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. Honesty, Spirit and the Communist
Way
@6
May 2000 Thor May Wuhan
There are honest people in China,
and there are people who are as honest as they dare to be. Yet this society
expresses the extremes of tendencies which are found everywhere, and here we
have an extreme of moral collapse. "Moral" is used in the sense of
"honesty", not sexual license etc. The problem is NOT that of a
community which historically never had moral frameworks within which to fudge
but roughly conform to decency. The Confucian ethic, the Buddhist and Taoist
ethics, and other philosophies certainly diverged from European notions in
various aspects. But the underlying tenets were clear enough. A good man was
known from a bad man. The
Communist missionaries worked feverishly to sweep these obsolete moral
systems away. They proclaimed the brotherhood of man (and woman), based on
secular responsibility. For a generation this captivated the ideals of
Chinese youth, and basically had them sacrifice personal goals for "the
nation". Yet from the very beginning it was a false paradigm, for
"the nation" turned out to be by no means the ordinary people of
China. They were given ration cards and trinkets. In the old imperial system,
the nation had been a fiefdom for a tiny clique of privileged men, headed by
a titular emperor. There was nothing new under the sun that Chinese
imagination could sustain after 1911, whatever the rhetoric of ideology. From
1949 "the nation" was actually code for the interests of one more
group who had grabbed power and privilege: another tatty story of violent
revolution eating its children. This
group of power holders retained control partly by coercion, but largely by
mobilizing the force of lies, told endlessly with all the paraphernalia of
mass communications. It is in the nature of lies that there is a reckoning.
Reckoning in a democracy (where lies also grow like mushrooms) comes through
the ballot box, very imperfectly, to be sure. The communists keep "rolling
over" their reckoning (to borrow parlance from the finance industry),
rolling it over with new debts of promise. A diminishing band of "the
people" still believe that their trust will not be betrayed. Most
already know in their bones that they have been betrayed, but do not know
where to turn. Betrayal
is sometimes more a condition in the mind of the betrayed than a treachery
committed. Technocrats in the Chinese administration might well feel agrieved
at the ingratitude of "the masses". Human expectations are so
fickle. Materially China has indeed become a much more secure place to live
in than it was seventy years ago, although most of this improvement came with
the pragmatic displacement of communist economic lunacy after 1978. For
peasants - the majority of the population - there have been hugely
significant but little publicised changes quite recently. The arrival of the
telephone (even one) in a previously isolated village utterly changes the
relationship of people in that village with the outside world. At least the
potential for some kind of democratic input is also greatly enhanced (as has
been the case also in rural India). Television of course brings such places a
whole new set of dreams as well, and is no doubt fuelling the country to
urban migration. The telecommunications revolution is quietly changing the
Chinese political equation, as are new roads and railways. The progress of
mass schooling has been rather more anaemic, a failure that must add to
discontent. So
the betrayal felt so keenly amongst Chinese peoples is largely in terms of
what was promised, not what was materially feasible. That they, the people,
were culpably naive is hardly a consolation. The taste is bitter, and public
trust almost extinct. Worse, everyone knows that they too are required to lie
in this kingdom of lies. Above all they must proclaim the glory and wisdom of
those whom they feel have betrayed them, or else (amongst the middle classes)
there will be no personal promotion, nor even the right to study in a university.
Surviving
in the kingdom of lies has taught people other lessons, according to their
personal inclinations. The first lesson is that public proclamation and
private behaviour must be utterly different matters. Most can now put one
hand on their heart, look absolutely blameless, and declare their own and
China's virtue. The other hand will be in somebody's pocket looking for cash
or advantage. The second lesson is that they personally are responsible for
absolutely nothing - not their own behaviour, not the collapse of communities
around them, not the boss who is embezzling the budget, nor the jobs that
never get done. They have learned as a cardinal principle never to volunteer
for anything, and never to say what they accidentally saw on a dark night. Who
is responsible? The Government. Those bastards want the power, all of it. Let
them have it, and let them have the responsibility that goes with it, all the
responsibility. So there are no citizens left in China, only the faceless
masses. Ironic,
sad. Communism, the ethic that was going to enshrine the very best that
humankind has to offer, has conditioned its children to be the very worst.
Selfish, irresponsible, amoral, dishonest. Yet,
of course, that is not the end of the story. There ARE (some) people who
continue to be as honest as they dare to be. And there ARE numberless
millions who are craving to be shown a credible way to stop being "the
masses", and shown how to become citizens of a Chinese civilization that
they really can call theirs. This inner hunger swings them this way and that.
"Market capitalism", a.k.a. "socialism with Chinese
characteristics", has been served up to dampen the pangs of spiritual
hunger. It tastes good, a quick boost, but leaves the snackers dissatisfied. In
Beijing the high priests understand the failure of their religion, and
greatly fear the inrush of new and old belief systems which might fill the
vacuum. Hence their disproportionate response to the so-called Falun Gong
movement, and punitive attitude to the ancient palliatives of Christianity
and Islam. In terms of realpolitik, the communists have made a bad mistake by
arrogantly ruling out the assistance of those dimensions uncharted by
easy-to-grasp "science" (i.e. crudely, the supernatural). They now
have, as it were, nowhere to hide. If they had been a little more diligent
about studying human histories they would know that the unseen forces of
spiritual authority have had far more staying power in the hearts and minds
of common people than any secular government. The non-rational quantum in
human psychology is not dispensable, though it may be coaxed a little. This
was precisely the insight that Marx, Engels, Mao Tse Tung and all their heirs
overlooked, so it might be asking a bit much of their nervous successors in
Beijing to swing a spiritual conversion at this stage. Some kind of humanism
(my own inclination) might be their only hope, but hardly sits well with
their style on past form. We
therefore wait with interest to see, hopefully to chronicle, the spiritual
answer that the peoples of China will find for their malaise. We can be sure
that it won't be an ~ism attached to communism (not again for two generations
at least). Will it be yet another prophet, promising Nirvana on this earth or
elsewhere? Will it be the pluralistic response of Western democracies, where
everything from witchcraft to environmental worship, to high Latin
Catholicism, to football, to coffee shop anarchism ... somehow coexist in a
supermarket of the spirits? Will it be an Internet-dwelling superbeing? Is it
growing somewhere under a rock at this moment? Relax; the next installment is
coming sooner or later to a place near you ... But shaky masters of the
current universe, when the changeover comes, please exit gracefully. Let's
see if we can keep the body count down this time around... "Honesty, Spirit and the Communist
Way" copyrighted to Thor May 2000; all rights reserved
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