Reculer pour mieux sauter.
(first draft)
Now is the plight. The plight is the pitch black darkness before the twilight. The plight is the Platonic Cave. The plight is the Fatality that the Chinese viewed themselves to be destined in. The plight is the hopelessness and powerlessness the victimized citizenry felt about their situation. The plight is the pitifulness and wretchedness the petitioners are being brutally beaten and killed by the Party goons and thugs. The plight is the ignorance and arrogance those
nouveau riche are being complacent of and complicit in. The plight is the
impasse of intellectual communication with those jenny-asses and jack-asses. The plight is the
cul-de-sac of the aspiration for democracy by those exiled, ostracized, marginalized, stifled, incarcerated, imprisoned, desperate, and despaired dissidents. the plight is the
fait accompli by the CCP established regime for over half century's indoctrination, propaganda, obscurantism, and tyranny. The plight is the ambiguity of the international community for a regime change and merely paying lip-service for human rights and freedom in China. The plight is people's apathy and rampant corruption, degeneration, and immorality. The plight is that the Party has got the guns and we only the stones. The plight is people's inertia for change. The plight is that people simply don't give-a-shit anymore. The plight is that they viewed those who still do as turncoats and traitors. The plight is the
Weltschmerz. The plight is the
Zeitgeist. The plight is the Anomie. The plight is you and I.
In this chapter, I shall attempt to analyze from an array of angles in order to grasp a general understanding as to this type of dilemma that we're in. In doing so, as in diagnose the nature of this symptom, it is my genuine longing for a possible prescription to this Plight, which will lead us to the Catalyst in the next chapter. As stated above, the plight is an egregious chimera and a gargantuan behemoth that we're facing, it is a conundrum and an age-old mystery wrapped in a labyrinth. To unravel this unfathomable puzzle is surely no easy task, it is a Theseus' ship that no longer retain its original outlook, one could only get above the whole Game to beget a bird's eye view of the complete topography, to wit, that the Plight is multi-faceted, it is religious and spiritual, philosophical, historical, cultural, social, and political. Only when we start to investigate into every part of the equation could we emerge to a level of clearance. Onerous as it is, let us not be scared of its monstrosity, because at the end of the day, it is the Will that carries you through all the suspenseful navigation.
To begin with our discourse, we should take for granted that our behaviors are being dictated by two aspects of psychology, namely, nature and morality, from which the latter has been for eons solely monopolized in the field of religion. As we can all attest, the progression of the civilized world from its antediluvian provenance could be generalized as a series of different spiritual stages unfolding itself since the most primitive form of animism, to shamanism, to polytheism, to monotheism, and finally to the modern stage of atheism. It is quintessentially crucial for us to realize that monotheism, in its various forms such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, had wielded a tremendous dominance on people's spirituality, which in turn, formulated an all-encompassing and ne plus ultra morality and ethical standards. In comparison to the previous form of neolithic religious practices of animism, shamanism, and polytheism, monotheism exerted the mightiest influence on people's way of life since the dawn of our own Epoch, and spawn a whole variety of civilizations based on its supreme command on Ideology before the modern era shattered its once omnipotent presence. Nevertheless, having set the archetype for the ultimate morality in the name of the supreme God, its legacy and presence still holds firm well into our present age of scientific rationalism, even if people are not consciously aware of it. To wit, monotheism acted as the cynosure in people's moral landscape as the ultimate guidance on people's behavior and way of life.
In contrast, except the importation of Buddhism from India, monotheism has never taken a substantial and deep-rooted role in the whole Asian race of the Far East, thereby leaving a vacuum for that archetypal supreme being, who dictates the whole moral framework of a people. In the West, Yahweh has assumed that role for the Jews, the Christian God for the whole Christendom, and Allah for the whole nation of Islam, but traditionally no such omnipotent supreme being existed in the Far East and what happened was that a mortal human being assumed that role in the name of the mandate of Heaven, and he, the son of Heaven. For eons it operated in that manner and the idolatry of that supreme command, which has been more or less internalized into a collective unconsciousness. Such case could well be evident even in the 20th century: the Japanese emperor for the pre-WWII Japan and the Maoist totalitarian China. But the problem lies in the very fact that he is nevertheless a mere human, and therefore is subjected to all types of fallacies and human errors, once he is either toppled or people became disillusioned with his aura, a general social turmoil tends to follow and leaving that archetypal supreme moral framework unattended, shattered, even virtually demolished. People either relapsed to the neolithic pantheism or animism, which is esoteric and voodoo in character, and agnostic and nebulous in practice, or they simply give up the faith in goodwill, prevaricate on ethical standards, avoid moral questioning, denying an ultimate truth, and turn to complete cynics, nihilists, philistines, and opportunists, of whom are all too ubiquitous in today's China. In short, the lack of a substantiated monotheism in China has weakened fundamentally a solid moral framework, especially after the total collapse of the age-old Confucianism, which traditional held up the buttresses of morality, the Chinese moral landscape looks absolutely bleak. (In the case of Japan, the preservation of the imperial throne and the continuity of the Japanese tradition has ensured consistency in the Japanese moral framework, ameliorated by civil democracy and rapid social improvement.)
Having examined the religious aspect in China, it isn't hard for one to see that the spiritual realm of the Chinese people are in a state of crisis, contributed by a hundred years of ill-started modernization compounded by the atheist Communist fanaticism especially during the Maoist era. It is not unsound for one to conjecture that notwithstanding a continuing economic and technological advancement in China from its medieval initiation since the 20th century, the Chinese spirituality remained alike that of the Stone Age, in which physical needs, nature instincts, and innate intuitions gives much precedence over that of a moral high ground. This is why power worshiping, ignorance, herd behavior, and apathy are all but a quotidian matter in the contemporary Chinese society. One of the key factors of why the aura of Mao continue to captivate many people albeit his catastrophic reign of terror is that Mao's mythology personified that ultimate awesome power which easily conjured up people's primitive instinct of idol worshiping into the most convinced form of prostration. By induction, the Party holds legitimacy not so much on its legality or justification, but simply as the heir of Mao the Omnipotent. Furthermore, thanks to the Party's decades old relentless brainwashing program, which bred a new generation of people who simply fused Mao, the Party, and China into a single representation, thereby fostered a self-induced megalomaniac chauvinism which could be summarily described as
pan-sinocentricism. The consequences of which has already shown itself in regional violence such as Tibet and Xinjiang, where ethnic tension between the minority Tibetans and Uyghurs and the Han Chinese had already wreaked much havocs across western China. It is safe to construe that the Han Chinese's ignorance of history, apathy for the marginalization and impoverishment of the minorities, plus their growing sense of self-glorification had much to contribute to those violent clashes.
If one could contrast the difference between the occidental and the oriental in a categorical comparison of their spiritual realm, it isn't hard for one to see that for centuries, the West has been preoccupied with the ideas of freedom and liberation and the Christian conceptions of a messianic Salvation, while the East has been for millenniums obsessed with myriad forms of despotism and tyranny, and the institution of fear into the masses' collective conscientious to furthering the facilitation of control. There is an ancient parable in China called
fierce governance is more ferocious than a tiger 苛政猛于虎, in which it recounts a tale that an itinerant had traveled to a remote place in the forest where he surprisingly met an old lady who resides with her family. He was startled by such encounter and very much bewildered by their choice of such perilous remote region where tigers roams freely, but the old lady replied with rather a sense of gratification that at least in here they had escaped the unbearable governance. Such tale has shed much light on the spiritual landscape of the Chinese people, who on the one flip side had assimilated their almighty master's sense of glory into power-worshiping as relayed previously, while on the other had instilled the sense of fear for the master's unchecked license into every single one's unconsciousness. Up until the fall of the last imperial dynasty in 1911, the authority routinely made the public to congregate into the center of the marketplace to watch the decapitation and
Lingchi 凌迟, a form of slow slicing in the numbers ordered, of prisoners sentenced to death. Such mass experience of terror were not unfamiliar by the older generation who endured the Maoist era, in which public denouncements often resulted in physical harm, torture, and injury which weren't that much different from the antiquity. This type of firsthand mass indoctrination of the most graphic sensation of horror had surly left a profound spiritual scar, which translates in a knee-jerk response of fear for the most petty deviation from the Master's mandate. The legacy of the institution of fear still lives strong in the contemporary CCP regime under the guises of a debonair Master with his magnanimity on social liberalization. Beneath that deceptive veil, the Party still practices all types of barbarous form of punishment and torture toward those captured disobedient subjects. This is why to be openly critical of the political situation in China has always been a dangerous subject for the people, and they often divert the sensitive subject into some other neutral matters. It makes sense to say that this is also one of the critical reasons why my father decided to immigrate to the U.S. with his family after being investigated by the PRC state security bureau because of his intimate friendship with the staffs of the U.S. consulate in Shanghai, for he is all too familiar with that fear factor.
While we're on this subject, and the invocation of ancient idioms seem to be a good way to enlighten our perception on the current state of the Chinese spiritual well being, there is another famous saying which no doubt came from an already lost ancient provenance; it goes like
ren zei zuo fu 认贼作父, or literally,
recognizing the villain as one's father. A sort of an oriental analogy of the Western version, the Stockholm Syndrome, the idiom has borne much weighty inconvenient truth on the history of China with all plausibility, which must contained innumerable instances of such cases, for most people in most of the times tend to behave in herd instincts under the whimsical sway of any daredevil drovers with the fear factor mentioned above, while unwittingly nurturing an unconscious sense of the most sincere admiration for the Powerful, hoping in one of his afterlife incarnations, he would assume such mighty position by some windfall lottery, for the Monkey King had already relayed to us:
the saying goes, it takes turns to be an emperor, next year it's up to my house 常言道:
皇帝轮流做,明年到我家. In the Chinese mind, there is no ultimate high ground of morality, honor, and truth, but the ones currently in power has the monopoly on everything, because the ancient aphorism,
cheng wang bai kou 成王败寇, or literally,
winner king loser enemy, and by inference,
winner right loser wrong, still holds substance today. This tragic reckoning has much to explain the Plight. Even though it doesn't take rocket scientists to see all the rampant social ills and injustices in the contemporary Chinese society, such as the outright persecution of minorities, dissidents, petitioners, religious practitioners, most people tend to either turn a blind eye or simply endorse the state propaganda as a matter-of-fact.
Having marshaled our thoughts on the plight of the spiritual realm of the contemporary Chinese, from its lack of substantiated monotheist origin, to the seemingly self-contradicting fear factor and power worship, let us now consider something that is equally critical as this deplorable aspect, namely, the philosophical nature of the Chinese. If the reader recall from Part 1 of Chapter I, I have already stated the fact that the greatest philosopher of China who shall be rightly honored as the philosopher-sage-king-prophet of China to be Confucius, who gave the Chinese their identity and their moral backbone. For more than two thousand years, it was Confucianism, which acted in lieu of the monotheist void, and buttressed the moral and ethical framework of the people. It focused primarily on secular affairs and inculcated to the people about ethics and civil obligations. While both Buddhism and Taoism had degenerated into innumerable schools of agnosticism and pantheistic idol worshiping, which was passive in character and discouraging in civil participation to say the least. It was Confucianism that maintained the viability of social fabrics and civil institutions through countless different dynastic replacements. However, the crucial differences of philosophy between the East and the West was that while someone said that the whole western philosophy could be described as connotations on Plato, the latter nevertheless transcended and transformed into an immortality, which is still vivacious and engaging today. The East on the other hand, has been truly connoting Confucius for the past two thousand years with all the faithful dogmatism and loyal adherence on its orthodoxy until the beginning of 20th century, the consequences of which was that without the pliability to transform along with the zeitgeist, it appeared to be anachronistic to the moderns, if not a complete dinosaur, which was precisely the case to many progressive left-wingers who advocated for the apocalyptic Sovietization of China in the beginning of 20th century. The rest is of course, an utter catastrophe. We cannot blame the Great Confucius for something that happened more than two thousands years after his time, rather, we shall take a closer look on the intellectual trend the Chinese had taken after Confucius' era in order to better understand this seemingly incomprehensible conundrum of the contemporary philosophical plight.
To begin with, Confucianism is designed to be secularly oriented and mainly focused on formulating a moral construct in order to foster a most desirable and harmonious society in which people could live honorably and prosper in turn. It preoccupied itself primarily on the realm of ethics, social science and political philosophy. In contrast with the Western tradition, theology, natural philosophy, the precursor of modern science, metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, epistemology, logics, freedom, and liberation, these quintessential schools of thoughts which built the foundation of Western civilization are innately nil in the teachings of Confucius. That is simply a given, for Confucius, his peers, and his disciples, who shall be considered as the
paleo-Confucians, had never encountered anything from the West, and simply had to make due with the existing autochthonous traditions and ideas. Historically, it is Taoism which added much substances in the field of natural philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, and freedom, while Buddhism acted likewise in the field of theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, since the Han dynasty officially enshrined that Confucianism as the state sponsored ideology, which exercised its domination for the next two thousands years, the subsequent Confucians, who acted much like a priesthood, had much bearing and influence on the intellectual character of the Chinese for the next two millenniums. In effect, their main contribution isn't necessarily a philosophical breakthrough, but a refinement on bureaucracy and civil service examinations in order to produce an army of mandarins in the service of the imperial court. They churned out tomes of exegesis on the Confucian canons; ameliorated the poetic verses with all the grace and elegance; blossomed a classic tradition of literary panache and belletrism; institutionalized the Confucian ethics into a cult of ancestral worship, monarchic loyalty, and patriarchic dogmatism as the most sincere form of orthodox filial piety; they engineered generations of intellectuals, scholars , and bureaucrats who essentially repeated and refined the previous accomplishments without adding new blood into the aging body. Whereas some sinologists argued that with the introduction of Buddhism which ultimately gave a resurgence in the Song dynasty called Neo-Confucianism, the case is insubstantial and the coinage a misnomer. The new school in Song dynasty founded by
Zhu Xi 朱熹 shall be viewed in a historical perspective as the
Meso-Confucianism, who simply reinterpreted the authenticity of Confucian orthodoxy in the lexicons of Buddhism and Taoism. Namely, he consecrated the most noble virtues and honors of Confucian ethics with a dash of religious aura by commandeering phrases in the Chinese vernaculars which were traditionally associated with the nonsecular realm, such as
Tianli 天理, or
Heavenly Doctrine,
Dao 道 or
Taoism, and
Qi 气 or
spiritual energy. The whole monumental effort was really to justify Confucian principles as a form of universal truth. Furthermore, he was the key architect who compiled the canons of Confucianism known as the Four Books (
The Great Learning,
Doctrine of the Mean,
The Analects of Confucius, and
Mencius), which had a tremendous impact on the education of subsequent generations of Chinese for almost another millennium. In a nutshell, the
Meso-Confucians helped in buttressing the foundation of Confucianism by elevating it to an universal and heavenly status, systematized its doctrines, and codified its teachings. That is all.
We did not see another major landmark in the history of philosophy until the Industrial Revolution of our Modern Age, which uneasily awakened the somnial lion of the East. After all of those humiliating defeats on the Manchu Qing dynasty by the Western and Japanese imperialists in the the First and Second Opium Wars (circa 1840-1860) and the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), there was one prominent figure coming to the fore of historic stage, who shall be deemed as the godfather of modern
Neo-Confucianism. His name is
Kang Youwei 康有为. A child prodigy, colorful esquire, and much admired, respected, and loathed gentleman who nevertheless lived up to the virtues of a Confucian
junzi 君子. He has allegedly denounced much of the previous Confucian teachings as falsehood and heralded a return to the classics of the original Confucianism, thus marked him a heretic among his peers, he was the first prominent Neo-Confucian who absorbed Western ideas such as evolution, rationalism, and democratic reforms into his own Confucian thoughts. Being a man of his era, he was a loyal monarchist, and sought to reform the antiquated political system in the Manchu court in order to modernize China in the form of constitutional monarchy, as in the manners of Britain and Japan. Given the political atmosphere of the late Qing dynasty being so abysmally out of his league in which the meager emperor
Guangxu 光绪 was completely under the manipulation of the tyrannic empress dowager
Cixi 慈禧, he nevertheless staged a magnificent feat in order to save the emperor in the abortive attempt of the so-called Hundred Days' Reform in 1898. After the crushing forces of the reactionaries commanded by the empress dowager, the attempt was labeled as a
coup d'etat, and his enterprise destroyed utterly with him chased away as the enemy of the state, and some of his followers decapitated in the public market. This historic blunder could be viewed as the first martyrdom of the Chinese intellectual community in the modern era, which had a far deeper effect than its initial impact. Because after the incident, albeit the dethronement of the Qing dynasty about a decade later by the republican forces, there has never been a successful philosophy which was able to command the entire moral landscape of the society such as Confucianism once did, thus resolutely demoted the millenniums-old tradition of China into some obscure backwater and initiated the beginning of a philosophical dark age of our present epoch. What we have since the commencement of our republican era is a cacophony of a whole different ideas and thoughts, in which constitutional monarchists, libertarianism, polemics, nihilism, existentialism, fascism, escapism, and leftist progressivism vied for the intellectual high ground, until all gave way to the mighty crushing forces of the ideologues heralding the coming establishment of the communist empire in China.
To summarize briefly about the Maoist Era, that is roughly thirty years of state terrorism between 1949 to 1979. It was apocalyptic and iconoclastic for the entire Chinese nation, and a summary execution of the spirit of the whole intellectual community, thus marked its second martyrdom most notably in the Anti-rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution, with millions of intellectuals purged, persecuted, and liquidated in the
Laogai reform camps or simply committed suicides. One of the most notable ones being
Lao She 老舍, a prominent leftist literary master who wrote much about the lower class' struggles during the nascent republican era and the social transformation brought about during the 20th century in a realist style, his works were first commandeered by the communist propaganda machinery as a useful tool preparing the masses for indoctrination about the manifest destiny of the coming socialist paradise in China. He was then inducted in the 1950's into the much celebrated communist-backed writers' guild as its chairman along with lots of other honorary titles and respectable yet inconsequential positions. Being flattered with such honors endowed by Party, he blew the trumpet for his master in his increasingly hollowed and contrived literatures, and yet he had gradually fallen out of favor and eventually got cut out of the loop during the commencement of the Cultural Revolution, finally he drowned himself after much unbearable cruel humiliations and condemnations in the face of the coming fanaticism and iconoclasm which wreaked devastating havocs across the entire country in the next ten years. His life epitomized the tragedy, moral cowardice, and philosophical impasse that is to haunt so many in the modern intelligentsia community, which brought about a thirty years hiatus in the continuity of intellectual progress. The legacy of which was to have a lasting effect, with the creative void and inertia overwhelmed by totalitarian absolutism for nearly two generations of people, the decades following the foundation of PRC was indeed the nadir for the Chinese in every respect, from which they have yet to come out of its daunting effects.
There came a brief liberalization following Mao's demise and Deng's secession which was regarded by the Chinese as a mini-golden age of intellectual blossom in the 1980's culminated in its ultimate manifestation, the 1989 students' democratic movement, which was nevertheless, ruthlessly cracked down in the June-4th Tiananmen Massacre, thereby unequivocally marked the third martyrdom of the Chinese intellectual community in their century's old struggle for a titanic philosophical breakthrough and the liberation of our national Soul. Tragic as it is an abortive takeoff, the glorious 1980's is worthwhile for a closer look for it served as a fulcrum point from which virtually every contemporary cultural and intellectual schools and ideas could trace its origin. It started from a grassroot underground literary movement of the so-called
Scar Literature 伤痕文学 in the end of the 70's following the passing of the so-called
ten years of catastrophe (a.k.a. Cultural Revolution), which inspired many to write novels about the tragedies people endured. It conveyed a sharp criticism of the ultra-leftist misadventure and a deep loath for the Communist treachery, at the same time imbued with a most profound sense of sorrow and revelation. As a result, the movement helped to launch new discoveries in every intellectual field from the arts, literature, poetry, film, to music with a focus on the Free World that was only slowly reopened to them since 1979. A socio-political critic named
River Sorrow 河殇 written by a group of pro-West liberals, and later adapted into a mini-series documentary articulated the zeitgeist of the era so well that it was perceived as sounding the death knell for the CCP's approaching end of dictatorship. The show was banned from broadcasting subsequently, but its legacy had been laid and only in a few years' time, it saw its reincarnation in the magnificent 1989 student movement swept across the country in all its triumphant morale and democratic glory. For once in a time, the sweet flavor of freedom and the refreshing breath of liberty was really in the air.
Since the Tiananmen Massacre, the post-'89 atmosphere with sustained state sponsored economic development underpinned by rampant materialism and mammonism had significantly diminished the vivacity of people's intellectual and philosophical quest. The whole stifling environment albeit immersed in a sea of consumer knick-knack petty products had fostered a culture of cynicism, epicureanism, hedonism, agnosticism, skepticism, nostalgic euphoria, self-indulgence, moral degeneration, and hypocrisies which permeated every facet of society today. Last but not least, an intellectual expatriation
en masse had become a trend as the only viable way to maintain moral independence and spiritual purity for many, who opted for such Exodus. To conclude the above sketch on the intellectual character of modern China, while it is rightly granted that even though the Chinese are rated as an intelligent people who never ran out of supplies of resourceful and smart individuals, their intellectual dynamics had stalled, lagged, and finally, stagnated for the last hundred years for reasons of both political repressions and self incompetence amidst the rolling waves of history. Today they have in their storage an abundance of eloquent anchormen, witty commentators, clever columnists, erudite publishers, stately editorialists, highbrow educators, recondite thinkers, urbane TV hostesses, chic writers, stylish literatis, cultured glitteratis, genteel socialites, brainy celebrities, and cosmopolitan politicians, but rarely, a great philosopher. In short, while there might be a few exceptional individuals who commanded the highest regard for their triumphant spirits and distinguished minds, the intellectual community as a whole had not only failed the noble obligation of the traditional Confucian ideal, namely, the pursuit of the highest virtues and the elevation of the entire society's moral character, but also, they had failed the Chinese people. So far this seems to be the case.
Having examined some of the spiritual and intellectual aspects, which helped to elucidate just part of the equation of the Plight we're currently stuck in, let us now turn our eyes on some concrete historical incidents, which might be more directly, shedding some lights on our inquisition as to the abysmal impasse of this so-called "Chinese exceptionalism". This term has started to gain its common recognition, along with another term such as "Chinese anomaly" since the onset of the 21th century by some savvy sinologists, China-watchers, and pundits to describe the unorthodox course China has taken, in which its consistent modernization and economic liberalization had coexisted with age-old authoritarian tradition well without even a sparse trait of political reform and democratization. Almost all other authoritarian regimes would sure not to enjoy such fluke of luck as the CCP does, thus the global wave of democratization in Africa, eastern Europe, Soviet Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan by the end of 20th century had seemed to have no real effect on the walls of Communist China. Therefore, it might be enlightening for us to look back on its history in order to search for some indicative explanations.
As we have already seen in Part 1 of Chapter I, in which I had given a concise recount of the millenniums-old history of China, if there could be said something conclusive about its nature and character, it will be plausible to recognize the fact that since the establishment of the Qin empire in 221 BC., which for the first time gave an all encompassing geopolitical concept of today's "China Proper", China has been an authoritarianism with a powerful and hegemonic centralized government all along for at least two thousand years regardless of which dynastic houses happened to be in reign. At every turn of dynastic reshuffling when the central government started to wane and regional factions from all quarters gain their ascendancies, one thing for sure is that the state of decentralized regionalism won't last as long as the unified period before another almighty sovereign took the helm of the ultimate leadership of the entire country. The cycle thus keeps on repeating itself, with the longest factionalism in more ancient times of the so-called Three Kingdoms period (220- 280 AD.) followed by a feeble dynasty of Jin (265-420 AD.), and then disintegrated into the dark age of Southern and Northern dynasties (420-581 AD.), some total of 360 years, and the later Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-979 AD.) following the demise of the great Tang dynasty, some 70 odd years. Other than that, for most part of her history, she had always been in a solid grip of a powerful central government with a far-reaching bureaucratic administration. This can almost be said as just the opposite of the European experience, in which after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD., there hasn't been a single authentic empire who had under its sway the entire continent of Europe, other than that fleeting experience of the Carolingian empire, the marginalized and isolationalist Byzantine empire, and the nominal but neither holy, nor Roman, nor imperial, Holy Roman Empire. Such collective experiences of the East and West surly had shaped an idiosyncratic and deep-rooted character of both, which could be identifiable as some of the most prominent features of the Eastern and Western civilizations, with the former to be authoritarian, dogmatic, illiberal, and centralized, and the latter more democratic, dynamic, free, and surly decentralized as still is today.
Without dwelling too much on China's classic history but only to lay a blueprint upon which the modern edifice of its polity and constitution is built, let us examine a few instances in her modern history to see if she has consistently failed at every window of opportunity that were afforded to her in order to transcend this spell of fatalism afore mentioned. And if she didn't, let us see if we can draw some parallels between the people of the late Qing dynasty and our contemporary folks in terms of their attitudes and disposition in the face of this Western encounter. As every Chinese knows, the modern history of China started with a so-perceived infamy of the first Opium War in 1840, with the British empire blowing the shut-doors of China open and forcibly coerced her to fall in line with the rest of the globe. The very first widely celebrated item with its mass importation into China, thanks to the British East India Company with its relentless adherence to the doctrine of
Laissez-faire which ultimately became the major
casus belli, was rather an dishonorable produce: opium. Therefore according to the loyal mandarins of the Qing court, such as the heroic imperial envoy, Mr.
Lin Zexu 林则徐, who ordered to burn all of the merchandise upon confiscation in the infamous event of Humen Opium Burning 虎门销烟 in 1839, boycotting Western goods along with Western ideas as if perniciously implied such as the opium, has assumed a norm of standard practice, which surfaces again and again until the recent event of 2008 with Chinese boycotting the French Mall Carrefour, upon the Parisian mayor's honoring of the Dalai Lama. The irony of both, some hundred and odd years apart, is that in the first case which resulted in the so-called unequal Treaty of Nanking in 1842 , the Qing court ceded Hongkong to the Brits, without which there won't be a cosmopolitan Hongkong of today. And in the second case, the French Carrefour, along with all his other Western colleagues, had offered hundreds of thousands jobs to the Chinese and helped in innumerable ways in improving the Chinese civic and cultural qualities.
Another instance could be drawn from the the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century, which could be said as the first emergence of grass-rooted nationalist consciousness. Upon the unstoppable Western influence and China's decline, there came a movement of the most reactionary forces of the so-called boxers who opted for terrorism against the missionaries and their churches, received patronage directly from the empress dowager, and blindly adopted much voodoo witchcrafts along with some petty spears and machetes as their sole weapons against the invading Western forces. The outcome goes without saying was an utter catastrophe, but somehow to be openly critical of them in today's China is still politically incorrect and very much a taboo. A hundred years later, coincidence or otherwise, there emerged another grass-rooted anti-West undercurrent which had gained much currency for the past decade. The so-called
fenqing 愤青, which means
raging youth, denotes a new generation of young adults who maintain much resentment and hostility toward the West, and share much sentiments in ethos at least if not in deed, with their precursors. Instead of the boxers' barbarism, they rant and rave their rage everywhere on the World Wide Web, and produced a few sensational hot-sellers in China which received a brief popularity and media attentions, such as
China Can Say No (1996) and
Unhappy China (2009). Their official endorsement was still muted or equivocal, but it doesn't take a college graduate to compare them with the track record of the PRC State Department's spokesperson and detect much similarities between the
fenqing's attitudes and the government's disposition.
On the flip side was of course, committed rapid modernization and westernization for the past hundred years and still ongoing. Instances of which are too innumerable and therefore to be omitted for the concision of this discourse. Nevertheless, it should become quite obvious to an inquisitive person upon learning a few things about the Chinese recent experience to see that they somehow harbors a bipolar mindset about the West, with an avid admiration and the utmost pious imitation on the one hand, while still retains a deep inimical attitude and xenophobic distrust at the same time. Due to its antediluvian history, there are much ancient pithy aphorism which all attests to the Chinese idiosyncratic xenophobia, such as
huayi zhi bian 华夷之辨 or
distinction between China and barbarians, and such saying like
not my race, his mind must be dissimilar 非我族类，其心必异. If we can come to such a reckoning, it won't be hard for us to see that why the Chinese has always had an uneasy or rather conflicting relationship with the West. And the plight is precisely the fact that while they coveted wholeheartedly almost everything Western, from technology to soap operas, from KFC to Barbie doll, from Ivy League to IKEA, political and civic virtues such as the rule of law, freedom, human rights, and democracy had always been practiced halfheartedly and fallen short at their very threshold and never manage to inch in and take roots inside China. Their adamant distrust of the West's intention for criticizing China's deplorable human rights records had somehow justified the Chinese exclusiveness of being the contrarian of universal trend. Suppressions of freedom and liberty, and persecutions of dissidents, religious practitioners, and minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs had assume a quasi-legitimate character as the very "Chineseness" they are to uphold with all due faithfulness, a domestic issue that the West can have no say in lest for the accusation of infringement on sovereignty. In light of this expatiation, we can come to an understanding that while history made who the Chinese are, the Chinese also made how the history is. Therefore, the Opium Wars, Boxer Rebellion, Korean War, or June-4th ' 89 Tiananmen Incident and so on could all be viewed as solid corroborations of the Chinese exertion on their non-conformist national idiosyncrasy, while the Self-Strengthening Movement
自強運動 or the Foreign Affair Movement
洋務運動 of the Qing dynasty (ca. 1861–1895) and the Reform era since
Deng Xiaoping's PRC (1978 - ), along with continuing social and cultural realignment with the West attests to their schizophrenic obsession and mesmerizing infatuation with the West's grandeurs and might. This peculiar symbiotic experience of both love and hate had quite lodged China in her current uncomfortable position, uneasy, unable, and unwilling to transform. The dilemma of which begs for further diagnosis, and now let us turn to China's deep-rooted culture and tradition to see if we will encounter some new discoveries.
To probe into our cultural analysis of China, we have to bear in mind a few premises in order to establish our discourse, to wit: ancient economic organization, which in turn fostered a millenniums-old tradition. In other words, China has been a massive agrarian civilization for thousands of years and therefore, almost all cultural phenomena prior to the influx of Westernization had been predetermined by agriculture per se. From the lunar calendar to its twenty-four important solar terms, from the zodiacal symbols (which contained ten quotidian animals of a regular farmland out of the total twelve, the exceptional two are tiger and dragon, traditionally revered as sacred creatures;) to religious festivals, from the arts to philosophy (which are both heavily inspired by and preoccupied in the natural phenomena;), from folk idioms to people's daily life, the Chinese have been habituated in and affected by an oriental agrarian set of lifestyle that even though many had long been settled in the cities and well versed and savvied in all the fads and high-techs, much remnant behaviors still reflect their earlier way of life: talking louder than normal, heedless spitting and indiscreet sneezing, habitual squatting in the public, and a general lack of civility and composure are all but a few ostensible vestiges of their once rustic lifestyle, beneath that surface lies a far more deeper and much more entrenched disposition, which is far more difficult to ameliorate than say, an improvement on etiquettes and courtesy. This deep-rooted disposition had been exposited by many Chinese scholars since the 1980's and the seemingly novel coinage, the so-called
xiaonong yishi 小农意识, or literally:
petty peasants' consciousness, had gained much currency since then albeit always with a negative connotation. Never in the history of China, and certainly exacerbated since the onset of the reform era of the 1980's that the peasantry have had its worst time in terms of both social recognition and economic status, for even though the peasantry had always been dirt-poor during the Maoist era they have nevertheless assumed a glorified aura along with the proletariat. That aura was long vaporized since the Western capitals started to inundate the dried-up society in the 1980's, and the peasantry were summarily relegated to the back-country of social oblivion. People often use to criticize each other with a pejorative innuendo of being and acting like a peasant, without noticing the fact that the so-called
petty peasants' consciousness is a collective consciousness for almost all, more or less.
So just what are some of the characteristics of this so-called
petty peasants' consciousness and how did it affect the entire society in light of the central thesis of this chapter? For starter, one has to notice the economic organization in China's history has mostly been formulated by free farmers, that is unlike the serfdom in much of medieval Europe, Russia and Tibet, the caste system in India, the slavery in colonial and earlier period of North America, or the manorialism in the vast haciendas across much of Latin America. On the other hand, and much to the contrary of the Communist propaganda in its depiction of the so-called
the extreme heinous Old Society 万恶的旧社会, Chinese farmers were freemen for more than 2000 years, albeit the vicissitudes of their livelihood has always been subjected to the effect of natural and man-made catastrophes. They could be subdivided into the indigents, who could be easily hired to perform any menial labors; mostly the self-sufficients, who tilled a small patch of land leased from the government or the landlords, and paid taxes and even perform civil duties such as enlistment in the military; and a few well-off opulents who became land-owners and operated a handful of different businesses, and in turn, assumed the role of local headmen. Their collective aspiration and their highest goal in life is a categorical alignment with that of the good-old Confucian tradition: serve their parents well, educate their younger generations even if subsisted with a meager income, and ultimately, to see if one of them in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future to become an imperial mandarin of high offices. Their social ranking was traditionally that of the second place, right below the mandarins, above the laborers and the lowest, an irony in today of course, the merchants. (The traditional social roles
shi 士 mandarins,
nong 农 farmers,
gong 工labors,
shang 商 merchants, are still very much of currency in modern idioms.) In good years, that is most of the times for the past 2000 years, they were nevertheless satisfied, happy, and comfortable, thus fostered this so-called
petty peasants' consciousness that is generally depicted as parochial, myopic, narrow-minded, trivial, superstitious, fatalistic, selfish, shallow, lack of disciplines and social concerns, which ironically does not contradict them seeking higher offices, complacent with current livelihood, docile in the face of authoritarianism, quarrelsome amongst themselves, and adamantly organized in clanism and sectarianism. Because of these deep-entrenched characters, they have proved to be easily controllable by all kinds of governments as long as the latter don't tried to make life too miserable for them. From the ancient Chinese dynastic houses to the Mongols, the Tartars, and the Manchus, from the early republican warlords to the Japanese, and the current regime of CCP, they could be easily shepherded as long as they were petted from time to time. Thus we have seen the current administration of the CCP carrying out a series of nominal policies under the mantras of
yi ren wei ben 以人為本, or literally,
humanism as the fundamentals, and conveniently relaxed some social tensions by building a few cheap schools and hospitals, and waived the so-called agricultural tax since 2006, allegedly benefiting 800 millions of farmers. This however, is by no means to say that the peasantry today are comfortable, and there had been innumerable instances of clashes and riots between the peasants and local authorities, which has to do with an imminent threat of people's livelihood, due to some grotesquely corrupted officials' arbitrary relocation of people's homes for building a dam, a parking lot, a mall, or whatever purposes in the name of government usage. But this is always a material struggle without further and deeper social transformations, as long as the mobs gets suppressed, appeals get addressed, the displaced people gets reimbursed and resettled, all books are closed until the next case opens in the next village and town
. Petty peasants' consciousness has neither an immediate concern nor a higher aspiration for an entire social and civil transformation; democracy, freedom, liberty, and rule of law are all but too grandiose, too abstruse, too complex, and too exotic, for their preoccupation is and always will be their tiny patch of land, their water buffalo, their plows, their cottage, their children's education (albeit much garbage being taught), their 36" television, and their next meal. That is all.
Having posited the above cultural characters of the Chinese people, I am nevertheless not altogether in the position of denunciation of this phenomenon, for indeed, according to the infinite wisdom of Taoist teaching, our great sage
Laozi had even praised the radicalized version of such
petty peasants' consciousness as the most idealized way of life, such as seen in the text of the Taoist cannon Tao Te Ching: "isolated folks of petty small states ... don't interact with each other until their deaths 小国寡民 ... 民至老死不相往来". This Utopian envision of the most harmonious and idealized way of life certainly delineates a realm of the highest virtue, free of treachery and egoism, the terminus of History qua History, or the End of History, as postulated in Francis Fukuyama's idealized world, much akin to the shires of the Hobbits. But since the likelihood of mankind reaching that stage of History is still highly unattainable in the foreseeable future, and certainly for the Chinese people to reach there is still very much a daydream. For the time-being, that is for the past 2000 years they still have to make dues with their current situation. As a result, the highest aspiration of their salvation formulated by their
petty peasants' consciousness has become a singular longing, which is a recurrent theme throughout the Chinese history, to wit, the coming of a most noble and virtuous imperial mandarin according to the legend of a Song dynasty official
Baoqingtian 包青天, literally, (the honorable)
Bao the Blue Sky. Largely fictional and a dramatized protagonist, the character is loosely based on an imperial mandarin named
Bao Zheng 包拯, who has been praised of being most judicious and just, and has assumed the archetypal role in the Chinese collective consciousness as the symbol for equity and justice. Ironically, this cultural idiosyncrasy has attested to the very contradiction such longing manifested, namely, in reality, amongst the millions-strong army of government officials, people such as
Bao the Blue Sky is next to nonexistent, and the relatively insignificant history of the most endangered species such as
Bao the Blue Sky has become a hearsay, a folklore, a legend, and a mythology, much like a phoenix or a unicorn. Therefore, as we can see, without a wholehearted transformation of the socio-political system, this type of
Petty peasants' consciousness has become very much an impediment in the progress of history, because one virtuous
Bao the Blue Sky is inconsequential in the salvation of the entire nation, but only a brand new system and institution without such fanfare and fairytale epithet, might alleviate much burdens and miseries from the people.
Before we leave off this topic, I shall just address a few highlights on the Chinese cultural crown jewels lest a chauvinist attacks me for being a "traitor". Far from the worst designation that could possibly be ascribed to a fellow compatriot as being a
hanjian, or literally,
Han-traitor, which I'm sure some would be more than eager to prescribe to me and my kind. I am by no means as such, neither a sinophobe, but only a conscientious and devoted sinologist. I have been well versed on the Chinese literary classics since my adolescent years in the United States, even more so than my peers in China due to their state-decreed socialist education program, which was devoid of any substance of Chinese cultural studies and infested with communist propagandas. I have learned the values and lessons of these classics by heart, and I shall only exposit a few general points of their significances. Namely, if one is to investigate in depth on the nature of the Chinese spiritual disposition, the five literary classics are essential in understanding some of the idiosyncratic characters of the Chinese people:
The Romance of Three Kingdoms 三国演义,
Journey to the West 西遊記,
Water Margin 水浒传,
Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢, and
The Plum of the Golden Vase 金瓶梅, the last one being an anathema due to its pornographic content, although but without doubt a
tour de force of literary genius from an anonymous authorship and continues to enjoying its popularity after five hundred years since its debut.
One is capable of detecting much insights upon reading these classics. The
Three Kingdoms reveals that the Chinese people are a race endowed with some of the highest intelligence quotient in the world, but unfortunately they've invested most of that gift primarily on the art of power, and preoccupied themselves on politicking, or colloquially, enjoy the art of how to whack each other out.
Journey to the West conveys a poignant aspect which most tend to neglect about the Chinese people in stereotypes, that they are capable of highly sophisticated imagination and most extraordinary level of romance, thanks to the introduction of Buddhism from India. It points to the fact that Buddhist doctrines and philosophy had been deeply saturated in China, and consequently, people became profoundly fatalistic and euphoric in the belief of Karma.
Water Margin identifies a cyclical theme in Chinese history, to wit, peasant revolution and the making of a new Authoritarian Order. It contains many laudable characters of highest virtue and honor who are still being celebrated today, much like the aforementioned
Bao the Blue Sky, but this is really an aside in terms of History. On the other hand, its much substantial undertone bears more weight on our analysis of the Chinese cultural tradition, that is, the glorifications of the daredevil revolutionary peasantry who stepped out of their loop and aspired to become the next Alpha in line. However, the consequences of him after becoming the Alpha is really nonessential, from
Liu Bang 刘邦, the founder of Han dynasty, to
Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋, the founder of Ming dynasty, to Mao, the founder of Red China, all of whom had come from the class of peasantry, and all had become timeless epic heroes, much like the fictional characters in
Water Margin. The Red Chamber is really The Crown Jewel of the Chinese literary establishment. Accomplished during the early years of Qing dynasty by an indigent ex-aristocrat whose ancestry occupied high offices in both Qing and the former Ming imperial courts, the author Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 was a world-class top-brass literati who rivals Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Tolstoy. His magnum opus contains the core of Romeo and Juliet, the body of Anna Karenina, the soul of a most abstruse Taoist's highest spiritual realm, and more. It is the pioneer of humanism and romanticism in China and a profound testament of the philosophical depth of the author in both his enlightenment on China's Destiny and his own revelation on the vicissitude of life. I have only praises for this true literary prodigy, and the so-called Hongxue 红学, or literally, red-ology has become an academic discipline on its own right furnishing uncountable substances in both sinology and literature. Last but not least, Golden Vase, often overlooked or simply dismissed on the ground of its lewd depictions and vulgarities, sheds much lights on the life of the mundane folk world. Although the plot took place in the waning period of the Song dynasty, it conveys much substances even for today's Chinese people in a myriad of different aspects, such as folk culture, tradition, and art, social construct and the impact of political ramification, and not the least in its vivid and infinitely detail-oriented literary style, the so-called petty peasants' consciousness has been explored and exhibited to the most splendid level. For better or worse, the Chinese people has been given a true life as ordinary humans for the first time, not as saints and sages, heroes and demigods as earlier works have often focused on. It is precisely through such kaleidoscopic view the book offers us, much in lieu of the most celebrated panoramic painting, Along the River During the Qingming Festival 清明上河图 has manifested, we are able to investigate and analyze much sociological substances from this preeminent literary masterpiece.
In the penultimate analysis of our examination on the Plight of China I shall recount a concise statement as to my views on China's social aspects and its shortcomings or obstacles for a political transformation. Having explored thus far, I am confident that the readers can already delineate a general picture of China and her people with all the idiosyncrasies, characteristics, peculiarities, and even antics I have exposited before, therefore it is only worthwhile to focus on one poignant social phenomenon that I have discovered in order to further assist us to formulate a critical opinion on our central thesis of this chapter. Throughout my formative years from the East to the West, I have been fortunate enough to have a very different experience based on the social construct and class awareness between the East and the West, all of which had stimulated my inquisitive mind trying to reach some comparative revelations on this rather sensitive subject matter. Namely, I have come to the rational sense which lead me to the view that the Chinese society is much more rigidly constructed and class awareness much more conscious than that of the West. Even though not as rigid as the old Caste system once existed in the Indian subcontinent, however just as ancient and complex as the Indian civilization, the Chinese, even though being the aforementioned freemen, have constructed a moral archetype of the dichotomy between the rulers and the subject-masses much more adamantly and systematized than, say, the Western civilizations, and among the subject-masses themselves, the subdivisions of whom are also much more dogmatically codified and proved to be very hard to break through. On the contrary, with the exception of the Tsarist Russia, western Europe and subsequently, the newly founded United States have been much freer and more liberal in terms of social mobility, and in effect, class awareness weren't, and certainly are not, that acute as in comparison with China. Even though the bane of the West has always been the issue of slavery and civil injustice, the whole socio-political system and moral fabrics were not that solidified as to not allowing any forms of polemics and controversies, which ultimately lead to the transformation of society. Therefore we've seen pioneers of their own era, such as Alexander Hamilton, and the Darwins being abolitionists when the whole world still condoned the institution of slavery, and the subsequent revolution, manumission, emancipation, liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement were all really a logical progression based on the whole foundation of the West, to wit, their peculiar vocation on the subject of freedom, liberty, social contract, rights, and the distribution of interests. Even though xenophobic tendencies still exist toward new immigrants and petty nouveau riches' condescension still apparent to some degree today, The western society as a whole is sound and vivacious, such as the omnipresent and empirically proven idea of the American Dream, or the all-too-common quotidian concept of the fundamental equalities of all, regardless of, say an illegal immigrant, a hobo, an indigent, a celebrity, or a politician. This virtue was not, with much regrets, and still is not the case for China.
Chinese society on the other hand, is structured in such a way that is much more dogmatic, rigid, and above all, authoritarian. Due to its ancient historic pedigree that leads to an antediluvian past, which often conjures up a vainglorious arrogance for some, the idea of social contract is first and foremost nonexistent amongst the populace. There is the rulers and the subjects and that is everything. The only way to break up that pattern is not by means of civil politics or a plebiscite but by violent revolutions, and those revolutionaries who have overthrown the ancient regimes thereby assumed the role of sacrosanctities and being eternally eulogized did not really came up with a new system, but simply replaced the old "heinous and diabolical" rulers in the name of "benevolent and magnanimous monarchs" or great mentor, great leader, great generalissimo, and great helmsman (sic.), an ubiquitous mantra during the Cultural Revolution praising Mao by the perfidious general Lin Biao 林彪. The rulers stand above the law and use the law not as a way of maintaining justice, social order, and security, but as a means of controlling his subjects, thereby create a vast outpour of abuses and arbitrariness. Such cases ran throughout Chinese history from the top leadership all the way down to the local governments. Fundamental rights, equalities, liberation or justice are nothing but a byword for the media and diplomatic purposes, for if asked a Chinese himself, such charlatanism is really nothing but a laughing stock to any sound-minded individuals.
Another social peculiarity of China, especially since the beginning of the modern era, is that amongst the subject-masses themselves, an unwitting subdivision seemed to be taken place and by now had become rigidly deep-rooted as to any attempt of trying to absolve such symptom had proven to be extremely difficult and the obstacles monumental. Namely, society had been divided into four substratifications: foreigners, oversea Chinese (including Hongkong, Macau, and Taiwan), urban denizens, and rural folks. This seemingly odd phenomenon might sound strange to those who aren't familiar with China, but to the Chinese themselves and those who have extensive experiences with China, it is all but an open secret, if not readily admitted in public. With the rulers stand above them, this sub-denominations naturally had created different standards, attitudes, and treatments to each different person belonging to their respective classes, thus it goes without saying that arbitrary whim and caprice becomes the norms instead of reason and justice. Amidst them, foreigners and oversea Chinese are seen as outsiders with only a variant degree of distance, and received better or exclusive treatments (not always a good thing since they usually have to pay higher prices for almost everything). Never seen in all the nations on earth that the Chinese are generally speaking the most xenophilous people in the world, but this is just an aside. The urbanites and the ruralites are really the main subject the rulers deal with, between the two groups the former somehow assumed a self-induced elitist air and the latter the underdogs who had received an poignant epithet, the invisible mass 隐形的群体.From my attentive years regarding the news of China I can raise one indicative instance to further illustrate this idiosyncrasy in Chinese society: that is, the fate of dissidents from the four different classes. The foreign dissidents such as those human rights activists, journalists without borders, Christian priests, pro-Tibetan activists, and so on would've become the
persona non grata of the PRC, and they can either be denied of visas or be detained under custody by local authorities and be deported. But all of this would be done in a low-key manner as to avoid the limelight of international scrutiny as much as possible, and they generally received the "kindest" treatment, and be "graciously kicked out of the country". The oversea Chinese (including Tibetans) got a lower standard due to their identical race with their not-so-nice compatriots, and often received intimidations of variant degrees and insinuating threats of different kinds. Imprisonment could still be taken place if one is only a Lawful Permanent Resident of a host country thereby could still be prosecuted under the jurisdictions of PRC as its citizen. Those who are citizens of Hongkong, Macau also fall into this category, albeit with more of a gesture than a real sentence. Those who came from Taiwan, even though cannot be lawfully prosecuted in mainland China, can still receive a harsh treatment and be put into custody for a period of time without charge and be deported, such as those
Falungong activists. Overall speaking, the Chinese treat their compatriots a lot worse than foreigners, perhaps they have nothing to hide in front of a fellow countryman, for there is a tacit mutual understanding (心照不宣的共识) of just how nasty the one in charge can be if being crossed (For instance, the internationally renowned artist
Ai weiwei 艾未未 was brutally beaten after he started to investigate the deaths of children in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake and advocate for the rights of his lawyer friend in 2009, but of course the authority claimed innocence in all of this.). Nevertheless, it is really the urbanites and the ruralites who had gotten the brunt of the suppression from the authorities, and constitute the most victims and causalities. Since the Tiananmen massacre of June 4th, 1989 in which the authorities ordered the military to ruthlessly open fire on its civilians, regional unrests had been only on a consistent ascent due to increased conflict of interests between the rulers and the subjects and the extensive amount of corruptions and abuses of power. The urbanites could be bullied and tortured, incarcerated without habeas corpus, charged without due process of law, convicted in a kangaroo court, and imprisoned according to the whim of the judiciary system. As to the ruralites, who had been staging riots and fighting for their rights due to the rising corruptions amongst the local governments which commandeering people's land by coercion and outright violent force, their lives might be willfully disregarded at their own expense, for there began to circulate an increasingly popular sinister byword of intimidation:
dasi bai dasi 打死白打死, literally:
beaten to death simply for beaten to death. Such is the reality inside the red gates.
In my final discussion of this chapter I shall raise one last topic, which might otherwise seemed to be neglected for our deliberations on the political transformation of China, namely, politics. I have purposely leave this topic in the concluding section, for I wish to probe into this China Problem, our so-called Plight in a much more in-depth inquisitive manner than those literatures and editorials being circulated in the public, even though if we proceed from a holistic point of view, Everything is political, as the great mind of Aristotle have once detected on his examination on human nature, men are the ultimate political animal. Also, since this treatise is penned in the intent of an entire mobilization of political change in China, I shall focus on this subject primarily in later chapters, and only dictate a brief account for the sake of our present consideration. The list on the plight of politics in China could be stretched endlessly, but I am here only to expound on a few critical observations. Let us face it for ourselves. To begin with, the Chinese, whether the CCP or otherwise, never have the stomach, nor the mettle, nor were they ever endowed with the "natural ingredients", to prepare for themselves in becoming a world power qua world power, let alone a global leader. A permanent seat in the UN security council is purely within the confines of the art of diplomacy for the country's sheer sizes and an egregious population; we should not beguile ourselves in the wishful thinking by all those rhetorics and fanfares out there about its greatness, for big and large does not necessarily entail such specious misinterpretation, until we have first come to such reckoning, a sound and rational prescription for China's future cannot be obtained. For eons, the Chinese have been preoccupied with that less-than-grandiose and not-so-perfect land known as China Proper. If it wasn't for the tartar invasions, they would never even envision the vast realms beyond that not-so-great Great Wall. The Chinese are not an outwardly aggressive nation by nature, unlike, say the Mongolians and the Japanese, or the Germans and the Americans, who acted as such due to necessities. For ages, they have been content within that agrarian country, but they're capable of infinite cruelty and intolerance of their fellow brethrens for t
he slightest differences of interests. This has always been the bete noire of China since the founding of its civilization some 5000 years ago, and still is true today. This unfortunate characteristic had rendered authentic civil politics virtually impossible to be carried out without jeopardizing the soundness of itself. It is the case for the failure of Republican era for Sun Yat-sen's resolute bent on the militarist unification of China, and again for the tragedies of the Maoist era, which also came into being by means of militarist "liberation". Mao has famously quipped that regimes are born from the gun barrels 枪 杆子里出政权, for he had understood the nature of China all too well by heart, and it seems, at least up until now that violence is the norm for the Chinese to settle their own scores. If we understood the essence of politics is really the peaceful bargaining between different social groups by means of civic engagements, then this form of political exercises are not available to the Chinese people, for in China, there is only international diplomacy, (including with rogue regimes such as the Sudanese and North Korean governments and even maritime bandits such as the Somalian pirates who hijacked a Chinese cargo liner and held 25 of its crew for hostages while three Chinese naval destroyers were close by but failed to commit to their rescue;) intra-party politics, and extra-party domination and administration of its populace, an occupation that the Chinese seems to be pretty good at for the past 2000 years.
I do not wish to sound disparaging toward my compatriots, but on the other hand, it is not my intent to carry out an honey-tongued essay, for there are far more plenty of people doing just that, and I do not see how keep playing the triumphant bugles is really going to improve our common lot; call me a pragmatist or a conscientious Chinese, if you will, it is my incumbent duty as a member of the nation to perform a rational analysis and investigation on the problems facing my own country. To substantiate the aforementioned discussion, the conception of politics qua politics in the Chinese mind is drastically disparate from that of the West, whose notion of social contract and the dispersement of power is so deeply instilled that any other forms of government such as the Leninist so-called "democratic centralism" sounds outright distasteful to any sensible individual with a libertarian disposition. But in the Chinese mind with their millennial-old tradition of authoritarianism, politics and compulsory arbitration is the same thing. The Chinese age-old epithet for their local official is literally father-mother-official, or fumuguan 父母官, for they perceived of themselves as children, and the government, parents. Furthermore, the Chinese word for country, nation, and state could all be translated to: guojian 国家, literally means state-family. This is tantamount to equate the civil society functioning in the same manner as that of the family clan, in which the subjects and the junior is to confer undifferentiated loyalty and obedience to the rulers and the seniors respectively. If one is to probe into the origin of such ethical construct, it could all be, again, traced back to the great sage-philosopher-prophet, Confucius, for he had for the first time, systematically codified social relationships in the archetypes of monarchy-subjects, father-son, and elder brother-younger brother. With absolute ignorance to the city-states and republican ideas half globe away of the prophet Confucius' times, he had laid out an ideal to which each social role is to fulfill his obligations and duties according to the Confucian humanist and benevolent principles; Such as the rulers shall be magnanimous and righteous, the father shall be loving and responsible, and the elder brother shall be filial and pedagogic, and respectively, the subject shall be loyal and devoted, the son filial and dutiful, and the younger brother studious and pious. Such model could be considered as the most virtuous paradigm of Confucius' era, but just as stated in the previous section when we discussed the progression of the philosophy of China, the model has transformed into an orthodox, and the paradigm has ossified into a dogma for the next two millennia, thanks to the meso-confucians. Therefore, instead of excising the humanist virtues according to Confucius and the paleo-confucians, namely, ren 仁 or humanist compassion, which they emphasized as the quintessential and primary element for anyone, what we have in the next two thousands years up to the almost grotesquely obscene gentries we so frequently seen in Zhang Yimou's films depicting the time of early 20th century, a loathsome chauvinist, patriarchal, and a mortifying rigid authoritarian society became the reality, and still is very much true today albeit covered by a rainbow facade full of an ostensible westernization. In the political realm, regardless a communist overcoat, the Old Norm still holds sway. And just as an obstreperous enfant terrible would sure to receive a good whipping from his draconian father in the age-old family tradition of China, by paralleling the government with the parents and the subjects the children, it is no surprise at all that when a rowdy clique of "liberals" were ranting and raving about their civil rights and justice, the Party, who perceived of their gesture as an outright subversion of the status quo, thereby challenging the good-old tradition of social order, a ruthless crackdown is sure to be ensued in order to show those disobedient ones who is the boss. Such is the way of "politics with Chinese characteristics" (有中国特色的政治).
Up to this point I have expounded on the state of Plight in China in a fairly elaborated manner. The situation indeed seems daunting and the task awaits us immense. One is almost convinced that the Chinese civilization will, as it has been for the past few millennia, be destined in this perpetual Sisyphusian Fate, with the passing of one despot only to be superseded by another, one dictatorship after another. One is tempted to exclaim a profound self-pitying lament the fact that China has so little chance of success with a liberal and democratic society, and the cases for such proposition is gargantuan against otherwise if one is to examine the recent experiences of China since the modern age. Perhaps true, so be it. From now on I shall mobilize every ounce of my endeavor trying to probe even a flimsy glimpse of inspiration in order to see if it is possible for us to make a breakthrough from this cycle of fatality. In the next chapter, we shall examine some of the indicators, if not evidences, of how a catalyst of transformation might be taken place. Let us be patient and deliberate further.
Dai Jitao 戴季陶, (1891-1949) the main architect of the KMT political philosophy, was also an early staunch republican who advocated for federalism in China. 
