Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Stein Ringen
Read between
July 29 - August 5, 2017
It is to underestimate the Chinese leaders to suggest that they have forgotten about vision. They are doing in social policy what they are doing in all aspects of public policy, which is to do what they must do for their own sake. That may not be a vision but it is clear thinking. They are not in search of any broader consensus. Their social policy is exactly what it is intended to be: another instrument of stability and control, so much and no more.
Essentially, if not always efficiently, the regime works like this: The party decides, others do; the party controls, others stay in line.
control, although never neglected, is not enough. They must also, as far as possible, distribute rewards and create willing compliance or connivance in the population.
For the most part, engagement in systemic opposition is so difficult, risky, and costly, and so unlikely to matter, that it is hardly worth the while. Nor is it generally encouraged from below. Sad as it may be, those who do are more likely to be seen by ‘ordinary people’ as foolish and as making trouble in vain than as heroes who stand up for principles and justice.
This modern (shall we say?) form of subtle control is contributing to the creation of a compliant population. The Chinese state is edging towards a dictatorship that is in some ways pain free, one in which controls run smoothly and in which people stay in line more or less by their own doing because it makes sense to do so. Various forms of brute control have been or are being rolled back, such as detention in education through labour. Subtle controls work well enough so that brute controls are less necessary.
I have rejected the label of ‘authoritarian’ for the Chinese state. It is too accommodating. A state that demands obedience and controls to the extent the Chinese one does, that rules by fear and the force of armed power, that sends the police out at night to break down front doors and haul people away, and that in the last instance relies on violence, and on the demonstrable willingness to use violence when it sees that to be necessary or opportune, is not just an authoritarian state. It is a dictatorship. But I have also said that ‘dictatorship’ is not an adequate label. It is too
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I don’t think the party can take much credit for taking their boot off the windpipe of a suffocating man, and then saying they have saved his life.’
All states take from their people and thereby inevitably reduce not only their disposable income but also their freedoms. In these respects, the Chinese state is like any state. The question is whether it is effective, fair, and proportionate. Does it give its people what it should relative to what it takes from them? Is what it takes necessary for what it gives back?
This is a state that takes not primarily to serve its people but to maintain itself. Some of what it takes it returns to the people in the form of services, but compared to what it takes, not much. And even what little it gives is mainly self-serving and to prop itself up. What it takes in freedom is grossly out of proportion with anything that can be justified morally, or even in stability.
this is a regime that needs very much to be in dictatorial control. The claim that it needs to be dictatorial for the purpose of stability is not tenable. It needs to be dictatorial because it is the kind of state it is, because of its greediness in what it takes and how it takes it, and because of its stinginess in what it gives and how it gives it. A regime of this kind would not be possible if it were to depend on the consent of the people.
The alternative way of looking at China is to try to understand it as it is and on its own terms, as a state-led country, a party-led state, and a socialist market economy. That is exactly what the men in Beijing have been saying and are saying, and the rest of us should by now have learned to listen to what they say.
What this state does or could do for its people is not limited primarily, if at all, by incapacity or unaffordability. It does less for its people than it would be able to and could afford to do because it has other determinations and priorities than to work for the good of the common people.
China’s great weakness is to be a state-dependent country with a state that rules without the consent of the ruled. The state’s great weakness is that it runs a system that depends on extreme levels of extraction from the population and that it is unable to maintain itself without dictatorship.
With the welfare hypothesis disproved, the two alternative hypotheses remain strengthened. Which is it, then? Is the Chinese state trivial, a state that is for itself only, or is it a power state, a state that rules for an ideological mission?
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the man the world again thought would be a reformer instead lurched to the Maoist left, tightened all the screws of dictatorship, and turned to an ideology of aggressive nationalism. Against the odds, both inside and outside of China, people persist in believing and expecting that China is moving towards a more socially and politically open society, in what was once, hopefully, called a ‘slow-motion revolution’.
Two fallacies are behind these inabilities. One is an uncritical admiration of delivery, in particular delivery by autocratic order and strength.
The other fallacy is ideological. Both the Soviet Union and Maoist China used the weapon of ideology to great effect. They offered the world belief systems that promised paradise once the struggle was won, and many outsiders bought into those powerful narratives, some fully and some to a great degree. Those who did made themselves disposed to seeing the good in the regimes they admired and to excusing the ugliness as necessary sacrifices now for the greater good tomorrow.
But China is different. Its state is different—a party-state; its polity is different—a controlocracy; its economy is different—a socialist market economy.
What China has reinvented is dictatorship, not democracy. If there is one thing there seems to be solid agreement about at the top, it is that anything that resembles real democracy is a danger to that all-important stability and not permissible given the regime’s determination to self-preserve.
I have concluded that the Chinese controlocracy is the perfect dictatorship. It does not depend on commanding most people in their daily lives and is able to mostly rely on their acquiescence and self-censorship. But behind that façade of softness is the hard reality of as perfect control as is possible when control is needed, of ruthlessness, and of a totalitarian system’s care to let its capacity of control and unforgivingness be known to all.
This is not just a celebration of national greatness. It is in addition an idea that national greatness and individual happiness are one and the same and inseparable, and conversely that there is no individual happiness without national greatness.
The China Dream is a dream of national aspiration and for the nation ahead of the people who make it up. Their aspiration is said to be fulfilled if the national aspiration is fulfilled.
What we are seeing in the China Dream is the embryo of an ideology that is ultra-dangerous. It is that because it sits on a rhetoric of power and national greatness and because, ultimately, it is an ideology in which the person ceases to exist as an autonomous being and is subsumed in the nation.
At its core, the idea of unity between nation and person is a fascist idea, the fascist idea.
The final horror of fascist ideology as it arose in Europe was its rejection of enlightenment modernity by the elimination of individual autonomy.
For all we know, Xi Jinping may not deliberately be embracing ideology at all and may just be experimenting with slogans that work. But to play with ideology is to play with fire and he may, even if inadvertently, be releasing a force that is not only strong but also repugnant and that takes on a life of its own and becomes its author’s master on terms the author may not have fully anticipated.
