On Cities and Tongdong Bai's Confucian Modernity

[The following is a version of comments that I have been invited to give at a book symposium being hosted by the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong in October. It'll take place via Zoom, unfortunately. I'll get back to Hong Kong again someday, but not this year.]

Tongdong Bai’s Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case is a sprawling, ambitious, and often (though not always) compelling book. Going far beyond its title, Bai’s book does not only thoughtfully add to the ever-increasing literature on the relationship of the Confucian tradition to arguments about egalitarianism, meritocracy, and liberal democracy generally, but also aspires to make a comprehensive case for a Confucian alternative to liberal modernity entirely. Such a philosophical and historical claim might seem to be biting off more than any one book could ever chew, but there is much to be learned from the Confucian perspectives Bai brings to bear on the book’s many topics. In these comments, I will focus solely on the provocative framing which Bai sets up so as to situate the alternative which he spends the rest of the book describing, a framing which presents a way of conceiving of the Confucian tradition that leads directly to questions that, under some common interpretations, Confucianism had been assumed to have no answer.

Foremost among these interpretations is the assumption that the “familism” of the classical Confucian tradition--which Bai explicitly centers his analysis upon--is inapplicable to, or at least greatly constrains it direct applicability to, the modern world, which Bai himself characterizes as centrally involving the establishment of “large, populous, well-connected, mobile, plebeianized states of strangers” (p. 26). Given that, to quote L.H.M. Ling, classical Confucianism converges all the “various domains of human activity--political (ruler-to-subject), familial (father-to-son, parent-to-child), conjugal (husband-to-wife), and fraternal (brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend)--into one set of family relations writ large,” the notion of discovering in the Confucian tradition an arrangement that provides guidance to a society of characterized by mobility and anonymity is a surprising one. Bai’s argument this was accomplished through “the introduction of compassion-based humanness as a virtue,” thereby providing “a bond for a society of strangers” is powerful, though not, I think, entirely persuasive (p. 120).

That classical Confucianism lays out a moral and social system of signification and ritual which as a matter of theory served, and in practice through Chinese history frequently did serve, to tie together people beyond their basic family or village units is well understood. It is more commonly the case, however, that this understanding underscores a “civil,” as opposed to a “civic,” formulation of the possibilities for a Confucian politics. That is, the civilizing aspects of Confucian universalism are seen as not tied to any particular place or community, but rather to the simple fact of humans being everywhere in community with one another, beginning with the family and expanding out to potentially encompass anyone that any other given person could name (and be named by), thereby give real affective meaning to the obligations and bonds between them. As A.T. Nuyen put it, it invokes an “outward expansion of the individual self to a universal framework that encompasses the whole world.” How well can that vision of ritually realized civil relationships be adapted to the socio-economic reality of diverse populations capable of independent movement pursuing distinct, private goals in pluralistic civic spaces? Here, Bai qualifies his suggestions somewhat, and these are exactly the points where I find his basic framing of his argument most provocative.

Bait presents the centuries-long period of transition from the Zhou dynasty, through the Spring and Autumn periods and the Warring States period, until the establishment of the Qin dynasty (roughly 770 BCE to 221 BCE, a time which he abbreviates as the "SAWS"), as a time of modernization--though not the “modernity 2.0" brought on by the “industrial revolutions” of western Europe which “eluded traditional China” (p. 26). Nonetheless, as the SAWS saw the collapse of Zhou-era feudalism and its replacement with “a few large and populous states in which the kings had to deal with thousands of strangers without the nobility-based delegatory system available to them anymore,” Confucianism emerged in part as a response to “the demand for new political orders” which this early modern moment required. Bai elucidates this interpretation through some innovative use of well-known passages from the Mencius (in particular 1A7, with the story of King Xuan of Qi), concluding that “after the collapse of close-knit communities in feudal times [meaning the Zhou dynasty], the lord of a state lost the motive to care for his people, most of whom were now total strangers.” The Confucian tradition, in the hands of Mencius, presents compassion and humaneness “as a new bond between the ruler and the people, and as a new motivation for a leader of state to rule his people.” Thus the humane meritocracy of classical Confucianism, Bai goes on to argue, thus should be understood as a philosophical resource of direct applicability to the challenges facing liberal democracy today, since Confucian compassion and fellow-feeling were articulated in very socially similar--if very culturally distinct--milieus of modernity (p. 122).

My struggle with this--in many ways ingenious--justificatory argument is that Bai’s attempted association of the unique circumstances of the period of Confucianism’s emergence with the same period in European history which bequeathed so many of the conceptual developments that get lumped into “modernity” (the rise of skepticism and individualism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific developments of the Renaissance period; the development of advanced capitalist forms as changes introduced by travel, exploration, technology. and imperial expropriation were codified into government and law in the 16th and 17th centuries; etc.) simply lacks one of the fundamental elements which his own original description depended upon: urban spaces of genuine mobility, diversity, and personal subjectivity. This is not to deny that the ancient Chinese cities of Linzi, Yangzhou, Jicheng, or others lacked any sprawling or cosmopolitan character; on the contrary, the evidence is clear that many did. But for the Confucianism of Bai’s SAWS “modernity” to be truly accepted as, in his words, an order fit for “a society of strangers,” then it must incorporate some analogue to the kind of “heterogeneity of anonymity,” to quote Stephen Schneck, which slowly but surely emerged through the changing urbanism of Late Middle Ages and the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe. It is not clear that is the case.

Bai suggests, in reference to the long periods of disruption in Chinese history, that the overwhelmingly agricultural and local “close-knit society of acquaintances” which most take to be the default character of Confucian communities might be better seen as temporary refuges which developed in the wake of turmoil, or perhaps even “a mistaken projection of contemporary observations on the whole history of China.” His support for that revisionary argument is thin, however. Thus he follows this argument with the observation that “even if we accept the judgment that the economy of traditional China was agriculture-based, and its villages were societies of acquaintances that were mobile...only at a rather slow pace,” that still doesn’t account for “the mobility of government officials who were often not even allowed to take a post in their hometowns.” He thus argues that his interpretation of Mencius’s emphasis upon the bonds provided by humaneness is compatible with a “dual structure...in which there were communities of acquaintances on the level of the common people and societies of strangers on the level of the political and commercial elite.” Admitting that “for businessmen and officials in traditional China living in cities, their economic base was still often in rural areas, and thus they couldn’t sever the ties with the communities of acquaintances they grew up in,” he concludes that “[n]onetheless, the bond developed by Mencius for the society of strangers remains relevant” (pp. 123-125).

On that I certainly agree! It is vital to consider, as Bai does, how the bonding power of Confucian humaneness can open up our conversations about representation, gender equality, health care, civil rights, international institutions, and so much more, all of which most Westerners have tended to conduct alongside unquestioned assumptions about liberal democracy. But it is equally vital to acknowledge that those assumptions became as widespread as they did not solely due to the success of liberal democratic states, but also because those states recognized, and institutionalized practices pertaining to, the new, transformative forms of human life that were the creation of the modern urban space. The cry of the apocryphal 15th-century German peasant--Die Stadtluft macht frei!--reflected far more than the particulars of feudal law, but rather a general appreciation of the diversity, privacy, and distant formality that urban spaces came to offer in modern Europe. Thus have arguments about strengthening the kind of intimacy and community which the shift from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft arguably weakened, perhaps fatally, always had to struggle against accusations of agrarian nostalgia, and find ways to express themselves in the context of modernity’s seemingly inevitable liberal and urban character.

It is unfortunately that Bai, in this fine book, did not consider building parallels between what he presents as the modernity-compatible Confucian conceptualizations of humaneness, and the large literature on republican civic virtues, civil religion, and other communitarian and neo-Tocquevillian forms of social organization that have emerged over the past 35 years, especially considering that a great deal of that literature has both similarly struggled to clarify its theories in light of the rural-urban divide, the controversial place of elites, and other matters which clearly relate to Bai’s own reconstruction of the classical Confucian tradition, as well as having frequently connected with the Confucian tradition itself as well. Without that comparative work, the conceptual reach of some of Bai’s most interesting arguments remains an open question. To posit the classical Confucian tradition as possessing conceptual elements that can resolve the same theoretical dilemmas as liberal democracy, by virtue of that tradition being rooted in and have developed in response to similarly “modern” conditions, means that Confucianism must possess, within its teachings about civil morality, resources that can be adapted to not only the context of “strangerness” which elites may encounter in carrying out their ritual roles and responsibilities (as hypothetically adapted to the contemporary moment), but also the “mass strangerness” that the characterize modern civic spaces.

As a further example, Bai’s discussion of such civic spaces when conceived in terms of the nation-state and international relations generally, following what he labels a “new tian xia model,” is rich and thoughtful. But it, too, bypasses the space which must exist between, at one end, those street-level communities of moderns which will invariably partake of an urban character--the “ballet” of strangers who nonetheless acknowledge one another, as Jane Jacobs described so well--and at the other end, the sovereign state. Bai, influenced by an argument by Friedrich Nietzsche, dismisses the idea of there successfully existing under tian xia “quasi-autonomous communities,” since “a small community with even a few thousand people may not be able to maintain even the most basic technologies and institutions to sustain itself as a significant competing unit” (p. 177). But while it may have been reasonable for him to set that question aside while demonstrating the ability to extend Confucian arguments into current global debates over state competition, it reveals, again, something missing: an argument about how, and to what degree, classical Confucian humaneness, and the civilizing connections it enables, can be brought into modern civic spaces of urban diversity, subjectivity, and contestation.

My belaboring of what appears to me as a gap in the original framing of Bai’s argument should not be taken as a greater criticism than it actually is; disputes over the actual “modernity” of classical Confucian ideas do not compromise the value of what Bai suggests regarding the prioritization of equality, as well as much more, in modern life. Bai’s work stands as a great accomplishment, even if the way it presents its valuable political engagements may be less than fully persuasive on their own.

Crossing Cultures and Making Connections in Singapore (and Elsewhere)

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Singapore to participate in conference dedicated to a topic I can't claim to be anything like fully informed about, much less an expert in: "Chinese Philosophy in a Multicultural World." Why was I there, then? Because of a marvelous and challenging book published by a scholar and friend, Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. I and a couple of other folks interested in the question of how one actually does comparative or cross-cultural philosophy or political thought have been trying to put together a panel discussion on her book for more than a year; after many ups and downs, a panel finally came together the morning of July 7, with: (from left to right) Ranjoo Herr, a Korean feminist scholar who teaches in the U.S., me, the guy from Kansas, Goh Beng Lan, a Malaysian anthropologist who teaches there in Singapore, and Carl K.Y. Shaw, a Taiwanese political scientist, all providing comments on the book. Leigh herself, who is currently at the London School of Economics, had to Skype in at 2am, her time, to give her responses. Our many different disciplinary takes on Leigh's books turned out to be extremely fruitful, to say nothing of the fact that it was, bar none, the single most multicultural academic forum I'd ever been a part of, and a bit of a small miracle it came together as well as it did.

A few people have since asked me what was worth flying halfway around the globe to talk about, and it's a little hard to explain. Leigh's book, besides being (for me, anyway) a wonderful, eye-opening introduction to and theoretical argument built upon a too-little studied period of Chinese intellectual history--specifically, the revolutionary late Qing and early Republic era of the 1860s through the 1920s--is also a methodological broadside, taking a strong stand against the dominant hermeneutic and dialogic approaches to thinking through encounters between distinct cultures in the English-speaking Western academy, and insisting that a distinct philosophical alternative is available--all of which requires an understanding of debates within the sub-discipline of comparative political theory to fully follow. Speaking as one who has kept up with those debates, I have to say that whether Leigh really does outline such an alternative is an open question; at least three of the four commenters (myself, Ranjoo, and Carl) thought her understanding of what does--and doesn't--happen in a hermeneutical encounter is flawed. But my assessment doesn't mean that there weren't many ways her book called me up short, and made me re-think. So, for whomever is interested, here is a slightly modified version of the comments I prepared for the panel in Singapore. Enjoy!




Leigh Jenco is a brilliant and, sometimes, infuriating scholar. For over ten years, her work--including her first book, Making the Political, and numerous academic articles and reviews along the way--has challenged the still-young subfield of comparative political theory, particularly that variant which looks to Chinese and Confucian philosophical traditions, with a single question, articulated in multiple ways but always making the same point: why do the comparisons which cross-cultural studies make always seem to result in theoretical conclusions that may be (to quote from a 2007 review essay of hers) “usefully employed not by ‘us,’ but only by ‘them’”? In other words, aren’t Western students of East Asian philosophy and comparative political thought implicitly setting the terms of debate, introducing questions and categories which Chinese thinkers complement, but never supplant, implicitly reducing the thinking of hundreds of people over thousands of years to a secondary role, one that allows Westerners to bring themselves into Chinese struggles over various philosophical quandaries, but never actually be confronted by what was learned from those struggles themselves? Elaborating upon this charge has led Leigh to write a great deal about, and sometimes dispute a great deal about, the methodological and analytical norms that have emerged over the past 20 years in comparative political theory. In my view, Changing Referents is Jenco’s strongest and fullest elaboration of her challenge yet, and as such is a kind of culmination of more than a decade’s worth of argument.

It has been sometimes a contentious argument, because it is certainly not the case that the early advocates of comparative philosophy and the incorporation of non-Western thinkers into debates about political theory (and here I am thinking of individuals like Raimon Pannikar, Roxanne Euben, Hwa Yol Jung, Fred Dallmayr, Anthony Parel, and many others) were unaware of the exclusionary possibilities of their undertaking. On the contrary, the impetus behind comparative political theory has been, from its formal beginnings in the early 1990s until today, to challenge the implicit (and sometimes explicit!) colonialism, the condescending exclusion, which characterized so much of the Western academy throughout the majority of its existence. Comparative political thought, when done well, has always carried with it a deep awareness of the basic philosophical and ethical problems which a too easy universalism invites. Thus has it become normative for Western students of non-Western bodies of thought to incorporate into their approach a self-reflexive, dialogic, interrogative humility. As a result, as Jenco nicely puts it on the first page of Changing Referents, “our existing forms of knowledge are not transformed by this encounter with otherness so much as their limitations and possibilities are considered in a more self-reflexive light” (1). While not attacking humility, Leigh wants something more: she wants, I believe, to insist upon the possibility of the kind of direct encounters with a distinct philosophical perspective and a distinct linguistic world which alone would make, in her view, real transformative learning possible.

Jenco uses the term “culturalist” to describe her position, contrasting it to both the ethnocentric universalism of the bad old days, and what she calls the “particularist” account of various thinkers, all of whom, in her view, “affirm the inevitable embeddedness of our knowledge in cultural or historical background conditions over which we have little immediate control” (8). This is an interesting usage on her part, and one that points directly towards what I believe to be an important way of assessing Leigh’s methodological challenge. “Culturalism” was the term that Canadian theorist Will Kymlicka used--during an early iteration of the endless theoretical debate over community, identity, culture, and authenticity–-to distinguish his position from that of nationalists and, implicitly, what he saw as the assumptions of communitarian thinkers in general. For the culturalist, as Kymlicka presented it, “membership [in distinct historical, religious, ethnic, linguistic, or culture groups]...must not be imposed by the state, but rather be [must be recognized as] a matter of self-identity....[C]ulturalists support politics which make it possible for members of ethnic and national groups to express and promote their culture and identity, but reject any policies which impose a duty on people to do so.” (See Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship [OUP, 2001], 42.) He believed that in making this argument he was distinguishing himself from thinkers like Charles Taylor and others who, in his view, treated linguistic and cultural communities as having their own non-subjective (or at least not entirely subjective) continuity, and thus were conceived as something insufficiently subject to individual choice.

This point is worth dwelling upon, because it is one Leigh is fully aware of. In her view, though, “the differences between Kymlicka and the communitarians...are not as consequential as they appear.” In her reading, they are all one or another variety of “particularist,” in that they accept that there are particular “‘societal cultures’...determined by claims about history: presumably self-evident past sociological associations among groups of people are treated not only as constitutive of their given self-identity but as so important and (in the short term) inescapable that they define boundaries between their way of life and that of others” (41-42). The kind of comparative theorizing which cross-cultural encounters allow under this framework, then, whether nominally liberal or otherwise, can only be Gadamerian in character, referring here to the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer on the constitutive functions of language and culture. The upshot for Leigh is that particularists presumably accept that the problem of cultural incommensurability can only be elided through a dialogic evolution, through the emergence of a "third space" wherein, via long and evolutionary and often quotidian encounters with the cultural and linguistic other, a fusion of horizons becomes possible, the context of which allows for a reflexive, collective rethinking on the part of all involved.

Leigh is critical of the limitations which she sees baked into the presumptions of this hermeneutic negotiation of differences--and the way in which she presents her criticism gets at, as I alluded to above, something potentially rather important. Let me quote two (I think revealing) passages from her book. First:

Although intended to do justice to the particularity of diverse cultures, this (what I call) “particularist” account elides the extent to which many cultural practices, particularly those associated with knowledge-production, are not automatically historically and sociologically imparted, but rather are deliberately acquired by individuals and groups over time. As such this account provides no method by which other ways of thinking or organizing knowledge might become ours, in the sense of not simply enhancing our self-reflexivity but also of displacing existing modes of inquiry across communities and over generations (9, emphasis added).

And second:

Particularist arguments...are often advanced out of humility and respect for the unfamiliar. But they also entail ironically constrictive and underwhelming consequences for engagement with knowledge outside of the contexts in which one finds oneself. In drawing attention to the varied ways in which cultural and historical contexts influence what we take to be knowledge and how we produce it, cross-cultural engagement becomes constructed not in terms of political or social, but epistemological strategies....This emphasis is often applied self-reflexively, to draw attention to the variegation and partiality even of knowledge taken to be “our own” as well as to query the assumption of radical epistemological distance between “them” and “us.” Despite such affirmations, however, particularists inadvertently...draw a line between knowledge that “we” produce as theorists, and knowledge “they” furnish as objects of inquiry....This self-positioning effectively (if not intentionally) rigidifies the relationship of individuals to the particular contexts believed to structure their pursuit of knowledge (44-45, emphasis added).

There are, I think, multiple ways to engage with, and criticize, Leigh’s description of the hermeneutic approach here. Her notion that the interpretation of texts or ideas or practices which is the fruit of a dialogic fusion of conceptual horizons must involve no alteration or personalization of the concepts in question, but rather assumes such concepts to be historically or sociologically “intractable” (31), is, I think, one that seriously misunderstands what people working in philosophical hermeneutics assume dialogue actually consists of. One can accept the existence of limitations in one’s received horizons of understanding without thinking that, therefore, all received horizons are equally and in every way static and unshakable. They are, after all, constructed over time through the same participatory linguistic and mutually reflexive processes which dialogic encounters themselves always involve. And the movement inherent to such processes, I think, necessarily means for a change of position: a seeing of the other from a different perspective or point of view, which often includes seeing the other in oneself. (Gadamer himself described the “highest and most elevated aim” of working through the hermeneutic circle as that of “shar[ing] the other’s alterity,” and being changed thereby. See Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Integral Pluralism in Action,” in Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars [The University Press of Kentucky, 2010], 115.) Hence, Jenco’s insistence, when drawing upon the example of May Fourth leaders and intellectuals who truly did find their horizons of understanding shaken to the core by various events, that “incommensurability may not necessarily be....paradigmatic for all instances of cross-cultural engagement,” and that it is in fact “a synchronic rather than a diachronic phenomenon,” proves, I believe, much less than she may think it does (17). New communities do form, and old communities do change, even as the pre-understandings which constitute their conceptual horizons differently endure and find themselves reworked in multiple ways. The hermeneutic circle may not be a self-constituted one, but that does not mean the selves who encounter one another through it are not capable of experiencing through it their own disparate constitutions.

That being said, what stands out, on my reading at least, in Leigh’s discontent with both universalism and (her version of) particularism is the lurking sense that both fail to give full credit to the determined, self-motivated, intentional, border-crossing individual. And that is certainly true. There is an abiding communitarian sensibility behind any discussion of cultural authenticity and the need to recognize, in a sense, one's unavoidable submission to the historical and linguistic pre-understandings by which one approaches cultural discussions in the first place. You didn’t decide what you believe, this sensibility points out, and you didn’t determine the perspective by which you interrogate your own beliefs. The humble self-reflexivity which all this presumes connects very well, I think, with the tradition-, culture-, and community-sensitive side of phenomenological thinking. But it also probably does fail, at least a little bit, as an explanatory framework when one encounters the heroic individual thinkers that Leigh’s analysis depends upon. I choose that word purposefully: reading her wonderful book, and being introduced to the intellectual arguments of late 19th-century and early 20th-century reformers and radicals like Yan Fu, Liang Qichou, or Tan Sitong, provides strong evidence that conservative readings of the possibilities of knowledge within a framework of received constitutive understandings are arguably limited in their applicability when one looks at the actual record of this transformative, revolutionary historical moment, and the adventuresome individuals it includes. Leigh is respectful of Gadamer’s insights into “the prejudicial process of all knowledge-formation,” but it is very likely that China’s past simply didn't universally play a prejudicial role in the thinking of many Chinese activists and thinkers during the decades between the 1860s and the 1920s. As she observes, speaking specifically of the conversations in 19th and early 20th-century China over “Western Learning” (bianfa or xixue): “At no point did the ‘past,’ or even some self-conscious Chinese Confucian ‘tradition’ in [Alsadair] MacIntyre’s sense of the term, present itself as an obvious and clearly demarcated context for action or understanding” (134, 63). Leigh is, I think, obviously fascinated by the specifics of these debates, but also wants to strike a blow for the free individual against the tyranny of culture, language, and time.

This is why–again, on my reading–Jenco’s criticisms of the oppressive essentialism and the exclusion of subaltern voices which cultural particularity and the presumption of a received tradition has unfortunately sometimes involves (99-110), while strong, are not nearly as strong as her insistence upon culturalism as a specific, narrow, keyed-to-the-individual kind of universalism: “it assumes the general applicability of...cultural norms; this lies behind the claim that ‘anyone’ can become Chinese” (47). I did a double-take at that claim, as I’m sure others would as well (though, apparently, not Daniel Bell!), but again, she makes her case. Consider:

[C]ultural otherness may be better understood as one of the many kinds of otherness (such as the historical or idiosyncratic) that make learning of any type possible. It therefore may not require special techniques of assuagement, such as self-reflexive dialogue between presumably embedded interlocutors, but it may demand more of us in the way of self-transformative, disciplinary commitment to the standards and languages of a particular knowledge community--even as our own participation in that community shapes, in an ongoing and dialectical way, its distinctive features (23, emphasis added).

And:

Recognition of oneself as “Chinese” by others is authorized by one’s felicitous connection to particular pasts texts, practices, or events, even as those connections are necessarily reproduced and transformed as each new individual acquires them. New individuals join these communities of knowledge not automatically through birth but through gaining familiarity with their standards of intelligibility. Chinese culturalism can therefore be distinguished from universalist ideologies such as liberalism, in that the success of culturalism turns on acquired practices whose transmission and mobility are contingent and fragile--not secured in perpetuity through a priori assumptions about essential human attributes that are putatively universal (61, emphasis added).

As one who has always been interested in and has occasionally published on topics relevant to the Confucian philosophical tradition, and yet cannot read or speak Chinese, and thus is entirely dependent upon translators, this is a discomfortingly powerful argument. Might it be that I, and multiple other students of cross-cultural scholarship, are accepting of the conceptual limitations presumed by the dialogic model simply because we have not been successful, or simply haven’t been willing, to buckle down and do the damn work of learning the language in question? Quite possibly! (This is essentially Bell's argument which I linked to above: "Chinese-ness" is most fundamentally, in his view, a linguistically communicated cultural sensibility--defined, one might say, to borrow from Leigh's own argument, by its own particular "standards of intelligibility"--so given that he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has lived in China and built a family in China over the past 20 years, why shouldn't he be considered Chinese?) Leigh herself points to claims made by Chen Yuan, a historian from the 1930s, who advanced the claim that “literary production by non-Han peoples under the Yuan dynasty...expanded and enriched [the cultural property of the Han] in ways irreducible to, but still recognizable within, [the] past forms that others affirmed as part of a literary tradition they shared with them.” The argument, in short, was that these “‘sinified’ Yuan poets of Mongol ethnicity advanced Chinese literature” in as direct a manner as could anyone who received that cultural property as a part of their linguistic and cultural patrimony (59-60). If the perspective of these thinkers is such that becoming “sinified” really can make one Chinese, perhaps it is arguable that the sense of collective humility and the dialogic respect for difference which characterizes much comparative political theory may be taking things unnecessarily far in the direction of incommunsurability.

I am not wholly opposed to this idea, as much as it may indict my own failure in cross-cultural knowledge production; while I have written occasionally in ways which insist upon recognizing the anti-individualistic character of Confucian thought, I'm not unaware of the ways in which it also allows that the localization of meaning in particular places doesn't prevent such produced knowledge from serving broad, even cosmopolitan, civic purposes. And from that perspective, I can see the point of Leigh's argument. It's not, after all, that she insists everyone "will" be able to make themselves Chinese; only that they "could." Leigh turns to the writings of Qing-era reformer Tan Sitong to elaborate upon the dividing line here. Tan employed the ideas of the late-Ming philosopher Wang Fuzhi, whose interpretation of the Book of Changes emphasized the interdependence of the dao, or “the way,” and qi, or “vessel.” Quoting Tan’s observations, Leigh writes: “There is no dao without qi. Without a bow and arrow there is no dao of archery; without horses and vehicles there is no dao of driving....If we believe these words, the dao must rely on qi before you can have practical use; it is not the case that dao exists in some empty objectless space” (129). And remember, the qi are portable, not sociologically, historically, or even linguistically grounded in particular cultural communities--they are things, subject to individual intentionality, assuming they show sufficient discipline to master them:

Tan insists that culture--constituted by complex and dynamic daos whose true scope is essentially unknowable to any one human--necessarily is grasped and embodied only in qi (material objects, institutions, texts, and so on). But [it does not follow]...to conclude that at best a “fusion of horizons” will be forged to create a kind of third cultural space or understanding....Rather, the very replicability of qi enables the portability of culture....The portability of meaning here wrestles directly with the difficulties of social and not just individual self-transformation....Although these transformation will likely be beset by issues of translation and commensurability best handled in a “conversational” or dialogic way, to leave the issue of borrowing there would be to ignore the very real need to frame (and borrow) cultural forms in a set of institutions that can support a broad range of personal interests, needs, talents, and certainly interpretations (137-138, emphasis added).

Ultimately, then, Jenco is not wholly opposed to the humbling, collective character of the dialogic assessment of the cross-cultural project; she simply, on my reading, wants to insist that the writings of multiple scholars from these crucial decades in China’s history demonstrate that it is possible for understanding across otherness to be sometimes directly achievable in contexts where both personal engagement and an individual's disciplined mastery of the vessels of communication are present. Incommsurability, for Jenco, is therefore not an inevitable and necessarily negotiated consequence of cultural difference; while it sometimes may be, certain variables can make a major difference. And for Jenco, the key variable, I think, is often going to be the willingness and ability of the person encountering the other--whether Daniel Bell or Leigh herself--to make the vessel of understanding their own.

All well and good, yes? Probably. And yet...there is still something which sits badly with me, with all Leigh's (usually implied, but nonetheless, on my reading, constantly present) talk of individuals taking ownership of knowledge, of making it their own. Once again, the communitarian arguments which haunt any close consideration of the cultural work accomplished by language--the primary vessel that Leigh's examination of these thinkers who achieved so much in terms of bianfa focuses upon--comes into play. Here, the names which most readily come to mind are the philosopher Charles Taylor and the early Romantic translator and critic whose ideas about the constitutive role a spoken language plays in community-formation which he relied heavily upon, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder's insights here are crucial, in that he developed a philosophical anthropology which allowed numerous counter-Enlightenment thinkers who came after him--Humboldt, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, Heidegger, and many others, whether they acknowledged or even recognized the influence of Herder or not--to talk normatively about the interdependence of our identity and the received cultural structures and traditions which surround us, and how the realization of meaning depends upon that interdependence. Taylor's elaboration upon these Herderian themes has been hugely influential in arguments over philosophical hermeneutics...but of course, to start talking about how our knowledge of the meaningfulness of one thing as opposed to some other "depends" upon something "received" takes us right back to the kind of anti-individual conservatism or hesitancy which I think Leigh's sees as a problem in the dialogic approach to comparative political theory and cross-cultural thinking in the first place...and thus it's not surprising that, while she never mentions Herder, Taylor makes frequent appearances in Changing Referents--nearly always negatively.

Of particular concern to Leigh is an early essay of Taylor's, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," which argues, on Leigh's reading that knowledge has a "diffuse...social character," demanding a recognition of the particularity of each utterance, which in turn strengthens the assumption that, as Leigh puts it, "actos/interpreters in the present [necessarily produce knowledge in terms of] a certain degree of continuity with the past precedent of community of interpreters to which....they belong" (see 42-43, 122, 207). The idea that there are historical contexts which serve as "boundaries to the present scope and future malleability of culture" is one which Leigh, as should be clear by this point, strongly dissents from, insisting instead that, given that one can--assuming sufficient time and training and education--linguistically penetrate other culture contexts, why must there be any obviously boundary upon the audience most authentically served by the understandings which follow?

Taylor's response--and Herder's, and Gadamer's, and that of many other hermeneutic thinkers as well--might involve looking at Leigh's thoughtful claim (or at Bell's much more simplistic one), and observing that a language is more than words. It is a way of living a life, and of constituting a perspective on that life. In a response Taylor wrote to Kymlicka more than 25 years ago, he laid out this idea--in the context of the then-furious liberal-communitarian debates--quite succinctly:

The liberal accords a culture value as the only common resource of its kind available for the group in question. It is the only available medium for its members to become aware of their options. If these same individuals could dispose of another such medium, then the case for defending the culture would evaporate. For the people concerned, their way of life is a good worth preserving; indeed, it is something invaluable and irreplaceable, not just in the absence of an alternative, but even if alternatives are available....People who have lived in or near French Canada know the resonance of this goal of survivance. For the neutral liberal, the reasoning starts from the fact that certain already-existing people lack a crucial resource. For the community, the goal extend beyond serving the existing members to the continuance of the community through future generations. The goal that unborn people, say, my great-grandchildren, should speak Cree or French or Athbaskan, is not one that Kymlicka's liberalism can endorse...(Taylor, "Can Liberalism Be Communitarian?," Critical Review, Spring 1994, 259-260).

So the boundaries in question, and hence the need to prioritize the humility of the self-reflexive, dialogic approach to making connections across diverse cultures, has a deeply ethical component: it is about respecting the integrity of the culture one is trying to learn from.

I would never want to suggest that Leigh has anything but tremendous respect and ethical concern for the language and history and culture she has developed such a great mastery of. I can only say this: I see in Changing Referents a determination to show, through historical example as well as philosophical argument, that self-reflexivity and humility can be overdone in our thinking about comparative political theory; that there have been, and always will be, individuals who are not intellectually defined by their cultural inheritance and linguistic framework; and that as such the conservatism of dominant, dialogically-constructed comparative philosophical enterprise should be rethought. This is, I think, not wholly wrong...but it does fail to recognize the real, ethically and conceptually complicated target of the hermeneutic approach to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. And it also fails to appreciate that Romantic and hermeneutic thinkers over the centuries have never fully sublimated the idea of individuality to one's received tradition. Consider the words Goethe put into the mouth of Dr. Faustus: “What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.” There always is, and always will be I think, a space for individual action and interpretation in any cross-cultural encounter, there is no need to insist that language really is "merely" a vessel capable of being mastered, and there is no need to dialogic approaches to knowledge-production as limiting willful action of those capable of crossing cultural divides.

In any case, this philosophical back-and-forth is hardly going to come to an end with this blog post, or with her book. Whatever else I think, I will remain troubled by the possibility Leigh's argument just might be right: that maybe Western comparative political theory, particularly in regards to learning from Chinese sources, really may have taken so seriously the reflexive, mutually inward, mutually cultivating, communitarian attitude which has been ascribed to Confucian thought that it has ended up working against recognizing the individual voices behind these sources...and thus also implicitly excused engaged individuals from mastering those voices so as to be able to fully learn from them. Leigh’s book invites us to not only rethink these Chinese thinkers and how we understand them, but also how we understand the relationship between culture and individuality itself. Leigh has opened up a large field of (again, rather challenging) study here, and for that I, at least, am grateful.

Christmas Memories from Korea

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Despite recent (and ongoing) changes to the Mormon missionary program, the majority of those charged with traveling the world and evangelizing on behalf of the LDS Church are (and will likely remain for a good while yet) young white men from supportive Mormon families in the western United States. Being young, usually not very worldly-wise, usually not very experienced in dealing with foreign cultures or differing sensibilities, and usually carrying around with them expectations shaped by growing up in a family- and tradition-centered church, the Christmas holidays can be a rough time. Twenty-five years ago I was one of them, going through my second Christmas as a Mormon missionary in South Korea. My second Christmas in the country was better than my first. Why? Well, let me explain.

South Korea has more Christians than any other East Asian nation, but that still doesn't make Christmas a major event there, or at least it didn't back in 1988 and 1989. Some stores would put up decorations, and some families would have trees, but overwhelmingly the feeling was that of a borrowed holiday, something that was being embraced (when it was) for reasons that, however deeply felt, weren't at all organic. (Though Christmas is actually a national holiday in South Korea, unlike any other Asian country.) Mormon wards and branches would, like other Christian churches, make mention of the day in talks and songs, but there was little, if any, real cultural spirit behind the celebrations, at least none that I--a 19 and 20-year-old pretentious-and-never-particularly-comfortable white kid from an overdose-on-Christmas upper-middle class family in the western United States (let me tell you about the time Dad brought home an 18ft. pine for our Christmas tree...)--could discern. And I wasn't alone in feeling that way, which at least partially explains the way we American missionaries would go out of our way to create some kind of connection to the holiday (and here I'm speaking overwhelmingly of the elders; the sister missionaries, far more than us males, seemed to be able to integrate into the rhythms of Korean life, perhaps simply because they were such a minority, whereas amongst the male missionaries, Americans dominated). Unfortunately, at least on the basis of my first Christian in the country, those attempts at connection can seem a bit desperate, and sometimes (especially in retrospect) downright humiliating.

In December 1988, my first Christmas in the country, that connection was seemingly furnished for us from above. The mission--like the country--was feeling pretty good, I suppose. The Seoul Olympics had been a great success (or at least the Koreans thought so). The country was a year into the presidency of Roh Tae Woo (노태우), and while there were protests aplenty (and would continue to be throughout my time there), the scandals of his presidency hadn't happened yet. (For that matter, neither had the Tiananmen Massacre next door.) Back in those days--at least in our mission--we missionaries had to buy Books of Mormon to sell or give away in our proselyting, and the costs of a Korean mission being pretty high anyway, there was always a grumbling about money, and a great deal of rejoicing when news of some new generous subsidy being bestowed from the mission office, which happened, it must be said, not infrequently. It was in the midst of this that the news came forth: the Korea Seoul West Mission was going to throw a huge mission-wide American-style Christmas party, at none other location than the 63 Building (육삼 빌딩), which was then the tallest building outside of North America. (As you can see, it kind of dominated Seoul's skyline back then.)

It was a strange couple of days, rest assured. Missionaries gathered from all over; we crashed at each others' apartments, and those elders and sisters who had been around for a while made plans for a mostly unsupervised day in Seoul, while we newbies (I'd only been in the country for a few months by then) listened in, intimidated and scandalized and envious. The party took place in the banquet room, where we were fed not just fine Korean fare, but oysters, fresh roast beef, salmon, and lobster. Missionaries wandered throughout the building, up to the observatory deck, trading war stories and jokes and (no doubt) outright lies. There was a talent show which got completely out of hand, with different groups of elders and sisters competing with each other to win prizes (a competition which got fierce enough that when one group of sisters, decked out in black ninja outfits, took to the stage to perform a rather impressive choreographed dance to some K-Pop hit of the day, another group of American elders rushed on to the stage and promptly broke out in all sorts of--in retrospect, rather pathetic--break dance moves, thus disrupting their act), all of which came to a rousing end with U2's "Desire" blasting over the loudspeakers. (That was the choice of the American zone leader who'd somehow ended up in charge.) Truly, it was a bit crazy. I mean, there was an ice sculpture of the Korean Temple, for heaven's sake. I have no idea how much the whole thing cost (the long-time financial secretary to the mission was released soon afterward and, though I was later companions with him, I never learned much about how the whole thing was pulled off), but it was a small touch of Reagan's bull-market America, right there in Korea. I've often shared stories of this party with other missionaries, and when I think about how outrageous it all was, even I have a hard time believing it happened. Thank goodness I had my camera and, thus, hard evidence.

A week after than party I was transferred to Ansan (안산)--or "Banwol" as some of the older locals who had been shaped by the Japanese occupation more than four decades earlier still referred to it. Today Ansan is part of the greater Seoul megapolis, but a quarter-century ago it was coastal town whose connection to the big city was a single (admittedly busy) train route. There was a small Mormon branch there, which met in an upstairs office space, where we'd huddle around a single coal stove for protection from the cold winds coming off the sea that would pass through the thin walls and windows with ease. It was, for me, a lonely and dispiriting place to spend the holiday, made worse, I suppose, by my constant berating of myself for feeling that way. There was a genuine attempt to bring some Christmas spirit into our shared drab space that holiday, with a Christmas Eve social during which a group of Primary-aged children sang some songs and a short nativity was acted out. (Unfortunately, we American elders decided to contribute a skit to the evening's entertainment which, while well-received, was characterized by some especially immature and, in retrospect, highly insensitive antics on our part. At least we didn’t get arrested, though.) But all those attempts, both by myself and by others, didn't change my put-upon mood. All through the holiday, I found myself defiantly listening to my homemade cassette tape recording of the Osmond Christmas album (the original double album, the one with the solo number by Merrill which never made it on to either of the album's cd releases) over and over again. The song I most associate with that Christmas, though, was a ridiculously maudlin cover of Wham's "Last Christmas" by Lee Sun Hee (이선희), which I seemed to hear everywhere and which brought me to the brink of tears almost every time. (In the decades since, it has apparently become a bit of a seasonal K-Pop staple, though usually lacking of the aching earnestness of the 80s version.)



Christmas in 1989 was different, perhaps because I'd matured, and got some of the self-pity and self-aggrandizement (yes, those two emotions can go together) out of my system, or perhaps because the odd go-for-broke sentiment that characterized so much of my first year or so in the mission seemed to have dissipated. I still wasn't at peace with missionary work (that actually wouldn't come until many years after I came home), but I'd been assigned to a large ward in Suwon (수원), where I ended up spending the final year of my mission, something I am profoundly grateful for. There was a feeling of genuine community in that ward, or at least I could feel that the community was there, and draw some strength from that, outsider though I was.

The mission had another Christmas party, though this one was far less extravagant. Talent shows and silliness abounded, as always, but I think this time around there was less pretension, less of a "what can we get away with this time" sensibility, and more honest fun. A bunch of us got together, ostensibly to do a scene from The Pirates of Penzance, but actually singing Ray Stevens's "The Pirate Song," and it was a blast (given my general shamelessness I was chosen to play lead, and, unfortunately, I was still a rather immature and insensitive performer: I went out on that stage, and I was flaming.) Christmas Eve itself was spent at the home of generous, older American Mormon, a man who was a veritable Santa Claus/Father Confessor to lonely and struggling missionaries far from home, on Osan Air Base, Songtan Station, which was near Suwon. I spent much of the evening attempting to explain, in whatever level of ridiculous detail my broken Korean allowed, the plot and significance of "Miracle on 34th Street" (the original, being shown that night on the Armed Forces Korean Network!) to the lone Korean member of our party. The snow fell heavily that night as we took a late bus back to our apartment, and a reflective, simple song "또다시 크리스마스" ("Again Christmas"), from the second (and last, and not as good) album by the 80s K-Pop masters Deul Guk Hwa (들국화) was playing from an intercom outside a store near the bus stop. The brassy, yet humble tune and lyrics ("어디에나 소리 없이 사랑은 내리네"--"Love is falling everywhere without a sound") fit my mood perfectly.



My favorite memory from that holiday season, 1989, was traveling with a large number of young people from our ward far outside out proselyting area--outside our mission boundaries, in fact, though I suspect no one remembered to inform the mission leadership, thank goodness--to climb Mt. Soyo (소요산), north of the city of Seoul. It was a huge event, planned for weeks and involving close to 30 people. It was bitterly cold day, enough to make one want to bail on the 4am start time, but in the end it was a trip filled with camaraderie and good humor. We packed in our meals and had a glorious cookout in near-freezing temperatures. We explored Buddhist shrines and talked about religion and nature and fate. We challenged each other--missionaries and Korean members alike--to rock climbing contests and snow ball fights. We missionaries swapped stories, sure, but I thought there was a little more openness, a little more receptivity, in what I heard--at least, I hope there was more of than in what came out of my mouth. We made it all the way to peak, and--as was (and I hope still is) typical of the Korean people--we sang songs and gave each one of ourselves a little bit of alone time. I had my Walkman with me, and a tape that I'd picked up at a music shop somewhere in Suwon, a tape which I still have today: a Korean production (hopefully legally obtained, but quite possibly not) of George Winston's December. I can remember sitting near the top of the mountain, listening to his rendition of "Jesus, Jesus Rest Your Head" three or four times over. (Obviously, much of my pretension remained, but still: it was a wonderful moment, one which impressed upon me a sense of quiet majesty and grace and simplicity which I found beautiful. However much growing and maturing my mind and soul still needed and still had awaiting them in the months to come, that Christmas moment was one worth treasuring.)

I've not saved my missionary journal, not any of the letters I sent or received from my 22 months in South Korea. That's a loss, I recognize, especially when it comes to writing down memories like these: there's so much that I need to reconstruct, so many disconnected pieces of evidence--a photograph here, an odd note there--that's it hard to avoid accepting that I might have all sorts of essentials wrong, or might be including the accidental inventions of two decades' worth of oral story-telling in my account. But then honestly, just how distant is anyone's memory from myth? I'd love to return to South Korea someday, and travel back to Ansan, and Suwon, and Mr. Soyo, and Osan Air Base, and see if there was anything I remembered, anything I could connect with. Maybe there would be; I'd love to believe that all the good things--the language, the friendships, the positive lessons--would come flooding back. But maybe they wouldn't. And in which case...well, isn't that what invented memorializations like holidays (like everything we manufacture and make our own, again and again, out of our own subjective acts of cultural retrieval and interpretation) are for? So that we can reconnect with ourselves, set apart and see those moments of foolishness and joy and despair and grace for what they are. I had many such moments in Korea. Some, clearly, were better than others. But still, this Christmas, I'm grateful for them all.

What Tiananmen Meant to Me, Twenty-Five Years Ago

In the summer of 1989, I was living in Seoul, South Korea--on Yeouido (여의도) island, in fact, just a few miles from the 63 Building. (I strongly doubt any foreign missionaries could afford apartments there today.) The heavy rains of the summer had come early that year, or at least that was my memory. I was just about halfway through the 22 months I was spending in the country as a church missionary, and by that time I probably had learned about as much Korean as I ever did master, unfortunately. It was enough to be able to follow in a very general way the information I caught on the occasional television news program which I'd watch while eating at a restaurant or visiting a friend's apartment, but I still kept an eye out for English-language newspapers and magazines, and would grab a copy whenever I could. And then came a day in June, perhaps a week or so after the event in question, when I managed to find this copy of Time.

The June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre--the violent crushing, via the armed force of the People's Liberation Army, of the massive, disorganized, dizzying popular demonstrations which had been taking place in Beijing's central Tiananmen Square since April--had managed to pass me by entirely. I later learned that just about everyone in Seoul had been talking about the tragedy, and I saw more than enough news coverage of it through various Western sources. But on the South Korean news programs, there was nothing--the order had come down from the government not to discuss the massacre, as it was feared that it would remind people too much of the Gwangju Uprising, when hundreds of Koreans were slaughtered by the South Korean army when they took control of the city of Gwangju during a period of martial law. (South Korea in 1989 was technically on its way to becoming a genuinely free, mostly liberal, multi-party democracy, but its president at the time, Roh Tae-woo (노태우) had still been hand-picked by a former military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan (전두환), who himself had ordered the Gwangju slaughter in 1980, and many political and social restrictions were still in place--all of which were unmentioned in the media and constantly protested in the streets, leading one local American I knew to refer to South Korea, riffing on one of the nation's traditional names, as "the land of morning calm and evening riot.") So an unknown number of violent deaths--probably numbering in the thousands, though no official numbers have ever been released--out of the more than a million Chinese students, Beijing locals, and others who participated in those demonstrations went essentially, officially, undocumented in the country right next door.

When I returned to America and went back to BYU in 1990, I wanted to understand the culture and people that I'd been sent to preach to, and I began to study Asian politics and philosophy. While I never became anything like an authority on Chinese politics, in those years while I was completing my undergraduate degree and then getting my MA, it was impossible to go to a conference, to gather together with other students, or to meet with faculty in my area, and not have the events of the year before, or of two or three or four years before, come up at some point or another. We were all former East Asian church missionaries, or people who'd spent time doing business or teaching English in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, and elsewhere, or both--and all of us had, at the time, desperately scavenged for news coming out of the PRC. (This was pre-internet, folks.) As students in the years to come, we went to hear from dissidents and troublemakers that our professors knew and managed to bring to campus, as well as apologists for the regime (I can remember one time when, in a gathering at a small campus theater, some representative of PRC government, perhaps someone from the consulate nearest to Utah, answered questions about the causes behind the demonstrations, leading one Chinese student at BYU to bravely shout out "You are a liar!"--after which all his friends quickly hustled him out of the theater, before he could be identified, have his student visa stripped from him, and suffer the consequences). Nothing seemed more important to me, back then, then contributing to the debate about how to help bring democracy to China, and punishing those in power. The mostly forgotten argument over giving China special trading privileges with the U.S. seemed massively important to me then. When it looked like China was going to be successful in landing its bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, it seemed like a terrible scandal. And so forth, and so on.

Well, they eventually did get their Olympics in 2008--and 25 years on, the word from China is that most young people are pretty unfamiliar with the protests and the enormous bravery shown by thousands of people who engaged in hunger strikes, marches, and life-threatening civil disobedience, so as to be heard by their government. And I'm still no expert about China--indeed, given the huge changes globalization has wrought over the past quarter-century, I'd have to say I know less about China's people, culture, language, aspirations, and politics today than I did back then. (The fact that I ended up doing almost nothing with East Asia during my graduate school years--this article is about the only evidence of the passions that I carried with me from my BYU years--may have contributed to that as well, of course.) I may have a chance to visit China this coming year, speaking at a conference in Nanjing; it'd be my first visit back to East Asia since my Hong Kong trip four years ago, and dearly hope it works out. No fears about visiting China? None at all. Whatever the many good and important things that we hoped for and wrote about back then which haven't worked out, so many other unexpected good things, good things that many students and friends of mine who have visited and lived in China over the past 25 years have testified of, actually have worked out. China is, in so many ways, clearly a better place to live today than it was a generation ago. This hasn't made China into a democracy, by any means--the tyrannical practices of the controlling party, their human rights abuses, their suppression of dissent, their control of the media, their corrupt and exploitive dealings with corporate powers, is all still there. But this nation of billions of people has changed and continues to change in ways that no one could ever predict--so much so that the sort of tightly employed state violence which it wielded in downtown Beijing back in 1989 is probably pretty much inconceivable today, by the Chinese themselves and the millions who do business with them. And that is, most certainly, the best good thing of all.

Creative Destruction and its Benefits, China-Style

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A few weeks ago I was visited by a fellow Wichita resident who was thinking about getting into politics. We talked for a while about his education and background, about the situation here in Kansas, and about what might be involved in his finding volunteers and support. One thing he didn't lack--fortunately, for anyone with political ambitions--was money: he was a bit of an entrepreneur, and fortunately had lucked into some great opportunities in recent years in China. As we talked about his experiences in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Beijing, it became pretty clear to me--and he admitted as much forthrightly, when I asked him about it--that he'd in fact been doubly lucky: he'd been able to benefit from the chaotic and ofttimes corrupt circumstances which characterize doing business with banks and factories in southern China these days...and then he'd been able to get himself (and his money) out of those dealings, before the convoluted scheme he'd found himself helping to finance collapsed, as they do with great regularity in China these days.

That China today--and for the past twenty years, really--has been utterly transformed by pervasive booms and busts, a process of super-charged "creative destruction," as Joseph Schumpeter long ago accurately labeled it, seems like a commonplace observation. My youngest couple of daughters, just a couple of days ago, were joking about how everything was made in China, and when the revolutionary emergence of the most populous country on the planet as the primary manufacturing of half the mass-produced consumer goods on Walmart's shelves and our garages and bedrooms has become a source a casual, childish humor, what new is there to say? Not much, perhaps--at least not if you're looking at China's place as the clearing-floor of globalization in the marco, global economy sense. But the visit I received from this fellow who'd made a killing then gotten free of the rapacious capitalism of China put me in mind of a book I'd read recently, a book that looked at the "made-in-China" trope from a decidedly mirco level. The book is Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, and it puts a human face on a few young women out of the nearly 150 million people--nearly half as many people as live in the whole United States of America--who have become migrant workers, fleeing rural villages and economies, and traditional schooling and sexual expectations, and instead have flocked to the manufacturing centers of southern China, where they arrive mostly alone, undirected, and ambitious and open-minded and desperate beyond belief, crowding into apartments, quickly learning new jobs assembling cell phones or computer game joysticks or gas tank caps, taking night classes in English or computer programming or accounting, and somehow building lives for themselves. The book was published in 2008, so given the pace of change in China no doubt more than a few of its details are already out of date. But I found it fascinating all the same.

The primary source of my fascination with it was that so much of its story--whose broad outlines basically matched those of the stories my visitor told me--depicted a complete rejection of everything that I see my co-bloggers at Front Porch Republic taking seriously: tradition, locality, equality, and community. Chang's story (which she developed out of years of ground-level reporting for The Wall Street Journal, as well as from her story as a Chinese-American woman reconnecting with her own family's history) doesn't celebrate that rejection, though in some ways it does find it inevitable, or at least unavoidable. Mostly though, the rejection of family ties and the farming duties and traditional filial connections is simply documented, put into the reported statements and observed realities which Chang heard and saw. This rejection comes in many forms, put it essence it is repeated again and again:

Migrant workers use a simple term for the move that defines their lives: "chuqu," to go out. "There was nothing to do at home, so I went out."....Migration is emptying villages of young people. Across the Chinese countryside, those plowing and harvesting in the fields are elderly men and women, charged with running the farm and caring for the younger children who are still in school. Money sent home by migrants is already the biggest sources of wealth accumulation in rural China. Yet earning money isn't the only reason people migrate. In surveys, migrants rank "seeing the world," "developing myself," and "learning new skills" as important as increasing their incomes. In many cases, it is not crippling poverty that drives migrants out from home, but idleness. Plots of land are small and easily farmed by parents; nearly town offer few job opportunities. "There was nothing to do at home, so I went out." (Factory Girls, pp. 11-13)

Chang's observations (and her book is filled with hundreds of them, as she fleshes out her portraits of young women, in their late teens and early 20s, striving to educate, refine, and transform themselves, to better take advantage of endless opportunities for making money, being robbed, learning lessons, and starting over again) match those of studies which have been made of this phenomenon, the largest human migration in recent history. Most of those (particularly most of the women) who choose to throw off the predictable limitations of rural life and embrace the risks of migratory work, moving from one factory to another and not-infrequently from one name to another, do so mainly because staying at home and in school seemed both uninteresting and unpromising. What reason have they to stay, against the appeal of the city, especially for the ambitious and curious? What established system of mores, what reliable infrastructure of opportunity or security, what confident body of teachings or traditions, exists in the lives of the rural Chinese to overcome the capitalist lure of the dollar and the complete make-over? As Chang weaves her portraits and her own family story together, the absence of many of those countervailing communitarian weights seems, more than anything else, a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, when the parents of today's migrants were children:

For more than a century, Chinese leaders and thinkers had wrestled with how to fit their traditions into the modern world. The Cultural Revolution proposed a simple answer: Throw everything out. Over the decade that followed, radical student groups known as Red Guards beat, and sometimes killed, their own teachers. Seventeen million students went to the countryside to labor on impoverished farms, a life that rural Chinese had been fleeing for centuries. Education, long the mark of achievement and the path to mobility, was deemed "counterrevolutionary." The Cultural Revolution took everything the Chinese people had long held sacred and smashed it to pieces, like an antique vase hurled against the wall. It finished off the world of moral certainty and Confucian values into which my grandfather, and countless generations before him, had been born. (p. 160)

Partly as a result of this, Change observes, the world into which the migrants hurl themselves is one without any kind of stable system of rules or expectations: contract-breaking, dishonest job applications, faked resumes, copyright violation, false addresses, bank fraud, and more sit along alongside much more explicit and routine crimes (prostitution, theft, etc.). Those who find one or way or another of succeeding in this environment of graft, back-stabbing, and self-promotion often make no bones about the lack of moral or intellectual resources which their own identities or communities might have otherwise provided them with; they accept themselves as copying, adapting, or simply stealing, and feel it is only reasonable to do so. One of my favorite--and most head-shaking--examples of this came when Chang spoke with the one of the self-help gurus whose books fill the aisles of stores throughout southern China:

Ding Yuanzhi's bestelling book, "Square and Round," was a perversion of an American self-help book. It did not urge people to discover themselves, to look beyond material success, or to be honest about their failings and in their relationships....Instead it taught them how to do better what they already knew so well: pettiness, materialism, envy, competition, flattery, and subterfuge...."Square and Round" painted a bleak world of complicated relationships, intense workplace politics, two-faced friendships, corrupt dealings, and status-conscious bosses with absolute power over one's fate....[It] was essentially a point-by-point rejection of the virtues Chinese tradition had preached for two thousand years.

The author of this manual of unscrupulous manipulation....had come to Shenzhen in 1987....and decided to start a public relations company. "We thought it would be easy to say, 'We are China's first public relations company,'" Ding Yuanzhi told me. "We figured the commercial bureau did not know what is was, so it would be easier to get approval." The publication of "Square and Round" in 1996 was similarly unorthodox. Ding Yuanzhi did not sign a legitimate publishing contract; he simply bought a serial number from a publisher and printed and marketed the book on his own. On weekends he traveled to bookstores around Shenzhen, set up a banner and a table outside the front door, and signed books. "Square and Round" was written at a middle-school level so even factory workers could understand it. "Migrant workers need consolation in their hearts," Ding Yuanzhi said. "They need to know that success is possible. These books are a solace to them."


I asked him what he thought about the other success studies books sold in China. He hadn't read a single one. "All the books in China just take their ideas from the outside," he said. "China really has no original ideas." (pp. 196-201)

As someone who is rather passionate about the Confucian tradition which Chang depicts as often simply ignored or dismissed by the young women at the center of her story, and as someone who has even published some on the "original ideas" which that tradition conveys, this bothers me. But what bothers me the most, I must confess, is that Chang's work makes it clear that, however much abuse, confusion, frustration, misdirection, and pure waste (of money, time, talent, and plain good sense) may characterize their lives in the factories and faux-communities which have sprung up almost overnight throughout China, these girls, for the most part, nonetheless wouldn't want it any other way. They delight in having spending money of their own. They thrill in the realization of their own powers as actors without a formal script. They own up to the responsibility of providing a supplemental income to their limited families at home, and wield the authority that income gives them over their parents or friends who stayed behind with pride. Most of them recognize that their lives in Guangzhou are in many ways desperate, with most of them having to constantly watch their every step, with danger or destitution or despair as a constant possibility. But to go back to village life instead? Quite a few do, it must be said. But many more don't. Chang, a Chinese woman whose Nationalist parents fled to Taiwan when the communists triumphed in 1949, and who had lived most of her life in the United States, is sympathetic:


Staying in with Min [one of the migrant workers whose life and choices she documents, including visiting her ancestral home over the New Year holiday] in her village made me think about my own family....In America, my parents had raised my brother and and me very differently [from the traditional way they had been raised], encouraging our independence and freeing us from family obligation. My parents had not expected us to visit relatives; they never told us what we should study in school....One morning after a large family meal, I walked out alone on the muddy road toward town. I saw things I had not noticed before: a blackboard listing school fees and livestock vaccination rates, a store whose entire merchandise consisted of cigarettes and fireworks, children no more than four playing with lighters....I had been gone an hour when my mobile phone rang. "Where are you?" Min demanded. "We're all waiting for you so we can eat lunch."


I hurried back, to amazed accusations. "You didn't eat lunch! Where did you go?" "What were you doing walking on the road all by yourself?"


The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversations that has been going for a long time and will continue after you are gone. Spending time in Min's village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when the first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it. (pp. 292-293)

Front Porch Republic's own Adam Webb has long been a fine traditionalist voice in the ongoing debate over what China's recent experiences suggest for the rest of the world. For sometime scholars of eastern Asia like myself, the conclusion that China's experiences suggest the obvious triumph of modernization, globalization, and atomism have been a constant refrain, emerging from bestelling books and academic conferences alike, and finding ratification in the observations of reporters like Chang. Webb has long noted this, having once described eastern Asia as "occupying a crucial place in the psyche of today's atomists" and as the "universal atomists' dream region" (Webb, Beyond the Global Culture War [Routledge, 2006], p. 124). For a long time, I saw myself as very much on Webb's side; I wanted to argue for a fuller and deeper appreciation of the possibilities for a Confucian revival in China and elsewhere, to effectively respond to the get-rich atomism and re-invent-yourself individualism which has stepped into the moral vacuum of Chinese life and unleashed such a magnitude of capitalist dislocation and creative destruction that, among other things, China has been transformed in less than a generation into the world's worst polluter, and resulted in dramatic increases in inequality. Against this, I wanted to think more about how Confucian traditions might directly challenge such awful developments; I wanted to see Chinese premodernity (perhaps when combined with some Western postmodernity) acting to provide a neo-traditionalist alternative to the ravages of modern life.

I still hope for this, at least to some degree. But I'm not sure I'm so comfortable with the way Webb and other traditionalist elide, at least as I (perhaps inaccurately) read them, the brute fact of technological and structural change in the construction of what is and isn't traditionally viable (much less desirable) in the lives of men and (especially) women. When Webb speaks of the status of women in a world that might be shaped by a Confucian revival, he rightly notes that we need to consider traditions as bearers of the means by which different people, in different time and different places, have attempted to inculcate, construct, or maintain virtuous lives--and hence we need to form our critiques around the virtuous point of the practices by which traditions were embodied, rather than simply fixing ourselves upon the (obviously often historically rather misogynistic) practices themselves. But I wonder if that doesn't go far enough. In a comment to that post of Webb's, I brought up the issue of technology, and how the changing contextual infrastructure through and within which people build their lives have to be considered if those of us interested in the power of local traditions want to bring the virtuous substance of those traditional ideas into conversation with the lives that are actually being built in Gunagzhou or Dongguan or anywhere else. That contextual infrastructure can be something as simple as the mobile phone, which in the lives of the young women Chang profiles takes on awesome importance as they establish (or reject) their identity in the midst of ever-changing networks of friends, colleagues, lovers, clients, and bosses. Or it could be something huge, like the steps China took in the late 1970s and 1980s to respond to the chaotic aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, on the one hand imposing draconian controls over family size (thus making it essential that children be wage-earners rather than simply maintainers of the family plot of land), while on the other hand greatly loosening the hukuo system that had been imposed a generation earlier to classify Chinese citizens as rural or urban (thus making it possible for large numbers of the former to become the latter). For women, in particular, the consequences of these changes have been monumental...and hardly uniformly "awful," as I once tended to believe. There was something condescending about that belief, something that failed to respect the reality that hundreds of millions of Chinese people were voting with their feet, and even if it is the case that economic destruction beyond their control is forcing most of it, the fact remains that, having voted, a not insignificant number of those people--many of them women who had never experienced this kind of individual liberty before--a building something with their choices. It may not be particularly beautiful what they are building, but it is their own, and that's something. Whereas the Confucian tradition, and the virtuous insights it may be seen to provide into how young women (and young men, and fathers and mothers, and everyone else too) might be able to order their lives--that isn't theirs, even if it is still part of them. Some balance must be struck, and perhaps if finding that balance requires some destruction...well, I'm no Panglossian; I don't think everything works out the way it is supposed to. But then there are Chang's young migrant girls, and more than a few are making their transformed, deconstructed and reconstructed lives work, and I have to acknowledge that.

Chang writes near her conclusion:

Learning my family story changed the way I saw the factory towns of the south. There was a lot to dislike about the migrant wold of Min and Chunming; the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. The journey my grandfather attempted was one that millions of young people now made every day--they left home; they entered an unfamiliar land; they worked hard....[T]heir purpose was not to change China's fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own. Perhaps China during the twentieth century had to go so terribly wrong so that people could start over, this time pursuing their individual courses and casting aside the weight of family, history, and the nation. For a long time I though of Dongguan as a city with no past, but now I realize it isn't so. The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time--maybe, hopefully, against all odds--we will get it right. (p. 383)

That is probably a ridiculously optimistic and simplistic conclusion--but then, speaking as I am as the as the descendant of immigrants, as I presume nearly all of those Caucasians (as well as many others) who read this in the United States are also, wasn't there likely a fair amount of ridiculous, simplistic optimism in the mind of someone, somewhere in my past as well, not to mention a little bit of destruction of tradition? That doesn't excuse not thinking about what is lost, but maybe it's a reminder that (especially when we are dealing with those who have usually suffered at least as much as they have benefited from the traditions in question) we ought to focus on what is being still carries and what is being built anew by those who have thrown the past off to move on.