My China Trip Experience
On my way returning from Thailand to Nanchang my home town on December 19, 2019, the Thai Lion airlines flight attendants had to repeatedly tell the full cabin of all Chinese passengers to sit down when the seat belt sign was on, to not switch seats from the one on the boarding pass, and to pay extra for sitting to the premium section and to remain silent when there were public announcements.
Many of the Chinese passengers really deserve little respect from others because they have shown very little respect to rules and to the needs of others. But guess what, this is the kind the people that make the party-state strong and powerful, and together they may just succeed in achieving the nation’s number one goal of becoming the largest economy in the world, overtaking the US. I will briefly explain below how the two seemingly unrelated things are connected and how one leads to another.
How Low Self-Discipline Helps the Party-State
The party State can take advantage of little disciplined citizens. When the citizens are each weakly disciplined, each of them wants some powerful agent to discipline the others but not him- or herself, because each of them will be otherwise bothered by the equally non-disciplined, non-considerate and non-respectable others. Each would suffer if nobody is willing to come out to train and to tame those ill-disciplined “others”. The qualified agent(s) must meet at least two conditions. First, they better have the power or capabilities to get the job done. Secondly, they also should have the authority, or at a position to wield coercive forces in cases of disobedience. These leave only two groups of people pre-qualified: Parents and government. In all truly democratic countries, the job is left to parents, which are the most natural and most efficient choice (because parents can do it at early ages, when the recipients are most vulnerable to external influences). Unfortunately, Chinese parents care too much about the future material well-being of their juniors, and the good grades from the school. They do their best to monitor school works —- at the cost of almost everything else, including discipline for proper public conducts and generally accepted ethics and values. Governments then pick up from parents as the “Substitute teachers”.
The point is this: It is the low self-disciplined citizens who collectively create a huge demand for government supervision and discipline. This differs significantly from when the supervision is imposed from top down, by some dictators, for example. Other things equal, the bottom-up, endogenous demand last longer and is far more stable than the top-down imposition.
I say this with my personal knowledge of some real life case that I heard during my most recent trip to China, to take care of my ailing father who is currently 95 year old. China has been criticized by the west to have installed numerous surveillance cameras in public places to monitor its citizens. There is another way to look at those cameras. Instead of monitoring innocent citizens, they have been used to catch the ill-disciplined or dishonest persons. Here is one for real: Someone I met during my last China trip was riding an e-bike and someone else on a similar e-bike was going the opposite direction — on a one-way street, with fairly high speed. As a result, the innocent bike rider I know was hit by the illegitimate rider, but the guy fled the scene without even saying sorry. Now, I don’t know any nation-wide statistics to tell us how many people would do that in China versus in the United States, but here is the perception that I heard first-hand from the victim herself in this incidence: “Most people would flee in situations like mines!” It does not really matter whether her personal perception of the behavior of the average e-bike riders is accurate or not. What does matter is that there is little trust of others like I have encountered in the United States. If citizens do not trust their fellow citizens, they turn to governments for filling the void of public trust. This is the base of government power that we typically do not see in any society where parents are doing the child disciplines themselves.
The government therefore means something quite different there. It acts as the home-based teachers, nannies, care-givers and supervisors all in one. Anyone who can read (simplified) Chinese can be the witness of how the government is everywhere in public life. People outside China only assume that the party state do much propaganda to promote the party line of ruling. But no, the reality is that the party exists mostly as a social manager or supervisor, because there are police to keep pedestrians moving on the sidewalk rather than in the lanes designed for bikes, mopeds, and e-bikes. They are there to take monitoring or surveillance pictures in case there are traffic disputes. Believe me, there are indeed many traffic related disputes, even though China has fewer cars per 1,000 people than the US. They are also there to do something that you hardly ever see in the States: banners and electric displays carrying party slogans. The hottest one nowadays is “Remain true to our original aspiration and keep our mission firmly in mind.” These words are directly from the keynote speech of the party Secretary General Xi Jinping delivered at the 19th Party Congress. Hardly anywhere else in the world would we expect them to become the household words, but that is exactly what these slogans are in China. As such it is typical to find them in almost all public places, such as street corners, store fronts, buses, billboards and most typically, the LED rolling screens. Because Chinese is a character-based language, it allows more information in a relatively small space. Therefore, it is common to see displays like: “Remain true to our original aspiration; no J-walking!” or this: “Keep our mission firmly in mind; No smoking!” or this: “Remain true to our original aspiration; 40% discount today in this store!”
How China May Achieve Its Goal
Does the party State have the right to boast the system to be superior to the system of Western democracy? The answer is partly or conditionally yes. The system or the political ecosystem can be powerful if it selectively leverage the high (no, really the highest in the world, among all civilizations yesterday and today) motivation for materialistic security of the future generations, and work on the highly tangible aspects of growth and development of the nation. However, it can’t compete with the democracy on an even playing field, or on any even slightly diversified goals. The firmly rooted determination for material gains among the Chinese provides a strong defense line against US influence. This is in fact the only reliable defense line. Other countries or cultures all are vulnerable because they don’t have such a strong preference. Such a strong preference simplifies governance of society, and enables the country to maintain a track of development qualitatively different from the US. It features a top — or even an exclusive — priority of prosperity, especially the tangible and quantifiable aspects of growth. It promotes a model of “small citizens” and “big state”, which is the opposite of the “small government” and “big citizens” model of the US system. It also leverages parents’ cut-throat competition in raising successful child(ren) to ensure workers of top work ethics.
How US Helps China Silently
From the world outside, the state relies silently but heavily on watching what the US does and says to help themselves change their courses of action. It is not exaggeration to say that the US has been and will continuously be their biggest mentor. The party state copies and paste many government agencies from the US, often with exactly the same names/titles, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But the learning is far deeper and broader than just copying the names. In a way the entire operation of the Chinese system depends on the US. US provides the incentive — a target to catch up and an enemy to defeat — for China to keep move up the value added ladder; US provides free mentoring services — both positive lessons and negative examples — for China to correct its course to avoid fatal mistakes; and US provides the ultimate beacon for the future China to catch. Even for party disciplines US helps, because everyone knows no matter how much within-party discipline President Xi puts in action, the government will not be as effective as the US government. This is a perfect example how two ecosystems are both enemies and friends, and how they influence each other silently but continuously.
The problem is that the defense is not permanent because as economy grows people all want to diverse desires. The only way is for people to have long last desires that cut across generations.
That is, to introduce the same political ecosystem as the West would entail immediate chaos among the current generation.
China history has full cycles of chaos and tightened orders, all depending on which side, the state or the civilians, has more power. Economic progresses and prosperity were only possible when a strong state gained an upper hand over the civilians, but chaos prevailed when the state was weak. On the other hand, the west also has low possibility of introduction of the same ecosystem as China does.