What’s a Civilization without the “Civil”?
June 2nd, 2010
They’ve ripped up the road in front of my apartment complex in Suzhou. One day, two months ago, white-washed barriers topped with basketball-sized lights went up on both sides of the street. The local powers that be needed to expand the road as an on-ramp onto expressway connecting Shanghai and Nanjing. The area has been filthy with no safety barriers or warning signs of the construction sight and dangers encountered in simply crossing the street to buy groceries. Construction starts from 6am, kicking up dust and tempers, and ends around midnight, seven days a week.
The lack of a civil society is the secret of China’s success. There were no civic council meetings about the implications of the expanded roadway; no consultations about the impact the construction would have on the environment (once a rich marsh land) and no certainly no townhall meeting in which citizens could air their opinions. The project was simply done. Without previous notice, without repercussion. The project just appeared one day. We all simply walked around the rubble that had once been a relatively out-of-the way apartment block.
China’s is a donut civilization: its civil society hollowed out millenia ago – if it ever had one. It is a civilization without the “civil”: an “-ization”, a process of ebbs and flows as cyclical leaderships dictate. The citizenry merely fall in line, protecting their own, promoting their own, ignoring the rest as long as the rest at any given time does not interfere with the accumulation of wealth and extension of progeny. The lack of civil society in China is evident in unkempt public places, fights on the streets, suicides in companies, viral violence.
It’s the lack of a civil society and the channels for airing local disputes, concerns and issues that is China’s greatest strength: Chinese have for millenia been able to mobilize the masses to build some of the greatest structures in human history and to bring nearly twenty-percent of humanity out of desperate poverty into modernity in thirty years. And it is China’s greatest weakness: when everyone is headed in the wrong direction at the same time the entire society goes into decline, like lemmings, following each other off cliffs. Chinese “-ization” has given the society three generations of young people willing to perform mind-numbing work in de-humanizing conditions for long hours, days on end.
It looks as though the next generation has a lower threshold for the lack of civility that has levitated China’s rush into a wealthier future. Foreign investors need to adjust their expectations for doing business in China accordingly. As Foxconn and Honda are already learning.
Further reading: NYT
June 9th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Mr. Dodson,
I sincerely am enjoying your blog, and am looking forward to your book in November (after my return to the US); I find your insight unique and useful.
Keep it up!
June 10th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Thanks, David;
Please feel free to suggest topics you’d like seen discussed.
Kind regards,
Bill
June 12th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
I found this interesting and I was wondering about how this fits into the strength of the Chinese family and overall, of Chinese authority.
Do you think that the strength of the Chinese family has meant that they haven’t needed to develop civil society?
And what do you think the future holds for the Chinese family?
It seems from what I read that with the demands of migrant labor and parents leaving their children behind when they get work, that the Chinese family could be under severe stress.
June 14th, 2010 at 5:43 am
Hi, Lark;
Thanks for your thoughtful questions.
I think the Chinese family has been under “severe stress” for centuries. I believe the value Chinese society places on a strong central authority over the last two thousand years, with the consequence of having weaker local authorities, has “hollowed out” the civil aspects of the society overall. As long as the “rule of man” trumped the “rule of law” and authority could be as capricious as it chooses, it falls to family “tribes” to rely on themselves for self-preservation. The West, on the other hand, is marked by a Magna Carta moment in which princes checked the power of the monarchy and leveled the playing field in status and economics far greater than anything seen in Chinese history. Western society has historically normalized power to the degree that individuals, families, towns, cities and states realized they would require administrative and legal institutions that would maintain the checks on central power and maintain distribution of power throughout the society. Indeed, the United States Constitution was designed with the assumption that a central authority left to itself would become corrupt and usurp the rights of citizens. In school in the States every student had to study Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”, which discusses the obligation every citizen in a society has to protest the wrongs perpetrated by those in authority.
Chinese Authority, on the other hand, from the Emperor down through his ministers, has seen civil institutions as a threat to their power; and most organizations formed to help the citizenry tended to be secret organizations (or benevolent societies) that one government or another felt the need to hunt down and destroy – with the exception of the Boxer’s, who Empress Cixi saw fit to cultivate as a bulwark against foreign encroachment.
Certainly, as long as China does not have an independent judiciary as a fundamental aspect of a civil society, a civil society will be a long ways off in developing in China. People need to trust they have recourse to injustices against them, especially if the perpetrator was Authority itself. Without such trust in its social institutions, Chinese families will continue to focus on their self-preservation, however stressful it might seem. And let the rest hang.