Last weekend, the Aspen Institute in Colorado hosted a rare and provocative conservation about the rise of China. Unlike most such conversations, which focus on China’s economic prowess, this one concentrated on ideas – China’s ideas about what the good society entails, about what kind of power it wishes to be in the world about what the world will look like as its influence grows.
Anand Giridharadas, author of India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking interviewed Eric X. Li, a Chinese venture capitalist, amateur historian and nationalist thinker.
In the conversation, Li argues that China will never be a democracy, will not intervene in other countries’ genocides and will invent its own conception of modernity. See the video above for a fascinating discussion.
Then if you want more, read the following excerpt from Anand's eBook Chinese Dreams where he talks about Eric X. Li's vision for China:
Eric X. Li is a successful and well-connected venture capitalist in Shanghai. He was once a believer in the American Dream; he now wants to help create a Chinese Dream all its own.
He grew up in one of the city’s communal lanes and did well enough to study, at his parents’ insistence, in America. He went on to work there, acquiring along the way a Texan accent and a love of American democracy. The only time he thought of returning to China in his first years away was in 1989, to stand with the students in Tiananmen Square.
In the 1992 American presidential race, Li found his way onto the campaign of Ross Perot, for whom he had earlier worked in private industry. When Perot lost, Li returned to China in something of a funk. He had come to believe, like Jin and Rao, that the modernity practiced in the West was the holy grail and that China had merely to mimic it.
But the contrarian spirit that once led him to Ross Perot slowly convinced him that the prevailing idea of Chinese progress was in error. China was being pressured to borrow an ideology, as it had before, without regard to culture, history, philosophical traditions, social and economic structures.
Some Chinese resisted these Western frameworks, but many lived under their sway. And yet the West was becoming less confident of its own universal truths: postmodernists who rejected such universalisms dominated its intellectual discourse; events in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond suggested democracy’s limitations; and the persistence of poverty across much of the developing world, coupled with the worldwide economic meltdown, undermined Washington Consensus free-market principles in the eyes of many.
What China needed, Li concluded, was its own framework. It needed to develop and propagate an alternative idea of modernity that was organic, rooted in its own soil.
“The Chinese challenge to the global order is going to be a moral challenge,” Li told me in his Shanghai office one afternoon. He is small-built and dresses elegantly, and he possesses an infectious enthusiasm for ideas.
While Westerners focus on how China has failed to measure up to Western principles—for example, its resistance of democracy or the capriciousness of its legal system—Li believes that China is inventing “an alternative set of organizing principles for human affairs that are fundamentally different—not in opposition—but fundamentally different from what the world has been looking to the West for in the last three-four hundred years.”
If China’s success continues, Li says, “philosophers and historians in the middle of this
century are going to come back and write about the Chinese story, just like Max Weber wrote about the Protestant Reformation and how it helped capitalism, and to look for a theory.”
“All theories,” he added, “come in retrospect.”
Li has made it his mission to beat them to it—to define and frame this theory right now. Along with a group of intellectual fellow travelers, which includes Jin and Rao and others, he wants to develop The Chinese Idea.
He is presently establishing a think tank to support the development of this new perspective. He recently bought a magazine, formerly associated with the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in order to disseminate his circle’s ideas. And, in conjunction with the Aspen Institute, of which he is a fellow, he is curating an anthology of Western philosophical texts that serve up what he calls a “counter-Enlightenment”—a mode of thinking closer to the present Chinese political worldview, in his estimation, than to the Western one.
In my conversations with Li and his associates, I tried to tease out the core principles of this Chinese Idea as they see it. It is worth noting that these ideas do not depict Chinese actualities today so much as mine key successes to sketch a set of retrospective principles of what has worked best in the last few decades.
And many Chinese disagree fervently with this group, seeing China’s peculiarities - for example, the persistence of its authoritarianism - as reflecting a lack of progress rather than new ideas.
When I met Fu Jun, a Harvard-trained political scientist at Peking University, for lunch,
and asked him what new principles China’s rise would give the world, he struggled to think of any. He asked me if I could.
“We probably have something to teach those behind us, who are trying to catch up,” he said, but not much more than that. And yet the ideas of Li’s circle are now referred to as the “Beijing Consensus” in some quarters, to rival the Washington one, and are, at
the least, taken seriously in some of the countries that have struggled to implement Western political and economic formulas in contexts very different from the West’s. These were the four core principles that I was able to glean from Li, Jin, Rao, and others.
1. Individualism isn’t universal. It is an endlessly repeated Western mantra that all human beings aspire to certain God-given rights and freedoms. This mantra has inspired the West to seek to spread democracy around the world. But in China, as in India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Africa, among other places, the culture places less emphasis on the individual as the basic atom of social life.
The West, in the view of Li’s circle, does not understand societies — for example, Iraq — where tribal or sectarian or neighborhood loyalties overwhelm simple individualism.
Bringing democracy to places without individualistic cultures, on their view, short-circuits an organic development process. The West slogged through centuries of difficult, blood-soaked history to arrive at the idea of an unmediated relationship between man and God - supreme over the relationship of man to all other men. China and many other countries have not gone through a similar process but are expected to mimic its outcome: liberal, rights-based democracy.
“To apply that kind of model, which is an organic result only in Europe and America, and decapitate that organic result and put it in the soil that never went through that organic process—you’re courting disaster,” Li said.
The trouble with this view is that ethnic Chinese beyond mainland China - for example, Taiwanese –have managed to move into democracy without disaster. So it may not be right to say that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. But, in Li’s view, China has, at a minimum, shown the world something new: that a large society can be successful and bring peace and prosperity to its people without an understanding of the individual derived from the European Enlightenment.
2. Pragmatism over abstraction. The philosophy of pragmatism claims proud American origins. But, as the members of this circle view it, it is China that lives by pragmatism as a way of life and the West that believes, and is defined by a belief, in abstract, universally applicable truths.
In reality, of course, no one has a monopoly on either pragmatism or principle. But it can be observed that the culture of China, like that of India, is generally less comfortable with the kind of sweeping, true-in-all-cases ideology of the kind that you find in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
“Our framework is more down to earth,” said Fu, the political scientist. “We lack metaphysics. We are not interested in idea-based searches. We practice first.”
Li’s circle believes that China’s pragmatic streak gives it a fresh approach to politics domestic and foreign. Combined with the traditional self-regard of a country that called itself the Middle Kingdom, it translates into a rejection of prefabricated models - the American model of democracy, the World Bank model of growth, the Marxist model of socialism - in favor of the doctrine of what works.
Chinese political leaders tend to pursue economic changes in the manner of business people: test a policy, pilot it, measure relentlessly, then roll out and scale. Pragmatism also implies a focus on the results of a political system rather than the procedures through which it got there - “performance legitimacy,” as one scholar put it to me. And it implies a shrewd relativism in dealings with other countries. China bristles at other nations’ telling it to be more like them, but, it must be added, it avoids telling other nations to be more like China.
3. Meritocracy over democracy. The members of Li’s circle are also seeking to revitalize the Confucian idea of meritocracy over democracy as the fount of political legitimacy. “Americans believe in election; the Chinese, if I simplify, believe in selection,” said Zhang Wei-Wei, an international relations scholar who divides his time between Geneva and Beijing and once served as a translator for Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who opened China’s doors to the world in 1978.
It is a recurring feature of Chinese history that, when new conquerors sought to entrench their power, they set up new examination systems: admitting the best and brightest, objectively measured, into the bureaucracy gave rulers legitimacy. On the ground, meritocracy’s record in China is more mixed. Today many Chinese boast that few of their leaders - for example, most of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo, the country’s preeminent
decision-making body - are the children of anyone important, chosen from obscurity by the exams.
And yet the descendants of revolutionary leaders are said to control a great part of China’s present wealth, and personal and family connections, not to mention simple corruption, govern much of Chinese life.
But in the view of Li’s circle, the Chinese system, for all its faults in practice, is presenting the world a genuine alternative principle for choosing leaders: by standardized test. One perhaps implausible
but illustrative example of the meritocracy principle in action comes from Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian political theorist who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has proposed a new political system that would include a legislature with a democratically elected lower house and an upper house selected by examination. As if to underscore the cultural difference behind such an idea, Bell points out that the sensible Chinese name that he proposes for the upper house, “Xianshiyuan,” sounds “ridiculous” when translated into English: the House of Virtue and Talent.
“Communism has lost the capacity to inspire the Chinese, and there is growing recognition that its replacement needs to be grounded at least partly in China’s own traditions,” Bell wrote earlier this year in New Perspectives Quarterly. “As the dominant political tradition in China, Confucianism is the obvious alternative.”
4. Representing the future. Among the weak points of democracies is that they do a lousy job of representing the population as they will be five years, twenty years, and certainly one hundred years from today. Elected leaders do as they are motivated to do, and their incentives direct them to please the people who will elect them next time.
China, though not a democracy, is hardly unfamiliar with such short-termism. Many local officials rotate jobs every few years and are promoted based on their realization of economic performance targets. The result is well known to the world: the illegal land sales, polluting factories, and lead-tainted toys that reflect the pressure to grow at any cost.
And yet the central government in Beijing is different in many respects. The members of the circle argue, with some basis, that China’s senior leadership, for all its other faults, has struck a healthier balance between the country’s short- and long-term interests than many Western democracies—a complaint that some Western observers, including the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have begun to make. China, as this group sees it, seeks to keep citizens happy enough that they do not revolt, while also tying up much of the nation’s resources in long-term infrastructure building that, in a democracy, might be scrapped in favor of policies that please the present electorate.
China’s relationship with the environment reflects both sides of this equation. It is, on one hand, ravaging the planet and the atmosphere more aggressively than virtually any other nation. It should be excused, its leaders say, because they have to secure economic growth for their people. But China has also pivoted more speedily than many democracies toward building a renewable energy industry - something for which the short-term political payoff is minimal, as Western politicians well know, but the long-term societal benefits potentially massive.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anand Giridharadas. To read more from Anand on China, download Chinese Dreams. This essay first appeared in The Antioch Review.
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Allo, there. I am much blushing. Why this obsession with we Chinese. We admit we are not a fantastic boastful people, rather a bit timid, and we never stiff anybody unless we are crossed. We much prefer to lie low. Please, let us.
Yes, the Chinese are very good-hearted, easy-to-get-along people. It's so difficult to be prominent and low-profile, isn't it? A new era is dawning. Trust in Jesus no matter what happens on Planet Earth.
I know! But the author has a few naive assumptions about the west!
Cravena
Democracy is controversial when if applies to each country on earth, because still due to limitation of the country' cuture. For example, many western countries think women in Arabs wearing veil is a suppressive to women, but turn out even Arab women living in western countries like French, Australia, Germeny..ect stand up to protest the ban of their wearing veil in public
We all got brainwash somewhat.
Typical Confucian immaturity.
Li oversaw that some values – freedom and justice – are universal. Aristotle and Confucius shared many similar thoughts. Mencius and Locke deemed tyrannicide as justified.
Li talked nonsense. China borrowed an ideology in modern history. Yes, Communism and now western consumerism.
Li didn't know that the European Union is a multicultural colossus and the culture in the south “places less emphasis on the individual as the basic atom of social life.”
Typical Indian diaperhead.
What American Dream lacks is pleasing the eldery. America pioneered everything on her own while she was young, but grieving one's own parents or grandparents is no good in long-run of life. The Bible even says those who do not honor parents will not have a long life. (Exodus 20) Parents and males are too reduced to nothing in the American society. Stop being driven by self-smartness and running after immoral trendy ideas. Godly foundation is always the most important as the Bible says.
Americans should read the writings of their own Founding Fathers or those of British ministers and of martyrs under Nazis instead of wondering about the rise of the South. Principles for winning life hasn't changed. It's present America that is declining because of moral decadence.
God makes nations powerful or declined at His will; it's none of human cleverness. Empires come and go but the Word of God stands forever – the Book of Isaiah. It's only Israel that has no ending as the Bible does. America has no guarantee no matter how powerful she once was. She must humble herself before the God Almighty once again.
Current blasphemy and perversion in USA was none of American Dream. Dream and character lost, so does the national strength.
Lets vote for a the next Chinese president of the US, that would really help US-China realtions couldn't do worse than and African President
As long as the Chinese is an American, it is not exclusive to whites only.
Eric:Let me see if you agree with this explanation–China is llesing stuff to the US in exchange for dollars.China is buying US Treasury securities with these dollars. Americans are happy to sell the Chinese these bonds, instead of making stuff to sell tho the Chinese.But now, Americans have quit buying so much Chinese stuff. This means the Chinese do not have the dollars to buy more Treasury securities. So, the US government has lost a major buyer of its debt, just when it wants to run even higher government deficits. So the US government cannot fund its growing government deficit....unless the Federal Reserve, the government's lender of last resort, buys the new Treasury bonds. But, if the Fed buys the Treasury bonds, it has to create more dollars to do this. In this case, when these new dollars are spent by the government ("stimulus"), it will cause price inflation and a decline in the value of the dollar.If the Chinese want to maintain their exports to the US as the dollar declines, they will have to devalue the yuan to match the dollar's decline in value. This will require the Chinese central bank to create more yuan.In other words, it is impossible to both maintain the dollar-yuan peg, and also inflate the supply of dollars, without also inflating the supply of yuan. If we quit buying so much Chinese stuff, they have to quit buying so much American government debt in response, or the peg will fail.You are saying the Chinese will let the peg fail, rather than inflating the supply of yuan.–Mark V.
I understand that democracy as we practice it may not work in China but the Chinese way is not going to work here either. The biggest issue we have here is that people are voting without understanding or taking the time to understand the issues. This make it easy for a BS type to get into office. Americans have to wake up and take back our power. I keep trying to comment and put out my beliefs and give the facts that lead to that. I don't know if I am convincing anyone but it is clear to me that the stakes are high and the ignorant and fanatical are pushing simplistic solutions the majority of the public does not want.
I am neither a liberal nor a conservative. My own experience from coming from a small town is that people should help the less fortunate but they should do so in a way that requires the helped to work for it and which does not reduce their dignity. My father hired a poor drunk on his farm and paid him in food that he took directly to the man's family. He did not need the help though it was helpful to him. The town also gathered excess supplies and put them for sale at small prices and the poor could pay a little and feel they paid for it and were good at managing their money. Those who had a crisis had the neighbors chip in to help. The sick farmer had the other farmers harvest his crops. The elderly and the young were cared for but had some responsibilities too. Even the disabled helped as they could.
The liberals believe too much in victims that are helped by the noble without anything required of them and the conservatives are too much law of the jungle – every man for himself and only the rich count.
In the end, I think the best society combines socialism and individualism and models as close as possible to the model of the small towns. This might mean the government expects 12 hours of work for the social good from the elderly for as long as they are in decent shape and able. This might mean that those on welfare and unemployment have to work after 3 months to get payments.
U are talking about Christ love. Americans need to go back to their root >>>>>>>> the churchs and not shopping mall on Sunday.
I oftern hear people say, " never talk about politics or religions ". very smart indeed.
The fundauantal difference between US and China is, my oppinion, money controls politics in US but not in China.
President Licoln Said " government of the people, by the people, for the people". US government is by the people but not for the people, Chinese government is the oppsit, NOT by the people, but for the people.
Of cause, I know you'll laugh at what i say, but how else can you explain 80% chinese people support their government?! none of any country's government enjoy such broad support.
Asking 80% of the population of illiterate farmers to vote is not a good idea.
they were "among the strongest in the world". Due to China's atcipal controls, they were isolated from the rest of the world. That means they have no exposure to the US-lead financial insanity which swept up most banks: subprime loans, off-balance sheet vehicles, exposure to the 50 trillion credit-default-swaps market, etc. That alone makes them attractive by comparison."their exports are cut in half, as they will be shortly"So you believe Wal-Mart sales are going to crash by 50%? Wal-Mart was the only retailer whose sales ROSE this past holiday season.(To be fair, once the dollar crashes, I expect China imports to fall close to 50%)"China's economy is a leveraged play on western consumers." You aren't thinking this through. Let me ask you this, where do you expect worldwide demand to hold up the best?Commodities–Oil, gas, steel, etcCapital goods–Airplains, Catapillars, Machinery for new factories, Machinery for new mining/oil exploration projects, etcDurable goods–SUVs, CARs, appliances, business equipment, electronic equipment, home furnishings, etcLuxury goods–brand name products, designer clothing, artwork, etc...Cheap consumer goods–Everything you buy at Wal-MartGuess what China makes? Cheap consumer goods.I am sure China's exports will fall, but they will fall less then the export of any other country. The US consumers will stopped shopping anywhere else by the time they begin to cutback on their (By the way, if you can think of anything that is going to hold up better than cheap consumer goods, I would love to hear it.)If the China's economy is a "total sham", then what does that make the US economy?Do you REALLY BELIEVE that demand for our boings, caterpillars, and SUVs is going to hold up better than demand for cheap consumer goods?
Anyone else notice that in the first sentence the author used conservation instead of conversation? First sentence and it gets missed?
Democracy is controversial when if applies to each country on earth, because still due to limitation of the country' cuture. For example, many western countries think women in Arabs wearing veil is a suppressive to women, but turn out even Arab women living in western countries like French, Australia, Germeny..ect stand up to protest the ban of their wearing veil in public
mmmmmmm. We all got brainwash somewhat.
I am still struggling with George W getting elected the seond time. I don't vote because popular vote dosen't count. I'm starting to like Selection vs Election.
That's why America is a demo-of-crazy, not democracy.
99% Population of Good Chinese citizens, working so hard every day make living which had 7000 years beautiful cultural those Chinese nice person we met anywhere in china, which 1.3 billion people did make the wealth to 1% Population of monster, evil communist party living very luxury, over poor citizens, those evil communist party violation human right every day Chinese live,
That monster communist regime had to be change soon as possible, before Chinese people hang them all,
Note: please go to youtube.com type in to search: HUMAN RIGHT IN CHINA you see it your own eyes.
This surely makes great sense to anyone
That was some academic read
This post couldnt be more correct!!!
That was a really great piece!!!
Might be the best piece of writing online!