China's rationalizations for hostility and "clash of civilizations"

Elsewhere I’ve dissected a recent trend of Chinese authorities: issuing intellectual rationalizations to justify absolute, centralized rule. See “Central Control over AI... and everything else,” where I appraise the incantations now pouring from Tsingua University and other PRC academies, proclaiming that only top-down control by a paramount hierarchy – one dedicated to neo-adjusted and constantly re-defined Marxist principles – can possibly prevent rogue or deleterious AI…

...or provide care for a population facing technological unemployment…
...or solve environmental degradation...
...or confront dozens of other modern/future ills. These memes are pushed not only at all levels of internal Chinese media, but also upon the 300,000+ Chinese nationals who are students at U.S. universities, compelled to report-to and attend indoctrination sessions at nearby Confucius Institutes.

This tsunami of rationalization and control is dangerous enough when combined with another doctrine – that westerners are too stupid to control their bourgeois appetites and hence all predatory mercantilist practices are justified, the way a farmer can make use of dumb herd animals. (This applies to both U.S. consumers and the CEOs of western companies, who eagerly bare their necks in exchange for the allure of minuscule China market shares.)

But it is the final, volatile layer -- a relentless drumbeat of resentment propaganda blaming all of China’s past ills upon western – especially American – colonialism, that completes a chowmein of toxic memes. Together, they comprise a recipe for disaster. 

To be clear, this concoction is clever in many ways. It reflects the pure fact that the current PRC leadership clade is smart… nearly all are former engineers. Indeed, they are perhaps 10% as smart as they think they are, which is damned smart! One helluva lot smarter than America’s current leader-caste. But in a way, that is the point. 

This is not a clash of leaders, but of systems. Moreover the biggest danger to us all lies in the fundamentally delusional insanity of centralized, authoritarian/hierarchical rule.

== The same pattern, over and over ==

I’ve spoken elsewhere and often about the lesson of 60 centuries of human history – that gangs of large males will pick up cudgels and beat society into a pyramid of inherited privilege. Yes, this serves to benefit their sons, but it also leads to deluded statecraft. Even brilliant kings and oligarchies are inevitably followed by disastrous ones. That lesson is apparent across five continents and 6000 years, in the litany of mistakes and horrors called “history.”

Dialing in, just two of China’s paramount leaders illustrate what’s wrong with self-justified, autocratic government… the Dowager Empress Cixi who died in 1908, after wrecking any chance of a Meiji-style modernization, and Mao Zedong, whose successive endeavors – purging all non-communists, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests campaign, the Hundred Flowers Trap, and the Cultural Revolution were calamitous examples of unquestioned authoritarianism wedded to obstinate maladministration, incredible blunders enforced with utter ferocity. 

Those two paramount leaders were as catastrophic for China as anything wrought by Europe, Russia, Japan (but not America) via colonialism. Moreover, they weren’t exceptions. Across 3000 years, only rarely was the Central Kingdom’s model of governance any different. 

I recently read a short essay by Mao - “Combat Liberalism” - that is especially crisp and instructive. In it, Mao concisely displays his laser focus and brilliance, slashing at every Western notion of reciprocal tolerance, diversity of viewpoint, pragmatic negotiation, flat hierarchies, individual rights, accountability, voluntary cooperation and open-ended/creative competition. As in more recent works by the Unabomber – Theodore Kaczynski – Mao is clear-eyed and open in describing what he hates about liberal modernism. “We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight.”

A few of his strictures are sensible, like denouncing gossip. (Indeed, traditional Chinese Confucianism preaches many wise virtues for despots to rule better than their peers; still atrociously, but slightly better, much as chivalry and catholicism were supposed to moderate feudalism, in the west.) And yet, for the most part, Mao’s doctrines can be summarized as follows: attack fiercely any non-conformity to party dogma, even as that dogma changes; don’t tolerate any diversity of view; obey and conform your thoughts to party discipline.

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads.”

Mao intelligently surveys what you and I would call the strengths of liberalism, traits that liberal democracies exploited to grow, to innovate and discover/correct errors. These include: freedom of speech, diversity, voluntary-cooperation, fair-competition, extended negotiation, pragmatism, individualism, encouraging brashly-critical confidence in the young, and fostering vast pools of liberated talent. Only Mao denounces all of these as indulgences, sapping the ferocious, unified purpose of a single-minded party. A centralized entity that we would call… well… hive-like. A society of ants or bees.

Gosh, we humans are capable of such amazing dissonance! In abstract, it’s a dichotomy that should be subject to scientific falsifiability through evidence, were that not yet another bourgeois-liberal value.

What we’re witnessing is a fascinating rift over human destiny that appears to be zero-sum, either-or. For indeed, liberalism cannot survive in Mao's world, and in a successful liberal society Maoism becomes a quaint campus fad -- a pickup rant at parties.

Moreover, this dichotomy raises questions on a much broader scale, including the Fermi Paradox! For example: which approach seems more likely to have prevailed on millions of worlds out there, anywhere that sapient life built civilizations?

And which path seems more likely to evade the countless traps, pits and minefields that must be crossed, in order to attain the stars?

Well, well. Let’s stay closer to Earth. Because we know the real answer here. Mao’s approach – centralizing ferocious power and repressing all deviance, then concocting rationalizations to call this good, is not new. Nor is it (except in certain persistent styles) particularly Chinese or Marxist! It is the boring pattern that erupted nearly everywhere that humans achieved agriculture. 

The experimental evidence is before our eyes. Those who use priestly dogma-incantations to justify hierarchical-oligarchic rule – whether by kings, lords, priests or commissars – bear a burden of proof that it ever worked well over multi-generation scales. Or that any fifty such hierarchies accomplished – combined – what liberalism has, while gradually spreading ever-wider its horizons of inclusion, across just the last 200 years.

== The Trade War means… ==

You think I exaggerated, above? Bill Bishop, at Axios and Sinocism, provides a wealth of links and insights about the Central Kingdom. In one of his newsletters, he cites, several well-known hawks who have been quite vocal in their desire to see trade talks fail:

"I very much hope that the negotiations will break down," said Dai Xu, a professor at China's National Defence University and a retired air force colonel.  "Once the negotiations are over, the United States will be finished, for sure ... we kick out all the American companies and bring all of ours back.... No way will Trump be re-elected."

"The US openly sees us as their biggest enemy," said Tan Yungang, an air force colonel. "The United States will block China more than they did the former Soviet Union."

"Chinese people need to have backbone," said Prof Dai. "I am very opposed to one of our traditional concepts, which is that no matter how much others have hurt China, we are educated to forget ... what's the meaning of remembering the history without the hatred? It's meaningless."

Not all voices are uniformly hostile. Da Wei, Assistant President and Professor at the University of International Relations in Beijing, says there may be a way to avoid a new type of Cold War, but adds a pessimistic scenario if we have one "I think it is a comprehensive confrontation...If that happens it will last for quite a long time. That's a tragedy for everyone" 

And again, I strongly recommend folks out there read Frederik Pohl’s prescient novel THE COOL WAR.

== A clash of civilizations? Or models for Star Trek? ==

Again, I've got no problems with the neo-communist People's Republic of China and the liberal United States of America vying as models for future humanosphere culture. Indeed, I expect the average, baseline human in 2200 to have somewhat Asiatic features and for Chinese to be one of our top languages. It's not about nations per se, but models for individual psychology and social governance. Across all of history, for 6000 years, the model in 99% of agricultural societies was a pyramid of command by a few, who cheated to ensure limitations on competition by the sons and daughters of the poor, and who then had court priests concoct rationalizations for why the mandate of heaven must be vested in all-powerful top authoritarians.

Of all the world's pyramidal cultures, China's was probably the least awful, in that there were systems ensuring a little meritocratic rise. A future human civilization based on the Chinese model might reach ecological balance and make some progress... but it would remain power-biased (imperial) and insistent upon conformity. Even if the end result is consensus-benevolent (and history shows no examples), it will emphasize homogeneity, not agility. Instead of the stars, we will get hives.

Ours is the best ever version of a diamond-shaped society, designed to limit cheating, foster diverse questioning and maximize the number of capable competitors in any field. Periclean Athens and Florence were other rare examples -- vastly more creative, but with one glaring disadvantage. Liberal experiments are inherently unstable and vulnerable to innovative cheaters, requiring constant tweaking of the regulatory systems to evade mob populism or oligarchic putsches.

Several times, American generations rose to meet that challenge. If we fail this time, perhaps liberalism is fatally flawed.

Were this all there is, to Sino-West competition, I'd say let the games commence. Alas, the PRC leadership uses their sovereignty as a base of operations for cheating.  Worse, they justify their behavior by stirring nationalistic wrath in the population, based on exaggerations or outright lies...

...which is why I deem vital that we take on the polemical front. I know a few meme-zingers that could be useful there. But their best effectiveness requires deployment at the right time and place, by the right messenger. And I am not the one. Nor is this the time or place.

Again, I summed up how the PRC Politburo has its state theoreticians busy justifying why only a centralized communist central committee can possibly guide humanity into the future that faces dangers like uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence and automation-generated unemployment.  The rationalizations of scholars like Feng Xiang are very smart... worth reading... and ultimately spectacularly false.

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== ADDENDA ==

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1. For some big picture from another angle, see Jiayang Fan’s fascinating article on China's superstar science fiction author Liu Cixin, his epic trilogy, and on the future and the rise of science fiction in China – and across the world.  My family hosted him at our home. We did not press him re political matters, as this writer did. But the mix of optimism and fatalism we all observed is most-telling. As is Da Liu's (at least official) opinion that today's  PRC leadership has no other choice -- it is forced to be all-controlling, lest chaos ensue.

To be clear, I understand Da Liu's perspective. Certainly the fierce One Child Policy, which may have saved the world, could not have happened in a democracy (as Rajiv Gandhi discovered, when he tried something like it, in India). On the other hand, where do you draw the line?  Twenty-five years ago, I thought China planned to do a staged loosening, starting down at the level of towns and cities, allowing a vigorous and open civil society to deliver the synergies of freedom (e.g. using light to root out corruption) in local governance, while retaining control nationally. Then, a decade later, this loosening would spread to provincial governments, and so on.  A social contract that might have engendered patience with clear rewards. It's what the commissars would do, if they were sincere, if their freinds-to-the-workers rationalizations were true. Alas, it is not what they are doing.

2. The clear answer to the Confucius Institute tactic is simple. Require all US undergrad and graduate students to take one class in civics. Just one light survey of constitutional and legal processes and how things work in a society that has rule-of-law. (Stuff our own students should be learning anyway and that would help them start or run a business.) No matter how sullen or superficially resentful of this requirement those 300,000+ Chinese students might act, for their handlers, most would return home thoroughly "infected" with such values, asking "why can't we have rule-of-law, too? And that memic infection will be more valuable, in the long run, than any amount of intellectual property that gets stolen from us.

3. Here's a fascinating on the scene description and here are mind-blowing composite crowd images of how 2 million people - 27% of the population of Hong Kong - thronged the streets a few days ago to protest and - at least for now - kill the infamous Extradition Bill and show young people all across China what's possible, with guts and brains and luck. Whatever victories the PRC achieves against the West - in loose alliance with the separate Putin-Saudi-mafiosi-Fox cabal - they are happening via skullduggerous methods that may turn and bite them. Whereas the failure mode they fear is legitimate expression and achievement of the will of the people. No wonder they feel a hot breath of time that is not on their side. 

Their worldwide oligarchic putsch - in conjunction with western quislings - has made great strides. Their confederate puppets took Washington. But our strengths are gathering. And Oswald Spengler was wrong about the Decline of the West.