The Confucian Blind Spot

Huang Hung, writing for the Daily Beast, wrote a fairly powerful essay “Has China Gone Mad?”

….are we monsters who pay people to throw away dead babies, give children poisonous vaccines, eat food cooked with gutter grease, and kill people out of revenge, however justified? As we are becoming more powerful in the world, we must ask ourselves: what are our values?

I want to jump off a cliff and straight into something out of my league and try to explain what I feel, sometimes, is a a lack of morality in China. Now, this is a difficult thing to say. The Chinese are often some of the most moral and honest people you could ever hope to find. To parents, for instance, the Chinese I know would stop at nothing to ensure their happiness. What those parents expect from their children, however, might be a different issue. There’s something deeper and fundamentally flawed about Chinese society today and I think it’s been around for a long time. That something, I think, is a call to a conform to a Greater Good.

Fei Xiaotong once described the structure of Chinese society as being like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a lake. Each ring is a different layer of guanxi (relationships) with the closest being the strongest. For those in the innermost ring you stop at nothing to help them and they for you. My Chinese friends are the most loyal I could ever hope to find. They (seriously) offered to have someone beat up my wife’s boss when I first met her years ago. Today a student showed me an Armani watch a friend gave him upon returning from America. Likewise, children in Shenzhen often give almost all their earnings to their parents back home after deducting for basic living expenses.

But then there’s the darker side. A friend of a friend – an American – went to an ATM in Luohu late at night and was approached by a gang of robbers. He took his card and fled. He ran into a parked taxi and screamed “go go go!”. The taxi driver turned off the car, took the keys, and walked away. The gang beat and stabbed the man who continued to resist. I had another friend attacked outside the gates of his college while the guards who knew him stood by and watched. He had stepped in to help a woman being attacked by a drunk boyfriend. My Chinese friends told him he should had never have gotten involved. There are also multiple stories of bus robberies where the robbers wait till the next stop to get off. Even though everyone knows what just happened, they let them off. To stretch the issue, it’s not to difficult to imagine the Japanese taking the country so easily – nobody stood up to them. It was someone elses problem, no theirs, ad infinitum. Chiang Kai-shek/蒋介石 couldn’t even be bothered to fight them.

The issue, then, is that outside those rings – those relationships – there’s nothing. Meiguanxi, as the Chinese would say. It’s not unimportant that the first time the Chinese ever donated money on a massive and collective scale was in 2008 after the Wenchuan Earthquake. My research on civil society/NGOs in China has led me down a similar path – that there is almost no civil society here. The core institutions of China are those guanxi circles – business, relatives, and friends – and the Party.

Instead of complaining about, I want to attempt to answer the question of why it’s like this. Here’s my stab. Confucianism is fatally flawed by a gigantic blind-side that has forever plagued the Middle Kingdom. Confucianism preaches responsibility to another, but not the Other. The Greater Good, for Confucius, was byproduct of everyone was doing what they were supposed to do. When kings acted like proper kings and sons acted like proper sons everything would flow along harmoniously. Bear in mind that Confucianism isn’t just some patriarchal moral philosophy it’s sometimes made out to be. Husbands and kings had a great deal of responsibility to the people under them. These were not the Lord-Serf relationships of Europe. So with the king/father paying tribute to his people/wife and the people/wife paying tribute to him what could go wrong?

The Blind Side. Outside of those relationships there are no other responsibilities to other people. How are other kings supposed to act towards other kings? Other fathers to other men?

Where Jesus, Buddha, et all summed it up with “treat others as you’d like to be treated”, Confucius took a different road, “treat others the way they’re supposed to be treated” but with a fairly limited definition of “other.”

This is not to say that all “Westerners” follow this path, only that this is a bedrock philosophy of Western Civilization. Some of the greatest progressive social changes of our time have come from simply confronting the issue, are we treating the Other right? The long battle for civil rights in America came by identifying the descendants of slaves as an equal other. From there, the rest of the equation was simple.

She ends her essay with,

I sincerely doubt that the all Chinese hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think my answer, likewise, is no.

Society, et al

I’m working on my Master’s dissertation with my academic advisor to get it published (hopefully) soon. Don’t want to jinx myself like I have with everything involving post-M.Ed academics, but it’s good and it’s already getting bites from a respected journal. In our lit review we’ve been going over the origins of civil society and the West and in China. The academic world is one of nuance, but a blog is a world of bombast. I want to say here what I can’t say there. In fact, I’ll just quote Peter Hessler.

Well I can’t do that because I don’t have the transcript, but I’ll just tell you what he said during an NPR interview about his new book “China Road.” A listener called and asked what the social life was like for the millions of young migrants pouring into the new boomtowns of China. Hessler responded that the first thing you notice in these cities is the lack of institutions. There is no church, no volunteer groups, no libraries with reading groups, no coffee shops with a subculture hanging around them. It’s really just the Party and the businesses and millions of individual people and (sometimes) their families. Strong social groups would form at workplaces and would outlast that particular job, but there weren’t many friendships being formed outside that because of the aforementioned lack of institutions.