The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (37 page)

Post created in 1961 to relieve some of the increasing workload on the
chancellor of the exchequer
. The chief secretary monitors each department's spending plans, and helps set departmental budgets for the annual spending round.

 
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A procedural device by which a British Member of Parliament resigns. A member of the Commons is not allowed to occupy a position of profit under the crown, and by accepting one, such as the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, the MP is deemed to have resigned.

 
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Chinese classical thought was directed primarily to politics in the wider sense, yet China produced little or no systematic political philosophy. The Chinese cities of the Warring States period (481–221BC) were not, like Athens, the home of maritime traders with wide experience of other cultures, but centres of Chinese acculturation of the surrounding areas. China did not experience Christendom's struggle between Church and State, nor the enforced religious pluralism which succeeded the European Wars of Religion. Feudalism, which in Europe provided the basis for constitutionalism, disappeared from China with the war chariot; indeed it was the collapse of feudalism which created the problems with which China's ancient thinkers were preoccupied. Finally, the emphasis on finding new means of maintaining social harmony led them to think less in terms of abstract principles and more in terms of the processes of socialization. As a result, China produced a political culture rather than a political philosophy.
Confucius (551–479BC) set the agenda. The debate produced three main schools of thought. On the one hand, the Legalists, often servants of the new bureaucracies being developed by the competing states, asserted that human nature was incorrigibly selfish and society could be sustained only by strict laws ruthlessly enforced. On the other hand, the Taoists insisted that human beings were naturally sociable and it was only bad and excessive government which perverted them. Mencius (d. 289 BC) developed the ideas of Confucius to form a middle position. Human nature is perfectible. Altruism is instinctive: ‘when a child falls down a well you do not ask whose child it is before you pull it out.’ However, the good instincts must be nurtured by education and the force of example; man must be socialized.
The socialization process takes place in the family. It is here that mutual trust and mutual obligation, rational obedience, and readiness to help others are developed. The regulation of the family is the basis of social harmony. Regulation is through a hierarchy by generation, age, and sex, headed by the paterfamilias. The greatest virtue is filial piety, which covers all the family relationships involved (an opinion poll in 1982 suggested that this is still believed by a majority of Chinese). Rights and obligations are those of seniors and juniors.
Society is the family writ large, with similar hierarchical relationships. Confucius and Mencius, inheritors of a feudal past, could not but see society in hierarchical terms. Confucius indeed retained the word
junzi
, prince, for his ideal man, but he was now distinguished not by the horned helmet which the character
jun
originally represented, but by his intellect and his moral integrity. Possibly the theory expresses an acceptance of the new bureaucratic form of government, combined with an attempt to transform the new officials into guardians of society's moral norms, ready to serve the ruler loyally but equally ready to oppose him, to the point of martyrdom if necessary, if his conduct proves unworthy. In his ‘rectification of names’ (criticism of inappropriate use of words), Confucius made it clear that a tyrant should not be called a king, and Mencius justified the assassination of a certain tyrant called Zhou, saying: ‘I have heard that an outcast called Zhou was punished; I did not hear that a king was murdered.’
The first ruler of the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) made Confucianism the ideology of the state, but its victory was somewhat hollow; the emperors, from claiming to be the supreme patrons of the sage, soon claimed to be themselves the supreme sages.
Zhu Xi (1130–1200) attempted to give Confucianism a metaphysical basis to help it to complete with Buddhism and at the same time to reassert its credentials as a means to control erring emperors. Every phenomenon, argued Zhu Xi , is an imperfect expression of its own eternal principle. Good government also expresses such principles. The emperors, however, were quick to make themselves the supreme interpreters of principle. Zhu Xi's philosophy, thus captured by the throne, remained the official orthodoxy until modern times.
Wang Yangming (1472–1529), in opposition to this orthodox view, asserted that principles were merely generalizations from human observation. Moral principles were created by the response of an active conscience to individual experience. He developed the Zen idea that if, through meditation (which to Wang meant essentially introspection), a man can clear his mind of the prejudice, fear, and self-interest which cloud his moral judgement, he will be able to act with the speed and strength of the tiger. Wang also argued that knowledge was incomplete until applied in action.
In the late seventeenth century three scholars who had retired from affairs after participating in the popular but unsuccessful guerrilla defence of central China against the Manchu conquest of 1644, sought to explain why the Ming dynasty had collapsed. Gu Yanwu (1613–82) argued that China was at her weakest when the central government was strongest, and at her strongest when her local communities were strong. Huang Zongxi (1610–95) reasserted the belief that the true guardians of morality were the Confucian gentry, and advocated that the emperors should have to choose their councillors from the independent Confucian academies. Wang Fuzhi (1619–92) demystified the ancient idea of the Mandate of Heaven, by which successful revolt against a failing dynasty was justified after the event and the new dynasty said to have received the Mandate. He argued that the struggle for the throne was usually a struggle among rogues, but that the rogue who won was obliged to rise to the responsibilities of empire if he hoped to keep the throne. He thus secularized China's moral legitimation of government. All three in different ways were offering the primacy of civil society.
Meanwhile, the Manchu censorship had proved in one way counter-productive. It forced scholars back to apparently harmless textual criticism, which, however, ended by proving certain key classical texts to have been late forgeries.
When defeat and disorder forced China into the need for a profound revaluation the means were to hand, though hitherto buried under enforced orthodoxy. When Western political ideas entered China, Chinese thought provided precedents that assisted their acceptance.
The political culture was, in the same way, full of alternative possibilities. First, although the theory of government was autocratic and totalitarian, in practice Chinese communities largely governed themselves and the emperor's official representative made the best bargain he could with them; he was more of a British District Officer than a French prefect. Second, while official Chinese society was elaborately hierarchical, informal egalitarian associations flourished. Third, while the normal way to deal with potential conflict was to suppress it, there was a strong belief in the virtues of moderation and a widespread belief that the best solution to many problems was a bargain which gave something to both sides. Fourth, in spite of the attempted atomization of Chinese society and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of special interests, voluntary associations flourished in China on a scale more characteristic of a modern democracy than of an ancient monarchy. Thus the political culture offered some, at least, of the means of creating a pluralist system.
On the other hand, it offered certain stubborn obstacles to democratization. Patron-client relationships prevented impartial administration. The stress on harmony led to fear of conflict—even of the legitimized controlled conflict which is the content of democracy.
From China's defeat in the First Anglo-Chinese War (1837–43) onwards, China faced an increasing threat which required an increasingly drastic response. From 1880 to 1895 reform was in the hands of established officials, who were willing to do no more than attempt to strengthen the Confucian empire by acquiring Western arms. Defeat of China's new modern army and navy by Japan put paid to that. In 1898, under the patronage of the young Emperor, a group of young graduates attempted to establish a constitutional monarchy, modernize education, and provide a less hostile milieu for commerce and industry. After one hundred days they were overthrown by the old Empress Dowager. Many Chinese, notably those with family connections among Chinese emigrants living in Western societies, then turned to nationalist revolution. In 1912 the Manchu ruling house was forced to abdicate. The result, however, was not the hoped-for democratic republic but the beginning of brutal civil wars among the provincial military commanders, while the new parliament, massively bribed, supported whatever puppet of the ruling warlord faction held power in the capital. In 1919 the willingness of one of this succession of governments to make concessions to Japan at Versailles led to student riots in Beijing (the May Fourth Movement), an event which crystallized the opinions of the new generation, and also brought the urban classes of China into politics in the form of strikes and boycotts, together with a run on the banks. This was the watershed, at which Confucianism was repudiated by almost all of educated China, dethroned to make way for ‘science and democracy’. After the fall in the value of silver in the early 1930s, which reversed a long slow inflation that had increased rural prosperity, millions of distressed peasants were radicalized. It came to be widely accepted that a total restructuring of Chinese society was necessary.
In these circumstances, the writers of the European Enlightenment and their nineteenth-century successors were read in China by people who faced the task of founding a new state, indeed of creating a nation where hitherto there had only been a culture. This culture, however, was too deeply based and rich in alternatives to be swept aside. Western ideas were assimilated in terms of Chinese heresies ignored until then. Western individualism was interpreted in terms of Wang Yangming, and Western ideas of the relation of civil society to the state in terms of the seventeenth-century patriot thinkers. Typical of the new synthetic thought was the philosophy of Yang Changji . After a classical education, he studied in Germany and in Scotland. He accepted, as most of his generation did, the idea that the liberation of the individual was the source of the wealth and strength of modern societies. He then attempted to determine how individuals could be expected to behave in socially responsible ways. He was impressed with the idea that men are motivated by their perception of themselves to which they strive to conform. This chimed with Confucian (and Buddhist) stress on self-cultivation. He also accepted T. H. Green's idea that consciousness of the gap between ideal possibility and ugly reality itself motivates the ‘conscious man’ to moral action, and he related this to Wang Yangming's Zen-derived idea of the uninhibited power of a man to act when his consciousness is cleared of the distractions of self-interest and habit. He accepted, largely out of his commitment to the ideas of the seventeenth-century patriots, the Western assumption that civil society creates the norms and the task of the state is to safeguard them. In sum, ‘conscious men’ would be compelled to throw themselves into the reform of society, and with unimpeded willpower. They would create new norms and society, and the new society would create a new nation and a new state.
Such ideas were addressed to the conscious few. They were not, however, given an élitist interpretation. The revolution would not be from the top. On this, virtually all Chinese radicals agreed. The most eloquent advocate of the duty of the intellectual élite to ‘go down to the countryside’ and induce a new consciousness among the whole mass of the Chinese people was Li Dazhao , later a founder of the Communist Party of China. Many intellectuals accepted his urging, and spent years in the villages pursuing what would now be called ‘participatory research’. Their example was one of the origins of Mao Zedong's theory of the mass line.
Such liberal forms of synthesis between Chinese and Western ideas had little influence among China's political leaders, except for
Mao Zedong
. In his case, however, they were transformed by a communist interpretation.
Socialist ideas began to be widely discussed in China only after the
Russian Revolution
of 1917. They were readily received. The Chinese still entertained the distaste for capitalism general in pre-modern societies, where trade is perceived as the exploitation of scarcities and credit means usury at the expense of the distressed. And in a culture which attached supreme value to social harmony, capitalism was bound to be regarded as divisive and therefore deplorable. No party in China advocated uncontrolled free enterprise. All advocated redistribution of the land, at least a degree of co-operativization of agriculture, and state control of the commanding heights of industry.
Socialism, however, was seen in the accepted terms of revolution from below. Li Dazhao , with twenty of Lenin's titles available to him, showed interest only in
State and Revolution
, in which Lenin committed himself (theoretically) to a communalist view of socialism.
It could be said that Chinese theories of democracy and of socialism paid too little attention to questions of law and institutions, for two reasons, one historical and one contemporary. The first was the traditional distaste for fixed laws, associated with the Legalists. The second was the cynical constitution-mongering of the warlords and the venality of their puppet parliaments. Democracy was seen, for example by Li Dazhao , as ‘a sort of spirit’, not a set of laws and institutions guaranteeing specific rights. This is still the weakness of the Chinese democratic movement: the idea that democracy is a matter of political style. When during the 1978 democratic protest one of the posters on Democracy Wall urged the people to seize power and take democracy as a right, not a privilege, the fellow-democrats of the author (Wei Jingsheng ) gave him no support; he was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
JG