Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Socialization via the family was and remains a highly disciplining process in Confucian societies. Children learn to appreciate that everything has its place, including them. People learn about their role and duties as citizens as an extension of their familial responsibilities. It is through the family that people learn to defer to a collectivity, that the individual is always secondary to the group. Unlike Western societies, which, historically at least, have tended to rely on guilt through Christian teaching as a means of constraining and directing individual behaviour, Confucian societies rest on shame and ‘loss of face’. Discipline in Confucian societies is internal to the individual, based on the socialization process in the family, rather than externally induced through religious teaching, as in the West, though that tradition has weakened in an increasingly secular Europe. [404] [404] Pye, Asian Power and Politics , p. 327. Also Deepak Lal, Unintended Consequences (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 13, 153.

Such is the power of this sense of belonging — to one’s own family, but then by extension to society, the nation and the state — that it has resulted in a strong sense of attachment to, and affinity with, one’s race and nation — and, by the same token, a rejection of foreigners as ‘barbarians’, or ‘devils’, or the Other. All the Confucian countries share a biological conception of citizenship. The strong sense of patriotism that characterizes each of these societies — China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam — has generally been ascribed to a reaction to overbearing Western pressure, including colonialism. But this is only part of the picture, and the rather less important part: the power of identity, the rejection of outsiders and the strength of native racism is primarily a consequence of the nature of the indigenous process of socialization. [405] [405] Pye, Asian Power and Politics , pp. 62, 80.

The role of the family is to provide security, support and cohesion for its members. In Confucian societies, in other words, government is modelled on an institution whose focus was not on the achievement of external goals but on its own well-being, self-maintenance and self-perpetuation. It is not surprising, therefore, that a powerful feature of these societies has been the stress on unity and stability and on continuity, cohesion and solidarity. Confucian societies, thus, have a rather different conception of government to that which we are familiar with in the West, where the state is viewed as an essentially artificial construct, an external institution that people seek to hold to account, which they view with a certain suspicion, whose powers they constantly seek to define, limit and constrain. For the Chinese — and the same can broadly be said of the other Confucian societies — the state is seen as a natural and intrinsic part of society, as part of the wider common purpose and well-being. The state, like the family, is subject to neither codification nor constraint. The Chinese state has never been regarded in a narrowly political way, but more broadly as a source of meaning, moral behaviour and order. That it should be accorded such a universal role is a consequence of the fact that it is so deeply rooted in the culture that it is seen as part of the natural order of things. [406] [406] Interview with Chien Sechin Yung-Xiang, Taipei, March 1999.

It is difficult for Westerners to appreciate and grasp the nature of Confucian political culture because it is so different from what they are familiar with; moreover, Westerners, accustomed to running the world for so long, are not well versed in understanding and recognizing difference. East Asian polities, as a result, are usually seen only in a very superficial light. Japan is regarded as democratic because it has elections and competing parties; yet the Japanese system works entirely differently from those in the West. Post- 1949 China has been explained overwhelmingly in terms of its Communist government, with a consequent failure to understand the continuity between the Communist regime and the long thread of Chinese history. In fact, we should not be surprised either by the highly idiosyncractic nature of Japanese politics or the umbilical cord that links Communist rule and dynastic rule. Both are examples of the way in which politics is rooted in culture. [407] [407] There is one sphere in which profound cultural differences are accepted and acknowledged in the West, namely the way in which, for example, the nature of Japanese and Korean firms reflects the cultures of their respective countries; Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, Mastering the Infinite Game: How East Asian Values are Transforming Business Practices (Oxford: Capstone, 1997), especially Chapters 5–7; Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1993), Chapter 11; ‘A Global Toyota Faces Dilution of Its Culture’, International Herald Tribune , 15 February 2007.

Given that East Asian polities operate by very different customs and practices to those of the West, can we draw any conclusions as to their merits and demerits? This is a tricky question, for Westerners, however broad-minded they may be, inevitably tend to apply Western criteria. They are inclined to see dependency as a negative, while East Asians veer towards the opposite view and see it as a positive. Who is right? It is impossible to make a judgement. The downside of East Asian societies might be seen as a tendency, given the strength of dependency and the paternalistic conception of government, towards authoritarianism and one-party government. On the other hand, such paternalistic leadership also has certain strengths. Because government and leaders enjoy a different kind of trust, they are given much more latitude to change direction and policies. They are not hemmed in and constrained in the same manner as Western leaders. In some ways East Asian political leaders are also more accessible and more approachable because they view their accountability to society in a more holistic way and people take a similar attitude towards them. Their greater all-round authority, rooted in the symbiotic relationship between paternalism and dependency, can also enable them to take a longer-term attitude towards society and its needs.

The highly distinctive characteristics of East Asian polities may be rooted in history, but are they declining with modernization? In some ways they are getting stronger. As the ideology of anti-colonialism has weakened, there has, if anything, been a reversion to more traditional familial attitudes. Moreover, while the family itself is changing — in China, it is far less patriarchal than previously — it remains very different to the Western family, especially in terms of values and attitudes: [408] [408] See Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900 - 2000 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 119-26; also Gavin W. Jones, ‘Not “When to Marry” but “Whether to Marry”: The Changing Context of Marriage Decisions in East and Southeast Asia’, in Gavin Jones and Kamalini Ramdas, eds, Untying the Knot: Ideal and Reality in Asian Marriage (Singapore: NU S, 2004). indeed, family customs have been amongst the slowest of all Asian institutions to change. Such is the profundity of the forces that have served to shape East Asian politics that it is impossible to envisage these societies somehow losing their political distinctiveness. [409] [409] On the contrary, as Lucian Pye suggests, the form of modernization ‘will be significantly different from that produced by western individualism’: Pye, Asian Power and Politics , p. 334.