Hasheng Huang’s subtitle to The Ascent and Decline of the EAST is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. An excerpt reveals an extraordinary lacuna in the author’s knowledge of Chinese governance:
For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state. There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.
Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society.
Anyone who struggles to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state has never read Confucius.
In my explanation of the Chinese state, I point out that the State has survived for two-thousand year thanks to its designer, Confucius, the fons et origo of the bureaucratic elite. He devoted many hours to designing a society built around geniuses willing to devote their lives to selfless service of other, in distant, often dangerous places.
Daniel Bell calls them a ‘just hierarcy’: selected on merit alone because, over decades, they consistently enriched the people they governed. That’s Confucius’ Step 1, and China’s median net worth, PPP, is probably higher than America’s.
Step Two is ‘educate them,’ and already, the median 30-year-old Chinese has the equivalent of 3 more years of schooling than her American cousin.
Huang attributes the effectiveness of the Chinese state to
..coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.
Again, Huang’s naivety is baffling: the state works well because it does what Confucius said it should, and badly when it strays. Every Chinese knows this in his bones. And right now it’s doing what the people want it to do which makes them trust and like it, and forgive its excesses and follow its instructions with considerable enthusiasm.
Says Martin Jacques,
The reason the State enjoys a formidable legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese has nothing to do with democracy but can be found in the relationship between the State and Chinese civilization. The State is seen as the embodiment, guardian and defender of Chinese civilization. Maintaining the unity, cohesion and integrity of the Chinese civilization-state is perceived as the highest political priority, the sacrosanct task of the Chinese State. Unlike in the West, where the State is viewed with varying degrees of suspicion, even hostility and regarded, as a consequence, as an outsider, in China the state is seen as an intimate, as part of the family, indeed as the head of the family. When China Rules the World.
