MIT Economics Professor 黄亚生 on Chinese History, and Xi

choi

Tunku Varadarajan, The Conformist. China's best minds have been drafted into civil service for centuries. This discourages revolt but creates society nearly synonymous with the state. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023, at page C 9
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ity-crisis-9769ba5d
(book review on Yasheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of EAST; How exams, autocracy, stability, and technology brought China success, and why they might lead to its decline. Yale University Press, to be published on Aug 29, 2023)

Note:
(a) Huang was "Educated at Harvard * * * In 'The Rise and Fall of the EAST,' Mr Huang explains Chinese history as a dialectical tussle between administrative 'scale' and intellectual 'scope.' Ever since the rule of the Qin Dynasty (221-07 BC)—which “gave birth to political China” in addition to leaving behind the Great Wall—the Chinese have sought to make their territorial and demographic vastness governable by clamping down on diversity of thought.
(i) Yasheng Huang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasheng_Huang
("enrolled for a BA degree program, with a major in government from Harvard College, which he completed in 1985. Upon completion, he went on to earn a PhD in government from John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1991")
was born in 1960.
(ii) The adjective dialectical has two corresponding nouns: dialectic 辩证的 and dialect 方言.
(iii) "Qin Dynasty (221-07 BC)"

It should have been written "(221-207 BC)." lest readers misunderstand it as "(221-7 BC)."

(b) "the late sixth century. That was when the Sui Dynasty introduced a civil-service examination to recruit functionaries of the state. Variants of the exam, known as Keju, persisted through the centuries and exist to this day."

科举
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/科举
("科举始于605年时的隋朝，由隋文帝首创 * * * 在1905年才被慈禧太后废除；在越南更迟至阮朝末年的1919年才废除，整个科举共持续1300多年")
(c) "As proof of the pliant nature of the Chinese civitas, he points to the powerlessness of even the most celebrated entrepreneurs in the face of curbs placed on them by Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Jack Ma, the showboating founder of the company Alibaba, has accepted his recent political banishment without so much as a whimper."
(i) The civitas was a Latin noun feminine (c is pronounced k; plural  civitatis; see Wiktionary) is adopted into English unchanged (including pronunciation; except that plural is civitases). For the latter, see English dictionary:
* civitas (n): "a body of people constituting a politically organized community"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/civitas

The www.merriam-webster.com says the English noun "city" came through Anglo-French [spoken om England after Norman conquest) cité, from Latin noun civitas, which in turn was from another Latin noun (masculine or feminine) civis citizen.
(ii) The above English definition started in early Rome.

civitas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civitas
(iii) whimper (v or n)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whimper

Both humans and dogs may make whimpers. Dogs do not complain, but "make a low whining plaintive * * * sound."
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In the past few years, Yasheng Huang has found himself becoming disenchanted as a scholar, tired of the shackles placed on him by academic journals. Their excessive specialization has led, he complains, to a “suboptimal supply of big ideas.” So he set out to liberate himself from refereed publications and write a sweeping and “self-consciously ambitious” book about his native China. The riveting result is “The Rise and Fall of the EAST,” whose last word isn’t a reference to the Orient but is, instead, an acronym—for Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology—the interplay of which has shaped China for nearly 1,500 years.

Mr. Huang is a professor of economics and management at MIT and the author, previously, of “Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics” (2008). Educated at Harvard, he has publicly defended the desirability of liberal democracy in China, sparring eloquently with those who would insist that the Chinese way of market-communist governance is an acceptable—even preferable—alternative.

In “The Rise and Fall of the EAST,” Mr. Huang explains Chinese history as a dialectical tussle between administrative “scale” and intellectual “scope.” Ever since the rule of the Qin Dynasty (221-07 B.C.)—which “gave birth to political China” in addition to leaving behind the Great Wall—the Chinese have sought to make their territorial and demographic vastness governable by clamping down on diversity of thought. The seeming ease with which the Chinese Communist Party has governed since taking power in 1949 is best understood, Mr. Huang says, by turning the clock back to the late sixth century. That was when the Sui Dynasty introduced a civil-service examination to recruit functionaries of the state. Variants of the exam, known as Keju, persisted through the centuries and exist to this day. In such a way, the state “monopolized the very best human capital.” The finest minds were taken out of wider circulation, so they weren’t available for subversive deployment in such spheres as religion, commerce and the intelligentsia.

As a result, writes Mr. Huang, China hasn’t ever really had a society that is “considered separately legitimate from
the state.” As proof of the pliant nature of the Chinese civitas, he points to the powerlessness of even the most celebrated entrepreneurs in the face of curbs placed on them by Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Jack Ma, the showboating founder of the company Alibaba, has accepted his recent political banishment without so much as a whimper. And for all the attention garnered by the protests last year in Shanghai against draconian Covid lockdowns, China’s security apparatus was able to control the turbulence with aplomb. Had even a fraction of the 25 million locked-down Shanghainese “acted in concert,” Mr. Huang claims, the government would be “powerless no matter the size of its police force.” But the state’s cops and goons had 15 centuries of history on their side.

It is for this millennial reason that Chinese autocracy is “stickier” than autocracies elsewhere. On Oct. 1 of this year, the People’s Republic of China will turn 74, making it longer-lived than the Soviet Union (the world’s first communist country). There was notably more dissent in the Soviet Union—and in Vladimir Putin’s successor-state autocracy—than there’s ever been in Communist China. Mr. Huang says that Mr. Putin has “poisoned so many of his critics” because he has critics who speak out against him. Yet he must resort to extra-legal means, unlike Mr. Xi, who can bring the might of the state down on anyone who deviates from his party’s rigid prescriptions.

Ever since the introduction of the state exam, there has been in China an “absolute insistence on convergence, conformity, and uniformity,” Mr. Huang writes. The Confucianist ideology that was put in place in the sixth century was designed to “attenuate, or eradicate” all heterogeneity of thought and action. Chinese Communism, like Confucianism, tolerates no mavericks. And the downside of this “splendid political homeostasis”—Mr. Huang’s caustic phrase to describe China’s quiescent constancy—is also the decline or death of creativity.

Chinese inventiveness, Mr. Huang writes, peaked in the third to sixth centuries, the turbulent interregnum between the close of the Han Dynasty (which ended in A.D. 220) and the start of Sui rule (in A.D. 581), when a drive for doctrinal oneness led to the setting in of a prolonged creative “sclerosis.” Such stability came at a “steep price,” writes Mr. Huang: China “lost its technological lead” to the West. With the exception of brief interludes, this creative torpor didn’t dissipate until 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping set the party (and China) on a world-changing course of economic and political reform. This course came to an abrupt and disconcerting end in 2018, when Mr. Xi abolished the two-term limit on the presidency of China that had been put in place by Deng.

Refreshingly, Mr. Huang tells us, “China is no longer an exclusive domain of China scholars.” In this vein, readers will derive much profit from the book’s last section, in which he focuses on Mr. Xi, who has “engineered the biggest reform reversals in the history of the PRC” in pursuit of his goal of a “frictionless autocracy.” Mr. Huang lists examples of Mr. Xi’s hubris, which he describes as being “of the highest order”: ending the framework that ensures a peaceful transition of power; hobbling China’s high-tech private sector; endangering economic and technological collaboration with the West; and degrading the party as an institution by promoting a Cult of Xi. In addition to all of this, Mr. Xi is a fierce and relentless micromanager—unlike Mao, who, while just as powerful, had a more magisterial style. Mr. Xi insists on making all decisions himself, in Mr. Huang’s view a “prescription for policy mishaps and paralysis.”

Mr. Xi has openly scorned democracy, even as he acts as the guardian of a gargantuan, impressively educated middle class and a thoroughly globalized economy. In truth, as Mr. Huang explains, the dictator is steering China in a hair-raising direction: Yes, the country’s per capita GDP is approaching that of South Korea. But its political system has begun to resemble that of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. In so many ways, the man who rules China could be characterized as “Kim Jinping” (my label, not Mr. Huang’s). We should all be very afraid. After 15 centuries on a well-trodden path, China is now in uncharted territory.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor,
is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.