HOW TO BE POWERFUL
Ying Zheng was born in 259BC and although the name might not ring a bell, he has had a huge impact on your life because he invented modern government.
Ying Zheng was the son of the king of Qin (pronounced Chin) in central China. Like many great figures of history, he started improbably young and killed a lot of people along the way. At the age of thirteen he succeeded his father, and by thirty-eight he had conquered most of what we now think of as China, marking the first time that all of China had been united. Ying Zheng celebrated his great achievement by renaming himself Qinshi Huangdi (pronounced Chin Shur Hwang Dee), the first Emperor of China.
Qinshi Huangdi’s achievements were based on his phenomenal powers of organisation. Before we can examine that, we need to go back a bit further to explore Chinese thinking at the time. I want to demonstrate that although there have been apparent dramatic shifts in Chinese thought, it has ultimately been a stable A/B ideology since ancient times. At the beginning of this story, there were two conflicting schools of thought in Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism and the Legalist Tradition.
I have already introduced the philosophy of Confucius and his follower Mencius. Confucius’ influence spread throughout East Asia. He lived at a time when China was torn apart by civil war, and sought to teach that morality led to correct government and that this would be to the benefit of all. He taught that personal and government morality could be developed through education. Correct behaviour, honesty and justice could be maintained by meditation and study. His teachings on morality emphasised self-development and emulation of role models. One should develop judgement rather than knowledge. His famous “Golden Rule” was “never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”160
Legalism was a contrasting philosophy that had more to do with the exercise of power than the concept of law. The underlying conception of humanity upon which Legalism rests is that all people seek to avoid punishment while seeking to achieve gains. Effectively, it ignores the possibility of morality by assuming that everybody acts selfishly. The Legalist philosopher Guan Zong (died 645BC) summed it up as follows: “The Ruler is the creator of the law. The Ministers are the keeper of the law. The people are the object of the law.” A principle of Legalism is that the ruler can create a stable society by exploiting his superior vantage point to ensure domination.
Legalism resembles the European thought of Thomas Hobbes – we need government because people are bad – while Confucianism more reflects Jean-Jacques Rousseau in assuming that people are good. Clearly, Confucianism was all about the individual and Legalism was all about totalitarian rule or the suppression of the individual. So Qinshi Huangdi did the obvious thing: he ordered all Confucian texts to be burned and Confucian scholars to be buried alive.161
The whole concept of Legalist thinking was that the people should be close to automata (i.e. should suppress all emotional behaviour) and should be ruled by fear. The people’s ability to rebel should be restricted by ensuring that they were kept ignorant. Essentially it is a vision of human society that is approximately modelled upon a bee colony.
The Legalist philosopher Han Fei Tzu (died 233BC) recommended that government departments should not be permitted to communicate laterally and all communication should flow along the spokes of the wheel to the Ruler at the centre. Qinshi Huangdi no doubt really liked this idea. Han Fei Tzu taught that the Ruler should conceal his own motivations to prevent people exploiting them for their own advantage – an explicit recommendation to suppress behaviour. The Confucian belief that people should develop their own moral judgement endangered the edicts of the Ruler. If the people could question those edicts, the power would not be absolute.
Qinshi Huangdi’s greatest accomplishment was to establish the first true civil service bureaucracy and therefore the first modern state. He abolished the hereditary right of noblemen to hold government office and established a civil service drawn from the brightest scholars in the land. These were promoted on merit – as defined by Qinshi Huangdi. There was no place for nepotism or personal relationships in his government.
Qinshi Huangdi was a totalitarian dictator who ruled entirely by fear. Any merit-based hierarchy ruled by a despot comes to mark loyalty as the highest form of merit. All imperial commands were concluded with the words “Tremble and Obey”, and this continued almost until the end of imperial rule in China.
The imperial system established by Qinshi Huangdi survived for two millennia. Although dynasties rose and fell (usually with civil war in between), each new dynasty adopted the same system of government control. Even when Genghis Khan, a nomadic tribes-
man from Mongolia, conquered China, he saw the superiority of the Chinese system of government and adopted it to form his own imperial dynasty.
POWER OF THE PEOPLE VS POWER OVER THE PEOPLE
Despite the incredible efficiency of the Chinese imperial system of government, eventually it collapsed. Qing was the last Chinese imperial dynasty. The Qing imperial government refused to adopt the superior technological methods of the Western powers. Ultimately it was doomed when faced with their superior military and trading know-how.
In 1912, Sun Yat-sen, a reformer turned republican revolutionary, founded the Nationalist government known as the Kuomintang or KMT. They sought to build a Chinese republic based largely on Western concepts of democracy, free markets and capitalism. A free press briefly flourished along with diverse political parties. The KMT officially abandoned most of the imperial system along with most of its bureaucracy. This was their downfall. In doing this, they destroyed the only mechanism of government that the country possessed. The KMT failed to impose Western ideas of government upon China because Chinese people did not understand such ideas, and they could not be learned overnight.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 by a group of intellectuals. They had a different vision of China’s future and were encouraged by the success of the Soviets in establishing rule in Russia after the fall of the Russian imperial system. The CCP waged civil war with the KMT (not to mention remnants of the imperialist forces and the unwelcome intervention of the Japanese). Early CCP defeats caused a retreat that became known as the Long March, where the Red Army fled to China’s south-west province of Yunnan before heading North and regrouping in the province of Shanxi. This was a key event in Chinese history, as Mao Zedong emerged as the CCP’s leader. The Japanese threat was removed in 1945 by their defeat in World War II and the CCP conquered the whole country by 1949, when the KMT leadership fled to Taiwan.
Mao Zedong finally declared the People’s Republic of China.
IDEOLOGY: WHAT’S IN A NAME?
This has been a fairly long preamble, but it brings us to the point of this chapter, which is an examination of belief drift. China is a truly unique case of ideology-warp.
Communism, as Karl Marx saw it, would arise from class struggle, but he based this theory on his Western perspective of class. China had a very different class structure under imperialism. In particular, there was no industrial working class, and there were no huge agricultural estates owned by an aristocracy. So naturally, Marxist theory applied literally to China produced some bizarre results. For example, Marx talked of rich landowners, but since these did not exist in China, people who owned a single acre of land were persecuted and brutally murdered. Marx also saw communism taking hold in industrial societies, and it is one of the curious facts of twentieth-century history that communism only ever took root in agrarian societies, as China was at the time.
But the most interesting thing about communism in China is that it pretty much bypassed Marx from the beginning.
Mao’s rise to power was pure Josef Stalin, complete with the terror and brutal purging of opposing forces. However, his studies at the time were split between reading Marxist ideology, and the study of imperialist theory of government based in Legalism. Mao’s political genius was recognising that the two were essentially the same thing. He made it very clear that he was a great admirer of Qinshi Huangdi. (Mao revered all of China’s most brutal emperors.) So although his consolidation of power was Stalinist, his exercise of it was pure Legalist. He had an almost mystical faith in the role of the leader. Although he took pains to present a humble image to the masses, he essentially continued to live an imperial life and even compared himself to the Emperor.162
Mao acted early to re-establish all the instruments of power that had existed in imperial China. The structure of his government was near identical to that of the imperialist era. He set about establishing over a hundred ministries to micro-manage all aspects of government and the economy. They all reported to Mao and his immediate associates at the head of the CCP (with very limited cross-communication) – another bee colony under a different name – pure Legalism. The civil service was very hierarchical with approximately twenty grades from senior Politburo members in Beijing to local clerks, each trained in ideology – again, Legalism. Legalist jargon was replaced by communist jargon but with no change of meaning. Imperial magistrates became local party secretaries – same job; different title. Imperial officials became ‘ganbu’ or cadres – same function; different name.
The relationship between the peasant and the state also hardly changed. Mao gave orders that everyone had to carry a residence permit called a ‘hukou’. These booklets are issued on a family basis. They list the names of all family members, their birth dates, their relationship with each other, marriage status, class (e.g. peasant), racial origin and the address of their employer. All hukou state the district where you are required to live. This system is also an imperial power mechanism. In imperial times the family registration document was known as a ‘baojia’ – same document; new name. Records of baojia go back to the fourteenth century, but there is evidence of systematic family registration going back two millennia.
The power of the hukou as a method of social control is immense. Chinese police can check your hukou at any time, and if you are found in a place where you are not a registered resident you can be arrested. Periodically, the police conduct sweeps in cities and round up all people who are not registered to be there.163 The effect is striking: a Chinese city has an atmosphere of Western affluence because the hukou laws ban rural peasants. For comparison, India has no restriction on movement, so Indian cities are swarming with beggars, casual labourers and street sellers. This hukou system is often called the “Chinese apartheid”. It segregates between city dwellers who benefit from economic development, and rural dwellers who are denied the benefits of economic development because they have no freedom of movement.
Mao enhanced the rigidity of the old imperial system by requiring people to buy food with coupons known as ‘liangpiao’. People could only buy food with liangpiao in the place where their hukou was registered. Leave this district, and you can’t eat!164 You were therefore a prisoner without bars. Outside the place of your hukou registration, you couldn’t get education, medical services, employment, or any sort of government service.
Mao retained another element of imperial government structure concerning the peasants: the system of taxation. In the West, we think of taxation as the payment of money to the government. However, Chinese peasants have little money and mostly operate in a non-cash economy. Again, Qinshi Huangdi displayed his genius as the creator of modern government. He devised a system whereby peasants were taxed in grain and labour – a sort of barter taxation. It was through the mechanism of grain taxation that China was able to support a thriving urban population, military and government bureaucracy a thousand years before this was common elsewhere in the world. It was due to the mechanism of taxation with labour that China’s infrastructure and great monuments were built. In imperial times the extent of these taxations varied according to the needs of the state. Most of the time, peasants were required to give the state 15 – 20% of their grain crop and about a month a year of labour. However, there were periods during the imperial era where these taxes were much higher – for example when the Great Wall was built. Some Chinese dynasties fell as a direct result of peasant rebellion following periods when these taxes were raised beyond the peasants’ pain threshold.
Mao retained these methods of taxing the peasants. However, Mao became obsessed with peasant productivity because he needed to prove the validity of his political theory. Mao set ludicrous targets for peasant grain productivity, while also setting targets to overtake Britain in steel production in just fifteen years.165 Anybody who dared to point out that this was unrealistic was purged and exiled to hard labour in the countryside. To meet their steel quotas, Chinese peasants melted down their tools into worthless raw metal. These policies, known as “The Great Leap Forward”, triggered famine among the peasants that killed thirty million Chinese.166 Mao thereby became the leader who killed more people than any other in history.
PASSING THE IDEOLOGICAL BATON
In 1976, Mao died and by 1978, Deng Xiaoping established control of the Party. Deng had long been ideologically opposed to Mao, but held power within Mao’s circle by biting his lip and biding his time. Deng’s most famous saying was, “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”167 The significance of this quotation is that the Chinese word for “cat” is derived from the sound it makes: “mao”. In my trips to China, I repeatedly ask Chinese people whether they see the irony in this saying, and every-
one seems mystified by my question. Deng’s words were carefully chosen. He thrust the knife into Mao’s ideology.
Despite Deng’s subtle disavowal of Maoism, he did what all successful successor dictators do: he retained the cult of personality of his predecessor. (Compare Stalin’s cult of Lenin, Castro’s cult of Che Guevara, the Vietnamese cult of Ho Chi Minh, etc.) This was necessary, because successor dictators have no other means of establishing legitimacy of their rule. Deng’s stated protection of the legacy of Mao concealed the fact that he moved great parts of the Chinese economy from communism to capitalism. “To get rich is glorious” was another famous Deng slogan. He unleashed the reforms that permitted the spectacular industrialisation of China. He permitted selective entrepreneurship and capitalism to thrive within the communist framework. But Deng did not abandon the old imperialist infrastructure that Mao had preserved. In fact, such was its effectiveness as a means of social control, that Deng’s reforms only needed a slight tweaking of the old ways.
He needed to find a way to transform the peasants into industrial workers. As previously explained, the peasants were imprisoned by the hukou and liangpiao system. Deng modified this system to transform peasants from prisoners on the land to prisoners in factories.
After 1980, he abolished the liangpiao food coupon system. This made it possible to relocate and eat at the same time. He then permitted people to become factory workers in development zones without needing a local hukou. However, all highly paid, government or professional jobs still require a local hukou. The hukou system retains total social control. A peasant is permitted to become a migrant factory worker. From there, they can go nowhere. They are still a prisoner without bars. Because they are trapped in this factory sub-class, they are easy to exploit by factory managers and this keeps the cost of their labour artificially low. The hukou is therefore the instrument that preserves a system of industrial slavery on a colossal scale.
Understanding this requires only a brief visit to a Chinese factory. It doesn’t take long to register the dead-eyed numbness of the people who work there.168 All emotional expression is self-
suppressed as a survival strategy. This fact is a closely guarded secret, but the sheer numbers of people involved mean that this information cannot be hushed up. Western consumers were recently alerted to the possibility that the person who assembled their new iPad might have committed suicide before they took it out of the box.169
A peasant hukou may permit them to work in a factory outside their district, but it still won’t permit them to obtain education or other public services. But if you are a migrant factory worker, you are so easy to exploit that you can’t afford much more than your food and your bed anyway, particularly if your family in your home village relies upon your money to help them survive.
Outside these economic zones where non-local hukou workers are permitted, people are still arrested if they are found with the wrong hukou. In 2003, there was a widely reported case of a man called Sun Zhigang who died in custody after being arrested for a hukou offence. This case was a watershed moment in China’s embryonic human rights movement. But don’t expect the hukou system to be abolished. It is too effective a method of social control.
THE BELIEF THAT KEEPS ON CREEPING
So, back to the original topic: belief creep. China moved from imperialism to communism without much actually changing. Chinese communism is merely Legalism spoken in Marxist jargon. It has now evolved into an amazing split system of industrial capitalism working alongside agrarian communism, but still fundamentally based in ancient Chinese philosophical views of government. Looking at the economic expansion and blatant capitalism that represents China’s industrial growth, it seems astonishing that this country is still ruled by a party that calls itself the “Chinese Communist Party”. The problem is that China cannot reform politically because Party and bureaucracy are one. The CCP bureaucracy is the largest bureaucracy that the world has ever seen – thirty-six million people in 2000.170 Every one of these civil servants is a CCP member, and in true Legalist tradition, their highest ideal of service is total obedience and loyalty to the Party.
Chinese society is still based on the bee colony model of human society: anyone with a rural or agricultural hukou is a worker bee, anyone with an urban hukou or some education is a drone, and the queen bees meet in secret and command total loyalty to “the Party” that is effectively the Emperor disembodied. The Politburo has therefore replaced the Emperor, and the sixth-century BC Legalist maxim barely needs updating: “The Ruler is the creator of the law. The Ministers are the keeper of the law. The people are the object of the law.” We could simply say “The Party is the creator of the law. The Cadres are the keeper of the law. The people are the object of the law.” Imperial jargon effortlessly translates to communist jargon, and the people remain slaves of a system.
This is the reason that Chinese communism has outlasted communism in virtually every other country – the causality of the belief has nothing to do with the German with the bushy beard, but is an A/B ideology that is thousands of years old: it is preserved by suppressing all emotion other than fear of destitution and chaos. This is why the CCP leadership detests the Dalai Lama and the Falun Gong, despite both being about as harmless as an old lady’s Pilates class. Neither rejects the CCP’s rule, but talk of compassion is an attack on Chinese ideology as serious as flying planes into their skyscrapers. Freedom in this ideology requires suppression of all negative emotions. If one atom of compassion is permitted to enter a Chinese factory, the entire edifice collapses because the workers would refuse to put up with the conditions. The Dalai Lama is therefore as dangerous to the Chinese as bin Laden was to the Americans. The CCP makes pictures of the Dalai Lama and the practice of Falun Gong illegal for exactly the same reason that Qinshi Huangdi banned Confucianism.
So, what has changed in two and a half thousand years of Chinese history?
In Imperial times, the role of Emperor passed to the Emperor’s son. Now the role of General Secretary of the Communist Party passes by anointment by a secret process. Abolition of the Imperial patrimony has made Imperial paternity no longer paramount. It is no longer necessary for all government officials with access to the Imperial presence to be eunuchs. Basically, high-ranking government officials are now permitted to keep their testicles. That is a very important development. I really care about my testicles. In fact, you could say that I believe in them.
SCENARIO: THE MORAL LOGIC OF TYRANNY
They cowered before him in adoration. He had the power to order them killed, and so he also had the power of mercy. They did not look at his face. To do so would be insolence towards his divinity, but they kept their eyes fixed on him. The whole of his court gazed fixedly at his feet.
He did not look back at them. He needed to keep his thoughts on higher matters, so his gaze was over their heads. His look was fixed on the back wall of the Chamber to the portraits of his forebears. They were the inspiration for his greatness. They were proof of his majesty.
He did not choose to be the people’s leader, but it was his fate. The peoples’ lives were a bestial struggle for survival. Every day that they went to sleep still living was a victory against the odds. They lived with a gnawing desperation; a dread that their worthlessness would end with random annihilation. But in his presence, they did not show these feelings. In his presence they felt fear, but they did not show this either. They gazed meekly at his feet, their faces blank in total submission.
A supplicant came forward and lay face down on the Petition Stone. “Great Lord, the people are hungry.”
He wondered: What is this “hungry” that they speak of?
His thoughts drifted off. He was thinking about the night before when his favourite concubine came to his chamber. He had lain back in his bed, and the concubine followed the usual procedure to bring about his release.
What troubled him was that, at the moment of his release, he suspended all power. Here was his favourite concubine: he could demand her presence whenever he wanted, and could send her away afterwards. But at that moment; at the precise moment of his release he was an infant in her care. She did not show him the love of a mother. Like all the people at Court, she expressed silent submission. It had never occurred to him to talk to her or ask her what she thought. It did not occur to him that she might have feelings. Why would it? Like everybody else, in his presence she kept her feelings concealed. He was oblivious to the one thing that mattered most to the people: they had feelings, and most of these were negative feelings of despair.
Sometimes his own feelings raged within, but he was divine and this could not be displayed. His walk was a glide. His robe covered his feet so that he seemed to float on air. His face was a constant state of passive calm. He had no idea what his feelings meant. He had no ability to see that these feelings occurred in the people. How could he have any such idea? His role was to project majesty, and they affected numbness in his presence.
He awoke from his daydream, and realised that the supplicant was still face down on the Petition Stone. The chamber was silent.
“Minister, what is to be done?” he asked. As he spoke, he continued to gaze forward, but his right hand gestured towards a minister seated cross-legged in the front row.
“Great Lord, the dykes have broken and the fields have flooded”, said the Minister.
“The people will repair the dykes.”
“Great Lord, the people are working in the fields trying to save what is left of the crop”, said the Minister.
“The people will stop working in the fields and repair the dykes.”
He gazed at the ancestor portraits, and there was silence in the Chamber. Gradually, the silence was broken by the scuffing of the supplicant dragging himself backwards off the Petition Stone.
A feeling welled up inside him. He struggled with this feeling. What was it, he thought? Could it be that this is what greatness feels like? To him, greatness had always been a belief. He lived in a world in which it was constantly spoken of. There was no alternative theory to this belief. But now, something different had occurred: greatness had become an emotion. His greatness gave rise to a feeling, and now this thought was irrefutable.
He arose slowly from his throne, and glided forwards as the people in the Chamber parted before him.
The will of the people had been served.
This is a more extreme version of Scenario A. A person who lives in an environment where people suppress emotional behaviour is unable to correctly identify their own emotions. Powerful people often find themselves in such an environment, which is the root cause of the old cliché of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. What I have tried to do in this Scenario is demonstrate that a cruel tyrant’s belief of faithfully serving their people can be a sincerely held belief that is a consequence of being in an environment of almost total emotional suppression. The mechanism for identifying an emotion is missing, and in that state such a person would be almost infinitely suggestible. A feeling arising in such a tyrant could be identified by him or her as simply anything – it doesn’t even have to be an emotion; anything conceptual could do. And this thought would be irrefutable because of the absence of any means of empirical refutation. Had I analysed the impact on the subjects in this story, it would also have become a version of Scenario B, but caring about the subjects of tyrants is oxymoronic when viewed from the perspective of power.