China's Grey Eminence and the Future of America and of Christianity

 

Professor Wang Huning - China's Grey Eminence

China's Grey Eminence and 'America against America'

François Leclerc du Tremblay, also known as Père Joseph, was a 17th Century French Capuchin friar, confidant and agent of Cardinal Richelieu. He was the original éminence grise ("grey eminence") the term for a powerful advisor or decision-maker who operates secretly or unofficially. His historical successors include Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov - and today Chinese academic Wang Huning, the very influential adviser of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Wang Huning was never a dissident but appears to have been an admirer of the United States and its achievements. This could have translated into good news for both countries and assisted reformers who wanted to liberalise the political regime in China. Unfortunately after a 6 months stay in the USA  in 1988 he concluded that the country had bred a  "younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance and that "nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit". .

According to an article on Bloomberg News on 13 January 2021 "A $2,500 Book on U.S. Decline Is Suddenly a Must-Read in China" 

After chaos engulfed the U.S. Capitol last week, some Chinese intellectuals found themselves searching for copies of an out-of-print book to make sense of events. “America Against America” forecast the U.S.’s decline due to domestic conflicts more than 30 years ago. [1]

Among the things driving demand was the author: Wang Huning, the Communist Party’s No. 5 leader and top political theorist to three Chinese presidents. Some copies have surged to more than 16,600 yuan ($2,500) on Kungfuzi, an online marketplace for antiques. That’s more than 3,000 times its original asking price in 1991, when Japan was more widely seen as America’s big economic rival.

“The interest in the book is the result of a renewed desire to understand a U.S. that is in the midst of a civil cold war,” said Wang Wen, executive dean of Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies. “China’s doubts about the U.S. will certainly increase in light of recent events.”

Wang Huning and America - A Dark Vision

[Much of the following is taken directly from two articles (A) by N. S. Lyons The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning in Palladium Magazine on 11 October 2021 and (B) book review by Habi Zhang The Chinese Communist Who Understands America in Law and Liberty, 15 November 2021]

In 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship  to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.

What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book 'America Against America'. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit”.

Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, [2] he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”[3]

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, [4] America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

"Civil Religion" and Christianity

Wang concludes, “political customs” and “political traditions” sometimes are more powerful than laws because “laws are written on paper whereas the former are engraved in hearts and minds.” Hence, Wang argues that it is Americans’ sacralization, as he calls it, of the Constitution that makes it transcend those pieces of yellowed papers to be vibrant and everlasting.

Sacralization is a unique feature that Wang identifies in America’s “colorful national character.” Wang writes, “The American nation does not have a disposition for mystification or deification, but it has a special nature that I call ‘sacralization.’” Wang noticed that Americans tended to sacralize certain qualities or phenomena they saw in politicians, athletes, businessmen, film stars, singers, technology innovators, as well as football games, national ceremonies, the military, and the space shuttle.

“It is of a cultic nature, but it is not a religious cult,” Wang writes, “pragmatic Americans find it hard to worship abstract, legendary, and invisible objects, but they can worship success, bravery, adventure, and wisdom in their own surroundings.” This sacralization of a spirit for Wang is what Rousseau means by “civil religion.” Wang’s following words are particularly illuminating: “The process of sacralization has a fundamental social function, which is to maintain and transmit the core values of society . . . It is here that people’s sentiments, ideas, beliefs, pursuits come into some kind of agreement . . . In such an individualistic, self-centered society, sacralization is the best mechanism for spreading core values.”

Wang did not overlook the religious side of the American mind, though. In a section called God on Earth, Wang discussed another paradox about America. Varied religious organizations and vivacious religious activities play a cohesive role in public life. They are what he called “Soft Administration.” Wang noticed that religion both maintained social order and promoted freedom of society. He concluded that what made religion work in America was its secularization, separation from politics, and non-superstitious nature. [5]

Return to China and End of Idealism

Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization. When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character."

Many Chinese are Pleased with Wang's View of the USA!

From the smug point of view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the Gate of Heavenly Peace on Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.

As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.

Wang's Nightmare as China Encounters Same Problems! 

But Wang is unlikely to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite all his and President Xi Jinping’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.

“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of the most economically unequal societies on earth - more so than the USA. Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than their U.S. counterparts.  Corporate employment frequently features an exhausting “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude that is the Chinese “gig economy.” Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such “self-employment” by 2036, according to Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.

The job market for China’s ever-expanding pool of university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals unemployment” is a societal meme. And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble.

Meanwhile, contrary to trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense of atomization and low social trust in China has become so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.

Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.

In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being “totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?” asked one typically viral post on social media. 

But even those Chinese youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”) life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual and economic resources on our own lives?”

"Liberalism" in China and in the West

So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential endpoint as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”

From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.

NOTES:

[1] "It is worth noting that though it is Wang’s most famous book, copies are no longer available on Amazon or China’s counterparts such as Taobao, JD.com, or Dangdang. No official English translation is offered. Indeed, the book is as mysterious as its author. One can, however, find an electronic scanned pdf version online." [Book Review in Law and Liberty: "The Chinese Communist Who Understands America"]

[2] As per Wikipedia "Bloom titles the second part of the book "Nihilism, American Style". He introduces in further detail the concept of "value relativism", mentioned previously only in the introduction. Value relativism, he says, plagues most elite institutions of higher learning. For Bloom, this dissolved into nihilism. He notices that students follow the path of least resistance when developing their values. For students, he writes, "values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life." Ironically, when traveling this path without reason, Bloom writes, students still "adopt strong poses and fanatic resolutions".

[3] From a book review America Against America: the Chinese de Tocqueville by Scott Locklin

Spiritual crisis: Mr. Wang was very concerned that even elite university students knew little to nothing about the history and culture of the society to which they belonged. His heart was at least somewhat with the neocons of the day; mentioning Alan Bloom and his best selling 1987 jeremiad against the ignorance of contemporary university students. Mind you: the morons described by Bloom and Wang are now professors in the universities and high officials in government. They’re still ignorant pustules, now responsible for creating ever more callow gelded toads to infest the crumbling halls of American power. He identified the cultural nihilism of the baizuo all the way back in 1988; the upcoming tribe of people who would run the country into the ditch didn’t understand it, and didn’t much care for most of its inhabitants either.

[4] An update: "In 2019 alone, nearly 50,000 people in the United States died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to CDC statistics. The misuse of and addiction to opioids – including prescription pain relievers, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and heroin — has been described as “a serious national crisis” that impacts public health as well as social and economic welfare across America, according to The National Institute on Drug Abuse."  (from Gript article U.S. Judge Throws Out $4.5bn Settlement Protecting Sacklers From Opioid Lawsuits)

[5] This reminds me of George Orwell's remark in "Notes on Nationalism" (1945 essay): "If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance – it is even probably true – that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition."