China and its Discontents

I’ve been reading a series of articles over the past week for my Post-1949 Modern Chinese History class, written by my professor himself, focusing on Nanjing’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, including the January 1967 failed power seizure. The details are more complicated and confusing than I could possibly have ever imagined. I am having trouble making sense of the various actors and plot twists, but that is partially the point. Occasionally sections jump out of the page for being unintentionally hilarious:

 When Mao spoke about Nanjing during this period his utterances were cryptic, cavalier, and arguably deranged. In a meeting with military commanders on July 13 he said,

“Don’t fear chaos, the more chaos there is, and the longer it goes on, the better. The more chaos goes on, there always emerges a hall of fame, and things will clear up. No matter how chaotic, don’t be afraid. The more afraid you are, the more demons will appear. But no matter what, don’t open fire, whenever you open fire its no good. It’s not possible to have nationwide chaos. Wherever there’s a pustule, there are germs, so they’ll always pop. The chaos in the streets of Nanjing is really fierce, the more I see the happier I get. The more chaotic it gets the more there is a third faction that opposes civil war, opposes armed conflict, and that’s great! (Zhang Chunqiao interjects: “Some say the third faction will take a third road”). What third road is there! Everyone should unite, criticize, you should guide them!” (Mao Zedong 1967).

Below is a speech I gave at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center election party this morning.

Four years ago in the summer of ’08, I was an organizing fellow on the Obama for America campaign in the Manchester, NH field office (organizing fellow being a glorified name for an intern). I wouldn’t even turn 18 until that October, and it was my first campaign. It was an exciting time for a young person to be involved in politics. The most poignant time came that June, when I staffed the first joint campaign event between then candidate Obama and then gracious loser Hillary Clinton, in aptly named Unity, NH. Unity is one of those bucolic and placid rural little towns everyone thinks of when they think of presidential campaigning and New Hampshire. It has about 500 people, and about 3000 showed up for the event. Of course it was all grand political theater, if the name didn’t tip you off. A giant 50 foot American flag framed the two erstwhile competitors as they walked in for the benefit of the tv cameras. David Axelrod was standing on a grassy hill 20 yards away wearing shades, talking on his cell phone and surveying the situation. U2 was blasting on the sound system. Obama and Clinton were wearing the biggest grins of their careers, as if a grueling primary campaign had not just ended.

In that moment, I understood why people persist in working in such a blighted field as politics. The energy of the crowd and the magnetism of the speakers fed into each other in a kind of feedback loop. It was all a bit much for a very young 17-year old who, by the way, had not even started college yet.

About an hour after the event, after Obama and Clinton had left and a sudden rain had driven away the crowds, we were left to clean up. I remember walking up onto the stage, sitting on what seemed like a sacred stool, and looking out over the podium at an impossibly still scene, the same place an hour earlier that was full of such raw emotion. It felt good.

Four years later, the US and the world feel like a very different place. There’s a sense that America is searching for something that it lost, a common purpose, perhaps. Some of us feel that we’ve been collectively scarred and made impotent by the hollowing out of the American economy, ineffectual institutions, and debasing of a sense of community from a different age. But I have a feeling that America has experienced these kinds of problems before, and gotten through them. In fact, we even have a name for this continuous process of lament followed by renewal in American history: the jeremiad, named after the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. After every period of excess, we’ve always returned to the moral center, relying on traditional American values to move forward.

Some people might critique the campaign process as overly emotional. They want to rationally and logically vote for every candidate. But in a very important way, the campaign, as irrational as it is, is necessary. In the parlance of the Obama ’08 campaign, it gets us fired up, ready to go. This sort of emotional appeal represents a form of idealism that lifts us up out of the morass, and gets us working on the substantive stuff. At least in my own life, the naïveté has hopefully diminished somewhat but the optimism has never retreated. And in the words of Ted Kennedy, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

This is a piece I wrote that was just published in this month’s SAIS Observer, but it hasn’t been put online yet.

I am one of two international students in my “Modernity and World Social Thought” class at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center; the other twenty or so are all Chinese students. Every week we talk about questions of modernity and modernization: whether a country can become technologically “modernized” without being culturally and psychologically “modern”; whether modernity is a universal value or a particular value for particular people; what part, if any, of the past should persist into the era of the nation-state.

I listen when my Chinese classmates debate the influence of Confucianism in the current Chinese socio-political environment, and whether the modernizing reformers of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 have been heeded to the present day. Most interesting to me is whether the project of modernity should have a “purpose,” whether modernity is a project or just an aimless process. Some writers, like Patrick Smith in “Somebody Else’s Century,” say none is needed. Other nationalists, like Jawaharlal Nehru, say that purpose lies in each country’s destiny. And many more say modernity’s purpose is derived from individual human fulfillment.

This question bites directly into the seminar and indeed many of my Chinese peers’ experiences. A century ago, China grappled over whether it could preserve its unique cultural ti (fundamental principles) while grafting onto it Western yong (practical application). Yong is the means, ti is the end. China is still dealing with this rift between ti and yong today. This separation is reflected in a number of common questions, like: what makes our state legitimate? What are our national values? Are we permanently stuck in a culture of material consumption, or is there a way forward?

Mao Zedong said at the outset of the People’s Republic, “Our new China is like a blank piece of paper on which we can write the most elegant characters and paint the most beautiful pictures.” In modern China, the question is not so much how to preserve the Confucian ti, but rather how to come up with a new ti after it has been thoroughly scarred from being scooped out and replaced, over and over again.

But then I focus on the reality of class discussion. I realize that, more than anything else, this small seminar, existing in a tiny bubble within China, is through its own way living out the project of modernity.  We are living out modernity through discussion; the classroom dialectic is perhaps the only way to move forward past confusion and post-modernism. Values are not objects for individuals. They are decided in common. And if we can do our small part in tackling such immense problems, especially in a place like China, then I will be happy.