One of the most vibrant intellectual discussions in China this year began with a tweet on Weibo, China’s premier micro-blogging service and anointed online town square. Economist Hua Sheng had just met with Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption czar, charged with fixing the country’s most important political problem. As Sinologist Joseph Fewsmith reported, Hua breathlessly tweeted after the meeting:
I went to the sea [海, an apparent abbreviation for 中南海, the seat of Communist power] to see my old leader. He recommended I read Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution. He believes that a big country like China that is playing such an important role in the world, whether viewed from the perspective of history or the external environment facing it today, will not modernize all that smoothly. The price the Chinese people have paid is still not enough.
Hua’s self-congratulatory reporting on social media would spur the cheapest propaganda campaign the Chinese government has instituted in years—one that is part of a tradition of intellectual suggestion by senior Chinese leaders, usually through sharing current reading lists. Wen Jiabao, China’s previous premier, popularized Marcus Aurelius’s The Meditationsby revealing that he had read it over a hundred times. And since Wang plugged The Old Regime late last year, Tocqueville’s tome has been front and center at the bookstore of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, where China’s future leaders are trained. The curious and ambitious in China are reading it, too, making it one of the country’s best-selling titles in the last few months.
Wang is perceived as a frank, pragmatic, and highly competent and thoughtful leader. He made his name running the Beijing Olympics, dealing with the outbreak of SARS in 2003, and shepherding China’s economy in the last administration. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the discussion he engendered about Tocqueville and modern China has been so simple, only producing a couple uncomfortable yet ultimately straightforward takeaways.
The general consensus in China is that the book offers two main historical lessons applicable to the country’s tenuous domestic situation. One, the French Revolution burst forth not when France’s economy was at a nadir and the central government strong, but when there was relative prosperity and political reform. Two, it is the nature of revolution that those who carry it out become what they most despise once in power. Such aphoristic caveats against both reform and revolution have been repeated for the last few months and treated as novel and significant each time.
Still, reform-minded Chinese can take comfort in the fact that the new treatment of Tocqueville is so misguided as to be useless. Like France, China’s path out of feudalism involved the subdivision of land among the peasantry and the general enrichment of the underclass. New economic rights brought additional burdens like taxes, legal obligations, and a more involved civic role, though not necessarily a sense of civic duty. Political dysfunction stemmed from the monetization of government offices. (In France’s case, the government sold administrative positions and entrenched those who held them much more explicitly.) Rural elections were little more than a ritual, but peasants clung to them as an outlet for political action even as they gladly embraced centralization at the upper levels of government. Any democratic gains made by replacing birth with money as the passport to power met with great resistance from the traditional social hierarchy, at the top of which sat an increasingly irrelevant aristocracy.
But the differences are vital. The lack of a meaningful vote in China has pushed people at the grassroots to assert themselves through demonstrations and riots. Not all make international headlines the way an uprising in the village of Wukan did in 2011 because most do not result in the demonstrators’ demands being met. Still, compromises between villagers and officials are not uncommon and indicate a healthy demand for Communist Party accountability.
And while the princeling class, comprised of the offspring of powerful Communist Party officials, may seem to be post-revolutionary China’s version of pre-revolutionary France’s aristocracy, the princelings are more evenly matched, both politically and socially, by a faction of cadres without prestigious family backgrounds. Neither group is immune from the uncertainties or demands of political life, and patronage within the CCP hierarchy can cross faction lines. Though from humble birth, Wang Qishan married into a princeling family and was mentored by his father-in-law. And princeling status by no means assures political survival. Bo Xilai, whose father Bo Yibo is one of the Eight Immortals in Mao Zedong’s original circle, was deposed in spectacular fashion last year from his position as Party Secretary of Chongqing and awaits trial.
This is not to say that a spirit of egalitarianism guides China. There is no shortage of influential voices calling for reform. However, the overwhelming tone is not righteous indignation in support of the disadvantaged but practical concern that a vastly unequal society will not survive. Even members of China’s liberal intelligentsia feel the need to constantly answer to the country’s pragmatic approach to reform. The pre-revolutionary French elite, however, for all their disdain for the lower classes, expressed a passionate sympathy for the peasantry. The revolutionary ideas of French intellectuals gained traction among an already receptive audience. As much as the Chinese Communist Party would like to believe that an unbridled love of liberty is the greatest threat to its existence, the truth is that many of its critics are also trying to protect against chaos.
Perhaps it is thanks to the absence of such liberal fervor that The Old Regime was not disqualified for consumption by the normally hyper-sensitive party cadre—despite the book’s affirmation of liberty as the antidote to a rotting post-revolutionary society.
Fascination with Tocqueville’s book is curious in other ways as well. In its urgency to find a solution to China’s complex problems, the CCP fails to acknowledge that it occupies the same contemporary world and shares the same modern revolutionary tradition as those looking to overhaul or depose it. If reform jitters had the leadership looking for possible sources of revolution within Chinese society, it did not have to look further than China’s own past. Why reach for a reference as distant as Tocqueville?
What most distinguishes modern China from Bourbon France is the Communist Party’s staunchly conservative and technical approach to reform. Tocqueville marveled at how France’s pre-revolutionary government, “which was so overbearing and despotic when all was submission, lost its presence of mind at the first show of resistance, was alarmed by the mildest criticism, and terrified at the least noise.”.. read more:
See also
Chinese media and the politics of forgetting: Tiananmen anniversary - June 4, 1989
Chinese Journalists resist censorship: Timothy Garton Ash on The Southern Weekly affair
Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on
Chinese Journalists resist censorship: Timothy Garton Ash on The Southern Weekly affair
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.
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