Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (14 page)

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that would censor searches for topics that the Chinese authorities did not wish its citizens to discuss, it was widely regarded as a concession by the company to a regime unwilling to allow free speech. Yet there clearly
are
other freedoms that have made a real difference to the lives of Chinese at all levels of society.

To understand the signifi cance of these freedoms, one must ask what concept of freedom had previously existed in premodern China. In late imperial China, the state was widespread but relatively shallow. Local magistrates, provincial governors, and bureaucrats of various sorts kept the network of the empire running, but its active reach into the lives of ordinary Chinese was much less strong than the increasingly intrusive state of the 20th century, which reached its apogee in Mao’s China. For poor rural farmers, just as for the poor of London or Paris, there was little freedom to act, because economic deprivation limited 87

the scope for action. Yet as in early modern Europe, there was also less active state interference in people’s lives than in the 20th century.

Economic freedom helped shape premodern China, with a sophisticated market economy allowing land to be bought and sold, and the ability to accumulate capital allowing business ventures to form and prosper, even though the economy was not mechanized or industrialized in the way that its European equivalent was. People and goods were generally free to travel around the empire, although the trade in certain key goods such as grain and salt was heavily regulated.

However, the freedoms of political action which are associated with the aftermath of the English, American, and French revolutions are not so easy to detect in premodern China, just as they would have been hard to fi nd in much of Central and Eastern
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Europe, Russia, and the Iberian peninsula at the same time. The education and immersion into elite values that characterized
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scholars and offi cials also made them subject to the moral rules of Confucian governance, and in particular, their duty to speak out when injustice was done by those in power. Nonetheless, the Chinese system did not institutionalize protection for those who spoke out in this way and that could make open dissent a morally virtuous but personally perilous undertaking.

The usage of law in modern China has been one way to assess how free the society has been. The Republican state was much more tied to the European idea of constitutions and codifi ed law than the Qing empire had been, because its structure was so heavily infl uenced by Western and Japanese models. The Republic was not a strong state, even under the Nationalists, although it was more stable and promising than later historiography has tended to acknowledge (see Chapters 2 and 3). Ironically, though, this failing was a blessing for personal freedom. Unlike the Qing, the modern Republican state desired strong day-to-day control 88

over its people; but it had insuffi cient resources to exercise that control.

Nonetheless, freedoms were restricted in the Republic, and became more so under Mao. Even in the era of reform, the ‘cage’

has been opened only part of the way. China still has very large numbers (probably thousands) of prisoners held essentially for political offences, such as attempting to set up a new political party, joining a banned religious group, or placing politically dissenting views on a weblog. There are highly credible reports that such prisoners are treated roughly and even tortured.

However, China today is overall not a totalitarian state, nor a military junta, nor a state run at the personal whim of a dictator.

From a Western point of view, China even appears (perhaps deceptively) free compared to, say, many societies in the Middle
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East. To use Isaiah Berlin’s terms, ‘positive liberty’ in China today
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is highly restricted – there is no freedom to establish rival political organizations, the media is highly circumscribed and censored,
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and public protests, although common, are usually shut down fast.

But ‘negative liberty’ – the freedom, essentially, to be left alone by the state in matters of personal choice – is undeniably strong.

The Chinese of today are free to set up businesses, wear clothes of their choice, buy consumer goods, and travel (though not live) where they please within China and even go to many places outside it. These freedoms are restricted by economic capability and by corruption, which prevents a truly free set of choices being made. Nonetheless, these freedoms have a real impact. In the Cultural Revolution, wearing leather shoes or Western hairstyles could lead to attacks from the Red Guards. Markets were almost entirely controlled by the state, making events such as the Great Leap Forward possible. The freedoms such as the growth in market information, that prevent such events happening again, are less romantic than the inspiring ‘Goddess of Democracy’

statue hoisted by students in Tian’anmen Square in 1989. But they are important and their enactment has not been without risk for the CCP. This is not to accept at face value the CCP’s self-serving 89

argument that only it can decide how far and how fast China can safely liberalize. But today’s China relates to its people in a very different way from the state under Mao.

One of the major factors that has marked the growth of freedom in post-1978 China is exposure to the outside world. Before 1949, China was highly internationalized, and its modernity was shaped by constant interaction with the outside world (often in the unwelcome form of imperialism). The Mao era saw China look inward more and more, and even the USSR was unwelcome after the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. Since 1978, however, China has embraced the outside world with enthusiasm. The Tian’anmen Square tragedy of 1989 looked as if it might put a stop to this process, but in fact it proved only a temporary obstacle. In the early 21st century, the Chinese are once again a globalized people in their homeland as well as around the world. Chinese students are among the largest communities in the universities of the US,
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the UK, and Australia. Chinese tourists are a common sight in Bangkok, Paris, and London. Chinese academics regularly visit
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the West for conferences, and Chinese businessmen do deals on six continents, in recent years fi nding new opportunities in Latin America and Africa. In the 1980s, there was an expectation that many of the Chinese students who went to the West to study would choose to stay there. Now it is far more common to fi nd entrepreneurs whose ambition is to return and set up a fi rm in China’s burgeoning market. Books by Chinese business gurus are piled up in the major bookshops of Beijing and Shanghai. One of the biggest sellers of 2006 was Wang Wenliang’s
Graduating
from Peking University Counts for Nothing
(
Biye Beida deng yu
ling
), a riff on the classic American
What They Don’t Teach You at
Harvard Business School
model, in which readers are taught that a fancy college education is no substitute for the real-life thrills and perils of a career in business.

For the majority who cannot yet afford to travel abroad, there are endless television news reports and documentaries on societies in 90

other parts of the world. Foreign television shows are imported and dubbed; likewise foreign fi lms. China is not isolated from the outside world. The arrival of the internet, for instance, has become a very important part of the ability of China’s new middle class to engage with the outside world. Many sites, including the BBC and sites relating to the Tian’anmen Square killings in 1989, are blocked from within China. But thousands of others, relating to foreign fi lms, university courses, news stories, celebrity gossip, and corporations are not. Many Chinese understand perfectly well the freedoms available in other parts of the world, but they choose not to embrace them – or at any rate, not to embrace them yet.

The wider Chinese world opens up intriguing divisions between what is ‘free’ and ‘democratic’. China itself is neither fully free
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nor democratic. Taiwan, since the 1990s, has been both free and
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democratic. Singapore, a largely Chinese society, is democratic, in that it has regular elections which are nominally open to
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opposition candidates (but at high cost to themselves), but is not free (the media and political activism are both heavily regulated).

Most intriguing, though, is Hong Kong, which is little more democratic than it was under the British. Yet it is a very free society: although there is political pressure and a certain level of self-censorship, it has a lively press, it is easy to publish books attacking the Chinese government, and it supports a variety of political parties (although the legislature is arranged to prevent any such party ever coming to power). There are few, if any, other such free, undemocratic societies.

One particular freedom that has been vigorously exercised since 1978 is the new freedom to practise religion. Offi cially, religious freedom was always guaranteed under the People’s Republic of China constitution, but during periods such as the Cultural Revolution, religious practice was condemned as superstition, and was politically dangerous. However, in the present day, the state feels that mainstream religion acts as a social glue, and no longer 91

seeks to discourage it, instead recognizing state-approved versions of Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism.

Christianity has become more widespread (government fi gures suggest around 16 million adherents, whereas other estimates place the number higher, at 40–65 million, the latter including attendees at illegal ‘house churches’) and has found a particular constituency among young urban Chinese, who associate the faith with modernity. Around 1.5% of the population of China is Muslim. However, the state is deeply distrustful of religious movements that seem to offer any organization that challenges the government, or even seeks merely to avoid its surveillance: the Falun Gong movement is one of the best-known of such groupings.

The passion for improvement

What ties together some of these themes? Since the violent,
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transformative impact of modernity on Chinese society from the 19th century onwards, it is clear that China has not
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been a ‘Confucian’ society in the premodern sense. However, signifi cant cultural infl uences have remained from that earlier era. Perhaps one of the most powerful, and one whose infl uence can be found in a wide variety of areas, is the idea of
xiushen
, or personal cultivation: the Confucian idea that the way to living a decent and ethical life lay in improving the self, with the aim of becoming a
junzi
(gentleman, person of integrity) or
sheng
(sage). Education is a clear and obvious means of achieving that goal, but contemplation and refl ection also make up a large part of it.

Although the modern Chinese states of the 20th century tried to distance themselves from what they saw as the backward elements of the Confucian tradition, the idea of
xiushen
as a collective, as well as a personal, goal persisted strongly. In the 1930s, as part of a drive for national renewal and in a bid to undermine Communist ideology, Chiang Kaishek launched the New Life Movement, 92

Olympics 2008

In 2001, two Chinese obsessions came together: sport and
respect. The International Olympics Committee (IOC)
announced that the 29th Olympiad of the modern era would
be held in Beijing in 2008.

The 20th century was marked by the use of sport as an
indicator of national prowess. Premodern Chinese culture,
however, had not regarded physical exercise as the mark
of manhood, but rather, praised the ideal of the Confucian
gentleman, learned and separated from the world of exertion.

This changed in the late Qing and Republican periods.

Many thinkers, infl uenced by Social Darwinist ideas, felt
that China’s devotion to scholarship over physical prowess
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was leading the nation to destruction. Mao Zedong, in his
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earliest writings, noted that ‘Physical exercise should be rude
and rough’, and even sketched out a personal exercise plan
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involving buttock thrusts.

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Nor was Mao alone. China’s leaders were aware that its weak
international status meant that it had a long way to go to
exercise military power in its own right. However, there were
other forms of cultural power that could be shown off in the
international arena. For the fi rst time, in 1936, China sent a
team to the Olympics, that year held in Berlin, perhaps the
most purely political Games that the Olympic Movement
has ever seen. The Cold War was also a sporting war, with
US–Soviet rivalries played out every four years. China did not
compete until the 1980s, but then quickly made its mark in
sports such as gymnastics. By participating in the Olympics,
China was making a clear indication that it was once again
part of the world community.

The same motivation fuelled the decision in 1992–3 by the
Chinese government to bid to bring the millennium Olympiad
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to Beijing. Huge amounts of money were spent in the bid,
and the result was piped through loudspeakers live into
Tian’anmen Square. However, the shocked crowd heard that
the lucky city was to be … Sydney. The unstated, but widely
felt, subtext was that the IOC could not award the Games
to China just four years after the killings in Tian’anmen
Square. The international world of sport could not give
China permission to slip back into the community of nations
as if nothing had happened. However, the 1993 snub proved
to be a start, rather than an end, to the process. Within two
years, China held a major international event, the 1995 UN