In January 1888, Sidney Webb made an appearance before the Sunday Lecture Society in London. The society was the brainchild of T. H. Huxley, a dogged defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution and a firm believer in the enlightenment of the working classes; they were supposed to constitute the primary audience for the lectures. Webb was a charter member of the Fabian Society, which had been founded four years earlier with the aim of persuading Britons to embrace social democracy. It was on just this subject that Webb had been invited to speak. He entitled his presentation “The Progress of Socialism.”
Even today it makes for a lively read. Though Webb harshly criticized the many social ills of Victorian society, the program he presented was stirringly redolent of the strong belief in scientific and technological progress that characterized his age. “The tide of European Socialism is rolling in upon us like a flood,” he proclaimed. The course of history, the development of industry, the recent discoveries in biology (meaning, presumably, Darwinism)—all these things attested to the truth of the socialist idea. “There is no resting place for stationary Toryism in the scientific universe,” he told his audience. “The whole history of the human race cries out against the old-fashioned Individualism.”
History was driven primarily by economics: “The student of history finds that the great world moves, like the poet’s snake, on its belly.” Moreover, Webb contended, all economic trends were moving clearly in the direction of collective or public ownership. As proof of this, he led his listeners to a long catalog of all the social and economic functions that were once performed by “private capitalists” but had since been taken over by various levels of government. The list, which goes on for a good three pages, spanned such disparate activities as surveying, coinage and regulation of the currency, “the provision of weights and measures,” and shipbuilding. Webb lovingly enumerated all the areas that had come to be regulated or otherwise controlled by the state. If this trend toward government control continued, he concluded, private property was on the way out—and this was as it should be. Public ownership of the means of production was the only effective way to raise the “material condition of the great mass of the people.” The technological and social advance of history inevitably led toward the embrace of socialism; socialism and progress, indeed, were interchangeable. Webb concluded on a suitably uplifting note: “The road may be dark and steep, for we are still weak, but the Torch of Science is in our hands: in front is the glow of morning, and we know that it leads to the mountain top where dwells the Spirit of the Dawn.”1
With remarkable brevity, Webb’s Sunday lecture concisely anticipated one of the most powerful strains in the political thought of the century to come. He and his wife, Beatrice, went on to transform the Fabian Society into an institution that paved the way for the triumph of social democratic ideas in early-twentieth-century Britain; they have been described as the “godparents of the Labour Party.” The Webbs were not Marxists; they were opposed to class warfare, though they viewed it as unavoidable if the condition of the working class was not bettered by the kind of gradual measures they promoted. Yet, like many other relatively moderate “progressives” of the twentieth century, they still felt deep sympathy for decidedly more radical visions. In 1935, after visiting the Soviet Union, they published a book entitled A New Civilization? that concluded that Stalin’s Russia was a model for the kind of collectivist society that ultimately awaited us all. The Webbs, in short, shared their beliefs in the desirability and inevitability of state-led modernization with many other twentieth-century reformers.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb are rightly celebrated today as progenitors of the modern welfare state; Clement Attlee’s post-1945 vision of the “New Jerusalem” can trace its origins directly to them. The modern-day observer will see much in their thinking that is heroic—but also a great deal that is almost frighteningly naive. We no longer share that faith in the unconditional goodness of technological and scientific progress that characterized so many members of the educated elite in the early twentieth century. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of the earth’s population today lives under conditions that would have been barely imaginable on a comparable scale just a hundred years earlier. Yet we are also only too aware of the price that humankind has had to pay for these achievements: mass slaughter, traumatic social turmoil, ecological damage on a vast scale.
The idea of progress carries within it the seeds of arrogance. The engineers of social and material advancement can easily succumb to the certainty that their program is scientific, inevitable, indisputable—that progress is, essentially, an end unto itself. But this is true only as long as an overwhelming majority of people within a particular society are willing to accept this vision. The story of 1979 can be seen as the story of those who rejected it.
To be sure, they sometimes did so simply to defend their economic or social status—out of “class interests,” as the Marxists would put it. But the cautionary tale of 1979 should also serve to warn us that the reactions of societies, classes, or individuals to technological and economic challenges cannot be reduced solely to technology and economics. Simple impoverishment is a poor guide to political stability; there are many poor countries that never experience revolutions. The economic slowdown of mid-1978 in Iran was not as severe as the one that occurred two years earlier—but 1976 passed with nary a hint of social disturbances, while the shallower recession that followed inspired a full-scale revolt.2 Meanwhile, social inequality in contemporary China is close to the levels that plagued Iran in the last decades of the shah’s rule—yet this does not necessarily mean that systemic collapse is just around the corner. Because Communist rule in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in the 1980s literally bankrupted itself, we tend to regard the 1989 anti-Communist revolts as inevitable. Yet identical systems in North Korea and Cuba endured for decades more—the former by virtue of a continued and unstinting commitment to brute force and ideological uniformity, the latter thanks to a combination of sophisticated oppression and tactical economic reforms.
Economic determinism is not particularly good at explaining why events happen precisely when they do, why people are willing to sacrifice their lives and livelihoods for their beliefs, or why the ideas of one powerless priest can bring an entire nation to its feet and a ruler to his knees. Economics certainly shapes politics, but politics is ultimately a category unto itself. And we cannot understand political dynamics without recourse to the ideas that motivate people to action.
No one demonstrated this better than Margaret Thatcher, who set out to dismantle a philosophy of government that owed a great deal to the Webbs and their ilk. Some of her more blinkered opponents liked to depict her as a defender of class interests, a willing tool in the hands of conniving capitalists. But it is precisely Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory that shows why this interpretation falls short. The Britons who chose her in that election were not voting for monetarism or stock market deregulation. They were motivated by more general concerns. The majority embraced Thatcher’s argument that Britain was in a state of terminal decline and that it could be stopped only by limiting the reach of the state. More specifically, voters opted for Thatcher as a way of rejecting the most obvious manifestation of that decline: the overweening power of the unions, viewed by many late-1970s Britons as a kind of unelected government that was contrary to the very spirit of the democratic system. There were undoubtedly many who also believed that Thatcher’s promised revival of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility would benefit them economically. But polling from the period convincingly shows that those who voted Tory did so based on a broader understanding of the country’s problems. Thatcher appealed to voters precisely because she promised a corrective to the expansion of the state, an end to a postwar consensus that was now seen as more stifling than emancipatory. She appealed to their sense of agency and freedom rather than treating them as cogs in the impersonal machine of progress. In so doing, she demonstrated that the “old-fashioned Individualism” derided by Sidney Webb was perhaps not so old-fashioned after all.
Of course, it is much easier to indulge in individualism when you know that you can visit a doctor for free, count on regular payments from the state in the event of unemployment, and receive a guaranteed pension when you retire. For all her determination to change the way Britain worked, Thatcher showed little inclination to return to the laissez-faire world of the Victorians. She understood very well that certain innovations of the postwar welfare state—above all the entitlement programs that Britons had come to regard as their birthright—were there to stay, and she did little to challenge them in any fundamental way. As a true counterrevolutionary, she acknowledged some of the achievements of the revolution that preceded her. But in stark contrast to the Tory “wets”—the true conservatives in the Conservative Party—she did not shirk from confrontation on the fronts where she spotted opportunities for radical change. Margaret Thatcher was not a technocrat. She defined her politics through values, ideals, and moral categories. Some commentators have taken issue with her self-description as a “conviction politician,” but there can be little question that she saw herself this way.
Thatcherism is often defined as an economic credo, but there was a great deal more to it than that. Though this point tends to be glossed over by commentators, Thatcher was a woman of strong religious beliefs. Her personal Christianity owed a great deal, of course, to her strict Methodist upbringing. (Contrary to some accounts, however, her father was not a fundamentalist, but a thoroughly modern believer who accepted the teachings of science and even conceded a significant role to the state in the fight for social justice.)3 That she went over to the Church of England later in life changes some of the details in this picture, perhaps, but not its substance. Her belief in individual responsibility and the primacy of personal freedom had its roots in a spiritual stance rather than an economic theory.
We tend to forget that modern politics has its roots in religion. For most of human history, the rulers of society have called upon the realm of the supernatural to legitimize their ascendancy. The notion of politics as a distinct and secular sphere of human activity has a rather shallow pedigree. Though the roots of this idea are much older, it is really only since the Enlightenment that politics has established itself as a business involving only human beings. Try as it might, though, even modern political movements have never quite managed to shrug off their scriptural and spiritual origins.4 The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—shared the belief that history is the product of a single and unified divine being that is pushing humanity forward toward a particular end; once that end is reached, history will end, and a community of purity and justice will be established for eternity. The European religious wars in the wake of the Reformation, and especially the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, showed how millennial longings for justice and equality gave rise to organizations that had remarkable similarities to twentieth-century revolutionary movements. The syntheses of Marxism and religion attempted by Ali Shariati and the theorists of Catholic liberation theology in the 1970s show that Marx’s thinking was, in a deeper sense, more congenial to Abrahamic prophecy than he might have been willing to acknowledge.
So perhaps it should come as little surprise that those who defined themselves as the militant avant-garde of “material progress” should have met with particularly bitter resistance from the forces of organized religion. For many twentieth-century modernizers, the proper “progressive” was an atheist, someone who rejected supernatural explanations of events in favor of a “scientific,” materialist analysis of history. Religion, in this reading, was a backward superstition, its defenders the cynical allies of the propertied classes. “Law, morality, religion, are to [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto.5 Marxists had a near-religious confidence in their own ability to transcend superstition—an attitude so infectious that even traditional monarchs like the shah of Iran felt compelled to design his reforms so that they echoed Communist models.
Religious thinkers had one response: man does not live by bread alone. Though the Iranian Revolution was fueled by many economic concerns, its ultimate impulse was a moral one. The Westernized intellectuals had failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the fundamental dilemma of identity that Iranians felt themselves to be facing. Khomeini offered a clear and brutal response: “Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1400 years. You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.”6
To be sure, Khomeini and his revolutionary supporters among the clergy strove to outflank the “enlightened intellectuals” by redefining Islam as the more “progressive” force. (Both Shariati and Mawdudi served as sources of inspiration in this case.) Yet the extraordinary intensity of the popular joy and rage that Khomeini was able to summon in his campaign to sweep away the world’s most powerful monarch drew its energy from the profound anxiety of people who felt that their most cherished values were under direct attack from those who claimed to be improving the material conditions of their existence.
Religious reactions can assume radically different forms. To Khomeini, the only viable response to the shah’s rule was revolution—and violence was an essential ingredient of the process by which the revolutionaries were supposed to purge society of secular excess. John Paul II came at the problem from a radically different perspective. His personal experience of twentieth-century totalitarianism at its most vicious—Nazism and Stalinism—led him to embrace an approach to resistance that minimized the possibility of violence. His first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, expressly addressed “the subject of development and progress [that] is on everybody’s lips and appears in the columns of all the newspapers and other publications in all the languages of the modern world.” For all its virtues, the pontiff warned, material progress always contains the potential to become an end unto itself—to lose sight of the individual lives it aspires to improve: “Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premises of its pioneers.”7
“A civilization purely materialistic in outline” sounds very much, of course, like the Soviet Communism that John Paul II was striving to resist. It is clear that he regarded such a system as an absolute evil to be opposed. Yet that recognition did not justify absolute means. The strategy of cultural resistance—the construction of alternate society, of “living in truth”—implied the same quality of “self-restraint” that later provided the basis for the “self-limiting revolution” of Solidarity and 1989. It is striking, indeed, that the most influential nonviolent activist movements of the twentieth century—notably Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for independence from the British Empire and Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign (both of which drew, in their turn, on the writings of that Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy)—had overtly religious origins. Their legacy can be traced in the 1980s through such diverse events as the uprisings against dictatorship in South Korea, the 1986 “People’s Power” revolution in the Philippines, and the “velvet revolutions” in East Central Europe.
Progress is often presented by its proponents as the only rational course. For much of the twentieth century, radical progressives were convinced that they were armed with the truth. But the fact of the matter is that people do not always want to do the allegedly reasonable thing—especially if it runs counter to the cherished sources of identity that give meaning to their lives. This is what made the events of that year so hard to fathom for many secular radicals. The Iraqi dissident, ex-Trotskyite, and self-described atheist Kanan Makiya still recalls how he and his fellow left-wing radicals were blindsided by the Islamic Revolution. “Here we had these forces that we thought we had confined to the dustbins of history that reappeared and turned out to have nothing to do with what we had always expected,” he says. “The working classes were nowhere to be seen. All the categories through which we had viewed the world had fallen apart.”8 The Tudeh, once the most powerful Communist Party in its region, effectively ceased to exist after the Iranian Revolution—a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to real-existing socialism elsewhere. The dream of the brotherhood of man was a powerful one, but it could not compete, in the final analysis, with the brotherhood of believers.
The man who started the Arab Spring was not an Islamist. On December 17, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in Tunisia, a high school graduate with an income of some $140 a month, changed the course of history. That day Mohammed Bouazizi went to a local government office in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid to register a protest against the police who had confiscated his vegetable cart. The official in charge refused to see him or acknowledge his complaints. Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and set himself alight.9
Bouazizi’s death touched off a revolution in his home country that quickly found emulators across the Arab world. In Tunisia itself, the protesters who took to the streets in empathy with Bouazizi’s frustrations brought down the country’s long-entrenched president. In Egypt millions of other demonstrators challenged President Hosni Mubarak—and won. Yemenis successfully dislodged their leader, Libyans toppled the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Syrians rose up against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The unrest spanned, to varying degrees, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Each uprising was different. Economic and political factors worked to unique effect in each country. Yet common to all of these rebellions was an essentially moral impulse: the urge to fight against the corruption and injustice that spring from long years of dictatorial rule.
The Arab Spring caught the world—not to mention many of the people directly affected by it—completely off guard. But one of the most surprising things about it was, at least initially, the comparatively subdued role of political Islam. Islamist movements exist in all of the countries affected by the Arab revolutions, yet religious activists were relatively inconspicuous in the early stages of upheaval. The demands of the people in the vanguard of change in the Middle East in 2010 and 2011 were remarkably similar to those protesting dictatorship in other parts of the world. Demonstrators proclaimed their desires for an end to tyranny, for free elections and freedom of speech, for an end to corruption, for transparent institutions and good governance, for impartial courts and strong parliaments. They did not call—at least at first—for the implementation of the sharia, for rule by the ulama or a jihadi avant-garde, for God’s sovereignty to override that of the people. For the crowds demonstrating on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, and Manama, Islam—to paraphrase the famous Islamist slogan—was not necessarily the answer. Many members of the younger generation of activists claimed to see their salvation in parliamentary democracy rather than the precepts of Quranic government.
Yet the ghost of 1979 has still managed to haunt the Arab Spring. The Iranian precedent has come to seem particularly ominous in the case of Egypt, the country that gave the Arab world its most prominent revivalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s success in the first free presidential and parliamentary elections since Mubarak’s downfall was, for many Egyptians, the logical outcome of the revolution; for many others, it represented nothing less than a betrayal of the cause.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is the extent to which Egyptians have not turned to Iran, the first Islamic Republic, for inspiration. History is probably to blame. In 1979 there was no precedent for an Islamic revolution; no one knew what it would look like or what course it would take. By 2010, however, the revolutionaries in Egypt could look back on three decades of Islamist experiments around the world. Few of them wanted to emulate Iran, where the initial euphoria associated with Khomeini’s experiment had long since degenerated into stagnant authoritarianism, a vicious, bureaucratic dictatorship with a frozen economy. Most Egyptians, of course, are Sunnis, so many of them might be inclined to seek examples closer to their own version of Islam. But the precedents established so far are hardly inspiring. Endless intra-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan after the victory over the Soviets, including the Neanderthal interval of Taliban rule, did not make for an attractive model, either. Nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, the attractions of al-Qaeda-style apocalyptic nihilism—certainly always somewhat exaggerated—had almost entirely evaporated.
There were also examples closer to home. Indigenous Egyptian groups like al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, led by Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “blind sheikh”), and Islamic Jihad, controlled since the beginning of the 1990s by Bin Ladens ally Ayman al-Zawahiri, both indulged in long campaigns of assassination and terror inside the country. In particular, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s 1990s campaign to destabilize the national economy by targeting foreign tourists proved deeply alienating to ordinary Egyptians desperate to find jobs and sustenance. In 1997 members of the group dressed as policemen staged a brutal attack on tourists at a temple complex in Luxor, killing fifty-eight foreigners and four Egyptians. The popular backlash against the act was so intense that the group ultimately found itself compelled to forswear violence altogether.
Still, it would be premature to claim that the lure of political Islam has faded altogether. To the contrary, there are many indications around the Muslim world that believers still yearn for a political order that will give place of honor to religious values. Jihadis still exist, and they will for many years. But there is reason to believe that their ideas will meet with greater competition from within the community of believers in the years to come. There are signs of a great intellectual ferment beginning to get under way within Islam. Just like Khomeini and Qutb, the theorists of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers have conspicuously avoided mapping out the details of the state they are trying to achieve—betraying an otherworldly utopianism that hardly looks compelling in a world filled with many far more attractive alternatives. The newer generation of Islamic activists seems less inclined to leave all the details up to the fanatics who claim to know what’s better for them.
Some of the most interesting examples of this dynamic come from the very country that pioneered Islamic revolution: Iran. Even as the regime there has concentrated power within an ever-narrowing elite, excluding even many former members of Khomeini’s entourage, the institutional order bequeathed by the revolution has continued to offer at least the possibility of self-correction through elections. Again and again, Iranian voters have used their right to vote to express their desires for liberalization and reform, and again and again the governing elite has fought to thwart those desires by whatever means it can. The most dramatic example to date came with the 2009 presidential election, when alleged government vote-fixing in favor of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, triggered popular protests that brought thousands of mostly young Iranians into the streets.
The main candidate opposing Ahmadinejad, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, hardly qualified as a dissident; he was a well-established stalwart of the regime, a former prime minister of the Islamic Republic. Originally a sympathizer of Shariati (and an admirer of Che Guevara), during the revolution he quickly gravitated to Khomeini, and in 1979 he joined forces with Ayatollah Beheshti to found the Islamic Republican Party. It would be hard to find someone with more impeccable insider qualifications, and, indeed, Mousavis campaign program was hardly the stuff of all-out counterrevolution. He promised a few modest correctives to the existing system, including an expansion of women’s rights. (Among his supporters was Mohsen Sazegara, the young idealist who joined Khomeini from Chicago in the fall of 1978. Like many former Iranian revolutionaries, he has now become a reformist.)
Yet the huge protests that followed his defeat dramatized the yawning gap between the expectations of many Iranians and the increasingly isolated circle of people at the top of the regime. (Many of those who chose to defy the regime were less active supporters of Mousavi than people determined to see that their votes were respected.) It was no accident that the protesters chose the color green—the traditional emblem of Islam—as the insignia of their movement. The protesters who took to the streets in what have been described as the biggest demonstrations in Iran since 1979 called not for a secular polity, but rather for the fulfillment of what they described as authentic Islamic values of tolerance and social justice. At the same time, their dominant slogan—”Where is my vote?”—spoke to democratic norms, not religious ones. Many of the postelection protesters did call for a fundamental, even revolutionary, transformation of the Islamic Republic—demonstrating that Mousavi was, to some extent, a figurehead of widespread longing for much more radical change. But strikingly few of them called for the use of force to achieve that aim. In fact, the emphasis on nonviolence has been one of the salient characteristics of the Green Movement.
This grassroots demand for a true melding of democracy and Islam within the country that gave the world the very concept of “Islamic Revolution” underlines a fundamental incongruity. For centuries Shiite clerics had remained independent of Iranian state power, a position that gave them immense political legitimacy and spiritual authority. But having captured the state in an attempt to assert the sovereignty of God, they effectively transformed themselves into just another set of worldly rulers—a point noted by commentators at the time of the 2009 protests. “What is ironic is that instead of empowering the clerical establishment, [the revolution] made the clerical establishment a puppet of the government,” the Iranian-born scholar Mehdi Khalaji told a reporter in 2009. “So, the clerical establishment has lost its independence, its social popularity, and so on; and instead, the government, in 30 years, has been transformed into a military-economic-religious complex.”10 By politicizing religion, the mullahs have transformed religion into mere politics.
If Iran were to make the transition from the present regime to a new form of government that could unite Islamic values and genuine democracy, it could once again assume its place as a model for the Muslim world. Just as the revolution in 1979 redefined Muslim global attitudes, so the Green Movement points the way forward for a model of truly democratic Islam. In this context, contemporary Iranian religious thinkers like Abdulkarim Soroush and Mohammed Mojtahed Shabestari—both closely linked with Iranian reformists—are already shaping political debates within the Islamic world.
The Green Movement also suggests that a secular future is not the only alternative to militant Islamism. It is probably unrealistic to expect that the solution to Islamic extremism lies in a complete rejection of religious politics and a full-fledged embrace of secularism. There is little indication that Islam is losing its attraction as a religion—just the opposite, in fact. In many parts of the world (including the United States), it is the fastest-growing faith. The challenge lies in reconciling Islam’s powerful ethical demands with the values of democracy and human rights. There are many indications that many Muslims are already in search of just such a synthesis. True renewal can come only from within.
In the late 1970s, the act of crossing the border at Lo Wu, between Hong Kong and mainland China, meant moving from one mental universe to a completely different one. Today it has become a matter of everyday routine. The watchtowers along the border are empty. There is still a fence along the Hong Kong side of the border to prevent unwanted immigration, but it presents no barrier to the tens of thousands of travelers who pass through the crossing point every day—many of them regular commuters (even including schoolchildren) equipped with electronic identification cards that allow them to cross through special gateways with minimal delays. The Chinese border guard who examines your visa when you cross over occupies a cubicle adorned with a button that allows you to rate the quality of his performance. The whole facility is a model of twenty-first-century efficiency—a world away from the bureaucratic somnolence that reigned here thirty years before.
The border guard hands you your passport, and you step across onto the mainland—or, to be more precise, the city of Shenzhen, which introduces itself as a warren of neon-lit shops offering everything from knock-off designer goods to toy helicopters to Mont Blanc fountain pens, all of it on sale right there in the same sprawling immigration building. Much of what you see was made here. Today, by one estimate, Shenzhen and the surrounding Pearl River delta boast a larger manufacturing workforce than the entire United States. Its factories churn out everything from exercise equipment to iPods; by 2005 Shenzhen boasted the world’s fourth-busiest port and one of its biggest stock exchanges. As you roam the city, you will marvel at the traffic jams, the infectious energy of the bustling crowds, the immense shopping centers selling the latest cell phones and computers. Within an hour’s drive of this place are factories that can turn out just about any electronic component you can imagine as quickly as you want to have it.11
Don’t forget to stop in at the Diwang Mansion skyscraper. (The last time I visited, it was still Shenzhen’s tallest building. But this is a city where no record stays intact for long, so that status can’t be taken for granted.) Buy a ticket and take the elevator to the observation deck on its highest floor, the sixty-ninth. As you step out of the elevator, walk to the windows and take in the view. Skyscrapers, apartment towers, and factories march toward the horizon as far as the eye can see, lost in the haze toward the provincial capital of Guangzhou (a.k.a. Canton). Buried under the buildings somewhere down there—probably in the vicinity of the central railroad station—are the rice paddies that American investor Tom Gorman saw when he visited the spot in 1979.
The view isn’t the only attraction, though. You can also admire the sixty-ninth floor’s exhibits, which are devoted as much to Shenzhen’s sister city, Hong Kong, as Shenzhen itself (there’s a mock-up of a famous Hong Kong street, for example). You can’t quite escape the impression that the organizers felt that Shenzhen’s startlingly brief history, as amazing as it is, simply doesn’t provide enough content for the entire floor. A time line on the wall compares major events in the lives of the two cities. Hong Kong’s starts in the year 1842 and wanders along solo through the rest of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. The height of the line follows the growth of the city’s population, and so it rises steadily but slowly for 160 years. There’s a downward bump during World War II, when Japanese occupation drove many Hong Kongers away to the mainland, and then a dramatic rebound in the postwar period. Photos and text cluster at various points along the line, commemorating everything from the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the international fame of Bruce Lee in the 1970s. Still no Shenzhen, though.
Shenzhen’s visual history begins only in the year 1979. The population curve is sharp: an ascent of Everest compared with Hong Kong’s gentle upward slope. The key moments in Shenzhen’s chronology turn on factory openings and the inauguration of big buildings. The drama of the story comes less from some particular cultural or political accomplishment than from the sheer velocity of growth. Shenzhen’s population has still not quite caught up with Hong Kong’s by the end of the exhibition. But Hong Kong’s line has long since flattened out, whereas Shenzhen’s continues to climb. Hong Kong may be around for a while yet, the exhibition implies, but the future no longer belongs to it.
Walk around the corner, though, and you come across a remarkable sight: Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher are having a chat. The two life-size wax figures—Thatcher’s hair a bit too red—sit in armchairs against a backdrop photomontage: Beijing’s Forbidden City behind Deng’s head, Hong Kong behind Thatcher’s. Two pots of tea sit on the table between them.
A plaque in front of the tableau explains that it commemorates the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, when the two leaders finally agreed on the terms for Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. In 1898 the British signed a lease with the imperial government in Beijing that gave London control over the New Territories, directly to the north of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, for ninety-nine years. By the time the lease approached its renewal date, it was clear that the era of colonialism had passed and that the Chinese government was no longer willing to consider an extension of the arrangement. And if Britain could no longer control the New Territories, it could no longer hope to hang on to Hong Kong proper, either. It was time for colonial rule to end.
But there is, of course, a deeper logic to the visual union of Thatcher and Deng—though it is not mentioned on the commemorative plaque. It was these two figures who did more to promote the market-driven globalization of the late twentieth century than just about anyone else. Their ideological origins could not have been further apart—Deng the devoted Communist, Thatcher the dedicated Cold Warrior—but their rhetoric was often strikingly similar. Both spoke obsessively of the need to create wealth before it could be distributed. (“Socialism is not poverty,” as Deng used to say.) Both stressed the importance of proper incentives for performance. Both argued that a certain degree of inequality had to be tolerated. Both insisted that the state should withdraw from realms better left to the market. (And both, at various moments, sought the council of free-market economist Milton Friedman.)
They had different approaches, obviously. It was Thatcher who became the global embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon ideals of political freedom and unfettered markets. Deng’s admirers enshrined him as the embodiment of what came to be known by outsiders as the “Beijing Consensus” (a phrase that Beijing officials are reluctant to use). It was an approach that married openness to internal and external market forces with the strength of the authoritarian state. In the Chinese model, a surge of private entrepreneurship—especially on the town and village level—went hand in hand with tight political control and an activist state-investment role. The result is a remarkable melding of public and private. The percentage of economic assets now in private hands in China actually exceeds that in some European countries. Yet the Chinese Communist Party still runs the banking sector, retaining decisive authority when it comes to determining who gets loans, and what they are used for. The Chinese themselves often evince confusion about where the private sector ends and the public one begins.
China’s success is often treated as something unique, an extraordinary outlier the likes of which the world has never seen. This is not entirely true. As the experience of 1979 and the early reform period demonstrates, China’s economic reforms drew heavily on the experience (and, indeed, the investment capital) of its East Asian neighbors. Almost from the start, China received advanced technological know-how and substantial investment from Japan. Practical experience in manufacturing and considerable amounts of cash came from Hong Kong. Taiwan’s history of post-World War II land reform offered a vital precedent for the mainland’s efforts to boost private farming, and its experiments with export processing zones in the 1960s and 1970s spurred Deng’s interest in the Special Economic Zones. Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all showed just how effective the combination of dictatorship and market-oriented economic development could be. There is little that Deng and his comrades did in the late 1970s and 1980s that had not been done by these countries before them; what was most radical about the Chinese Communist reformers was their willingness to imagine how a similar program of reforms could be translated into the context of a communized society. In this sense, the “Beijing Consensus” can be more accurately described as the “East Asian Model.” The real pathbreaker for all of these countries, indeed, was Meiji-era Japan, the first of the non-Western nations to embark on a conscious program of Western-style economic and technological modernization. (It was this precedent, by the way, that Deng repeatedly invoked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)
What really makes China unique, indeed, is its scale. In 2011, Chinese gross domestic product per capita was around five thousand dollars, far behind that in these smaller, more advanced Asian economies. But because of its enormous population, the People’s Republic only needs to boost that number a bit in order to become the world’s biggest economy.
Deng and his colleagues changed China. The China they created cannot help but transform the world. The world does not catch cold when Singapore sneezes. And this is not just a matter of economics. China’s rise also has a direct effect on resource consumption, on geopolitics, on the environment. So we must all care whether China gets it right.
China’s triumph has been extraordinary. Yet the Chinese Communist Party remains strikingly insecure about its success, reacting with extraordinary speed and sensitivity to even the mildest signs of dissent. The leaders of the party insist that their policies meet with the overwhelming approval of their citizens. And this could well be the case (though it is hard to tell one way or the other in a country that has neither elections nor free media). Yet the CCP continues to respond to even the most minor challenges to its power with striking obsessiveness. The amount of money allocated to internal security has now surpassed the budget for external defense.12 Such behavior is not exactly the sign of a government that knows it enjoys the affection of its citizens. The Chinese state employs tens of thousands of people to scour the Internet for allegedly seditious content (which, in practice, often consists of reporting documenting the malfeasance of party functionaries). The Chinese Communist Party’s system for censoring Web content and influencing online opinions is regarded by experts as the most extensive and sophisticated operation of its kind anywhere in the world.
Less well known to the outside world is the extent to which the party has systematically studied the failure of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.13 Interestingly, the Polish example has loomed particularly large in this effort. This is partly a matter of timing. The early years of China’s economic reforms were roughly contemporaneous with the first flowering of Solidarity. But it is also true that the Polish example combined two factors that the party of Deng Xiaoping continues to follow with particular alertness. One is labor activism. The party tracks every strike and independent labor movement with extraordinary care, and it responds to them with a highly sophisticated divide-and-rule strategy, buying off some organizers while coercing others.14 At the same time, the party has gradually but notably expanded the legal space available for bargaining and legal recourse involving labor issues. There is clearly a recognition that China’s further economic development depends on ensuring a certain degree of flexibility toward workers’ demands for greater social justice. The second factor that worries party leaders, intriguingly, is religion. This might come as a surprise to those outsiders who tend to regard the Chinese as a ruthlessly practical people. But this is a simplification. The Communist Party knows, first, that religion can be a powerful source of organized opposition to central rule. One historical example that looms large in party thinking is the Taiping Rebellion, the mid-nineteenth-century uprising triggered by the members of an unorthodox Christian cult whose leader—reminiscent of the organizer of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979—declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The rebellion turned into a civil war that took millions of lives. A more recent case is represented by Falun Gong, the twentieth-century amalgam of native Buddhist and Daoist teachings that ultimately turned into the best-organized mass opposition movement to Communist rule since 1949 before it was brutally suppressed in 1999.
Official anxiety about religion is reflected not only in the party’s continued persecution of Falun Gong but also in its efforts to ensure state control of other confessions. Tibetan Buddhism, for obvious reasons, is particularly high on the list. But so too, rather oddly, is Roman Catholicism, a faith that claims only about 13 million believers in China. The refusal of the People’s Republic to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See has much to do with the history of Christian missionary movements as collaborators with Western colonial movements, but it also owes a great deal to Beijing’s sharp awareness of the role played by the Catholic Church in the collapse of Eastern European Communism. Once again, while secular Westerners tend to discount the political role of religion, this is a mistake that Communists are less inclined to make.
Chinese Communist Party leaders take political history very seriously. It is not only the challenge of organized faith that worries them. They are also extremely sensitive to the disruptive potential of “crises of prosperity” of the kind that—to name but one example—brought down the shah in 1979. (The CCP has not restricted its analysis of the weaknesses of one-party rule to Communist Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s; its studies also encompass places as varied as Indonesia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan.)15 As the example of 1970s Iran demonstrates, rapid economic growth can be profoundly destabilizing. As people watch society change before their eyes, old values can appear outmoded or inadequate. Sudden prosperity, as welcome as it is, can bring in its wake nagging ethical, political, and even metaphysical questions—especially if one of the results of development is a dramatic uptick in the gap between rich and poor. And, indeed, one striking trait of economic reform in China since 1979 has been a stark increase in inequality, a feature that distinguishes it dramatically from the other East Asian tigers. In terms of wealth distribution, in fact, contemporary China is much more similar to Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia than to Taiwan or South Korea.16
So it is not a surprise that the Chinese Communist Party has taken measures to fill the resulting “meaning gap.” In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping and his comrades tried to compensate for the loss of faith in Marxist-Leninist dogma by playing up patriotism and pride in the glories of the Chinese past. The party’s propaganda campaign intensified an already existent nationalist trend, particularly among young people, that may prove hard to manage in the years to come. (Extreme nationalism was also one of the by-products of the “late modernization” of Meiji Japan and late-nineteenth-century Germany—and in neither case was it an experience that ended well for the world.) In the twenty-first century, the powers that be in Beijing have also experimented with a revival of traditional Confucian values, with particular emphasis on the Great Sage’s message of respect for authority. But this, too, could potentially backfire: Confucius had minimal tolerance for corrupt or self-serving public officials—a concern shared by many of the Internet critics of the present regime.
It is striking that many of those who lived through it in China depict the turnaround of 1979 in moral terms rather than strictly economic ones. Even if the Communist Party continued to preserve its prerogatives, the rejection of the principle that ideology was more important than everything else amounted to a widening of personal freedom that most Chinese regarded with relief. “[The year] 1979 is very important for me,” one Chinese journalist told me. “It’s a watershed. Before that we were living in the Cultural Revolution movement and class struggle. After 1979 there was one word: humanity.”17 The creative energy of millions of Chinese people unleashed by the reforms of 1979 has produced remarkable achievements. How sustainable those achievements will prove in the end depends to a large extent on the Communist Party’s ability to respect the humanity of its citizens.
As I strolled around Kabul on a clear, chilly afternoon in January 2002, I happened upon a place called the Behzad Book Store. At that particular moment, a few months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, the Afghan capital was enjoying a moment of peace and hope in the future; everywhere, it seemed, people were starting new businesses, expressing a longing for prosperity so long thwarted by years of war. But it was really the past that caught my eye. I was surprised to see so much surviving evidence of the period of relative prosperity that Afghanistan had experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. The cars on the street included a disproportionate number of Volkswagen Beetles and fat Chevrolets so familiar from my far-away American childhood. (Some of them still had their eight-track tape players.) The magazine that I worked for had rented a place for its employees to live in, and the ranch-style house, with its shag carpeting and tubular aluminum light fixtures, evoked exactly the same period. When US Marines reopened the long-dormant US Embassy, they found stacks of intact vinyl records in the basement—Billy Joel and the Eagles—and a perfectly good turntable to play them with.
The best time capsule of all, though, turned out to be the Behzad Book Store, which had managed to save much of its inventory through the years of Taliban rule. (Some of it, the owners told me, they had preserved by burying it.) Its shelves were like the strata of an archaeological dig: each layer revealed more clues to Afghanistan’s overly eventful recent past. There were thick academic tomes on economics and sociology, in a variety of languages, brought in by the well-meaning development economists and missionary socialists of the 1960s and early 1970s. There were well-thumbed paperback best sellers—such as Alvin Tofflers portentous Future Shock, another artifact from my junior high years—in English, German, and French, left behind by the tourists and aid workers who had crowded into the country in the years when they were still welcome. There was a Communist-era propaganda pamphlet entitled CIA Agents Expose Their Crimes, published in 1984, in which captured rebels confessed to their sins against the state. And there was even a crudely printed booklet, green letters on a fading yellow paper cover, of Mawdudi’s Fundamentals of Islam, translated into Russian. It was, evidently, part of the mujahideens information war, targeting the Red Army troops who hailed from the Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia.
The most poignant relics of them all, though, were the postcards. The bookstore had a whole wall of them, each one a tiny window onto a happier time. They were produced by Afghans inside their own country—an achievement that seemed almost unimaginable in 2002—in the days when peddling such things to tourists offered plenty of scope for profit. There were wide-angle views of Kabul that showed a picturesque, well-watered metropolis thick with trees. There were inviting pictures of exotic mosques and archeological sites. There was a snapshot of the pool at the Intercontinental Hotel, one light-skinned visitor in the foreground enjoying the turquoise water with the nonchalance of his oblivious present.
There was one image that has haunted me ever since. It showed a glamorous woman sitting on the grass, her knees bent. Her loose, flowing dress was all folkloric swirls, purple and black, a fusion of 1970s psychedelia and ethnic chic. Her head was uncovered, and a cigarette dangled from one casual hand.
I wondered about her fate. Had she somehow managed to survive the Soviet invasion, the antioccupation jihad, the civil war among the victorious mujahideen, the triumph of the Taliban? Had she stayed inside Afghanistan, or had she been forced to live her life in one of those huge refugee camps in Pakistan? Had she perhaps joined the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who succeeded in fleeing to the United States, or Germany, or Eastern Europe, and started a new life there? Or was she now, invisibly aged, passing by the shop as I stood there, hidden away beneath one of the light-blue burkas that seemingly all the women in Kabul were wearing in early 2002? And, if so, how would she feel about being forced to live her life under wraps? It was such a stark contrast to the moment depicted in the photo, when many women could still stroll the streets with uncovered heads. By the time of the early twenty-first century, the women who might have taken her place were mostly confined to their homes and frequently prohibited from holding jobs. It was hard to imagine burka-clad women smoking cigarettes.18
And it wasn’t just her. Her Afghanistan had vanished as well. The tourists who had once provided a market for these postcards were long gone, and the photographers and publishers who had manufactured and sold these images had vanished, too. The hotels had shut, and the archaeological sites had become too dangerous to visit. The domestic textile industry that had once hoped to expand its markets through advertising had been consumed by decades of war and impoverishment. It was almost impossible to reconcile the Kabul in the postcards with the city that surrounded me, a place of dusty riverbeds, amputees on every corner, and miles of skeletal ruins, rocketed into dust during the 1990s civil war.
All images can lie, of course, and it would be easy to dismiss the cigarette-smoking model as an outlier, a solipsistic stand-in for a superficial program of Westernization with no organic connection to the surrounding society. But this is lazy. The Afghanistan she stood for was real. She may have belonged to a minority, but it was unquestionably a growing minority that many wanted to join. Afghanistan’s path was never preordained.
It was this modest encounter with pre-1979 Afghanistan that started the train of thought that led to this book. Though the vision presented by the model in the postcard might have seemed like ancient history, it had actually existed within my own lifetime. This Westernizing, secular, hedonistic Afghanistan was not a phantom; it represented a genuine dream for many Afghans who either left the country after the Soviet invasion (among them, Akbar Ayazi, the young Kabul radio announcer, who now lives in the United States) or who, in the early 1990s, sided with the post-Communist Najibullah regime against the encroaching forces of the Islamic rebels who were determined to wipe it out forever. These traces of the past stand for an option snuffed out, a line of development that proved too weak to survive the successive blows of Communist rule, the Soviet invasion, and the harsh backlash of the mujahideen. In Afghanistan, secular modernization was a road that was not only not taken, but dynamited out of existence. We may not see anything like it return for generations, if at all.
Why did Afghanistan take the course that it did? I am not sure that anyone can ever give a truly satisfactory answer. To study 1979 is also to study the tyranny of chance. It is worth noting, among other things, that many of the leaders whose careers are examined in this book were the targets of assassination attempts. How would our story look if their lives had been cut short?19 If we can gain any lesson from our examination of this watershed year, it is that history is, above all, the study of contingency—a search for an answer to the question of why certain courses were followed when others, equally attractive or potentially viable, were not. To say that historical or economic conditions predispose a country to embark on a particular path does not mean that its politicians will necessarily decide to take it. Under different conditions—if Mao had died earlier, for example—China might have chosen a much different course. Its economic experiments before the late 1970s, the speed of Deng’s final ascendance, and the astounding vector of China’s transformation since 1979 all suggest a potential that could have been exploited even earlier. The same is true elsewhere. What if Edward Heath had decided, as he apparently considered, to stick with free-market reforms in the early 1970s? What if Gorbachev had chosen Deng’s path for the Soviet Communist Party? Why did the shah fail when Kemal Atatürk, the shaper of the secular modern Turkish state, succeeded? Historians are not in the business of speculation; they should strive to explain why paths were taken rather than not. Yet we will never understand past events with the necessary clarity unless we retain our sense of the choices that historical actors faced at the time—leaders as well as those who followed or defied them.
In the end the counterrevolutionaries were victorious, and they achieved that victory by mastering a central contradiction that resonates today: the paradox facing those who aspire to safeguard the old by creating the new. Counterrevolutionaries can be distinguished from mere conservatives. Conservatives strive to enhance the primacy of tradition as one of several options available in the political marketplace; counterrevolutionaries seek to restore values to a world that has been deeply altered by revolution. The example of 1979 reminds us that we should pay close attention whenever politicians begin to exploit the past. Khomeini invoked Islamic traditions as he struggled to build something that had never existed before, but he did so in competition with rivals who held dramatically different visions of those same traditions; once Khomeini succeeded, he ultimately folded many of the modern state institutions created by the hated shah (and utterly unknown to the Prophet) into his new Islamic Republic. One of the notable fault lines that ran between Deng and his Maoist opponents involved an argument about who would best safeguard what was called “the fine tradition of the Communist Party.” The winners, led by Deng, were those who vowed to “restore” that legacy rather than to “uphold” it. Thatcher extolled the lost virtues of family, thrift, and nation even though she ended up retaining certain features of the post-1945 welfare state. Pope John Paul II largely repudiated twentieth-century Vatican realpolitik in his search for a new church that would respond more closely to the needs of his flock in an increasingly interconnected world. Massoud and his fellow holy warriors conducted their ultraconservative jihad even as they ransacked the political toolbox of twentieth-century revolution. As many leftists have learned to their chagrin, even transparently artificial paeans to cherished and embattled values can have a powerful appeal. Memories of tradition may be highly selective, but those who would mock the “naive” nostalgia of conservatives forget that the past has an authenticity with which disembodied utopias cannot easily compete.
Similarly, a look at the events of 1979 leads us to appreciate the myriad forms that counterrevolutions can assume. Deng Xiaoping changed China’s course through stealth and subtlety. Khomeini and the Afghans chose the path of violent uprising, the sudden transformative release of pent-up aggression. The only certain thing is that political and economic trends do not travel in straight lines. Yet if the experiences of 1979 suggest one conclusion, it is that we should never underestimate the power of reaction.
The twenty-first century is already witnessing an astonishing rate of social change. Genetic research promises enormous improvements in health and agriculture. Urbanization, and the rising standards of living that accompany it, continues apace. The rise of the Internet and mobile telephony accelerates the circulation of knowledge, eroding the tyranny of distance and transforming our notions of privacy and community. The spread of electoral democracy, respect for basic human rights, and advances in the status of women and sexual minorities are making remarkable strides. There are those who cite evidence of deepening secularization in some parts of the Western world and East Asia as additional proof of positive social evolution.
Yet important parts of the 1979 story argue strongly against any streamlined, simplistic view of historical progress. The huge power of genetic engineering already inspires fears of “Frankenfoods” and cloning. New communications technologies empower extremists as well as democrats. “Hacktivists” use the Internet to stage guerrilla wars against governments or corporations, while those same governments and corporations are finding that cyberspace also offers wonderful opportunities for surveillance or the exploitation of private data. It is not hard to imagine how ecological depredation and the threat of climate change could spawn radical new political movements—and perhaps even millenarian faiths. It is equally possible, of course, that the confessional fervor that has left such a strong imprint on the era since 1979—the year that also saw the founding of the Moral Majority, the vehicle of evangelically inspired political activism that dramatically affected America’s political culture—could suddenly ebb and give way to something else, as future generations revolt against the excesses of their predecessors. Yet this is likely only if the advocates of the new rationalism can find satisfactory answers to the nagging metaphysical questions or forge new sources of identity that fulfill deeply rooted human needs as effectively as the old faiths.
The story is still playing itself out. But as I write these words, the political experiments of 1979 continue to define our world. The woman in the Kabul postcard lives in all of us.