As the People's Republic of China continues to rise on the global stage, its leaders and supporters have become increasingly prone to advocating the idea of a “China model” that links today's political system to long-standing cultural traditions.
In this new book, Fei-ling Wang argues that there is indeed a China model: a lasting tradition of political culture extending from the Qin dynasty to today. Wang's analysis of “the China Order,” however, is unlikely to win him accolades from the People's Daily. Rather than portraying traditions as an answer to today's problems, Wang presents the China Order itself as the problem: admittedly a long-standing tradition of governance, but one that has come at a great cost to its people. Wang's argument will undoubtedly to provoke controversy, and even knee-jerk dismissal from some. Yet, his presentation and documentation of his argument is so thorough and devastatingly masterful that anyone who wants to talk about a “China model” really should be required to read this book.
Wang begins his ambitious re-examination of history from the pre-Qin era. The name “Warring States” certainly sounds disagreeable. Yet Wang argues that the Warring States era in fact constituted the peak of Chinese civilization: political pluralism and intellectual vibrancy combined to produce unparalleled philosophical innovations. And despite its name, Wang argues, the era was no more prone to war or destruction than later eras.
The real warring state, Wang asserts, in fact emerged with the Qin dynasty, engaged in an endless war against its people and the peripheries. Although the Qin is celebrated in official histories as the first great unifier, Wang instead sees its unificationist ideology as the start of a long Dark Age in Chinese civilization. In contrast to the Warring States’ pluralism, the Qin's all-encompassing totalitarian politics left no room for political opposition, philosophical innovation or technological advancement. Dedicated to ruling over tianxia (all under heaven), the order recognized only one “son of heaven” at the centre of civilization itself, producing an endless series of “barbarian” enemies on its peripheries.
In a list reminiscent of warnings at the end of pharmaceutical advertisements in the United States, Wang argues that clinical trials of the China Order tend to produce such side effects as “despotic governance, long stagnation of economy, suffocation of science and technology, retardation of spiritual pursuits, irrational allocation of resources, great depreciation of human dignity and life, low and declining living standards for the masses, and mass death and destruction periodically and frequently” (p. 54). Although this model was re-decorated using Confucian terminology by the Han, there was little change in substance: lofty sounding Confucian rhetoric merely obscured the fact that the order served only its rulers.
From the Qin onward, Wang argues, China's political history is a history of this order collapsing under its own weight, only to be followed by its eternal return. He brings our attention to two exceptions: the Song dynasty and the century of humiliation.
The Chanyuan Treaty of 1005, in which the Song and the Liao recognized one another as coexisting equals, briefly replaced world empire with equal and mutual recognition on a proto-Westphalian model. Wang argues that the acknowledgement that the world could have more than one son of heaven had real implications even for domestic politics in the Song, which were considerably more humane and peaceful than in other dynasties. Yet these real achievements have been renounced in official histories, which bemoan the Song's inability to unify tianxia.
The second exception is what Wang provocatively calls “the century of humiliation and progress” (1842–1949) (p. 135). The often-cited humiliation of this century, he argues, extended only to ruling elites and those indoctrinated by their orthodoxies: interaction with the outside world was characterized not only by the victimization emphasized in today's patriotic education, but also by exciting new political and cultural possibilities. The unraveling of the totalitarian China Order in the late Qing brought a new era of openness, creating a laboratory of constitutionalism in the Republic of China, whose political and cultural openness far exceeds that of the PRC even today. By 1945, China was not humiliated and cowering, awaiting rescue by the Communist Party – it was recognized as a leading world power, with a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Although the People's Republic of China has always been presented as the “new China” making a complete and radical break with the past, Wang argues that the Chinese Communist Party was only ever revolutionary in rhetoric. In reality, the PRC is a great leap backward politically, revitalizing Qin–Han authoritarianism via Marxist–Leninist revolutionary romanticism: replacing the Mandate of Heaven legitimizing universal rule with the Mandate of the People, and resuscitating the self-congratulatory spread of “civilization” via global revolution. The result, Wang argues, was a radically regressive theocracy that ruled through endless campaigns of totalitarian control of all under heaven, pushing the state to the brink of collapse. Acknowledging the traditional roots of this mode of governance, Wang memorably suggests renaming the PRC as the People's Republic of Qin–Han.
Mao's state was eventually rescued by the global system that he had wanted to overthrow. Yet even while integrating with the world in the post-Mao era, the PRC's leaders redirect the benefits of economic growth to support a paranoid domestic state machine and an expansionist “strong military,” so as to again exercise total control over tianxia: the China Dream, in Wang's analysis, will always be statist. With his provocative and innovative arguments, Wang's book will be ideal for upper-level seminars examining the meaning and implications of the China model.
Wang closes The China Order with a comment that, despite its simplicity, makes an essential point about political culture and China today: “The 21st century could be indeed different, after all, from the third century BCE” (p. 218). Whether it will be is, of course, another question entirely.
