Three days ago The Age had a most interesting opinion piece on China. No, no, come back, it’s not Uhlmann! I wouldn’t expose you to the thoughts of the lizard king on a Friday.
No, this was Peter Hartcher, busy transitioning from the man cabinet ministers leak to from within cabinet, to sage elder statesman of Australia’s position in the world.
Well, it’s better than Uhlmann. Hartcher is markedly less hysterical. If anything, he’s a little old-school Age in looking at the rise of China and the alleged contradictions it now faces.
Hartcher’s article is worth examining in detail for it usefully expresses the liberal viewpoint, and its confusions, not only about the Middle Kingdom but also about actually existing democracy in the West.
China’s rise has been magnificent, Hartcher notes: from a substantially peasant society when Mao died in 1976 to a country launching its own space station today. But at the same time as it releases mass human potential by the alleviation of poverty, it suppresses it through the repression of democracy and open society, in the process “infantilising” the entire Chinese population. China has repeated the earlier successes of the “Asian tigers”.
No one has ever achieved anything like China, Hartcher notes, and no one thought it could be done. Yet it has not simultaneously liberated its people, as the tigers did.
Well, like getting someone else’s suitcase off the carousel, there’s a lot to unpack there, and most of it is wrong.
If you consider the other tigers in isolation — Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan — it looks amazing. But Singapore was a city state that made itself a centre for capital, and the other three were rebuilt with US money before their own state-steered/cartelised processes took off.
What China did was quite different. Having been constrained within Mao’s “communism of poverty” through the cultural revolution — in which a society organised into communes would march towards communism without any process of individual embourgeoisement — Deng Xiaoping’s takeover in 1978 introduced something new to post-1949 China, namely Marxism.
Mao may have used Marxism as a guide to revolution, but there was nothing much Marxist about his subsequent governance. Marxism argued that only capitalism provided the structures which made socialism possible. Post-Maoist China wasn’t a steered capitalist combine — it was a command society with a few special economic zones in which the private economy was allowed to let rip. Within the structure of five-year plans, these were allowed to expand, building the economy until China could enter the WTO on its own terms in 2001.
The initial engineering of a city-country split in incomes and opportunities was later compensated somewhat, as medical and education services and eventually universal social security payments were extended nationwide.
One’s strong suspicion would be that this “herculean” task could only be achieved within a directed political framework, and that far from being regarded as impossible it had been explicitly considered by early 20th-century “second international” Marxists and later.
Hartcher may not have read Kautsky, but you can be sure that Deng had.
Such “transition” Marxists argued that a directed capitalist economy would have the maximum of capitalist initiative, while avoiding what Marx called “the anarchy of production” — the market’s circular logic which ensures that while China has an interurban maglev train system, and a hundred new cities, the US invested in credit default swaps and diabetes in eight different flavours.
Hartcher’s simplistic notion that multi-party democracy always leads to human flourishing is simply unwarranted. The main argument for an open society is that it limits the possibility of lethal tyranny. There is no guarantee of flourishing, since it can equally become a political market in which interests undermine the pursuit of clear social goods.
One could say that the Asian tigers were pretty laggard in pursuing actual democracy (and in Japan, the 50-year rule of the Liberal Democratic Party was managed by bribing the Socialist Party to be a permanent opposition), but they did.
It’s clear that China, by contrast, is re-Stalinising, curbing the market’s atomising effects by linking a new nationalism to a cult of personality fairly pallid compared to Stalin’s and Mao’s — although what isn’t. In 1967 the Chinese Communist Party issued conversation booklets showing how to begin each sentence in an exchange with praise of the Great Helmsman — in a manner that Hartcher, quoting Isaiah Berlin calls, the “artificial dialectic”. (He’s being naughty here; Berlin’s article containing that phrase was re-aired in the China Heritage journal a fortnight ago. Coincidence? Or does The Age not care about acknowledging sources?)
He’s also got it wrong. Berlin argued that Stalin’s post-war strategy of renewed capricious terror was a way of giving history a kick-along, by creating waves of liberalisation followed by a rounding up of all those who’d believed it.
Leaving aside whether that’s a dialectic or not, it is not what the CCP is doing (except in Hong Kong, a special case). Instead it’s the opposite — a gradual shrinking of such open society as existed, in a way that allows people to recalibrate their behaviour. It’s an offer of the Hobbesian contract — stay out of politics and prosper in the belly of the leviathan.
It is not a repeat of Stalinism, that hyper-violent and sometimes chaotic late chapter in the history of religion. It’s the refashioning of the Stalinist system, with patches and layers of limited openness, some forms of local democracy, in a way that would allow for its longevity and assure a form of consent to it.
Hartcher and other liberals can’t imagine anything but a choice between China’s totalitarian-authoritarian system and our broken democracies. The danger is not a chaotic China, plunging from semi-openness to semi-closedness; it’s a country that so perfects consensual managed control that we approach it from the other side, as a model, explicitly acknowledged or not, as the answer to our political anarchy of production.
Galbraith’s convergence, achieved at last. Nothing ordains the victory of pluralism and openness. But nor does anything guarantee that its only other is North Korea.
It’s the liberal fantasy endlessly replayed, the impasse in their ability to think about a changing world. Hartcher’s piece is that attitude’s most effective distillation.
We now return you to our usual service, where Uhlmann exposes Xi’s plan to have the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy poison the wind turbines.
ho hum : kinda correct and kinda incorrect. Irealise that you are critiquing Hartcher (and the similarly ill-read and ill-traveled) but some counter-point is justified.
Agreed that the Friedman – Fukuyama (history didn’t end) hypotheses (namely, that economic prosperity promotes democratic institutions) has not materialised in the PRC but neither across the “Tigers” either. Protests, up to a point, are tolerated in
South Korea but less so elsewhere; particularly in Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan. Organising a protest in Taiwan takes some doing; one does not merely “turn up”. It is wafting in that direction in HK too.
Mao did not have a clue as to “Marxism” and in fact his Dutch tutors (from the 1920s) almost gave up on the rather dense teacher. Mao would not have made it to first base without his childhood friend Zhou Enlai; pluses and minuses here but we won’t digress. The “progress” in Taiwan, in terms of reforms, are quite complicated. By comparison, they were suppressed in the Philippines and remain so today! Do make a comparison.
There is a distinction to be made between a dictatorship (Egypt, Haiti, Syria – cough – North Korea) and an authoritarian
states such as Vietnam, Thailand and the PRC (China). The point is that there is NO ‘cult of personality’ in the PRC but there is considerable support for the current General Secretary and his Politburo. Think of Turnbull choosing Morrison’s
cabinet (on his way out) and you will have the idea in terms of the PRC equivalent!
However, we are agreed on one point : keep ya toes on the correct side of the white line and no one will ever have a problem.
Becoming individualistic in anti-state objectives along with proselytising will be rewarded with a stern wagging finger. Yet, the rise of China has created a taste of sour grapes among many. Xi’s books (three volumes) “Governance of China” says it all.
Someone as conservative as Cabesan (p.60) “China Tomorrow” state, openly, that the Chinese people “support the PRC political system and its institutions and recognise its legitimacy”. No, they are not brain-washed. Prior to C-19 about 400 million (16x population of Oz) travelled overseas annually (saw what they wanted to and returned).
That Tiger’s (in general) did not roll over and become “American” was a f.ing great disappointment to those who “pushed”
interaction. NOW, that some of the hi-tech Asian product is more than a match for equivalent product in the USA the tune
has changed; along with the hitherto smiling faces. Pompeo waltzed all over Vietnam and surrounds in the last days of Trump
but did not return with a single order. All that he was offered was diplomatic courtesy.
The disenchantment takes many forms from books of the impending (if not imminent) doom of the PRC to issues with minorities (often from sources known for sensationalism) to drivel as to “democracy” per se. Pity you weren’t in the region for the 6 Jan. when the riot occurred. Assumptions as to barbarians (i.e. foreigners) were confirmed definitively!
There is no prospect of the USA retaining its influence anywhere in the world. Equally, the PRC is not interested in a war
(utterly counter-productive) but is preparing for such an event. There is considerable choice as to the future between
the USA and the PRC but the history does not look attractive.
A non-hysterical look at China’s rise should lead the ‘democratic’ West to adopt a friendly competition with China to see which form of governance is the better, because the Chinese themselves are satisfied with the outstanding increase in living standards under the CCP since the 80’s, , while the middle class in the West has stagnated since Thatcher/Reagan following Milton Friedman’s monetarist delusions.
The current Western paranoia about China’s rise, cloaked under a guise of “values” and “human rights”, reveals hypocrisy on a grand scale, eg, the acceptance of entrenched/systemic poverty and unemployment as a norm in Western neoliberal economies.
Inequality is a huge problem in China, as they admit themselves:
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3111016/xi-jinping-has-pledged-double-size-chinas-economy-2035-can-he
But, unlike the West, it is being addressed by the PRC. The RATE of change is important with reforms in the countryside on-going. Overall, Neil is correct.
The hollowing out of the middle class in the west is now it’s biggest problem. The thing about entrenched poverty and unemployment in the west is that it takes your eye off having to worry about ‘values and human rights’ in that Maslowian way.
You don’t have to be a deep idealogue to see that most people, anywhere, will put up with any type of government as long as their own lives are chugging along nicely. It’s when living standards fall, or there’s chaos, that people want changes.
What bothers me about China is Xi’s veering towards ethno-nationalism. What happened to “Workers of the world, unite!”?
Just on that basis, notible Marxists stated that the impending wars in the Balkans would not and could not extend to Europe. THEN Nationalism prevailed unambiguously!
‘long as their own lives are chugging along nicely’. Lived and worked in China for many years and I found that the Chinese who were in any way interested in politics were no different to ordinary Australians who want the best for themselves and offspring. Except perhaps the Chinese educated classes were better read than the average ocker. Have look at the China Daily, which in the early time of my stay in China was a bit of a propaganda rag (not unlike The Australian et al). And see how interested the Chinese are in national and international matters and not just the footy and who will get married first.
I should have noted that the China Daily is published in English, but then nearly every educated Chinese speaks and reads English. It is a place where so many have tertiary education that the receptionist at a joint venture company might have a masters degree in engineering (as was my experience).
Yes, but what’s published in China Daily is what the authorities want published, not what sells copies.
Kinda. The C. D. is also available from Oz or anywhere in the world. Take a look at yourself. I think you will find a better spread than CNN, MSM, Yahoo, and similar.
Erasmus, I spent years in China and I’m familiar with China Daily. It’s mainly aimed at a western readership and presents the way China would like to be seen.
As I say : agreement more or less. As far diplomacy is concerned, how a country wishes to be perceived is of some significance if the diplomacy is to be effective on all sides.
As for media propaganda (electronic or visual or print) one does not have to look far regarding Oz.
But at least we have Crikey here!
Which is hardly objective in terms of being able or inclined to write on both sides of the argument or question. No shortage of wheelbarrows here.
There is an odd tendency to carry, often overfull, wheelbarrows and push on rope.
To do otherwise is to invite opprobrium.
Your life can be in peril and yet you can be comfortable. Stockholm Syndrome.
Not sure how that theory works out with the US/trump experience. Didn’t seem to matter how bad things got, they still voted for him in droves.
I stopped buying the Age because of Hartcher. I think Guy Rundle has captured what Hartcher is, namely a brainless bogan masquerading as a spokesman for ‘Democracy’.
I have written to The Drum asking why they have scribes like Hartcher and Sheridan on the show when they could get some serious expertise like former diplomats, eg Varghese, McCarthy, etc, to provide informed opinion. Of course I received no reply. But then I reminded myself that the purpose of the Drum is not to inform. If it were, Ellen Fanning would stop interrupting the guest technocrats, and they wouldn’t invite former politicians as guests.
Have to agree Dieter. Hartcher’s role as Rudd’s megaphone during the Gillard years was particularly egregious, in my opinion.
I would trust those who have been living and working in China than any of our skip political activists masquerading as informed journalists who fall back on past ideology and perceptions, that may not represent reality.
The truth wins, ultimately Drew, but it may require decades.
So swiftly?
Nemesis’ wings barely rustle.