Still Seventy Percent Feudal

Still Seventy Percent Feudal

This is basically a report on some conversations with the director of the foreign affairs office here, a very lively personality with very good English, a good sense of humor and interesting insights into life in China.

After some various issues came up about why things depend so much on people rather than clear policies and straight answers, he explained that it is necessary to remember that China is still 70% feudal, by which he meant that it's a hierarchical culture of relations not of rules. Everything depends on who you know and who you have done things for and who has done things for you. People do things for reasons. There's always a catch. It's an eternal merry-go-round. Let's have dinner--can you judge the speech contest？ Let's have lunch—can you give a 2-hour lecture at the art conference—in 2 days?! This is the kind of thing that has been going on for a few thousand years more or less.

As for the other 30%, he considers 20% of it to be capitalist and 10% socialist. He is optimistic about change, but it's tempered with reality. He feels it will probably take some decades to get the feudalism down to 60% and the capitalism up to 30%. It was clear that he would consider that to be progress and that the eventual near total capitalization of the Chinese economy would be a positive thing.

I would almost surely take him to be a party member. One doesn't get that far without it, so it's simply a matter of practicality. However, he was very strong about how the down and outs of society need to be taken care of. I presume this is his 10% socialism, and it gives some insight into how such people think about the nature of socialism in China. He felt this needed to be done not out of political expediency but out of a sense of morality and justice. This might set him apart from many who would certainly do it only for the former reason. Knowing him fairly well, I feel comfortable taking him at his word. He's kind of carved out some space for himself by placating or at least dealing with those who must be dealt with so as to be able to do what he likes and feels in important. In short, he has more successful in doing what I never could accomplish in my own university days.

He's had things to say about Mao now and then. On this his view is pretty much that of most intelligentsia. Mao was right to put his finger on feudalism, i.e. patriarchal social class, as the root of the basic inequality between classes and genders in traditional Chinese society, but he dealt with it himself in a patriarchal way, like a traditional emperor issuing edicts. Even worse, according to the director, he did it in a way that messed things up so badly in China for 10 years that no has been willing to deal with it again since, making the last state in some ways worse than the first. Yet, for me, at least Mao did try to confront it directly, but today's elite are comfortable—yes, very comfortable—with the idea of just letting the ruling oligarchy deal with social class and gender inequalities indirectly by manipulating the economy or throwing bones at various interest groups as the need arises.

His background gives some insight into things. He grew up in the Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, and is young enough that his Cultural Revolution experience came through the eyes of a child with no bad personal experience. His father managed some kind of mess hall during those times, so there was always something to eat. He is clearly a city person, urbane but not the least arrogant. He told a joke about a country guy who came to Xinxiang with his young son, who, seeing the city for the first time, asked his father if this was Beijing. No, silly boy, the father replied, Beijing is in Zhengzhou!

Henan province has always had the reputation of being a rural rather backwater place. He said that even the university people used to be rather rough on the edges too, but have come some way since his early days. People have gotten a little more refinement. He told the story of some department chair or other who some years ago came into the business office to get his reimbursement money and just entered the room rudely shouting “Where's the money?” as if he were barking orders to a waitress (as people usually do even now). One of the clerks just raised her head and responded, “Oh, are you here to hold us up?” and then put her head back down to her work. I guess people no longer do such things. Progress.

He had a funny comparison between the economy and skirt lengths. He said when the economy is good skirt lengths get shorter, but if it takes a dive skirt lengths get long again because the conservatives will be back in power managing a strict top-down economy accompanied by hosts of other conservative attitudes and policies. I told him he should write it up for publication in an economic journal. I do believe it could be proven with statistical data. I don't think we'd be lacking in volunteers to gather the data about skirt lengths.

From a dinner with him I recall a funny pun about Chinese people looking forward to the qiantu (前途) ‘the future’ and qiantu (钱途) ‘the way of money’. There are so many things like this. I just wish I could catch faster and remember them better. I should have stuck with French.

At this same dinner he talked about world leaders like Bush and Hu Jintao. He thought that what makes such people succeed is not brains (responding to my comment that Hu probably had some whereas Bush had obviously been shortchanged) but just guts. This is what allows them to get what they want. In this context he went on to say that he thought the US had about another 50 or 100 years before it would slide, not to obscurity or into some cataclysmic implosion, but just to the natural end of its world dominance. Without saying so, he was probably reflecting what most Chinese feel about their own future in the world—slow and steady wins the race. I had no contradictory evidence to offer, at least not about the United States. Not with a bang but a whimper.