By Francesco Sisci ( 郗士), Asia Editor, LA STAMPA
The financial crisis has dented the former sense of Western cultural superiority over Beijing and is taking all into unchartered waters.
It may take a long time to recognize, but it will happen: The most important casualty of the financial crisis is not the disruption of the Wall Street–centered financial order, the people laid off, or the companies and industries that went bust;
instead, it is the sense of intellectual and cultural superiority the Western political system had vis-à-vis the rising power of China.
In simple terms, before the crisis，things were like this: China fully believed in the Western financial system and totally distrusted its own.
Beijing even invited foreign banks and insurance companies to invest in its national companies to improve their performance. Politically, things were less rosy, but the West still had the upper hand culturally. China recognized the need to democratize but fumbled with the idea of just following the Western model, fearing traps for the country. India has been a democracy since its independence and hasn’t fared better than authoritarian China on its path to development—was democracy a Western trick to slow Chinese growth?
Besides, the Communist Party was trying to protect its hold on power.
The crisis is showing a different reality.
The vaunted Western financial institutions were full of holes. Once-envied management skills lost their appeal when the new derivatives turned out to be castles of cards . The firm control and visionary power of central bankers was really short-sightedness and complacency to political directives. And even the ethics that prompted Westerners to point fingers at China’s notorious corruption crumbled when the Ponzi schemes of Bernie Madoff and his likes were exposed.
If this was true for the financial system, once considered certainly better than China’s, the already uncertain push for Western-style political reforms lost even more steam. In short, the cultural and intellectual superiority of the West was dented. This is a very important shift, as the drive to Westernize dominated the Chinese cultural scene for over a century. At the end of the 19th century, short-lived emperor Guangxu patronized Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in their doomed effort to bring Western-style reforms. The May 4th movement in 1919 was another massive intellectual push to bring Western culture into China,and the Communist Party’s success with intellectuals came about because it claimed to be the flag-bearer of the latest and most innovative Western concept:communism. Mao’s trust in the Soviets was supported by the belief that Moscow, the truest vanguard of Western thought, would overcome Washington. When that trust failed, Beijing turned its eyes to America and has kept its gaze fixed so far.
Around the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, the Central Party School, the top research and training institution for leading Chinese cadres,spearheaded a movement to analyze the positive sides of democracy. Its journal, Study Times, published a spate of articles, and three Party School teachers, Zhou Tianyong, Wang Changjiang, and Wang Anling, even edited a comprehensive book on the subject, Gongjian (“storming the stronghold,” i.e. democratizing the political system). The authors argued that political reforms had to proceed from economic development,although they admitted that, “China’s most innovative viewpoint was in favor of studying the Western political civilization, and wanted to realize popular suffrage and a multiparty system, the army under the rule of the state (rather than of the Party, as presently in China), freedom of press, etc.”
[1]
They didn’t dismiss this end result, but rather argued that China should proceed towards democracy by following economics—what Deng Xiaoping defined as the “hard truth” (“ying daoli”)—and not fashionable political whims. But if this is the logic,then once the economic strategy shows problems, the political path must take the hint. Once, American and Western economics inspired China to blindly follow the financial system and cautiously the political system. The present crisis makes the wind blow differently: Take the Western financial system with a pinch of salt, and its political system even more cautiously. Therefore, China should reconsider the priorities of its political plans.
On February 9, the People’s Daily published a commentary that took a different approach to the issue
[2], stating that China absolutely can’t go for a multiparty system. While the article was not an official editorial, it reported a long-standing caution about a multiparty system and took a stronger view against Western-style democracy.
Western democracy is a way of splitting power between capitalists in developed countries, and money is part of the political process, according to the piece.
However, for countries in the process of modernization and industrialization, it heightens social tensions and can even cause civil war. China, a developing country, cannot have Western democracy—otherwise, society will crack open. We can’t afford it, argues the commentary’s writer, Fang Ning.
It does not say anything about the injustice of the democratic system in developed countries, the stock argument of old Marxists. It implies that the system is good for them, and there is no call for exporting revolution, like Mao suggested. Also, no point was raised about “Asian ways,” in which “Western-style democracy” is considered against “Chinese cultural values.” This argument implies that when China is developed, it will have to split power among Chinese capitalists through Western-style democracy, or it will have to do without capitalists, something that China is certainly not prepared to do.
Of course this begs the question: When will China be developed? And also deeper questions: Is splitting power among capitalists the best solution for the country? Is there no other way to reconcile competing political and business interests represented by different capitalist groups?
There is no answer to these questions, but they are circulating in Beijing. And we know it is not the first time China has changed its priorities in the nick of time when facing unprecedented challenges.
Before the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Beijing pledged it would make its currency fully convertible by the year 2000. The crisis taught Beijing that a fully convertible currency would expose its economic system to potentially disruptive attacks by foreign speculators,and the effect of money flowing freely in and out of a country would create short cycles of boom and bust that could leave countries like Indonesia or even Thailand and South Korea in social and political mayhem. This chaos could turn back the clock on national economic development, leaving countries impoverished as if after a war. In the end, China’s not fully convertible currency stemmed the tide of the financial crisis and helped the recovery of many Asian neighbors.
Since then, the notion of full convertibility of the yuan has not been shelved. Progress has been made by introducing bands of fluctuations, but the Western cultural leverage on the issue has been seriously dented.
China did not shut out Western ideas but has become less keen on listening to U.S. pressures on currency policies. The effect of the present financial crisis is similar but much larger. The 1997 crisis proved the power of the Western world because perhaps the West did not care that it messed up Asian countries, or the West thought it was some form of economic Darwinism, survival of the fittest, or it wanted to teach these Asian upstarts a lesson. Anyway, America’s intellectual superpower was confirmed. Now that America has messed itself up, its power can’t be fully trusted
.[3]
Is China on the eve of having to think for itself without a guide? This was what General Liu Yazhou feared some years ago when he argued that China could proceed faster in its reforms because it could just follow America’s example.[4]
Now the American example is fading, and China has to fend for itself even more. Of course, the U.S. will bounce back from the crisis, but how? And when? Yes, crisis happens, but now what should China do? There are no clear answers, but a century-long cycle seems to be coming to an end, and with it China’s unflinching worship of Western ways.
There is no possibility of a return to Confucius, too old and beaten, and there are no clear signs to follow. Both China and the West, thinking of being the unmoving star of political firmament, are actually in uncharted waters.
Refere nces :
[1] Zhou Tianyong, Wang Changjiang and Wang Anling,Gongjian, p. 1, Beijing, 2007.
[2] Fang Ning, “Woguo jue bu neng gao xifang duodangzhi.”I am grateful to Yu Maochun for having pointed it out to me.
[3] See my “In America we distrust,” La Stampa, November 1, 2008.
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/giornalisti/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=98&ID_articolo=29&ID_sezione=437&sezione=
[4] “China-America The Great Game: Interview with Lt.Gen.Liu Yazhou,” Eurasian Review of Geopolitics,Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso/Cassan Press-HK,January 2005.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1402564/posts
