Preface
At the beginning of 2020, when I planned to write this book, a sudden onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the world. Since then, wearing masks, home-quarantine, subway and highway closures, flight groundings, etc., have become the order of the day. The normal order of life, including production and social interaction, instantly changed, as if an unknown spirit pressed the “pause” bottom to some human activities. People from all walks of life are engaged in the battle to save lives and to contain the virus. It is a life and death duel between the plague and human beings, testing human medical and technological capabilities, cognitive judgment, and the ability to organize the prevention of an epidemic. But most fundamentally, it tested a country’s ability to respond and govern when faced with major emergencies.
In 2014, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee proposed major issues for modernizing state governance. Four years later, in 2018, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee reiterated and deployed a strategic plan to achieve the modernization of state governance. The COVID-19 pandemic can be regarded as both a major challenge and an urgent call to improve the national governance capacity of the countries in the world.
A major challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic happens to coincide with the question we are thinking about – how to promote the modernization of national governance, which is the focus of our research. Under this circumstance, the necessity and urgency of this type of research is even more pronounced.
When delving into the modernization of China’s state governance, we find that China’s existing concepts, mechanisms, and methods that are related to state governance can be traced in Chinese history. The wealth of the ancient Chinese wisdom on state governance is still valuable today. This is probably because of the consistency between the governance of China today and that of ancient China.
Vast Territory. Chinese ancestors from the ancient times gradually spread outward from the Yellow River Basin. By the Qing Dynasty(1636-1912), China had developed a national territory roughly as large as that of today. As there were long-standing imbalances in each region’s natural endowments and social development in such a massive space, this requires the deployment and re-balancing of resource allocation, all of which undoubtedly brought challenges to state governance.
Large Population. The Chinese have their own unique philosophy of life – “the more the children, the more the blessings received.” As a result, the population kept growing and gradually expanded outward from the Yellow River Basin. Pieces of newly reclaimed land and the finely cultivated rice fields in the south of the Yangtze River vividly illustrated the two unbreakable views of production – the production of human beings and the production of the means of living, both necessary to sustain human existence. How to make such a huge population effectively organized, functioning, and coordinated is a demanding task for any government.
Ethnic Diversity. When the Chinese nation developed the Yellow River Basin, the ancestors of various ethnic minorities also developed the vast areas in and around China at the same time. The 56 ethnic groups flourish and remain closely united like the seeds of a pomegranate that stick together, and work jointly for common prosperity and development. The contrasting antagonistic and unified relationship between ethnic consciousness and national consciousness was always a challenging and fundamental issue in the social governance of ancient China.
Profound History. The Chinese people have created a splendid and unique Chinese civilization for more than 5,000 years that has a long and continuous origin. China is the world’s oldest civilization in the world. This civilization flows in the blood of the Chinese people and is the most extensive, most profound, and most enduring fundamental force in today’s China. The best way to understand China today is to understand it in of ancient times.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said that “China has an uninterrupted, time-tested civilization of over 5, 000 years. In the course of its long-term evolution, it has formed a unique value system, cultural connotations, and a spiritual quality for the Chinese people to view the world, society, and life, and has forged the cultural confidence of the Chinese nation to learn from all, which is the fundamental characteristic that distinguishes us from other countries and nations.” After 5, 000 years of struggles and success, the essential national elements of territory, population, ethnicity, history, and culture have forged the fundamental philosophy, system, and methodologies of the governance of China, which have stayed as strong as ever.
Thus, reviewing the past has become the spatial and temporal premise for the study of contemporary Chinese national governance and the historical starting point and the sure way for understanding the uniqueness, resilience, and future positioning of Chinese national governance.
Throughout the dynastic changes, thinkers and politicians have focused on summing the lessons learned and accumulating these knowledges over time, constantly improving and reinforcing the edifice of state governance which was dominated by emperorism and in the past thousands of years, creating a dynamic, systematic, complete, and distinctive system of state governance. Here, we will analyze this structure from three aspects: philosophy, system, and methodology.
In terms of philosophy of governance, we summarize and propose thirteen basic concepts which cover the most fundamental ideological propositions of ancient Chinese governance, involving the concept of nature, worldview, morality, values, ecologism, and ruling.
In terms of systems, we have listed thirteen institutions to which ancient China’s governance philosophy and culture are closely related, which embody two distinctive features. First, ideologies shape the political system, and cultures bolster the governance system; second, the core political concepts have been associated with the social structure, ideology, and culture for thousands of years. They were integrated into the institu-tional system of state governance with super-stability and continuity. The deep-rooted core political concept and super-stable federal institutional structure were the fundamental forces that sustained ancient China for 5, 000 years.
In terms of the methodology of governance, we have refined nine major methods, which are not only the classic wisdom of ancient Chinese statesmen in governing the country but also the primary cultural character and ways of thinking that the Chinese people have accumulated throughout their long history, that is, the typical spiritual temperaments of the Chinese people. It is with the help of these methods that, in the practice of state governance for thousands of years with the enduring fundamental philosophy and the basic system, that the Chinese nation has successfully responded to and resolved one risk and crisis after another, including foreign invasions, peasant wars, and natural and manmade disasters. Over her long history, the Chinese nation has been divided and then united, experiencing many twists and turns. With the expansion of the size of the country and its population, the Chinese civilization has become the only ancient civilization that has survived the turbulences of history.
If we compare ancient Chinese governance to a large ship, then the philosophy of governance is the compass, the system is the hull, and the methodology, the sail. The governance methodology provides power to the great ship of Chinese governance and maintains the balance, especially when the ship turns around. The proper use of methods can pull it through crises. The unique roles of ideology, system, and methodology are indispensable to make the Chinese ship brave the winds and waves, going ahead regardless of many setbacks.
Finally, I would like to make two more points.
The first is the uniqueness of ancient Chinese governance. Stability and development (efficiency) are an unavoidable contradiction in political practice but it is the basic goal of any political institution both in ancient and modern times. However, there exist a variety of different political systems from ancient times to the present. The question then is, where did the characteristics of governance in ancient China come from?
There are probably two basic factors: space and time.
Space. Space refers to the regions and the unique features of a local environment which give special characteristics to its inhabitants and forge a cultural pattern. All geographic cultures, including grassland culture, alpine culture, marine culture, plain culture, etc., each reflect distinctive geographical characteristics. As cultures are all born and perpetuated in the joint effort of people and nature, neither is better nor more superior to others. The shape and development of culture, determined by geography, has an inevitable connection to political construction. Therefore, culture (even geography) become the foundation of the political system. In ancient China, high mountains and deserts in the west and oceans in the southeast confined Chinese civilization to a stable space, which ensured the purity and autonomy of Chinese civilization, and at the same time, formed the uniqueness and autogeny of the Chinese political system.
Times. People’s own activities create social productivity; that is, the continuous improvement of people’s own capabilities provides motives to civilization, resulting in social forms with different degrees of development, including economic, political, and cultural forms. Marx believed that “the hand-pushed mill gave rise to a feudal society, while the steam engine ushered an industrial society,” which really makes sense. In this respect, we can safely say that some cultures are distinguished from other cultures. From a primitive society where people used primitive hunting methods to a slavery society, feudal society, capitalist society, and then to the communist society in the future, it is self-evident that Chinese society has continually been making progress. The political system of the ancient China has evolved from the agrarian civilization. The evolution of the Chinese political system continues to reflect the needs of the people in each era of its development and progress, a natural result of enlightened people of these particular eras. These needs are determined by the living environment and reflection on the issues of particular era. For this reason, the basic philosophy and system of state governance in ancient China are considered inherently undesirable compared with that of today. Let us analyze ancient Chinese state governance in terms of the relationship between the fundamental and the incidental. We believe that the correct attitude is to give up the former and stick to the latter. The “fundamental” refers to the essential provisions of ancient Chinese state governance, including the essence of basic governance concepts and basic governance systems, such as emperorism’s concept of the “divine right of kings (jun quan shen shou),” the centralized political system, the highly monopolistic economic system, and the rise of Confucianism as the main state ideology, which was thought to be undesirable and need be discarded. The “incidental” refers to the rich ideas and methods of ancient Chinese state governance, as well as the design and articulation of specific systems, which embody the wisdom of ancient statesmen and should be carefully learned and carried forward.
In short, the unique geographical environment and the needs of people in particular eras are the two inevitable dimensions of our understanding of ancient Chinese state governance and the basic foundation for advocating the creative transformation and innovative development of traditional Chinese culture today.
Chinese and Western cultures complement each other in global governance. As the power of each country waxes and wanes, the balance formed after World War II is collapsing, and the global order and global governance are facing major adjustments. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic worldwide has caused a major global economic recession and worsened the already fractured global order. Reshaping the global order and improving global governance have become the consensus of the international community.
But how does we conduct global governance? Can countries and people with diverse and different cultures in different historical contexts reach a consensus on the future of global governance? Since January 2020, the global ravages of COVID-19 have brought two situations to the fore: first, the idea and need for creating a community of a shared future for all humankind has never been so clearly and forcefully been responded to favourably by people around the world. As the ancient Chinese saying goes, “Fear not the want of armor, for mine is also yours to wear,” and “Though miles apart, we are under the same sky.” Fighting against COVID-19 requires the joint efforts of every country, looking after and helping each other. The sense of a community of a shared future for humans has never been stronger than now. Secondly, although human beings co-exist in a community to fight against epidemics, each country participates in its own way.
The cultural concepts and traditional way of thinking largely influence a nation’s anti-epidemic behavior and may even sway the result of the battle. For example, in East Asian countries dominated by Confucianism, people easily comply with the government’s anti-epidemic requirements, such as wearing masks, closing communities, quarantining when necessary, limiting travel, etc., and in this way COVID-19 can be effectively controlled; while in some Western countries with non-Confucian cultures, people value more personal autonomy and accept the government’s anti-epidemic requirements to a limited extent. Some people resist and reject the government’s regulations. They refuse to wear masks and still gather, resulting in a significant increase in the number of the victims of COVID-19.
The Chinese government has been decisive, scientific, and efficient in combating the epidemic, successfully containing it from becoming widespread and has become the only major economy in the world to achieve economic growth. On the one hand, this stems from the advantages of China’s national governance system, especially the political advantage of its socialist system, which can bring together the needed resources to accomplish great tasks. On the other hand, the deeper reason is the pursuit of values and concerns for family and country that Chinese people have formed and always held for the past 5,000 years. As the Chinese saying goes, “All men share a responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation.” Chinese medical doctors, nurses, and community workers, who brave the pandemic, have worked overtime night and day to make a significant contribution to the fight against the epidemic.
S. N Eisenstaedt, an Israeli sociologist, advocates multi-modernity, arguing that modernity should embrace multiple forms rather than a single one. The ways and paths by which people make progress in history have always been different and diverse. The fight against the COVID-19 has confirmed the essence and characteristics of human destiny: harmony in diversity. Needless to say, cultural differences will persist for a long time, and we must properly deal with the diversities of different cultures in building a global order. Poor handling of differences will undermine convergence and cohesiveness. In the future, there exists the potential for global governance, mutual learning, shared development, communication, and a mutual complementary vision and ideology of both the Chinese and Western civilizations.
Xu Weixin
December 2020