‘I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.’ –Confucius
China’s population is larger than those of North America, Europe, Russia and Japan combined, and has no tradition whatsoever of liberal democracy and memories are still fresh of the devastating breakup of the Soviet Union. Going further back, China’s more recent history saw chaos and wars, and on average from 1840 to 1978 a major upheaval every seven or eight years. So the Chinese fear of chaos is based on common sense and its collective memory, with very real fears that the country might well become ungovernable if it were to adopt the adversarial Western political system.
China is in many ways unique. It is an amalgam of the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state. It is a product of hundreds of states amalgamated over its long history into one. A very rough analogy would be something along the lines of the ancient Roman Empire continuing to this day as a unified modern state with a centralised government and modern economy while retaining all its diverse traditions and cultures, and with a huge population still all speaking Latin as their common language. […]
China tried American-style democracy after its 1911 Republic Revolution, and it turned out to be a devastating catastrophe. The country was immediately plunged into chaos and civil war, with hundreds of political parties vying for power and with warlords fighting one another with the support of various foreign powers. The economy was shattered and tens of millions lost their lives in the decades that followed. That lesson remains so sharp that even today ordinary Chinese are most fearful of luan, the Chinese word meaning chaos. Independent opinion surveys on values in China show that public order is generally ranked top, whereas for Americans freedom of speech is the number one value (even though, one may wonder how a politically correct society like the United States can have genuine freedom of speech).
Having myself travelled to over 100 countries, most of them developing ones, I cannot recall a single case of successful modernisation through liberal democracy, and there’s no better example illustrating this than the huge gap between India and China: both countries started at a similar level of development six decades ago, and today China’s GDP is four times greater and life expectancy 10 years longer.
photo { Jordan Fox by Jasper Rischen }
