The fears that bind us

It's nice to see my old blog-buddy Jeremiah over at The Granite Studio returning to the fray after a summer of almost total inactivity.  Unfortunately, he's decided to dispense with comments, which does make the old Studio rather less of a salon these days (although I can quite understand why he's done it; it can get very tedious trying to moderate comments from all the crazies out there). He had a particularly stimulating piece yesterday on the fears that colour the political outlook of the Chinese people, suggesting that China's historical experience, particularly in the 19th and 20th Centuries, has imbued its people with a deep-seated anxiety about the danger of 'social instability' - rather in contrast to America (and most of the rest of the world, I would venture; at least, most of the developed world), where it is the fear of 'tyranny', a wariness of the dangers of oppression by one's own government that dominates the political consciousnesss. It's scarcely a novel insight, and it very much accords with my own impressions of a commonly encountered Chinese mindset: China suffered terribly under the disintegrating rule of the later emperors, a century or more of warlordism, foreign exploitation, anarchy and famine. That kind of chaos is terrifying; and strong government is seen as the reassuring bulwark against chaos. The common defence mounted of Mao's rule these days is that he was at least a strong leader, even if he wasn't a very good one.  And that seems to have been the subtext of Zhang Yimou's film Hero: China's first emperor Qin Shihuang was shown to be a wicked man, but he was a strong ruler and he united China - so that made him all right (or 70% right, at any rate). J's comparison with American political instincts is interesting, but I'm not sure I buy his implication that it's just a case of "America's history makes her like this, China's history makes her like that."  (And I'm sure he doesn't really mean to suggest it's that simple; but his was only a brief post.) For one thing, it's not just a matter of the history that happened, but how that history is remembered, and how it is taught.  American schoolchildren doubtless imbibe - perhaps quite unconsciously - many of their views about the proper values their government should uphold from their textbooks on the Revolutionary War and bad old King George.  But I'm not aware of any single interest or institution in the USA that is co-ordinating the effort to inculcate those beliefs in the country's youngsters: some of it comes from the churches, some from the schools, some from the national political parties, some from major lobbying groups like the NRA.  But there's not a unified central programme.  In China, there is.  The narrative of 'harmony, good; chaos, bad; authoritarian government is necessary to restrict social instability' comes from the Chinese Communist Party, and it suffuses just about every word written and spoken in every imaginable form of media.  If people in China fear the hardships that social instability may bring (and they do), I very much doubt if it's got much to do with ancestral tradition, with the local oral histories of the horrors of the last two centuries; it's much more to do with the fact that they're being reminded about this history almost every single day in the state media. The selectivity of the history invoked by the CCP in this account is quite staggering too.  You'd think, wouldn't you, that for most Chinese today the most terrible examples of instability and chaos - the ones that are still within living memory - came not from the twilight years of the Qing Dynasty, nor even from the terrible days of the Japanese occupation, but from the Mao era.  If these were not airbrushed out of Chinese history and Chinese memory (and, of course, they can't be completely; that's another problem the CCP is storing up for itself, I think - continuing to ignore or deny crimes that prey upon the minds of the whole nation), it would be much harder to get people to accept the notion that the 'strong government' of the CCP is China's guarantee against another descent into chaos.  (Even if one accepts, as J suggests in his post, that the ten years' lunacy of the Cultural Revolution can be seen as an anarchic period, a breakdown of the usual institutions and practices of government, earlier Mao catastrophes like the The One Hundred Flowers Campaign and The Great Leap Forward were clearly impositions of the central government.  And it's not as if we left that kind of horror behind with Mao's death or the advent of 'reform & opening'; the One Child Policy, for example, has resulted in countless atrocities.) Also, I'm not at all sure that you could really call the attitude of the Chinese people "support" for the CCP.  I hardly ever come across anyone who's got a good word to say about the CCP (other than those being interviewed on CCTV, of course), not even Party members (a lot of young people still feel obliged to join for the sake of their careers, but it seems to me that not very many of them take it all that seriously any more; having to go through the motions like this inspires, rather, contempt and resentment).  No, I'd say "acquiescence" would be more the mot juste for the majority.  Most people put up with the CCP because - in many ways - it's not doing such a bad job.  And also because, at the moment, there just doesn't seem to be any viable alternative on the horizon.  (Which is not to say that people don't look wistfully towards the horizon.  More and more businesspeople and young professionals I talk to make noises about the Party needing to liberalize and democratize in order to become more accountable to business interests and the rapidly growing middle class.) Finally, I would say that to equate 'political reform' with 'instability' as the CCP seeks to do is a fallacy.  While there will be risks in any transition to a new political system in China, I would think that the dangers of long-term inertia would be far worse.  Most governments around the world now incorporate at least some elements of liberal democracy and the rule of law, and they mostly muddle along OK.  Yes, some of them might look like scary examples of the 'instability' bugbear, but it's not the political system per se that leads to that, but the social and economic changes those countries are trying to negotiate.  I believe the CCP is going to create a shitstorm for itself - and the country - if it doesn't find the courage to move forward. I daresay a Chinese critic will pop up from somewhere to accuse me of being 'culturally imperialist' for daring to suggest that the political priorities I am familiar with in my country may in fact have some innate advantages over those that pertain here - but I'm going to do it anyway.  To live in constant fear of disaster, of the worst that could happen, is not a healthy state of mind.  This kind of fear is not a good motivator, not a good guide for action; it tends to lead to indecisiveness and inertia; it does not inspire innovation and progress.  Fear of the improper or excessive use of government power, though (I would prefer to call it 'wariness' or 'caution', not a paralysing anxiety but a sensible watchfulness), should be a key concern for everyone.  The horrors the Chinese fear, the horrors they've witnessed in their recent history, are more likely to fall on them from their present government than from anywhere else.