China’s Moral Disfigurement By Perry Link
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/05/03/chinas-moral-disfigurement/#slide-1
The Communist Party has attacked, but not destroyed, the nation’s traditional ethics
In 2001 Gordon G. Chang, an American lawyer who worked many years in China, published a book called “The Coming Collapse of China.” The corruption and hypocrisy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be its undoing, Chang argued. A spirited controversy among China-watchers ensued. Nonsense — Chang is dreaming, said CCP defenders. No, it’s you apologists who are dreaming, replied CCP critics. As years ticked by with the regime still in the saddle, the apologists grew smug: We told you so.
I asked the opinion of Liu Binyan, the doyen of Chinese investigative journalists, who was widely revered in the 1980s as “China’s conscience” but was living in forced exile when Chang’s book appeared. “The title of the book is misleading,” said Liu. “Coming collapse? Morally speaking, China has already collapsed.” Liu explained his comment: After the massacre of protesters in 1989 and the CCP elite’s raid on the Chinese economy, during which a few high-ranking officials in the 1990s lopped off great chunks of it — electricity, IT, banking, shipping — and placed these in the hands of their own families, who profited spectacularly, cynicism had overtaken the country. Moral language of any kind was now a shell game; all that mattered was winning. The attitude of the elite seeped down through the whole of society. Liu told me about a new term that had arisen: zaishou, literally “slaughter the familiar,” which meant that, after swindling strangers had become commonplace, people were now going a step further. In zaishou one “slaughtered” friends and family; loyalty and trust were low-hanging fruit, there to be gutted for personal advantage.
Illustrative stories are many. Here is one, reported in 2007 in Beijing Youth Daily: A wealthy businessman was keeping a mistress when his wife discovered the fact. She was irate but did not ask for divorce. Instead she demanded that her husband hand the woman over for a personal beating by her. The husband negotiated with his wife over how long the beating must last. Then, wishing to spare his mistress, he went to the Internet and placed a notice on a popular jobs forum: “Wanted: woman to receive beating by another woman. Should be about 35 years old.” He offered pay of 300 yuan (around $40) per minute. He got ten applicants and chose one, and the beating proceeded. The wife, albeit deceived, was satisfied.
In citing this bizarre story I do not claim that it represents a pattern, because it likely does not. I merely want to illustrate the sort of thing that can happen in a society as ethically unmoored as China’s has become. The novelist Yu Hua has quipped that one advantage of writing about Chinese society today is that it is so vast and so adrift that one can imagine just about anything and still feel confident that it has probably happened somewhere.
The society was not always like this. In imperial times, a few hundred years ago, Confucian rules on how to “be a good person” were fairly clear, and, although it was by no means the case that the rules were always followed, there was a broad consensus that they ought to be followed. A victim of mistreatment could appeal to the public knowing that, because certain values were held in common, empathy would be forthcoming. Liu Binyan pointed me to some 17th-century popular stories in which a wronged party, driven finally to suicide, chooses the doorstep of the wrongdoer as the place to end life. Why make that particular choice? Because, as Liu pointed out, it says in effect: All right, you win; but the public can see, and heaven observes, that you have done wrong. And that statement had power.
Here “heaven” is an imperfect translation of tian, a broad concept that means roughly “the natural state of all things.” But tian in Chinese belief is more than physical; it is transcendent and has a moral will — it can anoint emperors and justify their rule, for example. It is one answer in Chinese culture to the human need for the supernatural, but it did not mean paradise in the sense of a place where one goes after death. About 500 b.c.e. Confucius commented that we shouldn’t worry too much about death because we still haven’t figured out life. Notions of heaven and hell came to China only a few centuries later, when Buddhism arrived from India, and the ideas were many. Buddhism spoke of not just one paradise but ten of them, and layers of hells, each more fearsome than the last. Moreover one’s afterlife flowed from one’s moral behavior on earth. Karma linked past, present, and future, and one’s “merit” could be carried from one existence to the next. Chinese civilization answered Buddhism by persecuting it at one level (defrocking monks and nuns and destroying monasteries) but adopting it at another. Daoism, a philosophy that was indigenous to China, accepted Buddhism’s heavens and hells, gave them Chinese names, and invented Chinese gods to preside over them. The great modern scholar Hu Shi (1891–1962) called this Daoist move “manufacturing an imitation product to take over the market.” Eventually Confucianism, too, produced a popular-religion version of itself, and a person could worship at a Confucian temple. Popular Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism were not antagonistic toward one another; a person could pray anywhere, as needed.
All agreed, though, that spiritual powers could observe human behavior and deliver rewards and punishments as appropriate. When a person commits suicide at someone else’s door, she or he can expect that more than the human community notices; tian, and maybe some gods, are watching, too. Heavens and hells reminded people to be moral. In the famous story “New Year’s Sacrifice” by the great modern writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), a poor, illiterate woman tries at every turn in life to be as moral as she possibly can. When her husband dies, she is determined to be chaste in widowhood. But his family sells her to someone else in marriage; that second husband dies, too, and now she is “tainted,” because her curse is plainly the cause of the two men’s deaths. People tell her she is bound for the netherworld, where the King of Hell will saw her in half — the only reasonable way to satisfy both husbands. She dies a beggar, with no firm belief in anything except that she has tried in this world to be a good person.
That Chinese idea that one should be a good person – whether the goodness comes from one’s conscience or from fear of the judgment of society or of the gods – suffered catastrophic devastation under the rule of Mao Zedong, especially between the years 1957 and 1970. China had survived violent emperors in the past, but the tyranny of emperors had not penetrated as far down as the alleyways and villages. Mao’s tyranny did. Youngsters, claiming to “defend Chairman Mao,” were encouraged to attack teachers, to denounce parents, and even to come further home than that. “Make revolution in the depths of your souls,” Mao commanded. If you hesitate, the problem lies in you, and it is your duty to dig it out.
The moral holocaust of the late Mao years did not obliterate the Chinese sense of justice, however. It is more accurate to say that it narrowed it. From what might in earlier times have been called a “confident expectation of shared norms” (even if they were not observed), the Chinese sense of justice morphed into “self-righteous indictment of others.” Justice was still the point, but it showed not as empathy for victims but as indignation at victimizers. Let me cite a famous example. On October 13, 2011, a two-year-old girl in the southern city of Foshan was run over by two vehicles and left bleeding on a road. For seven minutes afterward, at least 18 pedestrians walked by without making any move to help. The girl died. The events on the street were caught on camera and went viral on the Internet, where millions of viewers vehemently denounced the unfeeling passersby. This anecdote illustrates both sides of the point I wish to make about the post-Mao sense of justice in China. It is weak as empathy for victims (the little girl) and strong as indignation at offenders (the pedestrians).
China’s economy has grown in recent decades and material living standards for many people have risen, but the addition of money has made little difference in moral standards — and indeed often seems to have lowered them. A money-rules-all ethos has led to some extreme forms of cynicism — get what you can get, however you get it — that were the basis of Liu Binyan’s judgment that China, “morally speaking, has already collapsed.” Beginning in the 1990s one could monitor popular cynicism by studying the “slippery jingles” (shunkouliu) that sprang up in great numbers and spread through society more or less as jokes do in Western societies. Indignation at corruption was a prominent theme in them. This one offers instruction in how to bribe officials:
A cigarette gets you in the door,
And with the wine you hear the deal;
But if you want the problem solved,
It’s gotta be a great big meal.
Another expresses self-pity from a victim’s point of view:
I worked my whole life for the Party,
And had nothing at the time I retired.
Now they tell me to live off my kids,
But my kids one by one have been fired.
The state’s education system would, one would think, address the problem of dwindling empathy, but it does not. The moral guidance in school has been, overwhelmingly, to love the Party and to obey political leaders absolutely. Sympathy for the poor or abused is absent.
Some in the West have attributed the decline of ethics in China to Marxist materialism. That is a mistake. Marxism never sank very deeply into Chinese culture, and only some elite intellectuals were ever able to explain abstruse ideas such as dialectical materialism. Mao was nowhere near the “Marxist philosopher” that he pretended to be. He was much more in the tradition of Chinese “legalism,” which taught a ruler how to manipulate people in order to stay in power. He resembled rebellion leaders of recent centuries in China who drew support by touting “brotherhood” (while maintaining strictly hierarchical ruling structures), by promising an ultimate heaven on earth, and by reliance on some book that contained a magical ideology that told how all of this would happen. The magical ideology often originated outside China. For the White Lotus rebels in the late 18th century it was Maitreya Buddhism; for the Taiping rebels of the mid 19th century it was an odd strain of Christianity; and for the Mao rebels in the 20th century it was Marxism. I am not arguing that international communism was unimportant in the rise of Mao. Stalin’s support of Mao was crucial in the 1930s and 1940s, and the blueprint for ruling society that Mao imposed on China in the 1950s was modeled on the Soviet Union. But as an ideology, Marxism for Mao was little more than a cheerleader’s banner.
Should we despair? Has the communist revolution killed human empathy in China? No. The underlying culture, right down to structures of the Chinese language, persists with the ideas of “proper behavior” and “being a good person.” Taiwan, which was spared the Mao devastation and has successfully blended Chinese culture and democracy, is highly instructive. One need only go live in Taiwan for a few months to see this point. I lived in Taibei in 2013–14 during a year of research and here will offer just one illustration. It rains a lot in Taibei, and people carry umbrellas. Outside supermarkets, movie theaters, and office buildings there are huge vertical umbrella racks in a checkerboard pattern. People place their umbrellas into the racks, go inside to do what they will do, and later come out and pick up their umbrellas. I will not say that no umbrella is ever stolen or removed by mistake. What impresses me is the general attitude: People just assume that umbrellas will, of course, stay where they are put until their owners return.
The strength of the underlying moral culture is evident on the mainland as well, whatever thick blanket of cynicism has been laid upon it. China’s post-Mao years have seen a major revival of religions — Buddhism, Christianity, Falun Gong, and others, including myriad local folk beliefs. NGOs that work for the disabled, for AIDS victims, for the environment and other causes, are often not religious but have strong ethical identities. Of course, anyone who forms an organization that could pose a threat to CCP social control is subject to crushing by the CCP; but the popular thirst to live within a system of ethical belief endures. People look for ways to live with their consciences while lying low.
Not to lie low runs the risk of being labeled “dissident,” and that can bring disaster. As a Chinese saying puts it, “the bird that sticks its neck out gets its head blown off.” Still, a few intrepid birds do keep sticking necks out from time to time, thereby risking their jobs, their children’s access to school, their permission to travel, and even their freedom. The first people to criticize dissidents are often their own families: Are you stupid? What are you doing? Don’t drag us into it. Dissidents often do feel guilty for exposing their families to punishment.
Most people are not foolhardy and stay within bounds. But their ethical thinking is still there, beneath the surface, and leads to a “split psychology” that has been widely noticed in China. At a dinner table with trusted friends, people might denounce the pompous language of the state, bemoan the cynicism of society, and even curse top leaders by name, but then, the next day, they don their invisible armor, put on a different face, and take their places in the machine of public life.
The contrast between public and private is not always as sharp as I have put it here, but there is no doubt that it is widespread, and this raises a question. How stable is Chinese society? In the summer of 2020 Cai Xia, a professor of the history of CCP ideology who is retired from the regime’s Central Party School in Beijing, defected to the United States. She knows the regime at its core, and she writes in a recent article:
The CCP looks fearsome from the outside, like some polished model of a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship, but in fact it is fragile inside. . . . It has no way to handle the gaping mismatch between the ideology in its propaganda and the reality of its society.
She cites other reasons for the regime’s fragility: incompatibility between the market elements in its economy and its authoritarian politics; the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in society; the fear and resentment among President Xi Jinping’s rivals at his power grabs, his intention to cancel term limits for himself, and his continual purges of perceived competitors. She feels that a random event might “set off a chain reaction leading to an entirely unforeseen situation, including, even, collapse of the regime.”
In short, Gordon Chang might still be vindicated in his prediction of a “collapse of China,” even if that means the collapse of not just a moral edifice but a political regime. Pundits say that a collapse is highly unlikely anytime soon, and they might be right. I am not predicting a collapse. But if it does come, the pundits will have plenty of material to use in their explanations of why it happened.
Comments are closed.
