China is our future

While the coronavirus pandemic may initially have dented the market for China illusions, they have re-emerged in the form of admiration for the country’s authoritarian machismo in building makeshift hospitals and containing the virus before it spread more widely. Justified dismay at the regime’s punitive secrecy was swiftly replaced by familiar awe at China’s supposedly unmatched effectiveness. The contrast with the fumbling and stumbling of the UK government is only too painfully obvious, but it is still essential to get a grip on China-envy. To this day, there is almost no understanding in the western world of what has really been happening there in recent decades, and what is happening now.

For quite a long time, and especially before the advent of Xi Jinping, there was a tendency for commentators to speak of the country rather like Lincoln Steffens, the American journalist who famously went for a three-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1919 and reported, on his return: “I have seen the future; and it works”. In a similar spirit, George Osborne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, arrived in China in October, 2013. Speaking to journalists during his trip, he adopted the tones of the awe-struck enthusiast:

“I …feel a bit like, my God, we’ve really got to up our game as a country, and the whole of the west has to understand what is happening here in Asia… I do think there’s an ambition in the country and a sense of optimism and ‘can do’ which our country had in the Victorian age and had at other points in our history”.

As with Steffens, so with Osborne, it was a classic misunderstanding. China may well be our future, but not in Osborne’s sense. In gazing at China through a lens of nostalgia, he was holding up for admiration a time when, in Britain, the franchise was limited by class and gender, power was held by a small elite, poverty was thought to indicate a defect of character, protests were met with brutal force and education was for the most part complacent, stultifying and unthinkingly patriotic. Osborne’s comparison was revealing precisely because it was unintentionally accurate: contemporary China does indeed resemble Victorian Britain in almost all those respects. Far from being a model to be admired and emulated, it is a warning of a future to be avoided.

China’s culture is remarkable, replete with unexpected treasures, literary, artistic and philosophical; its people are often extraordinary — industrious, intelligent, kind and sincere (full disclosure: I am married to one!) But that should not obscure the truth about the country as a polity and society. Authors like Daniel A Bell, philosophy professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, have argued that China’s “meritocratic” system represents a valid alternative to western multiparty democracy.

The search for such alternatives is a perfectly respectable, some would say urgent, enterprise, given what has happened in the US, UK and elsewhere over the past few years, but to anyone with a feeling for democratic consent, the Chinese Communist Party’s hyper-nationalist command system isn’t an alternative that we in the west should contemplate. With its incomparably brutal record and contempt for different approaches, its narrow utilitarianism and reflexive repressiveness, it is more like a conspiracy in power than a modern political settlement.

This hasn’t prevented many western journalists and commentators over recent decades from using China as the point of departure for speculation on the future, lavishing praise on the country’s rise, arguing that economic freedom was leading to other freedoms and predicting a future China that was ever more powerful, more contented, more open. As ever, these descriptions told us more about the people offering them than the place they were describing.

You would not know from such accounts that, despite its celebrated growth rate, China remains in per capita terms among the world’s poorest countries. In 2017, Chinese GDP per head (at purchasing power parity) was 76th in the world, according to the World Bank’s International Comparisons project. This placed it below countries such as Iraq in 74th place (yes, amazingly enough, only three years ago post-war Iraq had a higher per capita GDP than China.) China’s citizens are also poorer than those of Botswana (73rd place) and Azerbaijan (72nd).

Economic growth is, of course, a public good that benefits all citizens, directly or indirectly, but the way that growth is managed plays a large role in its effect on individuals. As China’s total GDP has risen year on year, average household incomes have also risen, but this is where the issue of equality arises. In so radically unequal a society as China’s, the mass of people do not benefit proportionately from growth in the national income. China is no longer destitute, and that is an achievement worthy of respect, but in the new economy built on the ashes of Maoism, vast numbers of people are plunged into an exhausting, often terrifying, daily struggle for economic survival. Compared to the physical struggle for survival under Mao, it’s a huge improvement but it hardly justifies the deluded encomia of observers who present China as a wealthy superpower. As its leadership is only too well aware, impression and reality are not the same thing.

By 2019, China had moved up to 65th place in the World Bank rankings (just below Mexico and Saint Lucia), yet even these figures do not tell you just how poor the vast majority of Chinese citizens really are. As the nation’s investment amounts to as much as half its output, relative consumption per head is even lower than its GDP per person implies. Over the past half century, the government has held down the share of national income going to household consumption to “an astonishingly low 35 per cent of GDP”, in the words of Michael Pettis, Professor of Finance, Beijing University. This was “just over half the global average”. Historically, according to World Bank figures, it was the lowest share ever devoted to personal consumption by any significant economy.

When I was living in China, as I did for four years from 2008 while studying the language, the evidence of widespread, often extreme poverty was all around. It hasn’t disappeared since, as I have confirmed on a number of return trips. Chinese people work desperately hard, usually for little reward and sometimes for none at all. Bosses can refuse to pay wages and workers cannot get redress — this can easily happen in a society where law is at the service of power.

The Chinese work as they do partly because the culture stresses the importance of diligent contribution to collective effort, but even more, because they have no alternative. They live in a world where access to social security, sick pay, health care and pension rights is limited, minimal and often non-existent. The lives of the vast majority are governed by want and fear. That may be an ideal for leaders of the contemporary western right, especially in the US and UK but, if so, it merely supplies further proof of their sociopathic tendencies. The Chinese have a saying: “Guo fu, min qiong”. It means: “The state is rich, the people are poor.” It was true in the past, and it is still true.

The transformation of China after Mao’s death in 1976 was clearly one of the key events of modern history: Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” policies were initiated before Reagan and Thatcher took power. While the American and British leaders were influential, Deng’s momentous turn was more significant. It was perhaps the earliest, unmistakable sign of an international movement against, not just murderous dictatorship, not just against the command economy but, more broadly, against state control in areas where private initiative might do the job as well, or better.

As it turned out, the problems weren’t quite as the proponents of neoliberalism conceived them, and the solutions it offered soon led to new problems that were predictable, sometimes predicted, often ignored. Yet the international turn away from state control and central direction was a response to deep historical experience, clearly so in the Soviet Union and China but also more widely, both in the advanced west as well as in what was then called the Third World.

For the revolutionary movements that dominated, and frequently devastated, the twentieth century, it was axiomatic that to achieve their aims they had to — as Elizabeth I put it half a millennium ago — “open windows into men’s souls…” Whether they were on the right or left, their shared belief, which brought so much misery to the world, was that they could only achieve their dreams by destroying their opponents and controlling the minds of everyone else. The slightest sign of divergence, however trivial, was to be identified, reported, investigated, punished. No one was safe, even within the family.

In Russia and China, it was gradually realised over the decades that achieving mind control through brutally intrusive and punitive means was, if nothing else, an enormous waste of time, money and energy. Was all this fuss and fury about ideas, beliefs, states of mind, really necessary? In Deng’s China in the late 1970s, and in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, it was finally accepted that no useful purpose had been served by such primitive and destructive methods as long-term incarceration in labour camps, brutal interrogations with indiscriminate resort to torture and, above all, mass executions of those who belonged to the wrong class, ethnicity and faith.

At the same time in western societies — particularly the US and the UK but also more widely — a related transformation was taking place. After thirty years of generally successful economic recovery from the ravages of the Second World War, fissures were appearing. Social democracy, which in one form or another was the dominant western political philosophy during the cold war, was now facing challenges it could not manage. Sectional interests and identities were emerging that couldn’t easily be reconciled or appeased, while neoliberal ideas appeared under the seductive banner of freedom from the managerial state.

Even in the early days of this shift, it was clear that what stood behind the new slogans to do with markets, entrepreneurialism, independence and choice was a coarse nationalism. Both Reagan and Thatcher were explicit nationalists — that was a large part of their appeal — but they also promised to roll back state interference in the lives of individuals. This attracted those who lived in relative safety and security but felt restless with the pernickety bureaucracy and high taxes of social democratic government. In general, after all, people are not particularly reasonable: they want advantages without the disadvantages.

The counter-revolution of the 1970s and ’80s — in part a reaction to the disasters of totalitarianism and war that deformed the twentieth century — has now come home to roost. The rise of neoliberal ideas in the west has led to societies that are, compared to the societies that preceded them, dramatically inhumane. In present-day America and Britain, ideas of community and social obligation are everywhere on the defensive. Cruel, selfish, sometimes savage attitudes are widespread. They are constantly given unconstrained expression on the internet for, in the digital age, the public space has died. We live in our own solitude, in the freedom of our lonely fantasies, without supervision, correction, concern and, above all, without shame.

If we want to see where we are going, we need to look at China. China is our future, not in the sense that it has ever been moving towards liberal democracy, as some western fantasists supposed, but in that it incarnates to an extreme the disturbing social model that we ourselves have been building. If we examine the modern US, modern Britain, we see societies marked by fundamental inequalities and entrenched indifference to social need. At the same time, we see political movements undermining democratic procedures — the separation of powers, the rights of legislative assemblies, the recourse to legal redress — under the cover of popular sovereignty and crude nationalism.

The direction of our own societies is, more or less, towards the place where China has arrived. In China, just as in the US, there is a moneyed elite of senior Party members and their acolytes. There is a security system entirely devoted to protecting the interests of this elite. The skilful management of the infosphere is one of the Chinese authorities’ prime concerns. In terms of blocking, channelling, planting and censoring information, they do all that western governments dream of, and more.

According to Perry Link, the noted expert on Chinese affairs and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton, the government’s expenditure on “stability maintenance” (‘weiwen’ in Chinese — the abbreviated form of two double-character words, “weihu wending” i.e. “safeguard stability”) is greater than the entire Chinese defence budget! That speaks eloquently of the CCP’s priorities. “Weiwen” includes, “the regular police, courts, and prisons, but also censors and ‘opinion guides’ for the Internet, plainclothes police, telephone snoops, and thugs for hire, whose work is to keep citizens in line.”

The Chinese authorities justify their powers and ambitions by a ruthlessly utilitarian philosophy according to which dictatorship is the highest form of democracy, and the people owe their rulers absolute, unquestioning loyalty. Of course, “their” China and “our” China will not be exactly the same. To some extent, nationalism takes its character from particular national traditions, attitudes, ways of thinking and behaving — from the echoes of faded glory out of a misunderstood past. But the pretences will be similar: announcements of a spurious authenticity will mask the sordid chaos behind the scenes, the chaos of greedy, thoughtless men and women, fighting for position, money and power, for their moment in the sun, without any larger sense of responsibility for those whose lives they briefly hold in their hands.

Modern societies, east and west, are not greatly given to the delusion that they are building an ideal world. The ascendant view of the human today is hardly exalted enough to comprehend utopia. Rather, leaders and elites are almost universally convinced that the only things that matter are money and power. If you have the cash and if, in extremis, the thugs, no one can stop you. The little people can’t harm you, can they?

Maintain a reasonable-sized security establishment, control the internet, ensure people can divert themselves harmlessly on social media, watch porn (not in China, perhaps, but certainly in the west), follow sports to their heart’s content and all will be fine and dandy. Mass murder is probably wrong, certainly disturbing but, above all, unnecessary. Mind control is still on the agenda but now it is most efficiently achieved by technological means — silent, secret, mainly unnoticed. Persuasion is a matter of winks and nudges rather than the heavy hand of the state dragging suspects to their doom.

Dangers remain for both individuals and societies, but they are different from those that haunted citizens’ minds in the totalitarian states of the past. The use of modern technology, including facial recognition technology, which is deployed with increasing ubiquity in China today, offers governments the possibility of total control of the public space and massively-increased access to citizens’ private worlds. In the west, liberal arguments for the rights of the individual have increasingly fallen by the wayside as security, safety and immunity from offence have been privileged over other values. Meanwhile, given the infantile tendencies secreted within our societies, the possibility of some latter-day Mussolini grabbing the leadership and stumbling into a global war without giving the matter much thought in advance is only too plausible. Just one point is certain, all the same: whatever the answers to these quandaries, you won’t find them in China.