China: capitalism, democracy and sovereignty

David Seaton's News Links
China is an authoritarian state, run in Leninist fashion by a communist party and at the same time a vital player, perhaps, alongside the United States, the key player in the international capitalist system.

We wish it were more democratic.

Perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

Many who know China feel that the Chinese Communist Party is a moderating force on Chinese nationalism. That if China had something like a US system, they would be the plaything of fascist demagogues... It seems that reading their blog traffic etc, bears this out.

Let us take then, as given, that across the political spectrum, the Chinese are nationalist-chauvinist-revanchist. Then let us consider the situation they faced when the Soviet Union began to implode and it was no longer possible to play two superpowers off against each other.

China, a poor country, was left standing alone against what is commonly considered the greatest, most powerful, military, economic and cultural hegemon in the history of the world.

To use Maoist terminology the "primary contradiction" of the PCC was to maintain China's sovereignty at all costs: other priorities such as "building socialism" (whatever that might be) would have to be postponed in the greatest national emergency since the Japanese invasion, but facing the USA, open war would be suicidal.

What has happened in the past twenty years?

The best battle, Sun Tzu says, is the battle that is won without being fought.

After only two decades the United States economy and her currency are entirely dependent on China, that is to say, in many ways firmly in the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party. And now it seems entirely possible the Chinese People's Army's cyber-warfare capabilities could paralyze American infrastructure, again without firing a shot.

Let us assume that China's situation is that of a nation at war for its survival as a sovereign state... again, Sun Tzu:

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

People with a deep understanding of China have said that is a very fruitful exercise to study how Taoist thought (Sun Tzu is the greatest "applied" Taoist) found the dialectical thought of Hegel (as against Kant or Plato) the most congenial and useful of western philosophies and that Hegel led them directly to Marx.

If you take Marx as lucid analyst of the weaknesses of the capitalist system, especially the system's bottomless greed, and then knowing those weaknesses you take advantage of them in the manner of Sun Tzu, you might have a workmanlike description of what the Chinese have done.

If this is seen as a war, as a "national liberation struggle", which the Chinese are winning without firing a shot, then the sacrifices of the Chinese people in today's struggle are nothing compared to what they suffered to rid themselves of the Japanese, and instead of the smoking ruins that battle left behind it, today they have high speed trains.

And as for us, who think that by "converting" the Chinese to capitalism, we have won a famous victory. The famous Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, said that there are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

Again, perhaps we should be more careful what we wish for. DS

The swooping flight of the Oozlum

From the singing springs of an unseen bed,
To the silent velvet of an unseen box,
An errant flicker through the summer night:
Glowed, twittered and fed,
Incandescent, fluttering on the wings of a ticking clock.
The Fudd Haiku - Life

David Seaton's News Links
The great house of Dior has literally had to kowtow to China, and Sharon Stone is going to be out a huge amount of money for making her new-age, karma-babble, remarks about a disaster that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Chinese.

Beyond the obvious, callous, stupidity of Ms. Stone's tuppenny-ha’penny, pseudo-Buddhist, blather, there lies an interesting point; an ideological fault line of ours stands exposed.

As part of our post-Cold War heritage, we have made it an article of faith that capitalism and democracy are joined together at the hip, that, in the words of Sammy Cahn, "dad was told by mother, you can't have one without the other", but to the contrary, today we are learning that in the words of Ira Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so".

The Slovenian, philosopher-gadfly, Slavoj Zizek has written a very interesting contrarian article on the Tibetan question published in the International Herald Tribune. Here is a sample:

In recent years, the Chinese changed their strategy in Tibet: De-politicized religion is now tolerated, often even supported. The Chinese rely more on ethnic and economic colonization, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese capitalist Wild West with karaoke bars and Disney-like "Buddhist theme parks" for Western tourists.

What the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorizing the Buddhist monks conceals is a far more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation. In a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the United States.

It seems the Chinese Communists finally learned the lesson: What is the oppressive power of secret police, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments, compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations? The Chinese are doing what the West has always done, as Brazil did in the Amazon or Russia in Siberia, and the United States on its own western frontiers.

This takes us back to the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation

Zizek ends his article with these words:

There is a further paradox: What if the promised democratic second stage that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never comes? This is the most unsettling thing about China. There is the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation, which in Europe went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of the future.

What if the "vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market" proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?

Although practically simultaneous, the "Enlightenment", the Encyclopedia, the Rights of Man and the French Revolution came before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism and although many seem to think so, there is no immovable reason to consider them of one flesh. Perhaps our age will see them all sorted out.

As to the Chinese:

People trained in Marxist-Leninism, the "36 Stratagems" and Sun Tzu as practical methods of operation and not as a way of wowing pretty young students, have no ideological "capital" invested in capitalism per se.

For them it surely nothing but a force, a "terrain of Yang" to be occupied to further their goals. Their main goal, in my opinion, is the full sovereignty of China, something which cannot coexist with American hegemony... I say "hegemony", not with American power or super power, but with American hegemony.

Knowing that capitalism is history's greatest solvent, they are inviting us to dissolve ourselves in our own invention. Sun Tzu, wherever he is, must be glowing in pride. To defeat an opponent without ever coming to battle is the height of his art.

We have confused the freedom to buy things with the freedom to say things and perhaps even to think certain things. If we are not to lose our way, we must face with sober senses, our real conditions of life, and our relations with our kind.

If, in fact, we really see Liberty as the true path to Equality and Fraternity. if we truly believe that every human being has a right to health, education and peace, then, instead of lecturing others on democracy, we had better mind our knitting. DS