Page 3 of 4 The Dragon's
metamorphosis By David Gosset
oppressed subjects without any rights. I
remember a question that was raised a few months
ago - privately - by a European political leader
after a general presentation on China that I was
asked to deliver. "But tell me, how can you live
in a communist dictatorship?"
Obviously,
my briefing and analysis had not much effect on
this person's bias, misunderstanding and
ignorance. For many people
the
very use of the expression "China's
democratization" might be surprising. It should
not. While for the past 100 years China has been
through a process of political modernization, one
has also to realize that such a process has some
roots in the culture. Chinese traditional values
and modernity do not necessarily exclude each
other. If it is true to say that China never
experienced "democracy" - when we use this word we
speak Greek, not Chinese - one can still find in
the Chinese tradition sources for genuine
democratization.
In "Historical
Foundations for a Democratic China", a
programmatic text written in 1941, Hu Shi
(1891-1962) developed ideas that are stimulating
to open the debate on the internal source of
Chinese democratization. Hu Shi asked himself a
fundamental question: "Has Chinese democracy any
historical basis?"
Hu Shi mentions three
intellectual foundations. First, in Chinese
tradition human nature is conceived as in essence
good. Second, rebellion against tyrannical
government is traditionally justified. Third, the
subordinate has a sacred duty to criticize and
oppose the wrongdoing of his superior. Indeed, one
can find these elements, for example, in Mencius'
thinking, which enriched Confucian doctrine in the
4th and 3rd centuries BC.
Hu Shi also
lists three historical foundations. First, looking
at traditional Chinese society one observes a
relatively classless social structure (a very
important difference with India). Second, an
objective and competitive system of examination
played a very important role. The keju -
abolished by the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1905 -
did ensure social mobility and the renewal of the
elites. As a tool for homogenization, an
instrument to establish an efficient and
relatively obedient bureaucracy, the keju
has also been an extraordinarily fair - and modern
- system of promotion. Third, historic institution
of the government created its own opposition and
censorial control.
In the context of the
post-imperial (or post-May Fourth) Chinese
discourse, what belongs to tradition is often
perceived very negatively both in the Western and
Chinese perception and the Chinese emperors are
presented as despots of a dark age. To illustrate
Hu Shi's idea on the censorial role, here are the
words of the second Qing emperor, Kang Xi: "There
is no way the emperor can know every official in
the country, so he has to rely on the officials
themselves for evaluations, or on censors to
impeach the wicked.
"On tours, I learned
about the common people's grievances by talking
with them, or by accepting their petitions"
(Jonathan D Spence, Emperor of China,
Self-Portrait of Kang Xi, 1974). These are not
the remarks of an obscurantist despot. A
contemporary of Louis XIV and Peter the Great,
Kang Xi had to ensure peace and prosperity in an
empire whose population was about 150 million.
From another perspective - and leaving the
Confucian doctrine - the wu wei or
non-action, central to the Taoist tradition, is a
kind of laissez-faire that can also be seen as a
potential source of political liberalism.
It is fundamental to keep in mind that
democratization also has some roots in China's
traditional humanism. For China, the process of
democratization does not have to be a process of
alienation. And since relatively recent political
modernization is not a total rupture with
traditional elements, one cannot expect China to
adopt Northern European democracy but must
anticipate a democratization with Chinese
characteristics. In other words, China can be
modern and Chinese; as a living matrix of
civilization it will also enrich modernity - and
certainly enrich the vocabulary of Western
political scientists.
China's political
modernization has not been an easy and
straightforward process. How will China's
political transformation evolve in the beginning
of the 21st century? At least five main factors -
three internal to the Chinese world and two
external - will affect the process of future
political opening up.
Factors affecting
China's future democratization The first
factor is related to the West. What Hu Shi said in
the 1930s is, to a certain extent, still very
relevant: "The problem of China, however
multifarious and complicated it may seem at first,
is in reality one of cultural conflict and
readjustment" (Haskell Lectures, University
of Chicago, 1933). Indeed, China needs to adjust
to economic and political modernity that
historically originated in 18th-century Europe but
which is not by essence in contradiction with all
the traditional Chinese values. In reference to
the West, China's gradual political opening up is
internally threatened by two extremes.
The
first threat is what can be called pure
conservatism preoccupied exclusively with the
question of identity, a closed and static identity
that is, as such, largely a myth. Pure Chinese
conservatism dislikes the very idea of democracy
because it does not want to see or cannot see that
democratization also has some roots in Chinese
tradition. An implicit alliance between the New
Left that does not much like the West - its
economic liberalism and its perceived negative
effects on China's society - and the conservative
Confucianists is always possible. The agenda of
pure conservatism is simple. One of the
conservative Confucianists can write: "We have to
go back to the Chinese culture essence and to
contribute to the renaissance of our nation and to
the progress of universal civilization" (Mu
Zhongjian, "The great Chinese way", in Yuan Dao,
2005).
At the opposite of this is
Sinocentric cultural essentialism. China's
Occidentalists - to use a term that comes from the
19th-century Russian intellectual debates between
the Occidentalists or Westernizers and the
Slavophiles - are also very active both inside and
outside the PRC - they are welcome in US
universities and think-tanks since they say what
most Americans want to hear.
China's
Occidentalists would like to see Western democracy
and its mechanisms transplanted into the Chinese
world now. It is both unrealistic - what might be
possible with Shanghai's large and well-educated
middle class does not make sense in certain parts
of China's vast hinterland - and dangerous because
China will accept in the long term only what would
have been growing from its own context. One does
not import democracy like goods
