Patrick Mendis. Harvard International Review. Volume 40, Issue 2, Spring 2019.
In October 2017, the Communist Party of China (CPC) enshrined its constitution with “President Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” at the 19th Party Congress. After abolishing the presidential term limit. President Xi Jinping now leads the nation with Marxist and Confucian ideas for the “Grand Course” of cultural and national revival that will allow China to regain its “rightful place as a global power.”
The stealth strategy is becoming-clear to the self-assured 89-million strong CPC. By having over 370,000 Chinese students in American universities and more than 110 million tourists in every corner of world, including Antarctica, Beijing implements a quiet, but effective policy of cultural imperialism. By 2020, more than 75 percent of China’s urban consumers will earn US$9,000 to US$34,000 a year. China’s middle class is expected to expand from 430 million today to 780 million by the mid-2020s. The growing middle class is generally viewed as a “source of potential instability,” but the CPC has shown “extraordinary resilience” and an “impressive ability to recreate itself’ while searching for a credible alternative to democracy.
In fact, the CPC is repeatedly proving its “resilience.” The culturally confident China is now pursuing its “China Dream” with the Belt and Road Initiative (BR1), while also establishing a Confucian democracy. For Xi, China’s model of a Confucian democracy with the hierarchical power structure of the Communist Party is a far more effective system than America’s liberal, but seemingly chaotic democracy. With his grand plan, the Chinese government has already established 100 Confucius Institutes in American colleges and universities and over 500 Confucius Classrooms in K-12 schools “to enhance its own image” across the United States. In April 2018, the National Association of Scholars reported that China has “shrouded Confucius Institutes in secrecy” as part of Beijing’s “soft power” strategy. Xi’s “New Era” has now signaled a historic landmark in China’s long march for wealth and power. Beijing is, for the first time in history, emerging as a global superpower.
Long before United States President Bill Clinton, American policymakers had a consistent, but mistaken, belief that China would eventually become a liberal democracy, led by the shepherds of Washington.
What went wrong with the American vision of democracy for China?
Without genuinely understanding the collective mindset of the Chinese experience, the continuing worldview of China through the American experience is myopic. And this myopia has misled policymakers and strategists in the United States.
The Past is the Future
With Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, America’s views of China began to evolve with the rise of China’s next paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who began the Chinese experiment with the historic opening-up and trade liberalization policy. Like the American experiment, tested at its founding by Alexander Hamilton, Deng emulated an entrepreneurial Hamiltonian America with a strong manufacturing sector and a centralized government that supported the export-led development while developing a powerful navy to protect its growing trade relations.
To create a new vision of “trade for peace,” the young republic severed its mercantilist trade relations with the former European colonists and dispatched its first trading ship, the Empress of China, from New York Harbor to Canton (now Guangzhou) on President George Washington’s birthday in 1784. The historic event was purpose-driven to win a rightful place for the new nation in international commerce, and it created a mutually-admiring bond between the United States and the Qing Dynasty, which lasted until 1911. This bond, however, would be severed in the geopolitical and domestic conflicts of the twentieth century, and would not be revived until Deng’s arrival.
United States President Ronald Reagan celebrated the second century of Sino-American trade relations in 1984 when he remarked at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing that “personal dinner settings used by our first three Presidents—George Washington. John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—were of Chinese origin, evidence of our Founding Fathers’ attraction for your country.” Reagan also reminded the audience that former United States President Ulysses S. Grant also visited China a little over century ago in 1889, saying, “The population is industrious, frugal, intelligent, and quick to learn.” Reagan then concluded, “America and China are both great nations. And we have a special responsibility to preserve world peace…. The future is ours to build.”
The Rebirth of Trade
China has headed into the twenty-first century in much the same way America was ushered into the nineteenth century: through development and growth. The economic impacts of Deng’s Hamiltonian-like strategies were collectively called “Reform and Opening Up,” and China’s gross domestic product grew more than seven-fold with an average annual growth rate of over 9 percent from 1980 to 2001.
In the intervening years, the Clinton White House expected that China would continue to pursue the American experience and granted the pathway to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO)—a strategic device of the American constitutional framework “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” and to unite the world, which is the final embodiment of the American experience for a global nation as the Founders envisioned.
In “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama declared that the “final form of human government” had arrived and convinced the world that the free-market liberal democracy had won after the collapse of glasnost and perestroika in the former Soviet Union. American policymakers became ever more convinced that the Chinese membership in the WTO was the right strategy to sustain the American-led liberal world order.
This belief is now up for debate, as China is now commanding a greater role with the United Stales as trade and investment regimes have become increasingly complex. Harvard University Professor Graham Allison has concluded that “China has already surpassed the United States on each of 25 indicators of economic performance” except in military expenditure. Reacting to this reality, China-bashing has become the norm in presidential elections. To pander to his electorate, then United States presidential candidate Donald Trump also criticized China. As the president, however, his strategies have left policymakers scratching their heads. On one hand, he has imposed punitive tariffs on US$200 billion dollars of Chinese goods with more tariffs possibly on the way. On the other hand, Trump has agreed to work with Xi by making concessions to safeguard his family business interests in China and elsewhere while congressional leaders have opposed these concessions. The most controversial of these has been the ZTE incident, which has national security and military implications. These and other concerns have further been highlighted by United States Vice President Mike Pence during his remarks at the Hudson Institute in October 2018.
China has a long-term grand vision in mind with Xi’s more assertive “China Dream” plan with benchmarks to “Make China Great Again” after the Century of Humiliation. This is a drastic departure from Deng’s Peaceful Rise policy. The China Dream with the BRI is being implemented to build a “moderately prosperous society” by doubling China’s 2010 per capita gross domestic product to USS 10,000 when Beijing celebrates the 100th anniversary of the CPC in 2021. The second benchmark is targeted at becoming a “fully developed, rich, and powerful” nation by the hundredth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2049.
The Resilience of Confucians
China has had fraught tics with the United States historically, especially with regard to the epic betrayal by the American delegation at the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 that would result in the May Fourth Movement. It remains as a bitter lesson in the historical context of Sino-American relations to this day. China’s increasing power now allows Beijing to pursue its own national identity in socialism with Chinese characteristics, such as the revival of Chinese culture and Confucian heritage.
Mencius, a Confucian philosopher, said, “The people arc the most important element [in a country]; the Spirits of the land and grain are the next; the ruler is the lightest.” The inference of this Confucian social contract is not that the people rule, but that their welfare is vital to good governance. That is, the legitimacy of policies come from good governance, not the process by which it comes to power.
In America, government accountability for the people is often associated with periodic democratic elections. In Confucian governance, however, the rulers are compelled to protect the interests and needs of the people for their long-term survival. In the Federalist Papers on the administration of government, Hamilton argued that “the last is necessary to enable the people… to prolong the utility of his talents and virtues, and to secure the government the advantage of permanency in a wise system of administration.” With the extension of his term-limit, Xi could overcome the vested interests for the needed reforms and continue the national initiatives. The permanency of leadership has its own benefits, but the quality of leaders—especially with ethical and moral reasoning abilities and humility—is imperative for both nations.
Unlike the increasingly costly American elections, China has its own hidden intra-party democratic and consultative processes for the selection of leaders, policy formulation, and response to the welfare of its citizens. Despite all the negative press in America, the National People’s Congress (NPC) continuously scrutinizes the performance of its leaders, the Politburo also needs to have consensus for policy changes, and the citizens are actively engaged in governance through social media for which national, provincial, and local officials are swiftly responsive from natural disasters to corruption. Recently, for example, the NPC eliminated the electronic voting system in favor of secret paper-ballot to accommodate dissenting voices. The party—guided by Confucian ethics—is the heart and soul of China. The success of “strengthening the party’s overall leadership is the core issue,” said Liu He, Vice Premier for Economic Policy, in March 2018.
In America, when the Congress is often gridlocked on issues, policymakers frequently resort to the appointed bipartisan commissions to find solutions to national problems, ranging from deficit-reduction to military realignment. The regular and periodic elections, which serve as a democratic feedback device to check the public accountability, have been polarized politically through gerrymandered congressional districts and a lack of campaign finance laws. Whatever the mechanisms used, as Mencius and Hamilton agreed, the processes of government accountability to the people are simply the means to justify the ends. Irrespective of whether they are Chinese or American, the results have been consequential in the identity politics of ideologies.
Intelligent Design by Christians
For over millennia—except the period of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—the Confucian identity has competed and complemented each other with Buddhism and Daoist traditions, establishing the unity of opposites. In fact, Buddhist and Daoist monks interacted with itinerant merchants in ancient China by trading goods and mutually reinforcing their collective economic well-being with spiritual development and heavenly blessings throughout its Silk Road civilization since the Han Dynasty. Even more important, the Chinese people exchanged knowledge systems from the Indian, Persian, and European civilizations for their own philosophical advancement.
To rejuvenate China’s national culture, Xi has continued to integrate foreign Marxist elements that would advance national progress with amalgamated philosophies, like the imported Buddhism and now Marxism assimilating into a “China model.” Such pragmatism would give the overriding role for evolving Confucian ethos to accommodate the harmonious co-existence by the tolerance and acceptance of other world traditions and philosophies. Wang Yang, chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—the leading advisory body—recently acknowledged that the “Cultural Revolution eliminated a large part of both the essence and the dregs of traditional culture on the mainland.” As adaptive and quick learners as the Chinese, the simmering “culture war” among various interest groups—whether liberal or conservative—seems to be secondary to the primary goal of China’s harmonious national identity.
Similar to China’s purposeful revival of “Confucian identity,” the United States has had a long history of striving for a “Christian identity.” Having learned the European experience of religious persecution, American Christians have come to view religious freedom to protect themselves from other faith traditions that emanate from various ethnic and cultural origins, like the Buddhists, the Hindus, and especially the Muslims from the Arab nations in the Middle East. After his reflective works on the Hispanic Challenge and white nativism in America, Harvard professor of political science Samuel Huntington finally realized that he was wrong about “Americans as an exceptional people united not by blood but by creed.” Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations, long argued about the challenges to the American identity, starting from the Revolutionary War that produced the “American people” to the “American nation” after the Civil War. The 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden ended “America’s [soul] search.” In retrospect, it is not Huntington’s clash of civilizations that would challenge the American creed, but the causation of clashes within the United States that would eventually destroy the myth of American exceptionalism. The underlying white nationalism and nativist policies—like the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the 1912 Executive Order of the Internment Camps of Japanese Americans—have been amplified with the gradual rise of the Religious Right, an evangelical movement also known as the Christian Right. It has given a religious but political impetus to polarize the American electorate and to endanger the national identity, E pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.” Begun as a separatist evangelical subculture, Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged “in the politics and culture wars of the 1920s” and “reemerged as a political force in the form of the Religious Right of the 1970s.”
In his book, God’s Own Party, Daniel Williams unveiled the secret strategy that Christian evangelicals have come to sec in the Republican Party. They have used the party as the vehicle through which they could reclaim America as a Christian nation. In 1976, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a pioneer among televangelists and founder of Liberty University, proclaimed that the United States was “intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers.” He then paved “the way for the emergence of a Republican Party that is incapable of compromise.” The party that is now synonymous with conservative evangelicals—who associated with the Christian fundamentalist movement of the Intelligent Design creationism as opposed to Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution—has begun to wage a culture war in the name of religious liberty. Supporting faith-based initiatives, they adamantly oppose the policy initiatives of the Democratic Party leaders and work against the evidence-based science behind climate change, environmental degradation, and even human conception and abortion.
Adding to all this, there has also been continuing tensions but largely subtle racial and religious undertones that had prevailed during the eight years of the Barack Obama White House. In the 2016 presidential election, even though the Democratic’ candidate Hillary Clinton won by almost three million popular votes, the Electoral College ushered Trump into the presidency with over 80 percent of white conservative Christians. And, the policies championed by the president and his evangelical Christian electorate are now at the forefront to achieve their long-standing goals. For them, American democratic ideals and moral values are seemingly inconsequential compared to the final victory as these conservative Christian leaders have desired “to see an America that embraces Judeo-Christian values again” with continuing policy successes. For example, their initiatives have entailed the introduction of new anti-immigration policies (particularly against Muslims and Hispanics), the support of pro-life guidelines in government-wide programs, the appointment of traditionalist judges to the courts, the suppression of voting rights, the diplomatic move of the American embassy to Jerusalem, and other religious liberty issues like school prayers, gay rights, and even the right to bear arms and gun control. For this exclusively while community of evangelical Christians, they now have a president whose Christian morality is of less concern to them, but more of historic bargain for the Napoleonic zeal to remake the American identity.
The undercurrent of the culture war within the American polity and the Chinese nation-state has a complex stream of converging and diverging racial and religious forces. All Christians and Confucians have equally been vulnerable to these types of human tendencies For the group’s self-identity of economic and political power. Yet the two republics have both had varied political and ideological experiences throughout history. Like Xi’s rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, Trump has now changed the nature of the Republican Party and American democracy with the support of conservative evangelical Christians to “Make America Great Again,” which barkens back to the Andrew Jackson presidency. Historian Harry Watson writes that the Jacksonian “vision of the ‘people’ had no room for people of color … Jackson’s populism was thus a Trojan Horse for pro-slavery, pro-states-rights interests. He was a wealthy slaveholder himself. with no qualms about African-American bondage and deep hostility to abolitionism. He ignored the early movement for women’s rights, and his infamous policy of Indian removal partly stemmed from demands by his [white Christian] ‘base’ for plentiful free land.” Departing from the founding vision of a global nation. Old Hickory was the first populist and anti-establishment president (after four Virginians and two Massachusettsians). Trump’s aides and associates have pushed the notion that their mercurial leader is “a modern-day reincarnation of Andrew Jackson” as he has decided to keep a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office.
Although some parallel comparisons between the two presidents seem to exist, the Trump phenomenon is a manifestation of the unfolding realities of the globalizing American population and its demographic shift. Unlike the irrational fear of an endangered Confucian identity with Tibetan, Uighur, and other over 50 ethnic minority groups (only about eight percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese population), the Christian identity is a malicious insider threat that would further jeopardize the already divisive electorate in democratic governance than in a Confucian-state that has the long tradition of accommodation and scientific rationale for human conduct With the change of one-child policy based on the demographic calculus, China has continued its resettlement programs in Tibet, Xinjiang, and other western provinces through the BRI connectivity to keep the I Ian population (about 92 percent) a majority while modernizing the places of religious worship for largely Buddhist and Muslim communities.
In America, the increasing immigrant population—whether legal or undocumented—and other culture war issues have largely challenged the white Christians within Democratic Party politics. A wider range of racially, religiously, and economically diverse groups has a greater affinity with the cross-cutting identities of Democrats than the Republicans. The Republican Parlv is increasingly identified with ideologically-cohesive white Christian evangelicals and wealthy individuals, whose worldviews are aligned more with Jacksonian-like policies. The evolving polarization by a divisive Christian identity is a recipe for a disastrous endgame to the “American identity” that the Founding Fathers deliberately addressed in the Bill of Rights. Among them, Thomas Jefferson—with his Enlightenment notion of the separation of church and state—advocated the enduring American principle embedded in the freedom of religion for the survival of the republic.
The Religious Marketplace
Unlike the mutual enrichment of monks and merchants in ancient China, the American experience with the Pilgrims and colonists had given a different platform for the founding generation to birth a new Roman republic in the United Stales, knowing that a system of Athenian democracy would not be a viable option when slaves and women there were considered the properly of white landlords. It took more than a century for the Women’s Suffrage and almost two centuries for African-Americans to exercise their “unalienable Rights” guaranteed by Thomas Jefferson. The Jeffersonian struggle—primarily the separation of church and state—is fundamental to the American identity, national progress, and the eventual idea of practicing democracy in the “Promised Land” of the Pilgrims.
Similar to the colonists’ economic motives and Hamilton’s devout faith in market forces governing free enterprises, Jefferson also devised the church-state doctrine to reconcile the religious forces in the marketplace of spiritual diversity and to compete with each other’ for the betterment of each religious faith of worships. Believers in markets and freedoms—as opposed to government authority—Hamilton was successful in creating an environment for economic films to thrive on Wall Street while Jefferson upheld the view that religious liberty in various faith communities adheres to the basic principles of market forces. In all of this, the American identity—not the Christian identity—is like a computer that is run by the Jeffersonian software on the Hamiltonian hardware. In other words, the American bald eagle needs both the right and the left wings to soar in the air of freedom and to govern itself from “the shining city upon the hill.”
As a perennial integrator, China has selectively decided only to utilize the Hamiltonian ingenuity as the foundation of their economic template to have emerged as a global superpower. Unlike the struggles of Native Americans, the Women Suffrage, and the Civil Rights Movement in America, the Jeffersonian struggles in China—like the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and the 1999 Falun Gong nationwide crackdown—failed. For its own cultural revival, Xi wanted a distinctly Confucian software to run on a state-owned Hamiltonian system of enterprises. The Jeffersonian vision of religious liberty in China is not necessarily prohibited but guided by the Party. For China’s great religious awakening, the CPC has set up five “associations” for each of Buddhist, Catholic, Daoist, Muslim, and Protestant groups to run their own temples, churches, and mosques.
The Prosperity Gospel
Having seen the troubling American experience of religious liberty by the rise of conservative Christians who have found Donald Trump as “their dream president,” China has now apparently validated its fear of religion as an internal threat to their cultural unity and national identity. For them, the scientific nature of Marx’s analysis was correct when he said that religion is a drug prescribed by state power to make people submissive. This could well be related to the evangelical Christians who have long desired to reclaim political power as a path back to a Christian nation while alienating the rest of Americans. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” Marx remarked, “the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” For Mao and Xi, Marx was an objective prognosticator of human conditions, a scientific maverick, and a great philosopher.
For conservative Christians, however, the godless materialism is a rational fear. They came to “view communism [in China] and Soviet Russia as an existential threat [to America], and warned that the centralization of federal power might lead to a similar encroachment of godless materialism [of Marx] in the United States.” Ironically, however, those Christian fundamentalists and evangelists have materially enriched themselves by preaching the Prosperity Gospel, an alternative adaptation of the Bible for self-glorification as God’s chosen few. For them, this dialectical process of the interplay of wealth, religion, and politics is their baptized version of American identity in their Christian nation, buttressed by a growing hostility towards science, ethnic diversity, secular culture, and globalization.
In Das Kapital, Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the notion of “dialectic materialism” from German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, who believed that all human and material behaviors were conditioned by historical state of human consciousness whether they were political doctrines or religious ideologies. The current policy initiatives and political events unfolding within the Trump White House—like the Muslim travel ban, the Hispanic anti-immigrant policies, white nationalism, and patriotic Christianity—are results of the evolving consciousness of fundamentalists and conservative Christians. Extolling the Confucian virtues at the 2565th anniversary of the ancient sage’s birth, Xi had taken a different path of human consciousness by saying, “diversity is a natural character of the universe” and the guiding light of modern China—and, it is “the only way to make the garden of world civilizations a vivid blaze of color.” As enlightened as the Founding Fathers, Xi was echoing the American creed of a global nation. The inclusive idea is residing in the Jeffersonian notion of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” that has given three examples of the “unalienable rights” to all human beings by their creator, for which the American government as well as the Communist Party are created to protect.
Govern by Example
The CPC leaders are acutely aware of the American history as much as their own historical evolution. As a thriving civilizational state, their Confucian identity with harmony and order is still more desirable than the agonizing Jeffersonian struggles of America. China has great pride in their Confucian heritage. They believe China is an exceptional nation and that their DNA embedded in Confucian morality and ethics is far superior to that of the Christian morality displayed in the American political landscape. The American experience of “the Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends” may, however, eventually come to China of their own accord and time.
In retrospect, United States President Woodrow Wilson’s vision to “make the world safe for democracy” has not yet materialized, as evinced in America’s costly military expeditions continuation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Before democracy is exported as a refined American product, particularly to the deeply traditional and civilizational societies like China, it should be domesticated successfully at home. Confucius counselled, “It is not possible for one to teach others, while he cannot teach his own family. Therefore, the ruler, without going beyond his family, completes the lessons for the state.” American policymakers and strategists are now compelled to study the Chinese wisdom as the enlightened Founding Fathers once did.
Benjamin Franklin, the American Confucius, famously warned that “we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Despite the current divisive political environment, the bipartisan solutions to American challenges, as United States Senators Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn have successfully demonstrated, are possible. For the next generation of wisdom-seeking leaders, the destiny is still an American choice for the bald eagle’s lasting vitality.