Two cheers for the People’s Republic

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, on the first of October 1949 in the wake of a brutal civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. The mainstream American press, politicians and chattering class have been, rather predictably, unfairly critical of the festivities.

As someone who has lived the eighth part of his life in mainland China (namely in Beijing, Baotou and Luoyang), who fell in love with the Chinese inland and who married one of its daughters, my take on this Chinese anniversary is somewhat different. Even though I have one foot in the big red circle, my loyalty is in fact to the third China and I don’t, in fact, approve of the entirety of the legacy of the People’s Republic – neither that of Mao, nor that of the subsequent post-ideological state. I detest and abhor, with an unbridled passion, the One Child Policy and what it needlessly did to the country.

Full disclosure: my ideological loyalties as far as China is concerned are dual. The first belongs to the ‘institutional Confucian’ project inaugurated by Bu Shang 卜商 and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒; continuing through Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 委員 and Kang Youwei 康有爲; up to the constitutional project of Jiang Qing 蔣慶. The second, to the vein of leftist, illiberal-democratic thought inaugurated by Qu Yuan 屈原; blended with Marxism and social Gospel Christianity and continued by Wen Yiduo 聞一多, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and Jimmy Yen 晏陽初; and currently represented in the work of Wang Hui 汪暉 and Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍. These two strands share a great deal of overlap over multiple concerns and at multiple points in Chinese history, from Dong Zhongshu himself all the way down to Wang Hui. To my mind, these two strands taken together represent the true humane (in the Ru 儒 sense of ren 仁) strain of Chinese thought and action.

But I’m familiar enough with the rough, often horrifically-violent history of modern China to understand that the creation of modern China – forged as it was in the fires of European colonialism and militarism – could have been nothing other than it was, regardless of who won the Civil War. Modernisation was always conditional, and always laced with tragœdy. In context: the last great famine was an enormous calamity, yes, but it must be juxtaposed with the long history of gruesome famines which routinely claimed tens of millions of lives, from the late Qing dynasty all the way through the Republican period.

This is the basis for one of my ‘two cheers’ for the People’s Republic. The cost was high, but what was gained was a country where a famine every decade was no longer the expectation. The People’s Republic did indeed deliver hundreds of millions of human beings from lives of hunger, desperation, debt and permanent destitution. This is something that even presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – a fairly harsh critic of China’s human rights record – has acknowledged publicly. This is a world-historic accomplishment that is not to be dismissed.

The other of my ‘two cheers’ may sound a bit backhanded and even, dare I say it, dialectical. The process of modernisation under the People’s Republic has managed to demonstrate conclusively that unidirectional developmentalist theories of social and œconomic progress are profoundly lacking in explanatory power. China’s rise was not useful only for itself: in ‘standing up’, it delivered a profound practical blow to the idea of the Washington Consensus and the idea of capitalist convergence. Another Asia – and thus another world – was shown to be possible. China has successfully resisted not only the guns of American imperialism (and this is no mean feat, even today!) but also its ideas. In a very real sense, this opening up of new horizons of material œconomic possibility – the delivery of prosperity by administering hard Keynesianism through a politically-illiberal state with a foreign policy of creative inaction – was precisely what allowed China’s neighbour Bhutan to begin articulating spiritual measures of well-being. The Belt and Road Initiative, which builds on the historical Silk Road, is undoubtedly contributing to a great spiritual awakening of Asia, and possibly the openness of the southern stretch of the great continent to another Saint Thomas.

The beginnings of just such a ‘China model’ have also made some necessary internal critiques possible. China has been at the forefront of reforestation policies and innovative green architecture. Practical distributism and slow food movements are also taking root in the concrete cracks. The Chinese left is now talking in very real terms about food sovereignty: there are hints that it is becoming open to the idea of the axiomodern.

Again, I want to emphasise that China’s development is not all sunshine and peonies. The bureaucratic managerialism and the stultifying falsity of ‘official’ discourse are both distinctively unattractive features of this picture; as are the naked embrace of GDP growth at all costs, the reliance of coal and the construction of really ugly concrete buildings. A lot of that development is, in fact, fairly stark in terms of how it uproots and deprives whole bodies of people. The unevenness of China’s development in the reform-and-opening period was a feature, not a bug: and it’s one against which China’s homegrown left has fought tooth and nail since the 1980s. (Not that we would know anything about that, given how selectively Chinese history is narrated in Anglophone media – the notion that the poor benighted Chinese people know less of the truth than we do about the fourth of June would be laughable if it weren’t so insidious.) But even in its failures and wrongs, China has done human beings the advantage of exposing some of the major contradictions in ‘democratic’ capitalism’s narration of itself.

Again, my problematising of certain aspects of Chinese history should not be read as a full endorsement of the government (I’ve had too many encounters with that government to endorse it fully!); still less should it be read as full censure. Thanks to the party of government, China is heading in a direction that may not be the ‘right’ one, but at the very least it is her own, and by example it provides its neighbours with some semblance of an ability to chart their own paths. The People’s Republic of China does therefore indeed deserve these two cheers on her seventieth anniversary. 乾杯！