A Chinese poet who lived through the Cultural Revolution once told me that when he was a boy in China, no one ever talked about Communism because “that was where we were, that was the air we breathed.”
I often recalled this evocative sentence as I read Professor Ronald C. Keith's sure-footed, nuanced, but somewhat defensive analysis of what he calls “China's adaptation to the modern world.” As a biographer of Zhou Enlai and an expert on Chinese foreign relations especially since the Bandung Conference in 1955 (which he calls a “defeat for the United States”), Keith is well equipped to accomplish the tall order he has set for himself, which might crudely be called explaining the Chinese experience and an evolving Chinese point of view—Chinese exceptionalism, in other words—to general readers in the West.
The first two chapters deftly place the People's Republic of China (PRC) in historical perspective. They stress the importance and sincerity of Zhou's Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, which still serve as the official basis for Chinese foreign policy. To buttress his argument, Keith finds elements of patience, modesty, and pragmatism in Mao Zedong Thought that many observers seem to have missed, and he urges us to respect what he sees as the essential peacefulness of China's official point of view.
Chapter 3 deals with issues of the rule of law, human rights, and democracy, concepts put between quotation marks in the title of the chapter. “Rule of law” (fazhi) only entered the PRC constitution in 1989. Similarly, “human rights” (renquan) as opposed to citizens' rights (gongmin quan) and “democracy” (minzhuzhuyi) are also recent arrivals in the thought world of Chinese officialdom. Keith reviews the actions that Chinese officials have taken to tame, channel, and accommodate these unruly, open-ended concepts. In doing so, he admits that China from a Western point of view is profoundly undemocratic, and he uses Confucian concepts of embedded inequality and the acceptance of moral guidance from “superiors” to defend the top-down character of governance. In these pages, we are almost, but not quite, taken into the intractable world of “Asian values.”
Governance in China, Keith tells us, is in any case a work in progress, and one role of the PRC constitution—which might strike some people as peculiar—is “to set out the latest Party thinking on where China is and where it is going.” Later in the book, he aptly describes the Chinese Communist Party as “a mentoring custodial elite that knows better than the masses” as far as national policies and changes of direction are concerned.
Chapter 4 is essentially a panegyric to Deng Xiaoping and the visionary policies that he introduced after 1978 to make China less contentious and more prosperous and to bring it (back?) into a wider world. Keith sees these policies, as Deng often did, as continuations of the better aspects of Mao Zedong Thought, such as “seeking truth from facts” and productive contradictions. China's leaders since Deng have been less inspired and less inspiring, but they have continued and amplified the policies that he laid down.
Writing “from the inside out,” Keith insists that the problems facing China—never dealt with in much detail—cannot be solved by outsiders and that socialist ideology of a sort still underpins Chinese governance, even as party spokesman talk elusively of keeping the country indefinitely in the “primary stage of socialism”—a phrase that seems immune from definition.
The fifth chapter of the book deals with Keith's specialty, the ideological framework of the PRC's foreign relations. He stresses continuities rather than rupture while admitting that the concept of China as a tribute-inducing “middle kingdom” no longer makes much sense. He cites Zhou's idea of “seeking common ground while reserving differences” (qiu tong cunyi) as a persistent theme of Chinese foreign policy. Regrettably, the level of generalization that he prefers keeps him and his readers from such reality checks as the issue of Tibet, the Sino-Soviet split, China's bellicose involvement in all three Indo-China wars, or its perduring support for the Khmer Rouge. None of these is mentioned in the book.
Keith closes with a rousing, closely argued chapter called “China Redux?” in which a well-grounded sense of Chinese history matches his generalized optimism about the future. He points approvingly to China's “learning dialectic,” which he suggests strikes a happy balance between locally generated and imported ideas, and has allowed China to accommodate itself, perhaps unexpectedly, with the outside world.
I came away from China from the Inside Out impressed by the range and accessibility of Professor Keith's argumentation but eager for more case studies to buttress his generalizations, and for a few unofficial Chinese voices, or exceptions to the rule, that might have made some of his arguments more shaded and thereby more persuasive.
