July 25, 2005

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Irony of ghosts

There are few books on China that are optimistic or joyous, books with happy endings or ones that strengthen your faith in humanity. For China's history, what can be said of the last two hundred years? Fantastic incompetence, malicious rule, overweening pride in the face of often unscrupulous outsiders: few groups of people have suffered at the hands of their leaders the way those in China have.

Reading through Red Dust last fall, the memoir of an artist traveling throughout China at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping Era, I was hard pressed to find a satisfied couple, an unsullied smiling moment, an affirmation of hope (unless one counts Ma Jian's departure from China as one). In Chinese Lives, an oral history of Chinese interviewed in the middle 1980s, similar difficulties were encountered. Perhaps the 20th Century was a particularly bad period, but any one hundred year period of Chinese history would yield worthy examples of evil aforethought.

This past week in what I believe was my third try, I checked out Hungry Ghosts, a history of the great famine in China of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Last summer I also checked the book out from the local public library a couple of times. Each time it lay in my bedroom while I read other books: a victim of my dislike for sad stories conflicting with a desire to know the truth of a situation.

The famine that gripped Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, the one which defines deprivation for those my age, pales in comparison to what was visited upon rural China in the late 1950s. Perhaps the only other famine of comparable evil was that which was visited on Ukraine in the 1930s, but while Stalin set the bar for death quite high Mao, as was his want in all matters relating to misery, was determined to supercede any challengers. All three cases, needless to say, were directly caused by the actions of humans.

This is something that I continue to find difficult to understand about China and its history: the propensity for its leaders to regard the lives of Chinese so cheaply. This is not a recent phenomenon. It would be difficult to find a single century or even a decade where Chinese did not die needlessly because of their governments' policies.

Perhaps the only two places where you could find an exception to the century or decade rule are Macau and Hong Kong. Neither is particularly blessed with arable land, resources, or until reunification, defensible borders, but in both places the average person has thrived, achieving a standard of living higher than in any other place in China and a measure of individual freedom completely unknown on the Mainland.

There cannot be a significant difference in the culture of the people of these two regions and the Mainland: Hong Kong is famously made up of refugees from the Mainland, Macau less famously so but not less made up of refugees. Culturally speaking, all three are recognizable to each other, much like Americans, Canadians, and Australians can easily find similarities between themselves and the British.

How to explain then the lack of tragedy in Macau and Hong Kong's histories? Macau, the invisible colony, a place perhaps best known for not being known, 400 years of imperial anonymity ending in a reunification that lacked all of the pomp of its Pearl River neighbor. Hong Kong is best known for its Gongfu movies, a cultural export where even death is but a moment for slapstick. Prior to reunification it was the wealthiest of any place ruled in the name of the Queen of England. These are not the ingredients of personal devastation.

We could look at the administrators of both colonies for explanation, and while Hong Kong's post-WWII colonial governments made wise economic decisions, it seems unlikely to me that the quality of the people in either administration would have been significantly different than what could be found on the Mainland: intelligent, incompetent, benevolent, or venal bureaucrats are probably found in reasonably equal measures in every society on Earth. The notion of arguing that intrinsic differences exist between different races is morally repugnant and intellectually irrational.

But it seems equally unreasonable to say that differences in affluence and freedom between different societies are either accidental products of history or wholy determined by their natural environments. Recognizable differences in the standard of living in different places that continue for decades or centuries show that something different is happening in each place and that whatever the difference may be is having an effect on the lives of common people.

If Macau, Hong Kong, and the Mainland share strong ethnic and cultural affinities, then the primary difference between the places seems, in my mind, to be political: the rules of a particular society make it a success or a failure. The rules for success seem rather basic: rule of law that treats every citizen equally in the political sphere, rule of law that is predictable in the economic sphere, freedom of speech that allows citizens to discuss topics without fear and without having the outcome predetermined, a recognition that sovereignty resides in each individual and so each individual has an equal political opinion. Colonialism may have prevented the recognition of the sovereignty of those who lived in Macau and Hong Kong, but in almost all other respects the administrators of both colonies put rules into action that benefited their residents far more than anything done by Mainland governments.

In Beijing in the last 25 years more people have come to understand that these basic political rules are necessary for the improvement of the lives of the common people. Perhaps there were those in the Guomindang who also understood this, but certainly Jiang Jieshi did not. And while there exists in Confucianism the notion that leaders are obliged to return the common people's obedience with just rule, it would seem that over 2,000 years of Confucianisn in action yields more often an amazing blindness to others' misery. Obligation without accountability is easy to ignore: the needless deaths of hundreds of millions of Chinese over the centuries can attest to that. It would be irony indeed if the CCP, the organization responsible for the murder of more human beings than any other in history, the source of so many hungry ghosts, was the agent of such a positive change in China's political culture.

posted by Andres on 07.25.05 at 12:46 PM in the China economy category.




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Comments:

I seem to recall a fable that was apparently one of Mao's favorites. It was about a man who woke up one morning and arbitrarily decided that there was a mountain blocking his view. He went to the top of the mountain with his sons and chipped away at it, bringing what was chipped off down in buckets; he then went back up to the top and repeated the process. When one of his neighbors told him he was insane and that his efforts would never make a difference, he replied: "I may not bring down the mountain. But my sons will follow in my footsteps, and their sons after them, and eventually the mountain will be gone." To Mao, it symbolized the triumph of the human will (yes, the Riefenstahl reference is deliberate) over nature. To me, it is an arbitrary and senseless waste of human capacity.

I think that although you may find cultural differences repugnant explanations of economic development, it seems that you have tentatively concluded that they are the only explanations for the differences between a place like Hong Kong and a place like China.

I think though that culture in fact explains a great deal - particularly the political culture of a polity, and the individual work ethic. David Landes wrote an excellent book on the role of culture in innovation and economic development entitled: "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations." Politics is not separate from culture - political culture is a fundamental determinant of a person's worldview. In that sense I would argue someone brought up in China is very different from those brought up in Hong Kong. The British had a much more sensible approach to government than those various governments of Republican China, and it is the institutions, not the individuals, that make the difference. It is by making that distinction that cultural explanations for relative levels of development cease being repugnant and simply explain why success or failure occurs within given systems.

posted by: HK Dave on 07.25.05 at 03:34 PM [permalink]

Andres,

Glad to see you posting here, and in your usual thoughtful manner.

posted by: Joel on 07.25.05 at 03:52 PM [permalink]

I think there is a cultural difference between HK and the mainland that explains a lot. Those that fled to HK were willing to risk everything to get away from the oppression. They were naturally risk takers, explorers, people who yearned for freedom and less intrusive government. Coupled with the fact that HK allowed risk takers to reap the benefits of their success, means you have a very different culture here than over the border. And different genes in the gene pool.

It was one of the strengths of the US, and although ebbing now (welfare state means many are Coming to America for the handout, not the opportunity) it is still a poweful force for why intelligent and entrepreneurial individuals leave their homelands to work in America.

posted by: kennycan on 07.25.05 at 07:30 PM [permalink]

Dave,

I think you might have misunderstood that sentence about moral repugnance and intellectually illogical. I was talking about the view that different races have different DNA and that that explains how some societies are more developed than others.

Your last paragraph pretty much encapsulates what I was trying to get at. As for there being fundamental differences between Hong Kong and Mainland culture because of the differences in political rules of the two places, I don't know really. I guess it depends on what we define as political and how political we believe humans are. I don't have good thoughts on either questions (yet!).

posted by: Andres on 07.25.05 at 11:31 PM [permalink]

Not to hijack the discussion...

> welfare state means many are Coming to America for the handout, not the opportunity

Who are these people who come for handouts? By far the biggest rgoup of immigrants (legal or illegal) is Mexicans, and any landscaper will tell you they work as hard as anyone they've ever seen. My cousin employs a lot of Mexicans in his business and he's amazed at how hard they work and how much they save to send back home. And the illegals are scared to death to reveal their identity to any government agency. As a result, many of them pay social security & medicare taxes on a fake social security number, which means they never receive the benefits. In other words, they pay *more* in taxes and take out *less* in benefits than the average American citizen.

Aside from Mexicans, who live next door, it's actually very hard for poor people to get in the US. As an example, a friend of mine married a woman from Thailand that he met while lieving there for a couple of years. It was a huge PITA to get her into the country, and practically impossible to bring any of her relatives.

My wife is from China (which is part of the reason I read Simon World). She is now an American citizen, but it was still rather difficult to bring her mother here to visit last year.

posted by: Derek Scruggs on 07.26.05 at 12:29 AM [permalink]

Hi Andres,

Yes, I apologise if I sounded like I was splitting hairs. I am very much in your corner when it comes to deterministic, social eugenics type arguments, based as you say on race and DNA which I think is a throwback to Huxley and the theories that engendered Nazi Germany.

I fear, though, that the sacrifice of the individual at the expense of the state has far from been exorcised from the Chinese national consciousness. I could not believe, for instance, how many people loved Zhang Yimou's Hero, even though its basic message was that no human life is worth the sovereignty of the state and of the emperor, even if the emperor is wrong. I was doubly offended when I was told by someone it was 'un-Chinese' not to like the film, which I thought was attractive but dangerous load of nationalistic bollocks.

posted by: David on 07.26.05 at 12:53 AM [permalink]

I have just started reading "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" and so far I really like it. Interesting historical background on Europe vs. "Islam" if you will vs. China social/political/economic influences and how backwards Europe, circa 1000 AD could dominate the world by 1500 (or so).

posted by: Edmundo on 07.26.05 at 01:23 AM [permalink]

I can't believe the circumstances, I was just getting ready to blog about culture and economic developement in part inspired by the mention of David Landes whom HK Dave mentions. However, my conclusions are rather different than yours and I think the whole cultural explanation to success is a load of self-serving hogwash.

Unfortunately my wordpress database seems to have died so I can't post, but my blogspot host is up!

posted by: Jing on 07.26.05 at 05:33 AM [permalink]




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