Tuesday 23 August 2016

Reflections on the Middle Kingdom


The author somewhere in western China. 

The contemporary People’s Republic of China is a far cry from earlier versions of the same entity under the dismal shadow of the Maoists. It remains a single party state, of course, and the said party is officially called the Communist Party, but as one gentleman, a German who has been living in Luoyang for many years, explained to the present writer over dinner one night, “there are no communists left in the communist party.” Instead, the Middle Kingdom has reverted to age-old patterns of rulership and the Party’s authority rests more upon a general perception of the “Mandate of Heaven” than upon credentials conferred by the historic class-struggle of the masses. All the same, there is no escaping the fact that the good people of China have, over the last few generations, been through a Marxist hell and signs of it are everywhere if one cares to see them. 

This is a place where all religion was officially banned, where the institution of the family was crushed under the One Child Policy and under collectivist fantasies, and where the Cultural Revolution attempted to forcibly eradicate 4000 years of tradition - one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. The Cultural Revolution, in particular, has left the Middle Kingdom impoverished at various levels. The Chinese boast of their modernization, but it is especially shallow and uncreative for all of that. China is a casebook study of a society in which there is no longer, or not obviously, a deep well of tradition from which to draw, but also of the fact that tradition is, finally, irrepressible: the patterns of the past remain as strong as ever somewhere below the surface. 

In Xi’an, at the end of the silk road, where the author sojourned, the entrance to the ‘Revolutionary Park’ in the city centre is now adorned with a larger than lifesize statue of Donald Duck. Most of the old city has been bulldozed and replaced with row after row of ugly, functional apartment blocks – that hallmark of Marxist social engineering. Yet, within the city’s historic Mahometan quarter, and elsewhere, life continues on much as it always has and there is a strong sense that nothing substantial has changed, really, in hundreds of years. 

For their part, the Chinese people prefer to forget about the Maoist nightmare. Chairman Mao is acknowledged by lip-service as the founder of modern China or, more significantly, is adopted into the pantheon of Taoist deities as the man who defined the notion of the “people”. Slowly but surely the wounds inflicted by the Marxists are healing and the Middle Kingdom reverts back to something like its old self, albeit transformed by modernity, or the sino- version of it. There are many paths to modernity. China chose a particularly nasty one. The Party justifies it by the manifest evidence of contemporary prosperity and the growth of the middle class. But this is a lie. The miracle of the Taiwan economy is there to show that the transition to modernization did not require such appalling violence. Similarly, the fact of Hong Kong, and Singapore, exposes the lie that it was the “colonial running dogs” who had held the Chinese back and that “thought reform” and “class struggle” and “reindoctrination” were the only path forward. The real success of modern China is purely a function of the size of its market, not the wisdom of the Party elders or the historical mandate of Marxist ideology. Indeed, the emergence of a prosperous market-driven China owes virtually nothing to Maoism. On the contrary, Maoism retarded the country for long dark decades and it was only when the Marxists all retired to their miserable godless graves that the place was able to begin to fulfill its modern destiny. 

The wonder of it is that the Chinese people are not outraged by the cost they have paid. When one stands under the ludicrous grin of Donald Duck at the entrance to ‘Revolutionary Park’ one wants to ask: so this is what all the suffering of the Great Leap Forward was leaping forward to?!! The Party seems intent upon the Disneyification of China now. The country is certainly well-managed, but it is rather like the management of a well-run amusement park.

The real essence of the Chinese tradition is a quandary to the Chinese themselves. What has become if it? There is an air of amnesia across the land. An example of this is the food. During Maoist times family traditions were so disrupted that the age-old heritage of traditional recipes and family culinary secrets were fundamentally disturbed. For those dreary decades the whole country – clad in their silly Mao suits – was nurtured on Party canteen food. The Maoists, of course, were peasant farmers who loathed peasant farming. It is estimated that some 30 million or more Chinese died of starvation under the wise guidance of the Great Helmsman. There is no gainsaying it: Mao really was one of the great lunatics of all time. The extraordinary thing is that the army allowed him to inflict the damage he did. What remains now is a much diminished cuisine. In truth, real Chinese food can more readily be found in the Chinese diaspora than in the homeland. The present author knows this as a fact. As previous posts to these pages relate, he spent months exploring the communities of the Malacca Straits Chinese, especially in Phuket and the Prince of Wales Island. One finds a rich Chinese culinary heritage there, unbroken and proud. Food in China, whether in the western outposts of Xi’an and Luoyang, or the modern metropolis of Shanghai, is a tale of disappointment, by and large. These days chefs from China travel to centres of the diaspora to relearn Chinese cooking. If this is what has become of the kitchen, one can imagine what impact the mad hand of Maoism has had in other areas of life. 

The spiritual vacuum is most noticeable. The lineages of Taoism were stopped in 1951 but resumed again in 1987. This represents the hiatus that befell China in all walks. In much of China the sacred places of Taoism are now Disney-style theme park exhibitions where the Party has erected signs – belatedly – commanding that abstract entity “The People” to “Respect Our Heritage!” Traditional Taoist medicine and other traditional sciences are now being reconstructed according to Party requirements. Again, if one wants the real thing rather than the Party reconstruction one needs to go to Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore, or George Town, or even San Francisco.

Similarly, the great guiding wisdom of Confucius still exists as a bedrock of Chinese social customs, but Mao had a particular disregard for the Confucians and tried to wipe their influence from Chinese society altogether. Taoism and Confucianism are a matching set, a heaven-ordained synergy that, together with Chan Buddhism, form a complex that is the spiritual core of the Chinese tradition. (Perhaps more on this in a later post.) Today, Confucius has been rehabilitated as a great pioneering “educator” in the Party’s official secular history but his true place in Chinese ideas is largely unrecognized. There are signs of renewal though. There is a ‘New Confucianism’ movement and the contemporary scholar Jiang Qing (ironically the same name as Mao's wife!) has bravely proposed a political Confucianism to replace the withering experiment of Marxism. He believes – a view with which this present author is in sympathy – that Confucianism represents the best and purest and most authentic genius of China and that many of the Middle Kingdom’s social and political difficulties in these present and coming times would be best addressed by a new embrace of the Confucian tradition. The present author was privileged to visit several of the great extant Confucian temple complexes during his recent travels. The temple in Soochow was especially impressive. Such once-sacred places are now essentially schools and universities but it was noticeable that many Chinese visitors greeted the temples with solemn reverence and there is at least a functioning priesthood again. 




The Confucian temple in Soochow

All the same, the symptoms of secularization of the tradition are evident everywhere, not least in the quite remarkable spread of evangelical Christianity in China. How can the spread of Christianity be a symptom of seculaerization? Chinese Leftism, like Leftism everywhere, is essentially a species of self-harm. The thing that motivates a Leftist above all else is self hatred - usually dressed up as a concern for 'justice' for others. It is always a self/other pathology. In China, it was the Chinese tradition that the Maoists hated first and foremost. And it remains expressions of the Chinese tradition – let us note the conspicuous example of Falun Gong – that the Party continues to persecute first and foremost. Into the vacuum thus created moves exotic ideologies and especially, these days, Christianity. These are boom times for Christian missionaries in China, although one needs to note that – remarkably – Christianity grew and advanced during the Cultural Revolution too. Again, that “revolution” took aim at China’s own traditions – it was an extended exercise in self-harm - and in doing so it created the space for external ideologies to fill the void, rhetoric about “colonialism” notwithstanding. 

For the present writer this fact is a salient lesson. In the contemporary West, Leftists – “cultural Marxists" who are conducting their own “cultural revolution" through the sophisticated tactics of “soft totalitarianism” – are first and foremost out to do as much harm to the Judeo-Christian tradition as possible. They are perfectly happy to have Mahometanism and Lamaism and other exotic creeds infiltrate the occidental spiritual arena purely because it advances the vandalism of their agenda. (How else is one to explain 'Feminists for the Burqa' or 'Gays for Shariah'?) This is what occurred in China, mutates mutandis. Why, one must ask, did the Party, does the Party, so tolerate Christianity yet crushes a movement like Falun Gong? The answer to this question reveals much about the real nature of Leftism everywhere. 

Throughout his travels across China the present author encountered converts to Christianity at every turn. Islam too is advancing, or at least holding its own. Maoism deliberately damaged the native traditions of China. The Party remains watchful lest unwholesome vestiges of that tradition arise again. The sublime play that is religion has been replaced for most of the population with the inane trinkets of Disney consumerism. But there is – this writer can report – thirst in the ground. Sadly, the Chinese are turning to Protestant forms of the Christian religion as a cure. It is estimated that in a few decades time, at the current rate, China will boast one of the biggest Christian populations in the world. Sadly, because it is actually a side-effect of the Marxist vandalism of the Chinese tradition, undertaken in the demonstrably false belief that it was a necessary step on the path to modernity. It is just as sad – in the same manner - that people in the West are turning to Boodhism and Kung Foo because their own heritage has been systematically and tirelessly sullied by the vicious social engineers who now rule over the institutions of cultural production. This writer’s travels and experiences in China have served to underline this for him and to bring such politico-cultural issues to some new clarity.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black