Of the 7 countries I’ve lived in, China is far and away
the poorest and the dirtiest. The western part of the
country, away from the much more affluent cities in
the east and the south-eastern coast, is so poor, that
the average peasant lives on about $2 a day.
There is a huge difference in living standards
between east and west China, which is probably
China’s biggest problem. The western Chinese are
becoming increasingly conscious of the income gap
and are growing ever more frustrated and angry. The
Chinese government in Beijing is putting a lot of
infrastructure into the west, particularly in the form
of railways and roads, in a desperate attempt to
stimulate growth, so that peasants in the area can get
their goods to markets outside their immediate area,
and hopefully stimulate economic growth. With
transport infrastructure in place, outsiders can also
invest in the poor areas, taking advantage of the low
wage rates. Nevertheless, the wages paid will still be
higher than the usual income levels of peasantfarmers. The peasants will choose to work in the
factories if they are built.
It is difficult to describe to mono-cultured westerners
just how dirty China can be. For example, imagine
that some deranged person in a western country
decided to dump the contents of 100 household
garbage cans into a pile on a main street in a western
suburb. He would be immediately arrested. In many
cities in China (although less so in the more
prosperous south east), such rubbish piles are the
norm. The peasants who create such rubbish piles
simply consider them to be undesirable necessities,
because life generates garbage, and the garbage has
to be placed somewhere until it is finally collected by
the city garbage disposal workers. For a few hours in
the week, the streets may be clean, only to be
replaced by new growing piles of garbage.
You may ask, “Why aren’t there more large garbage
containers?” Good question. Maybe the city councils
consider them too expensive, or maybe they are as
much accustomed to the dirt as are the peasants, and
are not disgusted by seeing it lying around
everywhere.
A similar story holds for Chinese toilets, which by
western standards are simply putrid, - i.e. filthy,smelly, and unhygienic. I suspect the expression “shit
hole of a country” is derived from the third world
“squat” toilet, over which one has to squat, with no
toilet bowl to sit on. It can be very uncomfortable and
almost impossible for fat people.
The dirt and the poverty will be too much for
westerners to tolerate, so they will not come to live in
China in large numbers, until Chinese living
standards have improved enough and fast enough, to
be comparable with what westerners, Japanese, etc
are used to.
That is happening in some of the larger eastern cities
in China, e.g. Beijing (pronounced “Bay Jing”),
Shanghai (“Shung Hi”), Guangzhou (“Gwung Joe”),
Shenzhen (“Shn Jn”), Hanzhou (“Hun Joe”), etc. The
richest city in China is Shenzhen. (I am deliberately
excluding here, Hong Kong, which is a special case,
that can barely be called a Chinese city, after being a
British colony for nearly 2 centuries, and is far richer
than Shenzhen (which by the way is a short drive
from Hong Kong)).
I was very impressed by the modernity of Shenzhen
when I visited it recently. It is utterly western in
many respects, including its standard of living, i.e. it
has already largely “caught up” with the west. It isclean, efficient, affluent, the people think and answer
questions reliably, and are quick witted. It has a
lovely new concert hall (something of real
importance to me, who considers such things as the
“soul of a city”).
It was the first of the special economic zones, set up
by Deng Xiaoping (pronounced “Dng, Show(er)
ping”) the post Mao leader, who broke with Mao’s
anti capitalist economics and restored capitalism to
certain regions of the country, before generalizing the
concept to the whole country later in the 1980s.
In Shenzhen’s case, it was only a village prior to the
early 1980s, but has blossomed since. So it is a very
new, modern city that will catch up to Hong Kong.
Once that happens there is growing talk that
Shenzhen and Hong Kong may be merged into one
big city.
There are many western foreigners in Beijing and
particularly Shanghai, which has a lot of foreign
businesses that are staffed to some extent by
foreigners who live part of their lives in these cities.
How to rid China of its poverty and its dirt? This is
probably the dominant question on the minds of the
Chinese politicians in Beijing and at lower levels (e.g.at the province, city, town, village levels). China is
the fastest growing economy in the world, so it is
only a question of time, before it catches up to and
overtakes the west, which at the time of writing, is
the richest region on the planet (i.e. North America,
Europe, (and Japan, if you count Japan as western, in
which many respects it is, and other respects is not)).
Shenzhen has already caught up with the west, in
most respects. So much of the city is new, brand
spanking new, that it is superior to the west in
modernity. The city must be growing at about 15%
economically each year, with construction cranes and
huge ultra modern buildings going up in every
direction one looks. The metro is “Japanese clean”,
i.e. spotless, which is so refreshing after the dirt of
most of China.
One wonders, why the difference? In such a clean
environment, it would seem a travesty to throw away
trash or to spit, as do most Chinese in most Chinese
cities, and certainly in the villages. In Shenzhen there
are garbage bins everywhere, lined with easily
replaced plastic bags. One quickly becomes
accustomed to looking for the nearest garbage bin
when one wants to dispose of trash.A lesson to be learned here by other Chinese cities is
that if the city politicians want to have a clean city,
they should provide lots of rubbish bins and advertise
that they should be used. But again, I suppose in the
poor cities, such “luxuries” as plastic bags, and
having rubbish bins everywhere, would be considered
too expensive and not a high priority to such
politicians, who are themselves probably the
“children of peasants” or ex-peasants themselves.
About 10% of the people in Shenzhen have college
degrees, which is a lot greater than the national
average of 4% (but admittedly cannot compete with
say, Washington DC, where the percentage is about
50%). What is so refreshing about the people of
Shenzhen is that they are not mentally lazy, the way
most of China is. If you ask them directions, they will
be clear, efficient, and helpful.
In most cities in China, and especially, the further
west one gets, an intellectual sloth takes over, so that
whenever a little bit of mental effort is required in
giving directions for example, average Chinese
people will either simply lie to you, telling you some
random direction, so that they don’t have to lose face
by saying “I really don't know”; or they cant be
bothered thinking, so they just wave their hand in
some vague “over there” direction. To westerners,who are accustomed to people being helpful and
respecting other individuals’ needs, this kind of third
world intellectual sloth and inconsideration is simply
maddening, and tends to make westerners
contemptuous of Chinese (“chinks”).
I don't see any quick easy solutions to China’s “dirt
and poverty” problem, other than steady, time
consuming economic and educational development.
As people get richer, they get cleaner. They become
more intolerant of dirt, and make more effort to keep
their environment and their cities clean. The richer
the cities in China, the cleaner they are. If one moves
from an area of a city that consists of “city dwellers”,
it will be a lot cleaner than an area that consists of
“peasant dwellers” who have recently migrated from
the countryside.
On the whole, the city dwellers don't like the peasants
(especially in Beijing), and look down on them, for
their roughness, lack of education, lack of modernity,
lack of sophistication and cunning.
Cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou show what is
possible in China. These two cities are the future of
the rest of the country. My Chinese wife tells me that
these cities pay very little tax to Beijing, and largelyignore the capital. They are rich enough to be able to
do that and do not appreciate Beijing’s interference.
How can GloMedia help China? I think the biggest
contribution that the west can make to help China
become a prosperous happy democracy is to help
educate it. Once 100s of millions of Chinese are well
educated with college degrees, they will
automatically demand and get a democratic
government. As the cities in which these 100s of
millions of Chinese live get richer, they will get
cleaner. The two correlate strongly.
In Chapter 9, I will talk about something called
“GSL” (Global Satellite Learning) which, as its name
suggests, is a global satellite service to educate the
planet. Stationary orbit satellites will beam down
thousands of school level and university level
lectures to educate everyone, using small, very cheap,
mass produced, receivers that can be smuggled easily
into dictatorial countries where they are banned.
This service will help cause the downfall of the
remaining dictatorships on the planet, until there are
none left. In China’s case, this will be a bit more
difficult, because China has the technology to shoot
down such satellites, but the other dictatorships donot, so they will be vulnerable to the effects of their
peoples becoming educated.
GloMedia will also have educational material in huge
quantities. But the disadvantage of using GloMedia is
that one has to be rich enough to be able to afford a
connection to it. Already at the time of writing, China
has 160 million users of the internet (12% of its
population, and growing very fast), so even China as
a poor country is well advanced in this respect.
When motivated intellectually hungry minds can get
access to world class education, that is virtually free,
then they will be able to educate themselves and
change their lives. The educational impact of
GloMedia on the world will be profound.
Dictatorship and Corruption
I will mention in passing several times in this book
that I have a private library of about 10,000 books.
One of my intellectual interests outside my
professional work as a professor and researcher is
political science, as should be obvious to anyone
reading this book. In particular I am very interested
in a branch of political science called “transitology”,
i.e. the study of how dictatorships get changed intodemocracies. There are now about 120+ countries in
the world that are democracies, i.e. about 2/3 of them.
About the same proportion of Asian countries are
also democracies at the time of writing, so one
wonders how much longer will China remain a
dictatorship?
One can “calculate” certain interesting answers to
this question. For example, look at Fig. 1 below
which shows the percentage of nations that are still
dictatorships in the world on the vertical axis, and the
year date on the horizontal axis. By extrapolating the
trend into the future, one “predicts” that there will be
no more dictatorships in the world within about 40
years.
Since China is changing economically so fast, it is an
easy assumption to make that it will not be the last
country in the world to make the transition to
democracy. Of the remaining dictatorships, most are
very poor black African, or Arab countries, many of
whose economies are going backwards in purchasing
power terms per capita, due to a rapid rise in their
populations. So let us assume that China will convert
to democracy before such countries, i.e. before 3⁄4 of
them. Of the remaining 40 years before all countries
in the world switch, and assuming a linear
relationship between the number of remainingdictatorships and time, we can predict that China will
have switched within about 40*(1/4) years from the
time of writing, i.e. in about 10 years, so let us say
10-15 years.
1950
86%
Percentage of
Countries
that are
Dictatorships
2001
37%
Year
1950
2001
2040
Fig. 1 Percentage of Dictatorial Nations vs. Time
This number agrees with the result obtained from an
entirely different argument. Transitology teaches us
that when countries obtain a standard of living (GNP)
of about $6000-$8000 a year per capita, then they
usually switch to democracy. China is in that region
already (in purchasing power terms at least). But, the
inequalities of wealth are enormous and growing.The repression of the Beijing government of the
students who were pushing for democracy in 1989 in
Tiananmen Square is still fresh in people’s memories
so they don't want to stick their necks out
unnecessarily and risk being sent to a Chinese work
camp (called a “laogai” in Chinese, equivalent to a
Stalinist style “gulag”). There are many journalists
and other pro-democracy protestors in Chinese laogai
at the time of writing.
As long as the economy is doing well, growing at
around 10% a year, then most Chinese don't care too
much about whether the people in power in Beijing
are democrats or dictators, so long as their standard
of living keeps rising, and they have a job.
In fact, under the current Deng Xiaoping policy of
Chinese capitalism, several hundred million Chinese
have moved out of a state of extreme poverty in
which even the next meal is not assured, into a
relatively more affluent state. This is a major
humanitarian achievement, quite unlike what was
achieved (or rather not achieved) under the tyranny
of Mao, who indirectly starved about 30 million
peasants to death during the period of the Great Leap
Forward (1958-1960), when so many peasants were
pulled out of the fields to man the cottage industries,particularly the village blast furnaces, that there were
not enough people to harvest the crops. Of the little
that was harvested, too high a proportion of it went as
tax to the cities, because the local communist cadres
lied to their superiors as to the size of the harvest to
look good in a Maoist era of fear and purges. Also
Mao wanted the grain to sell to the USSR to buy high
tech weaponry, such as advanced submarines, from
the USSR, and starved the peasants to pay for it all.
All in all, Chinese experts living outside China
calculate that Mao killed some 70-80 million Chinese,
which makes him the greatest tyrant in history,
killing more people than Stalin with his terrible
purges, and Hitler, the architect of WW2. The
tragedy of China is that the current CCP (Communist
Party of China) still venerates Mao, since after all it
was Mao who put them in power. Mao defeated
Chang Kai Shek (“Jiang Jieshi” in Chinese,
pronounced “Jung Ji ye(ah) shr”) in the Chinese civil
war, in 1949, driving Chang and his followers to the
island of Taiwan.
Mao was a rebel, a military revolutionary, with a
huge ego and ruthless personality. He had a peasant
background, and was deeply suspicious of
intellectuals, whom he persecuted when he could. He
was certainly no economist, and made China worseoff economically after 30 years of his reign, than
when he came to power.
His “Great Leap Forward” (actually backward) in the
late 1950s, and his “Cultural Revolution” of the mid
1960s to mid 1970s, until his death, caused massive
hardship. The universities were shut down for a
decade, people were coerced to spy and denounce
each other, and high-school students (“Red Guards”)
were given free train rides to harass the cities around
the country.
All this was merely a means by Mao to get himself
back into power, after he lost status in the CCP
hierarchy as a result of his mishandling of the Great
Leap Forward that caused the “Great Famine of
China”. Mao created a personality cult for himself via
his cronies. He became a demigod. He then used his
Red Guards to undermine the power of his rivals,
causing hundreds of millions of Chinese to lead
miserable lives for a decade, and multiple millions to
be killed.
I see the consequences of this cult, even today. At my
first university, in the middle of the country, the
peasants were building a lot of apartment blocks. The
workers used a picture of Mao as a symbol of safety
and benevolence, similar to the way Roman Catholicpeasant farmers would use a statue of the Virgin
Mary. To the Chinese peasants, Mao had become a
god.
It is this “Big Lie” that is the current tragedy of China,
that holds back its general development. Let me spell
this out, to make it perfectly clear what is going on in
China at the time of writing. The current Chinese
leadership is derived from Mao. Mao pretty much
created the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and put
it in power. The current generation of CCP leaders
does not want to lose power.
Being Chinese, these leaders have never lived in a
democracy, and hence are accustomed to 5000 years
of political oppression and dictatorship. They are
therefore ruthless at stamping out any challenge to
their political authority, and find such behavior
perfectly acceptable and normal. Unfortunately for
China, historically speaking, it is.
Hence they foster the image of Mao. For example,
the face of the greatest criminal in history, i.e.
history’s greatest tyrant, the killer of more people in
the world than any other, is on the nation’s money.
That would be equivalent to putting Hitler’s face on
the Euro. Try to imagine the world’s reaction if
someone in the European Central Bank (ECB) triedas a sick joke to print a batch of Euros with Hitler’s
face on the European Union’s currency notes.
There would be instant, worldwide outrage. Heads
would fall. Overnight, the culprits would be found
and arrested. The event would make headline world
news.
Yet, this is the norm in China. In fact, history’s
greatest tyrant is still seen as a demigod by most of
China’s peasants. It is this that I call the “Great Lie”.
The current regime in China bans books that are
opposed to the CCP, or to Mao, that tell the truth
about how terrible the man was. Of course the CCP
has to do this, because imagine what would happen if
it did not.
The CCP came to power in a wave of optimism and
idealism. Millions of Chinese really believed that
Mao would make the country a lot better. He
promised democracy, to give land to the peasants, to
strip away the awful exploitation by the land owners,
who would force the farm laborers to pay 75% of
their crop in tax to the landlord. The communists
killed millions of such landlords and redistributed
their land to the peasants. Of course, the peasants still
love Mao. They have not been taught about Mao’s
terrible crimes.Most Chinese peasants today are unaware of who
caused the great famine or what the real reason
behind the Cultural Revolution was. So historians,
who have access to all truths, tend to have mixed
feelings about Mao. Even the CCP has come out
officially with a “70% good, 30% bad” assessment of
Mao (a ratio I personally find ridiculous, but it does
show that even the CCP admits that Mao “screwed
up”).
Once Mao had secured his personal power he ignored
his former promises to make China a democracy
(which had been one of the 3 main ideas of the
founder of republican China (Sun Yat Sen) when he
took over from the last of the emperors in 1911). Mao
then set out on a series of cultural revolutions that
brought chaos to the country, made hundreds of
millions of people miserable, and made the country
worse off when he died, 30 years later than when he
came to power (and killed some 70 million people in
the process.)
In the meantime, his arch rival, Chang Kai-shek,
who fled to Taiwan, set up a capitalist regime which,
once it was rich enough, converted itself into a
democracy in the 1980s, as is now happening all overthe world. There are no rich
Dictatorships are for poor countries.
dictatorships.
Hence if Mao had lost to Chang, China would
probably be far richer now, and possibly even a
democracy. It might have been a “big Japan”. The
world would have been very different from what it is
at the time of writing.
Today’s CCP, is still a one party state, anxious to
hold onto power. This becomes increasingly difficult,
for many reasons, which will be mentioned briefly
here.
The original ideology that brought the communists to
power was Marxist. Mao and others were strongly
influence by Marx’s ideas on the exploitative evils of
early capitalism, (i.e. the exploitation by the capitalist
factory and machine owners of the excess labor of
their employee laborers, who earned the value of
their wages by working X hours a day, but then
worked for a further Y hours a day for the capitalist,
who pocketed the profits of that excess labor value
(or as Marx called it, “surplus (labor) value”).
This Marxist economic abstraction translated easily
into the practical reality of landlord exploitation of
the labor of the peasant, where the landlord wouldoften take as much as 75% of the crop that the
peasant farmers would labor for and harvest. This
anti-exploitation logic made a lot of sense to a lot of
people in early 20 th century China. They were
motivated to modernize China, free it from
colonialist exploitation by foreigners, to promote a
sense of pride in the country again, and to make it
democratic.
As you can imagine, a lot of Chinese thinkers went
along with these ideals. But once Mao came to power,
he implemented some of them, e.g. he got rid of the
exploiting landlords, he expelled the foreigners, and
he tried to make China modern. Unfortunately, he
could not resist becoming a new emperor himself,
and forgot about his promises of creating a
democratic China.
In practice he became the worst dictator in history,
killing more than any other great tyrant of the 20 th
century. After 30 years of Maoist chaos, the new
pragmatic Deng, who had been purged several times
by Mao, was fed up. As soon as Mao died, Deng
pushed Mao’s wife and her cronies “the Gang of
Four”, out of power. He then reversed Chinese
economic policy by restoring capitalism.The result was an explosion of economic growth, the
greatest the world has ever known. It is largely
because of this growth that I have chosen to come to
China. I want to participate in China’s rise to
dominance and as a consequence, and over time, see
it lead the world intellectually on what humanity
should do with the species dominance question. But
that is another issue, and not the topic of this book.
See my first book “The Artilect War : Cosmists vs.
Terrans : A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether
Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively
Intelligent Machines”, if you would like to know
more about this issue.
But, the original ideology that brought Mao to power,
i.e. Marxism, has gone. Deng realized, and so did the
rest of the world, based on the experience of many
countries, that communist economics doesn’t work.
The basic idea that everyone should work for the
good of everyone, did not tap into the motivating
force to work hard for ones own profit and gain.
Adam Smith (the great British classical economist)
was a better psychologist than Karl Marx. Smith
spoke about the “Invisible Hand”, i.e. the idea that
when people work for their own personal profit, they
are motivated to work hard. They create companies
which compete with each other for sales, and thatforces prices down and efficiency up, which
ultimately benefits everyone. As the Americans put it,
“All boats rise” (i.e. the rising tide of economic
efficiency increases everyone’s living standard).
After decades of communist economics, comparative
economists looked at the results, e.g. they compared
China with Japan, or East Germany with West
Germany, or North and South Korea. The verdict was
obvious, communist economics did not work. The
Russian public got fed up waiting for hours for a loaf
of bread and eventually threw out their communist
leaders.
So, if the original communist ideology is no longer
accepted in China, then why is an old communist
regime still in power? This question has a lot of
weight.
The current Chinese regime is incredibly corrupt.
China is so politically, economically and socially
backward by western standards, that it does not even
have a “rule of law”. (See the last section below on
this). There are no real constraints on corrupt political
bosses and administrators to stop them from milking
off money from the state, state run companies, and
organizations.The general Chinese public thinks that most CCP
members are corrupt, and at all levels. Even the CCP
high level politicians recognize that if the corruption
becomes bad enough, and it is already very bad in
China, that the general public may want the CCP to
be overthrown and replaced by a democracy for that
reason alone.
When one is the victim of corruption, one is
disgusted, and seeks revenge. One wants to go to the
courts and sue the evil doers, but in China such
institutions barely exist. There are far fewer lawyers,
and especially criminal lawyers, in China, in
proportion to population size, than there are in
western countries. If one tries to sue some corrupt
CCP official, then all too likely, the official will hear
about it, and (ab)use his power to protect himself, or
even worse, hire some thugs to beat up the trouble
maker, or worse still, have the trouble maker killed.
The judiciary, i.e. the courts and the judges, are a part
of the CCP, i.e. they are under CCP control, not
independent. They are a part of the problem. So there
is no effective “escape valve” for ordinary Chinese
citizens to sue the corrupt officials. Actually, there is
some. The CCP has made some concession to the
growing frustrations of the Chinese people, so they
do provide some legal escape valve, but it is notenough, and of course, it cannot be enough, because
if it were, the whole CCP would be made illegal.
As business people become more powerful, they wish
to be free of corrupt officials. For example, and this
is only a small case, a friend of my Chinese wife has
a small retail business, selling light fittings, etc. She
complains of having to wine and dine corrupt local
officials, so that they will not make life difficult for
her, by imposing petty bi-laws that block her business.
If such things happened in the west, then the business
friend could simply go to a lawyer or to the local
council and complain. If the city council did nothing,
which would be unlikely, then the business friend
could go to the local paper and kick up a stink that
the mayor of the city allows such corrupt practices to
continue. The mayor would then face a torrent of
negative publicity, and would then probably lose the
next elections.
Thus the existence of an independent judiciary (i.e.
independent of the politicians), the existence of a free
(muck raking) press, and a democratically elected
mayor, and higher officials, all the way to the top (i.e.
presidents and prime ministers of countries) makes
such massive scale corruption virtually impossible in
democratic countries. Of course, corruption still goeson, but it is usually far more hidden, more subtle,
because the corruptors know they have the cards
stacked against them in democratic countries.
But, the cards are stacked in favor of corruptors in
China. Corruption is one of the greatest sources of
resentment and anger against the CCP and the lack of
democracy that, if it existed in China, would “quickly
kill mass corruption”.
So to thinking educated people, who are conscious of
the level of corruption in China, the need for
democratic reforms is obvious. Unfortunately, only a
small proportion of the Chinese public is well
educated, and conscious enough to know that so
much of China’s corruption problem is due to a lack
of the basic institutions of democracy that any high
school student would know about in the west.
The CCP deliberately makes it difficult for the
Chinese public to become educated into the basic
concepts of democracy, e.g. :-
a) Free periodic multi-party elections to choose the
leaders, forcing them to do a good job and to please
the majority of the voters, otherwise they are replaced
at the next election by an opposition party, which is
always hungry to get into power. This is the basicnotion of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, i.e. that the
people make a contract with the leaders that they are
to serve the people (not vice versa). If the leaders do
a bad job, the contract is broken and a new set of
leaders is selected (i.e. voted in) by the people.
b) An independent judiciary, so that legal disputes
can be resolved, without the collusion of politicians.
c) A free press, to muckrake scandals and
corruption by politicians and officials.
d) The right to form trade unions, so that employers
cannot exploit their employees by making excessive
profits.
e) The right to free speech, so that people can feel
free to complain about things they feel oppress them,
or to disagree with current ideas or ideologies pushed
by the politicians etc.
f) The right of assembly, i.e. the right to form
organizations to contest political power or to lobby
those in power, or to protest against those in power.
g) Freedom of religion, i.e. one is free to believe
whatever religion one wants, and not be persecuted
because of a particular belief.h)
Etc.
China and several dozen other third world nations do
not have these basic democratic institutions. These
countries are still politically underdeveloped, and
their populations suffer correspondingly.
Personally, I may live another 30 years in China. I
expect to see the country go democratic during the
first half of that period, and I expect to see a new
modern China emerge from that transition in the
second half. I then anticipate an explosion of Chinese
creativity, as over a billion people become energized
by the new China, with a new pride in their new
dominant place in the world. Once China fully taps
into its enormous potential, its intelligence, its
incredible energy, its large population, its raw
materials, and its rich cultural history, it will change
not only itself, but the whole world. The 21 st century
will be China’s.
But, China has to get through the next decade or two,
to make that transition, and I hope it can be done
smoothly. In Chapter 2, I laid out a basic plan as to
how the CCP could reform itself.Actually, I consider that the a priori odds that China’s
transition to democracy will be smooth are quite
good. This opinion is based on empirical
observations taken from the branch of political
science called “transitology” which studies how
countries switch from dictatorial regimes to
democratic regimes.
It has noted that in the last few decades, in the so-
called “third wave” of global democratization, in
which southern and eastern Europe went democratic,
so too with Russia, and many Asian countries, that in
about three quarters of these cases, the transition
itself did not come from “people power”, i.e. it was
not the case that the people overthrew the regime in
an act of mass collective defiance of the regime, but
rather that a democratically minded faction inside the
dictatorial regime grabbed power, and led the country
into becoming a democratic state.
The fact that this is by far the most common route to
democracy augurs well for China. Perhaps some not
so young Chinese “Gorbachev” is waiting for his
moment in the hierarchy of the CCP to lead China
into democracy, by reforming the CCP into a new
democratic entity, with a new name, a new doctrine,
but with many of the same human players, many of
whom may be very happy to be part of a modern,democratic China, i.e. a China they can finally be
proud of, and not ashamed of, because it will lose its
backwardness, its corruption, its dishonesty and
poverty.
With the rise of the internet, and especially
broadband internet, it is inevitable that hundreds of
millions of Chinese will be exposed to ideas from the
west. In practice, they will be largely intellectually
colonized by them, for the simple reason that Chinese
intellectual, scientific, technical culture is highly
underdeveloped at the time of writing. There are far
too few highly educated intellectuals in China, and
they are not free to say what they think.
At the time of writing, most of the world’s new ideas
come from the west, so until China becomes a highly
developed country, with freedom of speech, and with
large numbers of well educated and articulate
intellectuals, it is inevitable that when China does
open itself up fully to the broadband internet of the
world, its intellectuals will be largely westernized (at
least at first). China has such a long way to catch up
with the west, in all fields, especially in politics.
As millions of Chinese business people and Chinese
tourists travel to other countries and see how much
richer they are, how much freer, how much morepolitically developed, how much more generous and
happier they are, then they will feel ashamed of
China and be motivated to see China modernize, i.e.
become a democracy, so that China can achieve its
full potential.
A similar story holds for Chinese overseas students.
China sends its brightest students to the west, largely
to the US and to Europe, who, in 2/3 of cases, return
to China, having been westernized to a large extent.
There are hundreds of thousands of such students,
probably including the future leaders of China. Since
these students are China’s brightest, they will have a
powerful influence on China’s future. Since many of
them will feel ashamed of China’s current
inferiorities, many of them will be keen to modernize
China by helping to make it democratic.
China exists in a world that it becoming ever more
democratic. China has many neighboring or near
neighboring countries that are already democratic. If
China is slow at democratizing, then sooner or later,
all its neighbors will be democratic states. This
international pressure on China will help push it to
become a democracy.
The most powerful force it seems in causing a
dictatorial state to become a democracy is the rise ofthe middle class. There are already some 100 million
middle class people in China. They will increasingly
have the internet and will demand a stronger say in
the choice of who rules them. Being middle class,
they will be far better educated than the traditional
Chinese peasant farmer. They will be more
intellectually critical and demand the right to vote
incompetent or corrupt politicians out of office.
They will argue that a monopoly company in a
particular business area is bad for competitive service,
because there is no competition to keep the company
on its toes. A monopoly company can afford to be lax
and offer poor service to the public.
Similarly with government - a dictatorship can afford
to be lax in terms of settling the grievances of its
population. Having a rival opposition party in the
parliament, keeps the (elected) party which is
currently in power on its toes, otherwise it will be
voted out at the next election for not having done a
good enough job. Elections (i.e. democracy) keep
governments efficient and doing what the majority of
the public wants.
The Individual DisrespectedIn my first weeks in China, living full time, I was
rudely shocked to learn to what extent the individual
is not important, not respected in China. In my first
(university professor) job in China, I had a dishonest
dean, who would tell me what I wanted to hear, but
not seem to care that his half lies would soon be
discovered, and that my contempt for his cunning and
deception would make him lose respect in my eyes.
To keep things concrete and so that readers can judge
for themselves, I recount the following events. I use
this case as an example of a mentality that is all too
common, I’m told in China. If, in the 2010s, when
large numbers of westerners come to China, attracted
by Chinese salaries, the type of thing that happened
to me is fairly typical, then China will rapidly get a
bad reputation in the west for being “dishonest”, so
that westerners stop coming to China. If that happens,
it will hurt China very much. It would mean that
China will never become “Number One”, because for
any country to become “topdog”, it has to attract and
keep its talented foreigners.
Here is what happened to me.
Prior to moving to China, I had negotiated a contract
with my future dean. Based on the agreed terms of
that contract, I quit my US job, shipped my 10,000books, and moved to China – a major commitment
and life change.
When I arrived, the “dishonesty” problems started.
For example, I was told during the contract
negotiations with the dean that I would not have any
summer course teaching. When I arrived, he said my
salary was so high that I had to justify it with extra
courses (i.e. summer teaching). A few months after
arrival, I was told by the dean that I had been made a
full professor of the university by his school (as we
had agreed in the contract). I later found out that his
school had no power to do that. I then had to go
through the main university selection procedure.
I was told by the dean in the contract negotiations
that I would have PhD students to supervise. Much
later, I learned that the main university decided to
give the school only four PhD supervisor positions
(in the school’s new PhD program). My dean then
held a snap meeting to select those four, while I and
other senior people were out of town. He selected his
cronies, who in some cases were far less qualified
than those who were excluded. After a year of such
events, I got totally fed up and voted with my feet. I
moved to another university.Such dishonesty would not be tolerated in the west.
Such a person would be quickly fired, and no one
would talk to him, but this happened in China, where
moral standards are much lower, and where there is
little tradition of respecting the rights of the
individual, the way that democratic countries tend to
breed into people. My impression is that in China, if
you have dealings with people who are outside your
social circle, then you are “free bait” to be exploited,
to be used, to be abused.
This is a commonly held attitude in China that
disgusts and shocks westerners, because it exists only
rarely in the west. I suppose it should be expected in
a culture that is thousands of years old, that has been
poor and undemocratic for all that time, that it would
breed a “mean spiritedness” in people, and make
people tend to abuse others.
My Chinese wife tells me that prior to Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, in which people were encouraged to spy
and betray each other, that behavior towards each
other in China was much more generous. I hope she
is right. I hope that what I personally was the victim
of is not the result of deep seated Chinese cultural
attitudes that have taken thousands of years to
develop. If so, then such attitudes may only be
eradicated with great difficulty, perhaps takingseveral generations of “heavy social engineering”
based on living in a materially rich, democratic
culture that tends to make people more generous.
Only then might Chinese “mean spiritedness” (i.e. the
attitude that it is acceptable to abuse the rights of
others) gradually die out.
I really hope my Chinese wife is correct, and that
these attitudes are the result of a short historical
period that can be wiped out fairly quickly, once
people get richer in China. But, if these Chinese
attitudes of cunning, of deception, and abuse of the
rights and respect of the individual, are deeply
cultural, and (as suggested above) may take many
decades to be wiped out, then I fear that they will
cause China to pay a very heavy price.
What might this price be? As stated several times in
this book, China has been the dominant nation for
many many centuries, so it is a powerful part of
China’s self image to be “Number One”, the most
civilized nation on the planet, the “middle nation”. In
fact, China’s name in Chinese is “Zhong Guo”
(pronounced “joong gwor”), which translates as
“middle country”.
I suspect that the major psychological factor
explaining China’s incredible energy that has made itthe fastest growing economy and country in the
world is a result of wounded pride. At a deep level,
Chinese want to be rich, to be respected on the world
stage, especially after being so humiliated and abused
by the European, American and Japanese powers,
these past two centuries.
So it is a source of tremendous pride to Chinese to
feel that they are roaring back this century to being
“Number One” again. But this feeling may be short
lived. Let me explain.
We don't live in a world of isolated nation states any
more. The western world, particularly Europe, lives
increasingly in a growing world state, with a growing
world language, a growing world culture that China
is still only beginning to be conscious of. China’s
poverty and its CCP still largely keep China cut off
from this growing world culture.
In this growing world culture, people are free to
move where they want to work, more or less. In the
20 th century, the best brains often chose to work in
the US, because there they could get a high salary
and were welcomed into the (migrant) American
culture.If China wants to be “Number One” this century,
then it too will have to attract and keep the best
brains in the world. If China continues to grow a lot
faster than the rest of the world, then it will be able to
attract easily the best brains, with high, rich, Chinese
salaries.
But, what if Chinese culture, i.e. Chinese values,
deep seated ones, are repulsive to the rest of the
world, especially to western countries? What would
happen to China’s chances of being “Number One”
then?
They would be dashed.
China is the world’s most populous nation at the time
of writing (although India is catching up fast, with
nearly 1.2 billion people, to China’s 1.3 billion). But
even the biggest nation has only 20% of the world’s
population. If some other place, outside China, this
century, becomes the intellectual Mecca of the planet,
then China cannot compete with the other 80%, a
mass of people four times bigger.
If the intellectual Mecca is truly attractive, then it
may also attract China’s best brains, the way the US
still does today. If this happens, then China will never
be “Number One”, and will have to suffer the defeatof being forced to abandon its dream of returning to
its long held position of being “middle country”, i.e.
top dog. The pain of this defeat will be severe.
At the present time, the Chinese population lives in
the hope of returning this century to its old dominant
spot. But that is not a decision that can be made by
the Chinese alone. It is also a decision to be made by
all the many talented foreigners, who will vote with
their feet as to whether they choose to migrate to
China, and more importantly, whether they decide to
stay in China.
If someone asked me to look into a crystal ball and
predict the major reason why China “failed” to
become “Number One” this century (assuming that
this is what happens, as judged 50 years from the
time of writing), then I would answer, “Because the
foreigners, especially the highly educated, highly
intelligent westerners, could not tolerate Chinese
values, and in particular, Chinese traditional attitudes
towards other Chinese and especially towards
foreigners”.
For example, if the negative experiences that
happened to me with my dean during my first year in
China are fairly typical, (and my research students
tell me that such behaviors and attitudes are verycommon in China) then I can imagine in the second
decade from the time of writing (i.e. roughly over the
period 2015-2025) China will be “judged” by a large
number of talented foreigners who will be living in
China during that period.
If by the end of that decade, most of them vote with
their feet, one by one, by leaving China, then China
will gain a bad reputation in the west as being “unfit
for westerners to live in”. If the major reason why the
westerners feel in the future, that China is not a fit
country to live in, is because of Chinese dishonesty,
Chinese deception, Chinese abusive cunning, and
lack of respect of the rights of the individual, then I
would not be very surprised.
It would be a tragedy for China if it gets a bad
reputation in the west of being full of (to use the
abusive term) “lying chinks”. (A “chink” is a
derogatory slang term for a Chinese person. In
political correctness terms, it has about the same
weight as the term “nigger”).
China will start being judged in about a decade, not
now. I feel I’m about a decade too soon in China, but
because of my age, (I’m 60 at the time of writing) I
would be getting a bit old at 70 to make a major
cultural shift and adaptation, so I chose to come toChina now, and be the “cultural anthropologist” now,
watching China go through its major adaptations,
including I hope, and not too far into the future, its
transition to democracy, and then witness the
incredible flowering of creativity I expect to see
come from a democratic, modern China.
China should pay close heed to what happened to
Japan in the 1990s. During the 1980s and early 1990s,
Japan really thought it might become “Number One”,
and wrote many books on this theme. However, in
practice, the many talented foreigners who lived in
Japan in the 1990s, including myself, nearly all left,
in disgust, feeling that Japan was not a fit country to
live in.
Japan is now doomed to never be “Number One”. It
can’t do it on its own, its way too small - only a half
the size of the US population and a mere tenth of
China’s population. So Japan’s dream of being “ichi
ban” has evaporated, leaving only a wounded
national pride in Japan, with only the Japanese to
blame. The Japanese failed the “can we attract and
keep the talented foreigners” test, largely due to their
deep seated racism, their “them and us” mentality,
that the foreigners could not stomach, so they decided
to leave the country. They voted with their feet.What China needs to pay heed to is to ensure that
there are no similar deeply repulsive features in the
Chinese mentality that may push the foreigners away.
If the Japanese “failed the test” for being “Jap
racists”, could it be in the future that the Chinese will
“fail the test” for being “Chink liars”. It could very
well happen.
The westerners will simply not tolerate being lied to
everywhere they turn in China. They will simply go
somewhere else, and somewhere else will become
“Number One”. Maybe India? It too is growing well,
and is already a democracy.
What impact will GloMedia and other modernizing
forces have on China’s disrespect of the individual? I
think that once China becomes a democratic nation,
the old behavior of being sneaky, cunning, lying, will
be seen as being “old China” and be scorned,
especially by the young generation. Also older
Chinese will have to unlearn these old habits quickly
or they will be sued. Once a system of law is installed,
and there are many more lawyers, then being abused,
especially in business, will not be tolerated, and
victims will take their abusers to court. I suspect that
within a decade after the transition to democracy,
traditional Chinese deception and abuse of the
individual will have largely died out, killed offthrough fear of being sued and by being utterly
discredited.
Sloths
I hope that several more decades of capitalist
competition and the complete destruction of the “iron
rice bowl” system will cause China to lose what I call
its “intellectual sloth”, i.e. a form of intellectual
laziness that shocks westerners. The disadvantage of
the “iron rice bowl”, i.e. one that will not break,
implying employment for life in a CCP controlled
industry, is that one cannot be fired, no matter how
poor a job one does. Hence it is not surprising that
many people become sloths. They lose their
motivation to work well, because they have no fear of
being fired if they don't work well.
Capitalist competition forces higher levels of
customer service. I remember being stunned one
afternoon by my Chinese wife who led the two of us
into a state-controlled canteen, and banged her hand
down on the table demanding service in an extremely
(by western standards) imperious and rude manner.
When I asked why she did that (she is after all a
general’s daughter), she said it was an iron rice bowl
restaurant and that the waitresses didn't give a hootabout good service. All they wanted was to pick up
their pay checks, and expend minimum effort. They
knew they couldn't be fired as a result. They had
nothing to fear from their sloth. My wife’s table
banging was so obnoxious that everyone looked, and
a waitress hurried over to shut up the noise.
In government travel services, e.g. buying a railway
ticket, you can come across people whom I label
“boo jer dowers” (i.e. people who say in Chinese “I
don't know”, with a vapid look on their face, not
bothering to wake up their brains to think). I despise
such people. They are an affront to intellectuality and
to all that I hold dear.
Sometimes service can be really bad that way, but it
does depend on which city in China one is in. In the
southern and eastern modern cities, intellectual sloth
is much less prevalent, even dying out. Recently,
private airlines have been increasing their
competitive pressure on the railways, so even in the
short year I have been living in China I have seen the
level of service go up in the trains. A year ago, toilets
on trains would fill up and stink because the trains
had run out of flushing water.
Fortunately, such incompetence and disorganization I
have not seen lately. The government in Beijing hasplanned to phase out the state owned industries, and
to allow them to go bankrupt, but not too fast and not
all at once, because an army of unemployed in
Beijing could bring down the government.
Closer to home, I saw a real “bujerdower” in the
foreign affairs office of my former school. American
professors would visit, and have their administrative
needs taken care of by her. She was lazy and
incompetent, except for when it came to buttering up
to the few people who might get her a promotion, by
becoming a crony of theirs. I remember one
prominent US professor say to me privately, “You
know Hugo, if that woman were my secretary, I’d
fire her”. That was my cue to explaining to him the
concept of the iron rice bowl. The American
professor just shook his head in resignation, probably
thinking, “Thank god I live in the US”.
The peasants are notoriously intellectually lazy. They
give the impression of being half asleep sometimes.
Perhaps one gets like that sitting on a water buffalo
all day, ploughing up the rice paddy?! Since I don't
have much to do with peasants (all 600+ million of
them in China), except for the dirt that they generate
in the streets, I don't know them well enough to have
first hand experience of their attitudes to life. Thatwill be for my future, once I’m fluent in Chinese and
can chat with them, tapping their minds.
Shenzhen and Guangzhou show me that China can
become modern, intellectually awake and efficient.
Other cities will quickly follow suit, and, over time,
(not over too many decades I hope), the whole of
China. If China wants to be “Number One”, it cannot
afford its current reputation of being a nation of
“intellectual sloths” and the mass inefficiency that
that creates. No country can ever become “Number
One” if it takes days to weeks to organize something
that takes westerners a day.
Guanxi, not Rule of Law
One aspect of Chinese life I’m confronted with every
time I socialize or step out with my Chinese wife, is
the phenomenon of “guanxi” (pronounced “gwun
shee”). Guanxi means “relations”, i.e. who you know
who can help you reach some goal. For example,
imagine you want to get a cheaper price for a room at
a hotel. If you know the hotel manager, he might give
you a hefty reduction. You have guanxi.
One time, my wife and I were in a tourist bus that
was stopped by a corrupt policeman to have it pay a“trumped up fine” (in the judgment of my Chinese
wife, who said she had had many such experiences).
She said to me that if the fine were large enough, she
could make one phone call and have it squashed, and
have trouble made for the crooked cop. Being a
general’s daughter, she knew lots of powerful people
who could “pull strings” (which is probably the
closest translation of the term “guanxi” in English).
But guanxi is everywhere in China. It is the basic
social device that makes things happen in China.
Westerners call it cronyism, nepotism, favoritism,
dishonesty, putting family first, unfair, etc. I can
understand where it comes from historically. China
has never been a democracy. It has never had a
modern system of law, where laws are made for the
common good, created by elected politicians.
In deeply corrupt and oppressive regimes, over
thousands of years, guanxi would offer some degree
of protection amongst friends and close
acquaintances. There is even “honor amongst
thieves” in a sense, but I truly hope in a modern
democratic China, with a properly developed rule of
law, that there will be far less need for guanxi, to the
extent that it currently exists. Of course, there will
always be “can you do me a favor”, but not the
suffocating guanxi that exists at the time of writing,which is so unfair and unjust in so many respects.
The prevalence of guanxi in China is indicative of the
country’s political and social backwardness.
Puritanical
How can China rid itself of its terrible sexual poverty
and ignorance? I see several essential steps that are
needed. The main one is to democratize the country,
so that a dictatorial government cannot impose its
sexual standards upon a billion people. Once the CCP
falls, or reforms itself into a modern democratic party,
the sexual censorship it so notoriously generates will
disappear. Hundreds of millions of Chinese will then
be free to absorb what they want about sex from the
internet, the bookstores and the media. It is then
highly likely that Chinese book publishers will churn
out “how to” sex books to educate the Chinese on
how to have much better sex. That in turn will “free
up” the Chinese sexually, and make them happier.
Generally speaking, a person who has 200 orgasms a
year is happier than a person who has only 20.
As the GloMedia gradually comes into being,
Chinese people will be exposed more to the sexual
attitudes and customs of other cultures and can learn
from them. They will see with their own eyes on theirvids and by touristing, the much healthier sexual
attitudes of other peoples and be influenced by them.
They too will be flooded by sexual images in a
modern advertising world, and by the many sex
education books in the book stores. The media will
be freer to educate the Chinese public into superior
sexual techniques, so that the general level of sexual
satisfaction increases and the Chinese lose a lot of
their traditional “mean spiritedness”, so much of
which is derived from a deep seated sexual repression.
Given the depth and strength of the culture, and its
incredible age, it is likely that there will be a
generation gap on sexual attitudes. The older
generation will probably keep its repressive “yellow
book” mentality towards sex, i.e. not see it as a joyful
activity, but rather something as furtive and negative,
whereas the more globalized younger generation will
reject these older attitudes and adopt a more open
and accepting attitude towards sexuality. As a result,
Chinese couples will simply live together more often,
and there will be far fewer sexual surprises (and bitter
disappointments) on “wedding nights”, as the number
of wedding nights dwindles away to zero, as is more
or less the case in the richest and most socially
advanced countries.I feel sorry for so many Chinese on the sexual front.
They seem to have so little sexual joy, living in their
state of sexual deprivation, repression and poverty. I
truly see China’s democratization not only as a
source to liberate China’s politics, but also its
bedrooms. A billion Chinese will then be so much
happier. Under the current repressive regime and
cultural sexual ignorance, there are too few Chinese
living sexually blissful lives.
Two and a Half Years in China
The paragraphs of this section were the last to be
written in this book. They reflect my opinions on
China after having lived in the country full time for
two and a half years. The earlier sections on China
were written after having lived only one year in the
country, so this section will be better informed and
less naïve than the above sections.
So, what is my global assessment of China after
having lived in the country for two and a half years?
Speaking bluntly (as I usually do in this book) I
would summarize China as being “the fastest
changing shit hole country in the world”. I have very
mixed feelings about China. I’m both amazed and
disgusted at the same time. I’m still living in China,so obviously, on balance, the pros must outweigh the
cons for me, but both are considerable.
There are days when I ask myself, “My god, why on
earth am I living in this bottom third, low status
backwater, that is so politically primitive, it is not
even a democracy, that is as underdeveloped as the
“bottom nations” of the earth (i.e. largely the African
black and the Arab nations)?”
This book, for example, which I now know is to be
published in the US, will definitely not be published
in China. A potential Chinese translator, who has
already translated about 100 books from English into
Chinese, including some famous ones, stated quite
clearly to me that this book would be considered
“dangerous” by the Chinese government, and would
only get me into trouble, i.e. thrown out of the
country, so I will have to wait the 10 to 15 years
necessary for China to become rich enough to
transition to democracy before it can be published.
(My first book, on the rise of massively intelligent
machines, called “The Artilect War: A Bitter
Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should
Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines” was
published in both the US (by ETC Publications,
2005), and in China (by Tsinghua University Press,
2007)).Not being permitted to publish one’s books in a
country is of course by western standards, incredibly
primitive. Freedom of speech is taken for granted in
most countries on the earth, i.e. 2/3 of them now.
China is like Burma, a brutal dictatorship, in the
sense that intellectuals like myself are not free to say
what they think. That really “pisses me off”. After
having lived in 6 previous countries, all of which
were rich democracies (Australia, England, Holland,
Belgium, Japan, America), not being able to
intellectualize in public is a major “black mark”
against China.
So, after two and a half years, what is keeping me in
China, if I have such negative feelings about the
place? In a word - “opportunities”. As I write these
words, President Obama has just been inaugurated,
and the western recession is really starting to bite, so
it looks as though the relative strength of China vs.
the US, will only tip increasingly in favor of China.
I’m in China for the long haul, i.e. perhaps for the
next 10-15 years of my career, and perhaps even for
retirement, although I’m not sure yet about where I
want to grow really old.
As an example of China’s superior opportunities,
given its superior economic growth rates, I use myown case to illustrate the point. I have spent the past
year at a university on the south-east coast of China,
where the weather is balmy and the lifestyle is
distinctly more modern, more honest, and better
organized than in the more centrally located city I
lived in during the first year and a half.
My new university contracted me to be the director of
an Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) with a budget of
3,000,000 RMB, and the freedom to teach what I
liked. (I chose to teach pure math and mathematical
physics to graduate students in the 3 departments of
computer science, physics, and mathematics, on the
topic of Topological Quantum Computing (TQC),
which promises to make quantum computers, with
their exponentially superior computing power, robust
against noise, which is the major problem preventing
large scale quantum computers from existing today. I
am contracted by the way to write a book on
Artificial Brains by the end of 2009 and another on
TQC by the end of 2010).
Within a few months, the ABL’s budget had doubled,
thanks to the ambitions of my young dean. A few
months after that, the government of the province
made the lab a “provincial key lab”, with a further
4,000,000 RMB, taking the total to 10,000,000 RMB.
I have thus plenty of money to build the brain. TheChinese government, both at province level and
federal level, is very keen to develop high tech
research and is prepared to put big money into it.
Believe me, ask any western research professor, just
how attractive such a deal would be, i.e. to be given a
ten million RMB budget and complete freedom to
teach what one likes. It is undeniably attractive. Such
circumstances are the great attraction of China for me
and are the main reasons for keeping me in China.
My American friends and colleagues have been
looking closely at what has been happening to me in
China and have been amazed. Not surprisingly, a
growing number of them have decided to do the same,
i.e. to emigrate from the US to China, at least part
time at first, and for some, full time.
Thus one is beginning to see the early signs of a
“reverse brain drain”. Traditionally, one has seen
the most capable Chinese university students move to
the US or Europe to do their PhDs, and many of them
choose never to return to China, to its grossly inferior
salaries and its social/political backwardness.
But as anyone can predict, if China continues to grow
economically at a rate greatly superior to that of the
US, and with its 4 times larger population, it is only aquestion of time before China becomes the new
“number one” this century, i.e. the “China rising”
phenomenon.
I am very conscious of this reasoning, and being a
very forward thinking, future oriented person, I tell
myself that I’m in the right place, the right country,
but I do ask myself frequently, “Am I here too soon?”
On the down side, is the sheer lack of development of
China. I see it in the faces of the peasants, in their
hundreds of millions, namely, the dirty, unwashed,
ignorant, brutal poverty that dominates their daily
lives. International statistics show that the Chinese
have an average annual income of about
$3000/year/person (in exchange rate terms), which is
about 20 times smaller than that of the richest
countries, situated mostly in Europe and the US. The
brute reality is that China is a poor country, what I
call a “bottom third, low status” nation (as I used in
an earlier paragraph in this section).
I am not PC (i.e. politically correct). I prefer negative
truths to diplomatic lies. I have lived in too many
countries to be interested in protecting national egos.
I much prefer stating what I see as the truth, even if it
hurts the self images of monos. In China’s case, I see
a people who have a long way to go to catch up withthe west in terms of education, democracy, life styles,
sex roles, sex education, international travel, internet
access, living standards, self fulfillment, political
assertion, etc.
In many ways, I feel degraded living in China. I feel
that it is a culture unworthy of me to be living in. I
have lived in the best, most developed cultures on the
planet, including the US, Europe, and Japan, so with
such a basis for comparison, living in China’s 3 rd
world backwardness is frustrating.
I survive largely by isolating myself in an “ivory
tower”, living a “life of the mind”, surrounded by my
12,500 paper books in my private library and more
than 30,000 electronic books and papers. Absorbing
such knowledge can be done anywhere on the planet,
as long as one has access to broad band internet. Thus
the frustrations of daily life in China are minimized,
so that I can survive in reasonable mental health, with
not too much psychological stress and frustration at
China’s daily inferiorities.
After two and a half years, how have my views on
China and the Chinese changed compared to what I
wrote earlier in the previous paragraphs? My views
are largely the same, except perhaps I wouldemphasize more the “intellectual slothfulness” of the
Chinese mentality.
The Americans have an expression, “When the going
gets tough, the tough (minded people) get going”,
whereas in China, I notice, there seems to be more of
an attitude of “minimizing intellectual effort”, or
mental laziness. I notice it with my students, and
even with my Chinese wife. The Chinese definitely
do not have the Japanese “gambare” (i.e. persistence).
I suspect that there is a correlation between the level
of tough minded discipline of a people and their
standard of living. Look at the Germans, the Japanese,
and the Americans, on the one hand, and the black
Africans and Arabs on the other. In the latter case,
both groups have a bad international reputation of
having “no can do” attitudes towards performing
difficult tasks. This attitude does not generate respect
from “first worlders”. The Chinese are not much
better on the whole.
I can understand a reluctance to persist at a task if
that task has been imposed on someone by a
dictatorial source. For example, my dean simply
ordered various junior professors to work in my lab,
independently of whether they were interested in the
topic or not. This shocked me. Not surprisingly, thosewho were not interested and who had other agendas
were not motivated to work hard at the job at hand.
Under Mao, most tasks were imposed. There was
very little freedom of choice of jobs. After 30 years
of this under Mao, I can understand the Chinese
attitude of “doing as little as possible so as not to
attract (negative) attention”. It is a rational strategy
under a Maoist type dictatorship, but is a mentality
that is quite unworthy of survival in a modern
democracy (that China is yet to become).
I see China’s biggest problem as its government. It is
keeping China backward. It stops its citizens from
absorbing the television of its neighbors. For example,
to get access to the “BBC World” and “CNN”
television channels, I had to employ a Chinese
company to install an illegal satellite dish that was
quasi hidden at the top of my apartment building.
Once the present CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is
replaced by a democratic government, then the
Chinese people can be exposed far more readily to
the growing world community with its global
mentality that this book is mostly about. The Chinese
people will be given the television of many of their
neighboring countries. Most Chinese have no idea
how backward China is compared to most of theworld, except perhaps for a superficial idea of how
much richer Americans are than Chinese, judging by
the standard of living shown in American movies.
Most Chinese I talk to know almost nothing about the
atrocities committed against the Chinese people by
Mao, by the CCP, nor that two thirds of countries on
the planet are already democracies, nor that the CCP
is deliberately keeping the Chinese people ignorant
so that it can stay in power a few years more, before
it is inevitably kicked out by the rising Chinese
middle class (now estimated to number between 100
to 200 million people) as has already happened in
roughly 100 countries over the past half century.
There is a mean spiritedness in the Chinese mentality
that I find terribly unattractive. My Chinese wife says
that before Mao’s “cultural revolution” in the 1960s
and 1970s, the Chinese were a much more generous,
kinder people, but considering the suspicion fostered
in Mao’s China, where children were encouraged to
spy on their parents, neighbor on neighbor etc, in a
brutal authoritarian state, mutual trust was the victim.
China now has more internet users than the US, so
the rising younger Chinese, especially the university
educated Chinese know that their own government is
censoring them, denying them freedom of speech.Most educated young Chinese would prefer to live in
a democracy and feel cynical about their own
government. They only tolerate it because at least it
has given them the world’s best economic growth
rates (over a period of 30 years, since the Deng
Xiaoping reforms of the late 1970s).
It may be interesting to speculate that the US created
world recession may have an interesting side effect,
namely the downfall of the CCP, and hence the
democratization of 20% of the world’s population,
which would be a significant and historical event,
when it eventually happens.
Many Chinese political economists claim that China
needs a minimum GNP economic growth rate of
about 8% per year to be able to absorb the huge
influx of peasants coming from western China,
seeking a superior economic standard of living in the
eastern cities.
With recession in the western countries, China’s
economic growth rate has nose dived, and its export
industries have been hit hard by the downturn in
export orders from the western countries. This has
resulted in massive lay offs due to company
bankruptcies and hence greater resentment against
the CCP.One of the colleagues in my lab, a young postdoc,
says that the general feeling in China is that the CCP
is tolerated by most Chinese people, even though it is
not elected, so long as it continues to deliver high
economic growth rates. If that growth disappears, and
people lose their jobs, general frustration against the
government will rise.
There are already thousands of isolated political
protests against the government each year and the
number is growing. These protests usually reflect the
lack of development of legal institutions in China.
The peasants have little redress against corrupt local
CCP politicians who exploit them, making the
peasants angry and bitter.
My prediction in earlier sections that China will
make the transition to democracy in about 10-15
years from the time of writing, (i.e. around the year
2020) may be accelerated by the surprise recession in
the US, and (because of the economic dominance still
of the US economy), the rest of the trading world,
this transition may even occur within 5 years,
depending on how low China’s economic growth rate
falls.The transition will probably occur first in the eastern
Chinese cities which already have a sizable middle
class. Once a critical mass of educated middle class
Chinese start to feel that the CCP is no longer useful,
i.e. is no longer delivering the economic goods, then
its inherent inferiorities, i.e. its lack of legitimacy, i.e.
its not being chosen, not being elected by the Chinese
people, will become a major source of resentment
and frustration.
Any monopoly institution, whether commercial or
governmental, is prone to inefficiency. When there is
no competing institution to keep the first institution
on its toes, motivation to provide efficient service to
its clientele or its citizens tends to slide. In my own
case, I noticed that the CCP bureaucracy of my
university would often take several months to rubber
stamp a form that would take an American university
administration a week. It is maddening.
That same university has rules that in practice have
caused me to have no PhD students until after 18
months of the ABL project starting. Thus I have
plenty of money, but too few full time workers to do
the real work. Thus, due to the inefficiencies of the
university administration, the money is fine, but the
personnel is not. What the left hand is giving, the
right hand is taking away.But, since ultimately, it is the money that counts, I
will be able to bring in talented westerners to do the
work, and have them paid by Chinese grants. That
way, China gets the credit. It’s a pity however that
my university’s CCP based administration is so
inefficient. I would like to see them booted out and
replaced by a system that has accountability, i.e.
elected, and if the elected administration does a poor
job, then they can be voted out and replaced by
alternative candidates who are willing to do a better
job.
I would like to see the same principle applied to all
levels of government, including at highest levels, in
Beijing. Recently, some Chinese academic and
professional people signed a document called
“Charter 2008”, which advocated China becoming a
democracy. Within days, the Chinese police were
harassing the signatories.
Such harassment disgusts me. It is such disgust that
makes me feel that China is truly a “shit hole
country”. It deserves this terribly contemptuous title.
CCP inefficiencies exist at every level and largely for
the same reason, i.e. the lack of competition, and
hence the possibility of corruption, as mentioned inan earlier section. With no free press, such corrupt
practices go more easily undetected and unpunished.
The local victims of such corruption and inefficiency
are well aware of the injustice of such practices and
treat the CCP with growing contempt. The initial
civic mindedness of the CCP in the pre 1949 days
(when the CCP became the ruling party after a bitter
civil war against Chiang Kai-shek) has long vanished.
Mao promised the peasants democracy, but once he
took power, he “forgot all about it”, and became a
modern emperor with murderous dictatorial powers,
killing about 70 million Chinese, the greatest
criminal dictator in history.
Imagine then that the western recession is long, and
that the CCP is unable to prevent the unemployment
rate from increasing significantly. What is then likely
to happen? Protests will break out at a greater rate,
and in many cities. Perhaps then the middle and
intellectual classes (or a democratic faction within the
CCP) may feel the time is ripe to launch a Chinese
democratic party. With the internet, cell phones, etc,
it will be relatively easy to spread the word.
Once one city makes a declaration of independence
from the CCP, it is likely that many other cities will
quickly follow. This is what happened in 1911, whenthe city of Guangzhou, under the influence of San
Yat Sen (the father of modern China) declared
independence from the Qing emperor, and quickly
other cities followed.
Once China is a democracy, I anticipate a flowering
of Chinese creativity, and the gradual disappearance
of Chinese mean spiritedness.
Every time I cross the border from Hong Kong to the
neighboring Chinese city of Shenzhen (the richest
city in China) I immediately feel a sharp lowering of
the level of humanity between people.
The Hong Kongers have freedom of speech and are a
lot richer, having lived under British capitalism for a
century and a half. This reflects in their behavior
towards each other. They are much more refined,
gentle, considerate, and humane. On walking a few
hundred meters past the border, one is confronted by
the mainland Chinese, who have lived under 30 years
of Maoist dictatorship.
The Chinese argue with each other, shouting at each
other in a surly, mean spirited way, definitely not
humane. For a westerner it’s difficult to live in such a
culture. It is no wonder I tend to shut myself up in my
ivory tower, taking advantage of the superior aspectsof life in China as a research professor, but at the
same time pouring scorn on China’s many many
inferiorities. I really do feel that in many ways as a
westerner, I’m living about a decade too soon in
China. The culture is simply not developed enough
yet to be considered worthy of a cosmopolitan
western intellectual to live in.