adapting ahead of it if it intends to maintain control. China is changing the world, but it is changing itself even more, and we should expect plenty of surprises along the way.
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