More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 11 - December 23, 2019
The future of cricket now manifestly belongs on the Indian subcontinent, where the character, flavour and evolution of the game will increasingly be determined.124
The history of the West – in particular, the United States and Western Europe – is far more familiar to the rest of the world than that of any other country or region because the centrality of the West has meant that everyone else is obliged, or desires, to know about it. Western political values and ideas are the only ones that enjoy any kind of universalism for a similar reason.
The era we are now entering, in fact, can best be described as one of contested modernity. Unlike the Cold War, it is not defined by a great political or ideological divide but rather by an overarching cultural contest.
the Western conviction that its values, belief-systems, institutions and arrangements are superior to all others. The power and persistence of this mentality should not be underestimated. Western governments feel no compunction or restraint about lecturing other countries on the need for, and overwhelming virtue of, their versions of democracy and human rights.
There is a deeply embedded sense of Western psychological superiority which draws on powerful economic, political, ideological, cultural and ethnic currents. The rise of a world of multiple modernity challenges that mentality, and in the era of contested modernity it will steadily be eroded and undermined.
Ideas such as ‘advanced’, ‘developed’ and ‘civilized’ will no longer be synonymous with the West. This threatens Western societies with an existential crisis of the first order, the political consequences of which we cannot predict but will certainly be profound.
In future it will be required to think of itself in relative rather than absolute terms, obliged to learn about, and to learn from, the rest of the world without the presumption of underlying superiority and the belief that ultimately it knows best as the fount of all civilizational wisdom.
An essential element in this transformation was the decentralization of the state, which was seen as a precondition for the reform of the economic system and economic growth.
These countries shared with Deng a pragmatic and non-doctrinal view of how to conduct economic policy.
China’s economic success has been built upon the huge migration of rural labour into the cities which has kept labour costs remarkably low, made the country a highly attractive destination for foreign investment, and enabled Chinese manufacturing exports to be highly competitive on the global market. This has been the basic engine of China’s transformation. As a model it remains far from exhausted. Around half the population still lives in the countryside, so the supply of relatively impoverished rural labour to swell the ranks of the urban labour force is set to continue for at least two
...more
China is not just a nation-state; it is also a civilization.
India too can be considered a candidate but, unlike China, India, as we know it today, was a relatively recent creation of the British Raj, its previous history being far more diverse than China’s.
‘China is a civilization pretending to be a nation-state.’
Amongst its constellation of responsibilities, the state, most importantly of all, has the sacred task of maintaining the unity of Chinese civilization. Unlike in the Western tradition, the role of government has no boundaries; rather like a parent, with which it is often compared, there are no limits to its authority. Paternalism is regarded as a desirable and necessary characteristic of government.
A high priority has traditionally been placed on training and technique, as compared with the openness and creativity valued in the West, with the result that Chinese children often achieve a much higher level of technical competence at a much younger age in music and art,
‘what is quintessentially Chinese is the remarkable sense of continuity that seems to have made the civilization increasingly distinctive over the centuries’.
key aspects of Western culture, notably its scientific orientation and knowledge, were clearly superior to traditional Confucianism and plunged it into a deepening crisis as the Chinese largely resisted any serious reconciliation between traditional and Western values.
Even now, having succeeded in reversing its decline and in the midst of modernization, China is still troubled by the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures and the degree to which it might find itself Westernized,
For many developing countries, the process of modernization has been characterized by a crisis of identity, often exacerbated by the colonial experience, a feeling of being torn between their own culture and that of the West, linked to an inferiority complex about their own relative backwardness.
In the Confucian view, the exclusion of the people from government was regarded as a positive virtue, allowing government officials to be responsive to the ethics and ideals with which they had been inculcated.
Only two institutions were formally acknowledged and really mattered: one was the government and the other the family.
This commitment to ethical standards as the principle of government has combined with a powerful belief in the role of both family and education in the shaping and moulding of children.
In Western eyes, the test of a country’s politics and governance is the existence or otherwise of democracy, defined in terms of universal suffrage and a multi-party system. This is an extremely narrow and inadequate frame of analysis. Democracy is but one aspect of a much larger picture when it comes to assessing the nature and quality of a country’s governance.
By Western norms, it is certainly not democratic. Yet the Chinese state enjoys much greater legitimacy than any Western state. The Chinese treat the state with a reverence and respect that is more or less unknown in the West; and the reason clearly has nothing to do with democracy.
In other words, a state’s legitimacy cannot be reduced to the existence or otherwise of democracy: on the contrary, democracy is not necessarily the most important factor in a state’s legitimacy and may, as in the case of China, be relatively unimportant.
Democracy should not be regarded as some abstract ideal, applicable in all situations,
whatever the conditions, irrespective of history and culture, for if the circumstances are not appropriate it will never work properly, and may even prove disastrous.
For developing countries in particular, the ability to deliver economic growth, maintain ethnic harmony (in the case of multi-ethnic societies), limit the amount of corruption, and sustain order and stability, are equally, if not rather more, important considerations than democracy.
The European powers, furthermore, never granted the vote to their colonies: it was still seen as entirely inappropriate for the vast tracts of the world that they colonized, even when it had become an accepted fact at home.
Much hypocrisy, it is clear, attaches to the Western argument that democracy is universally applicable whatever the stage of development.
As developmental states, the legitimacy of their governments rested in significant part on their ability to deliver rapid economic growth and rising living standards rather than a popular mandate.
Singapore’s governance remains a highly authoritarian democracy;
It is true that India remains much less developed than China and yet possesses what, by historical standards, is a remarkable democracy; but in this respect India has so far been history’s great exception.
The main reason why countries have tended not to be democratic during economic take-off is that there is an inherent authoritarianism involved in an industrial revolution – the need to concentrate society’s resources on a single objective – which, judging by history, people are prepared to tolerate because their own
lives are dominated by the exigencies of economic survival and the desire to escape from poverty.
values that govern political behaviour, which can be summarized as sincerity, loyalty, reliability and steadfastness,52 all of which derive from the influence of Confucianism, and, to a lesser extent, Communism. In contrast, the equivalent Western values are accountability, representation and participation.
There is no reason to believe, except on grounds of Eurocentrism, that the very specific conditions that shaped European society (and European-derived nations like the United States), and therefore European democracy, will result in the same kind of democratic structures elsewhere.57
Reflecting the hierarchical character of society and Confucian influence, power has a permanent and unchanging quality that is relatively unaffected by the electoral process.
Intellectuals are now involved in policy-making discussions in a more open and systematic way at the highest levels.
In contrast, during the reform era there has been a steady process of depoliticization, accompanied by a steep decline in the importance of ideology. The highly politicized and obtrusive Maoist state has given way to what now looks more like a technocratic state, in the manner of other East Asian developmental states,94 although the powers of the Chinese state remain wide-ranging, from the one-child policy and internal migration to history books and the media.95
There is, in effect, a new kind of social compact between the Party and the people: the task of the Party is to govern, while the people are left free to get on with the business of transforming their living standards and enjoying the rewards of rising incomes and a growing variety of consumer goods.96
The Party has increasingly sought to transform itself from a revolutionary organization into a ruling administrative party.
Another possible scenario, in this same context, is that of Singapore – in whose arrangements Deng Xiaoping showed some interest109 – where the ruling party dominates an ostensibly multi-party system, with the opposition parties dwarfed, harassed and hobbled by the government.
relatively orthodox Confucian tradition of elitest government committed to the highest ethical standards.
Under China’s current institutional arrangements, meritocracy is a prerequisite for good governance. But meritocracy has been eroded by a political culture of sycophancy and cynicism.’
In the time-honoured manner of Chinese governments, given the exceptional priority attached to the maintenance of social order, it is constantly on the alert for signs of opposition or potential threats to internal stability.
Similarly it regards itself to be responsible for a vigilant and proactive policing of the boundaries of what is permissible and what is not in Chinese society. These are perceived as basic requirements of good governance, spliced no doubt with a significant dose of paranoia.
After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648
the European nation-state slowly emerged as the dominant unit in the international system.
Such has been the West’s dominance over the last two centuries that hitherto it has virtually never been required to address and understand the conceptual framework of a non-Western culture, certainly not as an equal.
