Confucius, Chinese culture, the CCP and Eric X Li

Sam Crane has an interesting post in response to a recent HuffPo op-ed piece by Shanghai venture capitalist Eric X Li which touches on a number of themes of interest to me and to this blog.  A number of big questions are raised by both authors:  is popular consent the only legitimate basis on which to found a government, and if so, is Western-style parliamentarianism the only reliable means of adequately reflecting it?  To what extent does ‘culture matter’?  What is the proper role of civil society vis-à-vis government?  Are there such things as ‘universal values’ and how do they relate to the question of culture?  To what extent does the Confucian philosophy have anything to do with the way the Chinese Communist Party operates?  This is basically the West-versus-China culture argument spelled out in its broadest form.  But, as with most such arguments, I come at it from a view informed by Western culture and philosophy which is sympathetic to some of the critiques of Western culture from Chinese sources, and I think both arguments deserve a bit of parsing from just such a vantage point.

Firstly, the question of cultural (in)commensurability. Mr Li writes:

Cultures are fundamentally incommensurate to each other and that is why the Chinese model is not exportable, neither is the modern Western model. It is no accident that, with a few exceptions due to notably unique circumstances, electoral democracies have not been successful in bringing peace and prosperity to countries outside of the Judeo-Christian West. With all the elections that have been imposed on them by Western conquerors or their own elites, the vast number of countries in Africa and Asia are still mired in poverty and civil strife, causing untold sufferings to hundreds of millions. Perhaps the only thing that is exportable from the Chinese experience is that each culture must find its own path.

To which Mr Crane writes in response:

This shows how useless the term “culture” is. “Chinese culture” is a collection of many, many practices and ideas and beliefs. It is big and vast and complicated. Within it are its own instances of value incommensurability (which is one possible way to understand Chen Guangcheng's stance v. those who seek to repress him). In its vastness, there are similarities and differences with “American culture.” Most aspects of “Chinese culture” are certainly commensurable with “American culture” or other instances of “culture” globally. (I am not quite ready to say all instances of “Chinese culture” are so commensurable - I am open to suggestions for more specific instances of incommensurability operating at something less abstract than the level of “culture”).

[...]

But one really needs to be called out: economics.

I, for one, absolutely believe that economic life is a kind of cultural practice. Markets are based upon certain cultural assumptions and, as they operate, they change other cultural practices. Contemporary China is a powerful example of this. Perhaps nothing has changed “Chinese culture” as much as economic reform of the past thirty years. And those changes have increased the economic-cultural commensurability between China and the US and the “West” and other cultural formations. Yes, of course, there are differences in how the Chinese and American economies operate. But mere difference is not incommensurability, which suggests no general standard can be used for comparison and judgment. And we know, obviously, that every day business men and investors and traders and, yes, “Shanghai venture capitalists,” work hard to find ways to make big piles of money from the dynamic pattern of similarities and differences between China's economy and other economies.

Further, economics, as an intellectual discipline, basicially rejects cultural incommensurability. It claims to be a universal science (a claim that I do not really accept because they take it too far, ignoring cultural differences within a broader commensurability). Ask Justin Lin Yifu if China is economically-culturally incommensurable and I suspect he would just laugh.

And there's your irony: if Eric X. Li was right, he'd be out of a job. And the fact that he is a successful transcultural investor demonstrates that he is wrong in his assertion of cultural incommensurability.

I think that Mr Crane overstates his case more than just a bit when he claims that ‘culture’ is semantically useless.  I believe that he could stand to read some Sam Huntington on the topic; even though his own ‘clash of cultures’ hypothesis is a bit overblown as well, he does demonstrate that the nexus of value- and norm-formations which make up the lifestyles of different people worldwide, particularly as regards religion, is not something which can be ‘flattened out’ into explanations amenable to language other than that of culture.  The fact that Mr Crane himself says that culture is something ‘big and vast and complicated’ seems to be, inspected logically, an assertion that one cannot break it down or explain it in other, more useful terms, which makes it semantically useful in this case.  Just because Chinese culture doesn’t necessarily work the way Eric X Li (or the CCP, for that matter) says it does / wants it to, doesn’t make it any less real or any less analytically significant - as Mr Crane’s own argument brings to light.

But the rest of Mr Crane’s argument is keen, insightful and well-reasoned, though I would argue that he does not necessarily take it to its logical conclusion.  Modern, globalist, capitalist economic life absolutely is a form of cultural expression thus broadly stated, but it is predatory.  It invades and replaces value-systems which have a surface commensurability with it, and actively silences or destroys value-systems which do not, backed by the arsenal of the modern nation-state which is its closest ally.  (Think, for example, of the American labour movement, backed as it was by radical Catholic social thought and liberal Protestant socialism, which was first actively crushed by state bodies such as the National Guard, and afterwards appeased into acceptance of capitalist norms by vital-centre dealbreaking.)  The reason modern (neoclassical) economics rejects cultural incommensurability is precisely because it wants to hide the fact that the system it champions preys upon all forms of cultural expression, whether commensurable or incommensurable.  And this is what leads me to agree with Sam Crane’s larger point:  that the Chinese Communist Party is not genuinely Confucian, particularly not Deng Xiaoping or his successors.

Confucianism is not opposed to the pursuit of wealth or power per se.  Having material wealth or physical power is not condemned or censured or seen as problematic in traditional Confucian texts the way it is in, say, the Gospels.  What is seen as problematic in Confucian philosophy is consideration of wealth (利) or power (力) before, or without a proportionate or greater emphasis on virtue (德), as interpreted through a community in the physical form of ritual (禮), as governed by the principles of rightness (義) and loving-kindness (仁).  The danger of reading and taking seriously a work like Mencius is that one can very easily come away from it thinking like a radical virtue-ethicist, the way Kang Youwei and Kang Xiaoguang did.  Both men have offered, with the intellectual armaments of Confucius and Mencius at their hands, exceptionally strong and thoroughgoing critiques not only of modern economic life and its inherent destructiveness to community, but also of the methodological individualism which trains and motivates both it and the broader descendants of the political-economic discipline in the Western academy.  By contrast, we can trace the points where the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism of the Chinese Communist Party has acquiesced to the reigning logic of modern capitalism, beginning not just with Deng Xiaoping but with Mao himself.  The silencing of anti-capitalist political leaders like Bo Xilai and of anti-‘capitalist’ legal scholars like Chen Guangcheng by the Chinese government attests to this fact.

Eric X Li is very right, though, to say that the approach to dealing with power is different in Confucianism than it is in modern Western thought, which shares certain operating assumptions with Legalism.  ‘Checks and balances’ in modern Western political thought - say, the Federalist Papers, which still enjoy entirely too much currency in popular American political thinking today even if they are not cited - are entirely about extrinsic motivation:  in order to prevent tyranny and approximate something resembling justice, one has to use the ambitions and resources of powerful people and interest groups to constrain would-be tyrants.  Confucius and his students, on the other hand, were entirely about using intrinsic motivation to prevent abuse of power:  only by appeal to, and cultivation of, good habits in princes, in states and in families, can power be rightly checked.  Where Confucius was dedicated to the project of regulating through education and internal cultivation the libido dominandi (the ‘lust for dominion’), modern Western political and economic thinking since Machiavelli has given up that project.  This has been a great loss - traditional Western, specifically traditional Christian thought as exemplified in the communitarian, intellectualist Catholic and Orthodox faiths, has much more in common with Confucius than Eric X Li gives it credit.  And, following Sam Crane’s argument, the modern Chinese Communist Party has far more in common with Han Fei than it does with Confucius.  As does the modern West.

One final thought:  Mr Li is absolutely right to point out the dangers of the existential-moral ‘children of light’ certitude which infects Western democracies, and also right to point out the Leninist roots of that certitude.  The projects to reshape the world anew in the image of America through conquest, awful bitter bloody farces as they have been and unpopular as they have become, have not died out at all.  Their perpetrators are once again making moves to regain public sympathy, and those of us who opposed them from the start must make sure that the neocons and the perfidious liberals who supported them in their murderous folly do not lead us into the same sort of mistake again.