From the Soil (II): Understanding China in the World

Reflections on Sinic Korea & Vietnam, Indic Thailand, the dilemmas of Xi, the politics of activist bureaucratisation, and traditions of Chinese statecraft.

All ideas (as distinct from techniques) have to resonate in order to replicate. That is, their appeal is never just intellectual, they need to engage our emotions to spread. Emotions as action-mechanisms evolved well before reasoning. Human reasoning still rests on emotions and needs to engage them in order to be fully persuasive.

The Big Three philosophies of China are Daoism, Confucianism and Legalism. (Buddhism and Marxism are both imports.) The insights of pioneer Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong’s (1910-2005) into the social dynamics of Chinese rural society—discussed in my previous post—help understand how these philosophies connect to the patterns of Chinese society.

Daoism

Daoism (or Taoism), the philosophy of the Way, is about spontaneous order, about identifying the natural patterns of the universe and going with them. It wrestles with the limitations of human thought and language. Zen Buddhism—which came to Japan from China via Korea—is a result of the interaction between Daoism and Buddhism.

Trying to import Western liberalism into China has the recurrent problem that liberalism—like all Western political philosophies, except Nazism (and perhaps Fascism)—is a Christian heresy and China is not a Christian society. The Hong Kong Chinese responded well to liberal British rule, but that was a light-handed imposition from outside extending across decades.

Taiwan demonstrates that folk of Chinese heritage can manage democracy just fine. Though Taiwan has the mixture of decades of (relatively benign) Japanese colonial rule—much more benign than was Japanese rule over Korea—and the disproportionately literate Kuomintang (KMT) refugee elite fleeing from the mainland and doing an “after action” assessment on why they lost the Chinese Civil War. But neither Hong Kong or Taiwan are continental-scale countries.

Forbidden City, Beijing, by Gigi, Unsplash.

The regular demographic catastrophes—from dynastic failure or collapse—that China suffered has very much elevated concern for harmony, for social order, in Chinese culture and thought. The irony is that subsequent periods of success in establishing social order encouraged population growth that would then strain that social order to the point of regime collapse. (Population/land ratios remain the main drivers of immiseration cycles: something else that Marx was wrong about.)

A free society as a harmonious society—rather than a chaotic and disruptive one—would have to be argued for, as harmony is a strong value in densely-populated, grain-farming societies for a reason. This builds on the previous history of East Asian populations as Arctic and Sub-arctic foragers, where close-quarter living and mutual reliance—due to the uncertainties of subsistence hunting generating a need to share kills and heat in a cold-weather environment—encouraged emotional suppression to avoid conflict.

One way to ground the basis of a free China in Chinese tradition could be to adapt Daoism to the notion of autonomous realms of human action. This is a very natural Daoist take—letting realms of human action operate to the pattern, and the purposes, that are natural to each.

Post-Enlightenment Progressivism aka Critical Constructivism aka “wokery” does so much its damage through politicising everything, so getting in the way of various realms of human action being themselves. It takes institutions, guts them of their original function, and wears their formal role as a skin suit, demanding deference to the simulacra of the original thing. It does this to comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies …¹ To everything it can get its hands on. Letting things be themselves is a very Daoist response—provided one can find ways to block such activist depredations.

Daoism tended to lose out to other Chinese philosophies as a basis for state action as it more naturally resists, rather than promotes, overweening claims of political authority. (Daoism’s main appeal to emperors were esoteric versions providing an alleged path to earthly immortality whose pursuit, ironically, seemed to shorten, rather than lengthen, imperial lifespans.)

In popular culture, Daoism is salient in wuxia (martial arts) and (especially) xianxia (fantasy) Chinese dramas, where Daoist cultivation—and Daoist sects—provide paths to profound martial arts. It is also a feature in various cultivation novels—a genre that has spread well beyond China—and Chinese games. Both the mega-hit game Black Myth Wukong and the mega-hit animated movie Ne Zha 2 utilise Daoist cultivation.

Daoists, and Daoist sects, get a very mixed rap in these various forms of popular culture. They are often presented as hasty in judgement, self-regarding, narrow-minded; even just plain corrupt.² But these genres have Daoism more as a path to mystical power, rather than a philosophy about the world.

For a more positive pop culture presentation of Daoism, set in a specific historical period—the lead-up to the Sui reunification of China—where the various philosophies are contending for dominance, the danmei novel A Thousand Autumns is recommended. It also has its own donghua.

Confucianism

Confucianism, the philosophy of human needs (ru), centres on identifying the enduring relationships that order society and keeping them to their proper functioning by a mixture of self and communal cultivation of the required virtues and forms. It elevates the scholar-gentleman as the moral exemplar of proper behaviour.

A perennial problem with Confucianism is that it can easily create a gulf between the Self-Consciously Clever and the general populace. Periodically, this results in popular revolts where a lot of the Self-Consciously Clever get massacred.

One can see aspects of these patterns in both Chinese and—somewhat less murderously—Vietnamese history. In the lead-up to the arrival of the Europeans in the C19th, Indic Siam (renamed Thailand after 1939) functioned notably better than Sinic Vietnam. In large part, this was because Theravada Buddhism in Siam was much better at integrating elite and populace than was Confucianism in Vietnam. One way to read South-East Asian Buddhist societies is as being what Indic civilisation is like if you do not have Brahmins and jati—the marrying-within, skill transmission and risk-management occupation groups that largely eliminated social mobility in India.

The Sinic society that most successfully created a socially-unifying Confucianism was Korea. This was ironic at several levels, as Korea (1) is not China, (2) it was already, and remained, an intensely hierarchical society and (3) it adopted a particularly dogmatic and doctrinaire version of Confucianism.

Korea adopted appointment by examinations in proper, master-the-classics, Confucian style, but limited official appointments to the landed yangban elite—none of this broad merit nonsense—who, ironically, were quite effective in spreading Confucian values into the general populace while pushing Buddhism and local animism into the fringes. This doctrinaire Confucianism also changed Korean society from one where women had quite high status and independence—likely a legacy of the original from-the-steppes warrior elite—to one of the most misogynistic, women-controlling societies in Eurasia.

Korea was a notably less commercial society than China or Japan; plausibly a product of its highly mountainous geography interacting with being geographically “boxed in” by China and Japan. Confucianism is not keen on the social dynamism of commerce, so this low level of commerce and doctrinaire Confucianism likely reinforced each other. (Another advantage of Indic Siam over Sinic Vietnam was that the former was better at encouraging and using commerce than the latter.)

The current social death spiral of South Korea makes much more sense in light of its history. The huge emphasis on education in its climb out of postwar poverty—for both men and women—played right into Confucian extolling of education. Yet South Korean men clearly expect a level of deference from women that educated, career-oriented South Korean women are not prepared to give. This leads to—along with the normal fertility-suppressing effects of apartment urbanisation—collapsing marriage and fertility rates and a surging gap between the attitudes of young men and young women. The enormous domination of the South Korean economy by a mere six Chaebol creates a mixture of elite power plus corporate managerialism plus all-consuming career competition that is—to put it mildly—not helpful.

The CCP has been engaged in a partial rehabilitation of Confucianism, notably through the Confucius Institutes. This in part reflects the shift to a more overt nationalism by the CCP, as it (somewhat awkwardly) presides over a huge surge in commercial activity. It may also represent the influence of Wang Huning, who seeks levers to counteract what he regards as the destructive nihilism of Western culture in general and of American culture in particular.

Legalism

The final of the Big Three Chinese philosophies is Legalism (the School of laws and methods). Legalism is about regularising the state and subordinating everyone to it. The underlying fear seems to be that the networks of obligation and connection of Chinese society will weaken the state—making it vulnerable to other states—or dissolve the state, leading to chaos. These are not unreasonable fears, given Chinese history.

Chinese thought and society is very much based on an order-versus-chaos concern that is both normal to farming societies and completely understandable, given the aforementioned demographic crashes that collapses of unified government lead to. These demographic crashes have been particularly horrifying in China due to the sheer scale of the country.

The Qin Dynasty (221-206BC) version of Legalism went overboard with punitive punishments. After the Han scaled that punitiveness back, various subsequent imperial Dynasties had a lot of Legalism in their thinking and operation, even while being ostensibly more Daoist, Confucian or Buddhist in their official world-views.

Buddhism

Reading From the Soil, these Chinese philosophies all make much more sense as arising out of Chinese society. What also makes more sense is why Buddhism, the doctrine of compassion, has been a somewhat awkward intrusion into Chinese society. Buddhism elevates a personal search for fulfilment over one’s social connections and obligations. Indeed, Confucians would attack Buddhism as being an affront to filial obligations.

Eventually, various emperors—notably Emperor Wuzong of Tang (r.840-846)—turned against Buddhism, especially its monasticism, as well as against other imported religions. Like Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541), getting access to revenue from monastic lands was clearly much of the motivation.

Nestorian Christianity in China also suffered from the suppression of monasticism and the decrees against imported religion. But the imperial Chinese state was always very suspicious of organisation within Chinese society—especially anything that linked different localities.

Village and clan self-organisation was fine. The former was entirely local and the second conveniently limited, although the Emperors worked to replace national aristocratic lineages with regional gentries: a process that the Song dynasty (960-1279) successfully managed to complete.

The limitations of the reach of bureaucratic command-and-control led the Chinese state to both encourage and use village and clan self-organisation. Such self-organisation permitted the state to economise on administrative effort.

Anything that linked different localities—monasticism, commerce, sects—was a very different matter. Apart from the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), of the major imperial dynasties, only the early Song dynasty could be said to be friendly to commerce and that was because its relative military weakness led it to value the revenue benefits of commerce. That very military weakness—culminating in the first foreign barbarian conquest of Southern China—led to the discrediting of the Song model and a return to a very controlling attitude to commerce in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The number rebellions in Chinese history organised via sects provides reasons to be suspicious of sects.

As I noted in my previous post, Buddhism—like Judaism, Christianity and Islam—suppressed envy, which aided commerce. Confucianism (and Legalism) disliked the disruptive social dynamism of commerce. Communism is an ideology of anger and envy—profoundly hostile to commerce—yet the CCP has been forced to preside over a massive expansion in commerce to provide the resources it needs for popular acquiescence and sustain and increase its strategic reach.

Taking medievalist Daniel Musto’s tripartite framework measuring of the health of an institution— ability to maintain separateness, emit authority, and produce innovation (though I would say: adapt to circumstances)—then neither separateness nor authority was something that either Chinese emperors, or their bureaucracy, was prepared to tolerate. It is hardly surprising that China was the most technologically dynamic when it wasn’t unified.

CCP China

As for CCP China, one of the great ironies of the post-1978 surge in the Chinese economy was it had the great advantage of—via British-governed Hong Kong—a rule-of-law commercial financial system on its doorstep. It had—thanks to Japanese colonial rule and the evolution of KMT rule—a democratising rule-of-law prosperous mercantile state just off its coast in Taiwan. These were major conduits and sources for foreign direct investment in China, as historian Stephen Kotkin notes in this 2012 talk. Historian Sarah Paine points out (short clip here) that the mass prosperity of Taiwan was also a tremendous economic rebuke to CCP rule in China.

Xi Jinping is in the process of strangling Hong Kong and gives every indication of wanting to conquer Taiwan. This would eliminate any exemplar of an alternative to CCP control.

Centralising Xi is often seen as a sort of digital-age Leninist, with some Confucian overlay. Xi strikes me as functionally more a digital Legalist, with some Confucian and Maoist overlay. Xi is apparently a Marxist True Believer, though it is unclear how much that is about not letting the CCP fall into the nihilistic lack of belief he blames the CPSU for, as enabling the Soviet collapse. The Soviet collapse remains the traumatising shock for the CCP.

Chief Purger Xi seems to be constantly fighting against the weakening effect—on both the CCP, and the Chinese state—of connections and networks that structure Chinese society. Yes, Xi’s campaigns against corruption elevated his own authority but the anti-corruption efforts are now targeting folk he appointed himself, which suggests a more endemic problem.

Anti-corruption Xi has a double difficulty. Rule by the ultimate activist-network state—the CCP—means a lot of official discretions. Corruption is the market for official discretion. The very strong tendency is that the more official discretions matter, the more corruption one is likely to have. Both Latin America and command economies display this pattern very strongly.

One can even see this in British history. The British state up to the later C18th was notoriously corrupt. As—under the influence of Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823) and other economists—the British state rolled back its official discretions (aka “deregulation”), its operation became less and less corrupt until, by the mid-C19th, Britain had an enviable record for honest government.

The other problem Xi has is that China remains very much a society of connections and networks. Ironically, the more dominant is the State—or, in this case, the Party-state—the more valuable such networks and connections become.

Xi’s very attempt to maximise CCP control—the collapse of the Soviet Union remaining the great motivating fear of Xi in particular and of the CCP in general—increases the value of access to official discretions and so the value of connections and networks. Hence the apparently endless purges. This does not look like the path to a stable political equilibrium.

Authoritarian rule has many disadvantages. Historian Stephen Kotkin sets them out nicely in this 2012 talk. The mega problem with authoritarian rule is that it blocks feedbacks.

The combination of blocked feedbacks with intense control creating pervasive official discretions that maximise the capacity for corruption—and the value of networks and connections—sets CCP China up for potential disaster through cascading dysfunction. A purely internal disaster would be bad enough. The real fear is that those same blocked feedbacks will lead to an international disaster—through a CCP China that cannot see how it looks to others and/or misjudges others—rather than just a domestic disaster.

Not that we in the West should be too smug. Contemporary progressive politics—which is all about inserting the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and ensuring as much control of public discourse as possible to justify and defend those insertions—is very much a politics of blocking feedbacks by de-legitimating all inconvenient concerns, facts and feedbacks. The tax-funded, astroturf activism being exposed by the Trump Administration via DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency)—and which has its EU equivalent—is the advocacy end of a broader pattern of toxic parasitism that requires blocking inconvenient feedback.

The conceit of the professional-managerial class—especially its activist wing—is that it owns morality. Hence, various activists refuse to debate with opponents because that would “legitimise” them. This is blatant blocking of feedbacks.

The push to censor well, everything—which is very much an exercise in denying authority to the general citizenry and handing it to the “morality-owning” professional-managerial class—further blocks feedbacks. It also generates resentment, alienation and distrust. Truth does not require censorship: dominance, lies and parasitism do.

Ironically, much of the Theory that justifies this imperial progressivism derives from Mao via Western intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and Paulo Freire (1921-1997): either directly or through those who have adapted and transmitted their ideas. Freire and Marcuse both openly admired Mao’s doctrine of permanent revolution, seeing it as a remedy to “sclerotic” Stalinism.

Mao developed his own version of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) and notions of privileged/oppressor v oppressed groups (the so-called Black and Red identities), which was an improved version of the Soviet Korenizatsiya program. North Korea has its own version, the Songbun system. It is not remotely accidental that a lot of DEI training turns into struggle sessions.

This DEI reworking of a Maoist-derived intellectual heritage really is not some weird accident. Creating the imagined future requires a mixture of activism and bureaucracy. Hence, progressive politics is about inserting activism into bureaucracy, something DEI is structured to do.

The Party-state is an attempt to embed transformative activism into the entire governing apparatus. One of the marks of the 1978-2012 period was that the Chinese state apparatus gained considerable independence of action. It is very much indicative of Xi’s tightening of control that the state apparatus has become thoroughly subordinated to the Party.

Analyst Samo Burja has some very thought-provoking comments about China and its current dynamics, including the long-term effects of making the Party so pervasively dominant.

Xi’s elevation of the Party over everything—so that other avenues of social action lack status or social clout—and the insistence on Party unity, is likely to lead to a stultifying conformity. The nature of such systems tends towards an increasingly corrupt stultifying conformity.

The West does not have any such centrally-directed Party as the CCP. What we have instead are networks of activists who embed themselves in existing institutions and organisations, gut them of their original functioning, and then wear the formal role of the institution as a skin-suit, providing both camouflage and legitimacy.

Precisely because the aim is social transformation, any progressivist revolution is always a revolution of activist bureaucracy, China has never been a rule-of-law society. Yes, both Legalism and Confucianism sought to regularise the operation of the state apparatus. But law as instructions given to officials is not the same as generalised rules that apply to everyone. (In rural China—as noted in the previous post—resorting to the courts and law was seen as an indication of bad character.)

In the West, the activist-networks of the professional-managerial class are blocking democratic feedback as much as they can, controlling discourse as much as they can, and undermining the rule of law by seeking to differentiate treatment of people depending on identity groups. If you make “marginalised” groups sacred, they cannot possibly be treated the same as the “profane” “oppressor” groups. The Maoist template of Black and Red identities—updated for the contemporary West—works just fine for the activist vanguard of the professional-managerial class.

Hence we see the development of a “skin-suit judiciary”, where activist judges clearly feel entitled to rule however they think of as a good thing. As a lawyer friend notes:

Lawyers and courts have been made a priesthood. Is it surprising that they are arrogant? They have been told they are justice.

For the professional-managerial class, the process of internationalisation—via the UN, via the EU, via the World Economic Forum, ...—is a process of giving authority to people-like-them and taking it away from people-unlike-them by constantly wearing away at national sovereignty and the significance of voting.

People Unlike Me

Precisely because Trump 2.0 is prosecuting the cultural-class war against these trends with such institutional fervour, he is proving highly disruptive of the “rules based international order”. This order has too many rules not grounded in the consent of citizens and not enough order protecting the interests of citizens.

It is an order that had becoming increasingly used to prosecute a multi-faceted professional-managerial class war against local working classes: via local-community-disrupting and wage-suppressing migration; via devaluing of heritage; via trade and interest rate/monetary policies that elevate efficiency over resilience and drive up income inequality; via coordinated attempts to control discourse; via use of international organisations and human rights conventions to do end-runs around voters.

In particular, the use of de-banking as an instrument of industrial policy by the Biden Administration enraged many of the tech-bros and drove them onto the Trump train. Trump is highly disruptive, but the alleged guardians of the Western maritime order pissed away trust in their arrogance. (If they won’t enforce their own borders, why should folk sacrifice to protect someone else’s?) The notion that trust in institutions could continue to decline without consequence is ridiculous.

This professional-managerial class progressive politics of transnational connections and networks naturally converges towards the digital Legalist-Maoism of Xi’s China. It is quite obvious that transnational networks in the West want their own version of China’s Social Credit system, using “inclusion” and climate alarmism as their justificatory goals.

CCP internationalism

The CCP is using networks and connections to penetrate, and seek to control, Chinese diasporas. It sees such diasporas as “theirs” and does not recognise dual citizenship. As a recent investigative report notes:

Overseas hometown associations, while often providing genuine services to the community, have by now become overwhelmingly co-opted by the CCP’s United Front organizations, which seek to increasingly control the Chinese diaspora.

Up to 2018, there was a pattern of the CCP simply organising the kidnapping of targeted folk.

Since then, a much more organised system of control seems to have been put in place, extending to a network of overseas “police stations”. Including within, for example, Canada and the US. A plausible hypothesis for the Trump Administration’s rough treatment of Canada is as a reaction against the level of CCP penetration of Canadian society and politics.

Australia has proved to be a persistent irritant to the CCP. Neither kidnappings nor the attempts to set up local “police” stations has worked—the long established Chinese-Australian communities have proved largely (though not completely) resistant, cooperating with Australian security agencies. Australian universities have also been quietly closing Confucius Institutes.

China’s recent trade sanctions against Australian goods—seeking to punish Australia for suggesting an investigation into the origins of Covid—mostly backfired, with some brownouts inside China due to interruptions of coal supplies. The trade sanctions also encouraged Australian industry to diversify away from Chinese markets. So, the CCP seems to have been reduced to attempting naval intimidation.

All this is a (so far) unsuccessful attempt by the CCP to impose on Australia the deference to China—and so itself—that the CCP clearly regards as proper. A pattern one can see in its interaction with other countries in its “neighbourhood”. Given the traditions of Chinese statecraft of China as the Central Realm (Zhongguo)—and all “civilised” others as its deferential tributaries (as per Zhōnghuá cháogòng tǐxì)—the Chinese ‘C’ in CCP can be as big a difficulty for other countries as is the Communist ‘C’.

Trump 2.0’s tariffs policies can be see as a form of countering intimidation. They target the central strategic dilemma of the CCP: it fears and dislikes the Western-dominated maritime order but China has been, for decades, the biggest beneficiary of that order.

The combination of Putin getting rid of term limits—making himself ruler for life—and Xi coming to power in China, and doing the same, leads Prof. Paine to date 2012-14—and especially Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea—as the beginning of Cold War II. It took a while for the US (and others) to notice.

The policy of engagement with China was always oversold, but it was not the US’s fault that relations with Russia and China soured as they did. What the two “continental anarchy” autocratic Powers wanted was never going to sit well with the maritime order the US and its allies had created.

The CCP is both an alien intrusion into the patterns of Chinese history and a manifestation of them. Fei Xiaotong’s From the Soil provides very useful insights in understanding that duality.

References

Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, Princeton University Press, 2014.

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Adam K. Frost, Zeren Li, ‘Markets under Mao: Measuring Underground Activity in the Early PRC,’ The China Quarterly, 2023, 1–20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/article/markets-under-mao-measuring-underground-activity-in-the-early-prc/FCED40169CCA6DEEF21B48012BC4D38C

Yasheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yale University Press, 2023.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Part I, Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, [2003] 2010.

Debin Ma, ‘Rock, scissors, paper: the problem of incentives and information in traditional Chinese state and the origin of Great Divergence,’ Economic History Working Papers 37569, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, 2011. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2011/WP152.pdf

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

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Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development, Princeton University Press, 2022.

Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society, trans, with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, University of California Press, [1947] 1992.

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Xueguang Zhou, The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

1. That “wokery” inflates the moral and cognitive egos of its adherents is central to its appeal. This makes it excellent at motivating and coordinating. It also generates resistance to it, as it degrades everything it touches and does so via an arrogant, self-righteous condescension that alienates people, while its activist degradation of everything it touches eats away at what folk were seeking from the activity in the first place. If you have entertainment that does not entertain, schools that increasingly do not educate, governments that do not deliver … folk withdraw their acceptance of, and—as far as they can—their use of the hollowed-out, skin-suited husks of institutions on offer.

2. It makes one wonder whether the sects are stand-ins for the CCP, protected by being in traditional societies and so able to claim either that they are nothing to do with modern China or really, they are like the KMT (Kuomintang).