Political Order and Political Decay (57 page)

JAPAN'S MISSING SOVEREIGNTY

Japan's political development since the mid-nineteenth century set a pattern that would be followed, with variations, by a number of other East Asian societies.

Prior to its encounter with the West, Japan was already endowed with a strong state that had many characteristics of Weberian bureaucracy, with a state-society “balance” heavily weighted in favor of the state. There were different social groups—farmers, merchants, and warriors—but they were not organized for collective action in a manner comparable to Europe's independent cities, churches, guilds, and the like. Thus civil society had a much harder time constraining the state through demands for a rule of law and accountable government.

Japanese civil society grew enormously after the country democratized, with the emergence of environmental, feminist, media, nationalist, and religious groups of various sorts. But the ability of Japanese civil society to mobilize for political ends remains weak relative to other industrialized democracies. The rise of the Democratic Party of Japan and its capture of the prime ministership in 2009 represents, in some sense, the emergence of a stronger oppositional culture. But its poor subsequent performance in response to events like the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear crisis casts doubts on the durability of this shift.

What compensated for a missing indigenous civil society were foreign pressures. The Meiji oligarchs accepted constraints on their powers not because there was a powerful domestic mobilization of citizens demanding their rights, but rather because they wanted the Western powers to accord them equal status. The 1947 constitution was even more directly imposed on the country. The only reason that it has remained legitimate and stable for almost seventy years is Japan's position in the international system. Through Article 9 and the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Japan has in effect outsourced an important element of its security, the capacity for self-defense, to the United States. Only as long as the U.S. commitment to defend Japan remains credible in the face of threats from countries like North Korea and China will the 1947 constitution remain viable. (Germany, the other defeated power from World War II, did much the same thing, outsourcing its sovereignty to NATO and the European Union.) The strongly nationalist prime minister Shinz
ō
Abe who returned to power in 2012 has stated his intention to seek revision of Article 9, and return Japan to the status of a more normal sovereign country. If this happens, many of the features of the postwar settlement may change as well.

Japan set a further precedent to be followed by other Asian countries, which lay in the moral qualities of its authoritarian rulers. These qualities were rooted, in turn, in Japan's Confucian heritage. In the words of George Akita, the Meiji leaders

believed first of all in a benevolent elitism which stemmed from the acceptance of a natural hierarchy based on ability … Like good Confucians, the Meiji leaders were fully aware that only a thin line divided enlightened from despotic elites … If the sovereign and the governed were expected to exert efforts for the common good, the implication is that the masses could be educated and trained to rise up to the point where they could meaningfully participate in the government.
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The Meiji oligarchs, as well as the senior bureaucrats like Kishi Nobusuke who led Japan in the 1950s, or Sahashi Shigeru who directed MITI during its postwar heyday, were arrogant, disdained the rights of ordinary citizens, and hungered for power. But compared to authoritarian leaders in other parts of the world, they had a keen sense of themselves as servants of a higher public interest. The Meiji oligarchs were so self-effacing that hardly anyone today who is not a careful student of Japanese history even knows their names. They were also extremely competent in building on tradition while simultaneously moving the country forward toward development goals for which there was no historical precedent.

This Confucian tradition originates of course in China, to which we turn next.

 

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THE STRUGGLE FOR LAW IN CHINA

How the state preceded law in China; rule by law in dynastic China; the beginnings of constitutionalism in modern China; Mao and the absence of law; rebuilding rule-based behavior in contemporary China

Japanese institutions ultimately came from China. In China, a centralized state with many of the characteristics that Weber identified as modern existed already at the time of the Qin Dynasty in 221
B.C.
and was consolidated during the Former Han Dynasty (206
B.C.–A.D.
9). China built a centralized, merit-based bureaucracy that was able to register its population, levy uniform taxes, control the military, and regulate society some eighteen hundred years before a similar state was to emerge in Europe.
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This precociously modern state was then able to forestall the emergence of powerful social actors that could challenge its predominance. In Europe, an entrenched blood nobility, independent commercial cities, and religious organizations from the Catholic church to various Protestant sects all had independent bases of power and could limit the power of states. In China, these groups had their counterparts, but they were initially weaker, and the strong state acted to keep them that way. Thus there was a Chinese aristocracy, but it did not exercise territorial sovereignty to the extent of its European counterpart; religions like Buddhism and Daoism were kept under strict control; and cities resembled the administrative centers of Europe east of the Elbe rather than the self-governing independent metropolises of Western Europe. Critically, power was dispersed in Europe at an international level to a far greater degree than in China, due as noted earlier to the region's different geography. This meant that any European state that tried to concentrate power and build an empire would face immediate resistance from its neighbors. These neighbors could fight aggression militarily at a state level and were more than happy to support internal opponents of the imperial power. European state consolidation by the mid-twentieth century reached a level that China experienced midway through the Warring States period (475–221
B.C.
), when the total number of large states was reduced to half a dozen or so. Perhaps the European Union will one day complete the process of unification that China achieved at the beginning of the Qin Dynasty, but the fact that it has not happened yet suggests how different the state-society balance has been in Europe than in China.

The China that the European colonial powers encountered was ruled by the Qing (1644–1911), a foreign dynasty from Manchuria, late in its dynastic cycle. The first Qing emperor, Shunzhi, had simply taken over Ming institutions and used Ming personnel to run the existing administrative apparatus.
2
In those years, the agrarian economy of China was not terribly different from what it was during the Han Dynasty some sixteen hundred years earlier. But all of this changed dramatically beginning in the seventeenth century, as a much more extensive commercial economy started to take off. Like Europe and the Ottoman Empire, China experienced both price inflation and a rapidly growing population from the seventeenth century on.
3
British, Portuguese, and Dutch traders began showing up in southern Chinese ports, tying China to a broader system of global trade. A much larger and more independent commercial class emerged. Rather than being completely dependent on the government for their well-being, China's merchants became a source of capital and were thus modestly able to increase their autonomy vis-à-vis the government. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a small middle class began to appear in Chinese cities, from which many of the leaders of the 1912 Chinese revolution that ended dynastic China would be drawn.

Historian Kenneth Pomeranz argues that Europe had no significant technological or institutional advantages over China in the middle of the eighteenth century. In his view, Britain's subsequent takeoff during the Industrial Revolution was largely the accidental by-product of its access to abundant coal and foreign supplies of raw materials like cotton.
4
The Industrial Revolution, however, was the result not only of the availability of certain resource inputs but also of the integration of several critical subsystems: a scientific system that could induce general theories from observed facts; a technological system that allowed this knowledge to be applied to the solution of practical tasks; a property rights system that created incentives for technological innovation; a certain degree of cultural curiosity about the outside world; an educational system that increasingly focused on training students in scientific and technical fields; and finally, a political system that allowed and indeed encouraged all of these things to happen at the same time. China may have had several of these pieces in place; what it lacked might be called the “systems integration” capacity that could pull all of them together at the same time. This systems integration function ultimately needs to be provided by the political regime. As Japan would shortly demonstrate, and as contemporary China now proves, there are no deep cultural reasons why Asian societies are incapable of such integration. But this did not happen in the rigid and conservative China of the nineteenth century.
5

The late Qing Dynasty could draw on a two-millennium-long tradition of stateness that allowed it to avoid total colonization in the manner of Africa. But by the nineteenth century it was deeply mired in ritual practices and rigidities that prevented it from adapting to the competitive pressures brought to bear by the European powers. China's “century of humiliation” began in 1839 when the Qing government tried to ban imports of opium and were forced by the British to open their ports during the First Opium War. The Treaty of Nanking in 1843 ceded Hong Kong to Britain, gave extraterritorial rights to foreign nationals, and paved the way for further concessions to France, the United States, and other Western powers. A protonationalist Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century sought to expel foreign influence, but it was defeated by the Western powers and led to the imposition of a huge indemnity on China. Japan defeated China in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, which led to the loss of Taiwan, and of Korea as a vassal state. China itself was progressively occupied by Japan during the 1930s.
6

The experience of chaos and backwardness in early twentieth-century China convinced many Westerners that Chinese society had always been shambolic and impoverished. But they were encountering a foreign and declining political order that did not reflect the strength of past regimes. The rise of China in the second half of the twentieth century better demonstrates what a young and vigorous dynasty is capable of. Throughout this entire turbulent period, neither the Chinese government nor the Chinese tradition of centralized rule had disappeared. Despite the huge disruptions of the early twentieth century, there are large continuities between dynastic China and the polity presided over by today's Chinese Communist Party.

Then, as now, the central problem of Chinese politics has not been how to concentrate and deploy state power but rather how to constrain it through law and democratic accountability. The task of balancing state, law, and accountability that was completed in Japan by the late 1940s has been only partially accomplished in China. Under Mao Zedong, law virtually disappeared and the country became an arbitrary despotism. Since the reforms that began under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has been moving slowly toward a political system that is more rule based. But the rule of law is still far from secured, and the regime's sustainability will depend heavily on whether this becomes the main line of political development in the twenty-first century.

THE NATURE OF CHINESE LAW

China represents the one world civilization that never developed a true rule of law. In ancient Israel, the Christian West, the Muslim world, and India, law originated in a transcendental religion and was interpreted and implemented by a hierarchy of religious scholars and jurists. The keepers of the law in each case were a social group separate from the political authorities—Jewish judges, Hindu Brahmins, Catholic priests and bishops, the Muslim ulama. The degree to which law limited the arbitrary power of rulers depended on the institutional separation of the legal-religious hierarchy from the political one, as well as the degree to which one or the other group was united or divided. This separation was the most dramatic in Western Europe, where the investiture conflict of the late eleventh century resulted in the Catholic church's ability to appoint its own priests and bishops. In stark contrast to China, the rule of law was established well before the creation of modern states, and law put limits on state building that did not exist in China.

In China, by contrast, there was never a transcendental religion, and there was never a pretense that law had a divine origin. Law was seen as a rational human instrument by which the state exercised its authority and maintained public order. This meant that, as in Japan, China had rule by law rather than rule of law. The law did not limit or bind the sovereign himself, who was the ultimate source of law. While the law could be administered impartially, this was not due to any inherent rights possessed by citizens. Rights were rather the gift of a benevolent ruler. Impartiality was simply a condition for good public order. It was for this reason that property rights and private law—contracts, torts, and other issues arising between individuals and not involving the state—were given very little emphasis. This stood in sharp contrast to both the Common Law and the Roman Civil Law traditions in the West.
7

There was in fact an active hostility to the very idea of law embedded in traditional Chinese culture. The Confucians believed that human life should be regulated not by formal, written laws, but by morality. This revolved around the cultivation of
li
, or correct moral conduct, through education and correct upbringing. The Confucians argued that reliance on written law, or
fa
, was detrimental because formal rules were too broad and general to produce good outcomes in specific cases. Confucian ethics is highly situational or context dependent: the right outcome depends heavily on the relationship and status of the parties involved, the specific facts of the case, and conditions that cannot be known or specified in advance. Good outcomes are produced not by the impersonal application of rules but by a sage or superior man who can weigh local context. Having a good emperor at the top of the system is a condition for its proper functioning.
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