The Chinese Mission

Some 15 years ago I had a rather bad experience of China which I retold here. I had won the position of Team Leader of a 4 year EC project in the country which seemed to consist of having a lot of European experts visit the country for a week or so but was so depressed that I threw the towel in after the first month. But the experience did allow me to draft a 70 page paper on Chinese Administrative Reforms which was updated recently and an explanatory note Lost in Beijing – loneliness of a long-distance consultant. One of the factors which attracted me to the country was the writings of a Canadian political scientist, one Daniel Bell – particularly his 2008 book China’s New Confucianism – politics and everyday life in a changing society. 

The Commfucianist is a 2024 article about him which seems rather biased but which I excerpt for its very partiality

In the West too Bell’s star has waned. Granted, his books find a committed publisher in Princeton University Press. Bell is also the founding editor of the Princeton-China Series. It is in the world beyond the academy where interest has slackened. Not long ago Bell’s op eds in the New York Times, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, The Guardian, and Huffington Post, found avid readers, hungry to learn where China was heading. Today, these outlets are less welcoming. Editors who once feted Bell now ignore him, not because Bell is less challenging to Western prejudices but because he challenges them more in a bleaker time. When China was an object of Western wonder, Bell’s deciphering of the Middle Kingdom earned him admiration and respect. Now that China is an object of Western detestation, Bell’s Sinophilia is considered perverse

The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) is Bell’s most impressive book. Carefully argued and copiously documented, it combines rigor with audacity. “China Model” is not Bell’s coinage. Since the early 1980s, it has referred to the combination of market capitalism and state authoritarianism said to characterize the post-Mao reformist era. Bell finds this usage too generic: it could just as well apply to many Middle Eastern or African states. To capture China’s true specificity, says Bell, “China Model” is best viewed as “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top,” a uniquely graded system of governance. The model, Bell adds, is to be viewed as a reality, which the PRC approximates to a significant degree, and as a work in progress, an ideal to which the CCP aspires or claims to aspire. Evidently, it is also Daniel Bell’s preferred political system.

Bell begins not by singing China’s praises but by cataloguing the West’s problems, particularly those of the USA, the leading Western democracy. Bell will show that “the ideal of one person, one vote” is seriously flawed and that “electoral democracies do not necessarily perform better than political meritocracies according to widely shared standards of good government”

His appraisal of electoral democracy is damning. It is not merely deficient. It is “tyrannical.” The term is central to Chapter 1. Consider the “tyranny of the majority,” the worry of J.S. Mill. Most voters lack the relevant information about politics to act rationally. They are ignorant of the latest findings in science and social science and, unlike scientists, who “value intellectual honesty” (CM, 28), the multitude is shifty and perverse. It has neither the desire, the capacity, nor even the time to read “articles and books designed to be helpful” (CM, 30). Furthermore, it demonstrates little “communicative talent and emotional intelligence” (CM, 35). A “tyranny of the wealthy minority” (CM, 42) is no better. Doners, lobbyists, and special interests in general block change beneficial to society as a whole. The upshot is stagnant wages and worsening life-chances for workers. And not content with raw power, the affluent complacently justify their position by claiming that anyone with sufficient talent and energy can rise to the top. Systemic impediments (class, regional, educational) to scaling the ladder are blithely ignored. Callous and self-regarding, segregated by its gated lifestyle from everyday concerns, the wealthy minority is not even competent, evidenced by the West’s “major financial and economic crises” (CM, 45). The benighted majority return in a different guise when Bell describes the “tyranny of the voting community,” meaning, the total sum of citizens and residents eligible to vote.

A voting community is not only insensitive to the welfare of “future generations” (global warming threatens them) and “foreigners” (whose interests are not “represented”; CM, 46). It is also feckless and temperamental. By contrast, China is far better positioned to plan for the future. After all, “the same party will likely still be in power several decades from now” and, hence, will be more “likely to stick to its long-term commitments” than fawning Western politicians (CM, 53).

The West’s final shortcoming Bell calls the “tyranny of competitive individualists” (CM, 54). Western democracies are notorious for “negative campaigning” and “identity politics” both of which polarize the populace and make “compromise a dirty word.” The most hallowed aspects of voting make matters worse.

Having desacralized Western politics, Bell proceeds to vaunt the excellences of its rival. His point of departure is the CCP’s success in alleviating the poverty of millions of its citizens since the early 1980s and advancing their life-chances more generally.

He adds that the CCP enjoys considerable legitimacy at home. What explains China’s great success? Bell detects it in the CCP’s refinement of China’s long meritocratic tradition, especially as this affects the selection of leaders. The resonance with Confucianism is clear. Comparable to the great scholarsages of yore, the new literati combine intelligence and virtue if caged within the bars of a monopolistic party.

I began this essay by relating Bell’s odyssey to Confucianism and to China. I close it by emphasizing what must be increasingly obvious to Bell, a decent and honest man. Marxists, Sinicized or otherwise, are creedal monopolists. They do not share doctrine. It cannot be over emphasized that Chinese Marxism is at root a European import, stamped by Leninism which in turn was influenced by the French Revolution of 1789 and the European uprisings of 1848. This explains the presence in PRC constitutions of such foreign concepts as democracy, democratic centralism, dictatorship, and rights. Confucianism and Leninism are incompatible. The first is a philosophy, the fruit of a great and ancient civilization. The second is the ideology of a Leninist “combat party.” The CCP is the antithesis of all that Confucians valued. Indoctrination is not humanist self-cultivation. Propaganda is not wisdom, nor is training and technique the same as education and culture. A Party preoccupied with shoring up its legitimacy no more resembles Confucius’ passion for righteousness than mass conformity resembles his idea of harmony. No Leninist organization has never prioritized benevolence, goodness, human heartedness—the cardinal jen—over control and domination. Or been a beacon of moral example. And how can a Party at war with truthfulness, that effaces its own history to hide its crimes, that describes the quest for factual exactitude as “historical nihilism,” be a vehicle of virtue? It follows that the Party’s relationship to Confucianism is superficial, opportunistic, and conditional, and that this is true no matter how often President Xi visits Shandong or blesses the opening of another museum devoted to China’s past, always curated à la mode. The Party takes the plant and spits out the pith. It much prefers political theorist Wang Huning, a brilliant Marxist tactician, raised in the bruising environment of power politics, to the unworldly seer of Montréal. Confucian hierarchy is congenial but only so long as the Party constitutes its pinnacle and occupies its descending rungs. Ritual and form—the Confucian li—are welcome too, but only so long as they pay deference to Party conventions. Confucianism will retain its value to the CCP provided it is useful for legitimating Party rule. Nor will the youngest generation rue Confucianism’s demise, at least according to opinion survey research.

To this point, Bell has tried to marry Confucianism with Marxism and the Maoist “mass line”. More recently he has taken to calling himself a “progressive conservative” who aims to graft feminism and LGBTQ onto the Party shoot. This hybrid—we might think of it as Commfucianism—is doubtless sincere. It is also no threat at all to the CCP. For now, the Party is content to expropriate China’s great humanist philosophy, and happy enough to have a famous Westerner in its camp. It will be reassured to read Bell describe himself as a “servant of the Chinese state.” He could have said, metaphorically, that he was a servant of learning or of the university community. He could have said that he was a university official or a civil servant. That he did not say these things suggests to me that the real threat to Bell is not from the Party but from Bell himself, to his coherence as a thinker and his integrity as a critic.

The article is by one Peter Baehr and compares Bell with another Sinologist 

Simon Leys which I find strange since Leys spent only a few years in the country 

and had to adopt a nom de plume to avoid being declared persona non grata 

whereas Bell has spent most of his life in the country (apart from brief spells at 

Oxford and Princeton)

In The Dean of Shandong – confessions of a minor bureaucrat (2023), Bell describes the evolution of his political-moral beliefs. The subject of his doctoral thesis at Oxford was Communitarianism, a political philosophy with which he was at that time enamored. Communitarians argue that the sovereign individual of liberalism is a fiction. Human beings are not self-actualizing monads. They are social to their core. Born into an already pre-formed society, with a history and a culture, the infant becomes a human person through being immersed in group life and group symbols. Family, neighborhood, and association are the soil of human development and the cement of society.

A life that pursues freedom, self-realization, and pleasure above all other goals is not only corrosive of solidarity; it is impoverished and self-destructive. Material satisfaction is as transient as fashion. Egoism is frustrated by other egos. Factionalism is self-cancelling. A meaningful life unfurls in the company of and for others. It requires cooperation, compromise, care, and durable commitments. And because the self is a social phenomenon, it follows that we have obligations to the society that nurtures and protects us.

Recommended Reading

Chinese Shadows Simon Leys (1977)
The Hall of Uselessness – collected essays Simon Leys (2011)
Simon Leys – navigator between worlds Philippe Paquet (2015)