Our Fundamental Problem

Restoring the Promise of Neglected Societies in China and the U.S.

Friends and relatives are sometimes perplexed by why I am so attracted to China. Don’t you know that China is a Communist country with strict censorship, where the quality of life is nowhere near that of the U.S., they ask? I usually tell them that I am attracted by the differences between China and the U.S. I am generally satisfied with this reply because it is based in a grain of truth, but it is not the actual reason. Unlike many peers at Beida, I do not even attempt to embark on the Sisyphean task of trying to truly understand the differences between our countries by mastering the Chinese language and culture. Rather the thing that I find so interesting about studying Chinese society and politics is that in spite of the obvious differences, our fundamental problems are broadly similar.

Before I explain what I mean by that, I want to first acknowledge that I am stuck in Plato’s cave when I study Chinese politics and society. I do not actually see China, but the shadows of China. It could be that I am simply hallucinating the shadows that seem to show similarities because I am looking at China and its problems from an American perspective. Nonetheless, the things that I learn about China give me moral clarity about the problems within American society.

This thought started on the plane to Beijing when I listened to a Sinica podcast on Neo-Maoism, titled Everything Old is New Again, featuring Jude Blanchette, who is the author of the forthcoming book China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong. In that podcast, Blanchette makes a provocative but imprecise analogy of these neo-Maoist movements as reminiscent of the Tea Party, or the conservative insurgency that rose in opposition to Obama and is widely regarded as a precursor to Donald Trump. Neo-Maoists do not want to literally return to the Cultural Revolution, not more than Tea Partiers want to return to 1776. Rather, Blanchette clarifies that support for Mao should be regarded as dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.

Even more striking, the sources of discontent are often the same. Just as Trump/Tea Party support is concentrated in the Rust Belt in the U.S. and in rural areas, Neo-Maoists are also concentrated in areas that were hit hardest by Zhu Rongji’s SOE reforms and in the interior of China. Lastly, Blanchette emphasizes that Mao is the most important and most dangerous figure to the CCP just as the tribal antagonisms within American society (racism, hysteria, etc.) are the most important and most dangerous resources to the Republican Party. Drawing out the analogy fully, the lesson for Xi Jinping is clear. As we can see with the current realignment of the Republican Party under Trump, the danger of relying on Maoist legitimacy is that those who ride the back of the tiger often end up inside.

The Tea Party analogy reveals that the U.S. and China are both haunted by ghosts that neither side wants to actively confront and bury. China is haunted by the ghost of Chairman Mao, and the U.S. is haunted by the ghosts of a series of political figures who unwittingly relied on Mao’s principle of antagonistic contradictions. In a recent article in The Atlantic, George Packer writes that the Republican Party had been corrupted by three insurgencies, each embracing this principle of antagonism. The first insurgency, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, started the belief that the Democratic opposition was not just wrong, but a sinister conspiracy to destroy America. The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, who taught Republican colleagues and candidates to demonize Democrats through rhetoric like “disgrace”, “betray”, and “traitors”. Gingrich was so fond of inciting antagonistic passions that Chairman Mao was a natural source of inspiration, frequently quoting him on television appearances. Finally, the third insurgency came with the Tea Party, culminating eight years later in the election of Donald Trump. The antagonism that Donald Trump and his historical predecessors relied on is the main reason why I find Liu Xiaobo’s philosophy— summarized simply by the phrase “No enemies, no hatred, no lies”—to be so compelling. The corrosive effect hatred has on the national soul is the common element that ties Chairman Mao to the current political moment in the U.S.

Fundamentally, I believe that if both countries are to confront their history and avert gradual moral corrosion, they must embrace the philosophical insights that Liu Xiaobo discovered as he wrote obsessively from his prison cell. In my view, the most important insight— national rejuvenation will never come so long as leadership believes that the fundamental challenge is great power politics— is just as relevant to the U.S. as China. Rather than an obsession with demonstrating fuqiang 富强, Liu believed that the actual challenge that confronted China is to “regain sense of national pride by learning how to govern itself justly and treating its own people humanely.”

Surely, Liu did not deny that China had achieved remarkable engineering and scientific feats in its relentless pursuit of fuqiang during Reform and Open-up, but that these achievements are a mirage if they are not followed by a revolution of rights and values based on universalistic principles. He writes that “behind this economic miracle [was] the miracle of systemic corruption, the miracle of an unjust society, and the miracle of moral decline.”

In calling for a revolution of rights and values that matches scientific and economic progress, Liu Xiaobo’s message is eerily similar to an American dissident who was instrumental in bringing an end to Jim Crow and ushering the Civil Rights era, Martin Luther King Jr. In the last book that he published before his assassination in 1968, Chaos or Community, he wrote:

 One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of the things we have done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to touch the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths…I can hear the God of history saying that was not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of decent sanitary housing, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness….That is the question facing America today.

The same question is at least as relevant for China. In an article on the Chinese internet, one Renmin University professor, Xiang Songzuo, reminds his compatriots who doubt this message to go to the rural areas, or even to the outskirts of Beijing, to look closely on the conditions of the common people, many of whom are denied access to basic health care, education, or even the wages they are promised.

In a WeChat post, I recently wrote that the sooner the U.S. and China come to the realization that our fundamental problems are similar, the more constructive our relationship will be in the future. The following commentary reveals my thinking to why I believe our fundamental problems are similar in spite of numerous differences. The reality is that these problems are not challenges for either China or the U.S., but all of humanity. Moral progress has not kept pace with scientific progress, and the world needs a revolution of rights and values. Rejecting the vanity of remaking the world in our image and restoring the promise of our neglected society should be the slogan of this revolution.

In the fight against populism which seeks to address this neglect but brings only bewilderment, Americans should learn from Liu Xiaobo and Chinese should learn from Martin Luther King. Together, their writings suggest that we must first reflect on and realize the foundational ideals of our respective societies to “rekindle the imagination of mankind, and fire the souls of men.” Then, and only then, will humanity be in the position to live up to King’s dream of building and moving into “A World House”.