By Patrick Mendis
Patrick Mendis is an Associate-in-Research of the John Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and the author of “Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a Pacific New World Order”.
President Xi Jinping’s thought is now enshrined in the Constitution of the Congress of Communist Party of China (CPC). It may be called the modern “Communist Manifesto” for the New Era, which has been an evolutionary process to stage the “Third Revolution” of the People’s Republic of China.
The First Revolution started with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1949. He led the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward to get rid of the backward “feudal” society. With Mao’s passing in 1976, the Second Revolution was engineered by Deng Xiaoping with economic reform and trade liberalisation. The Deng Revolution made China a manufacturing powerhouse and the largest economy after the United States within a generation.
President Xi, as the leader of the party, state, military, economy, and most importantly the culture, sent a message that China has the “cultural confidence” to rejuvenate the Chinese nation and its cultural heritage in “socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era.” This is the Third Revolution to create a “moderately prosperous society.”
A Confucian China
The “socialism” aspects of President Xi’s report to the Party Congress resonate with the egalitarian ideas that Mao once espoused through his First Revolution. The president’s “rejuvenation” of the Chinese culture with Confucian values is implied in the New Era, as he would reinvent the party to unify the nation as a Confucian Union in majority Han with Mongol, Manchu, Hui (Muslim), Tibet, and other nationalities.
The Confucian vision of cultural confidence is now combined with Deng’s foundation of a capitalist economy with Chinese characteristics, like running the economy by the “visible hands” of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). President Xi highlighted the importance of SOEs in his long-speech as high-value for Beijing’s new leadership.
The execution of the Third Revolution is to restore the DNA of China’s “Confucian” culture of hierarchical authority that Mao tried to destroy and to continue Deng’s market reform by giving primacy to SOEs. Indeed, this is the enduring Chinese philosophy of “I Ching” (The Book of Change) of “continuity and change” in President Xi’s Thought, which is synchronised in the CPC’s Constitution with the veil of the Confucian doctrine of social relations and governing hierarchy.
Testing the merits of Confucian values
There are obvious parallels between the hierarchical aspects of Confucian ethos in the Chinese DNA and the authority aspects of Communist ideas imported from the Marxist-Leninist ideology. This formula may work in China for now. In social intercourse and political governance, however, President Xi and his leadership must be vigilant about two dynamic forces or challenges in China’s increasingly restless society.
First, China must sustain at least its current economic growth, through the Deng strategy, to address poverty alleviation and provide employment opportunities, especially for the young people beyond the CPC membership of 89 million. The hierarchical concentration of livelihoods in urban high-rise buildings is a futile way to politically control the masses when people are now horizontally and democratically networked, in both electronically and personally.
Second, China must re-engineer its old imperial appeal for Confucian values in governance, exclusively towards the hierarchical political leadership at the national, provincial, and local levels. This is being tested in lethargic bureaucracies as the anti-corruption campaign further demoralizes the public service. The cherished traditions of family relationships are also breaking down as the divorce rate is increasing in unprecedented numbers. There are also the growing cohorts of independent-minded young people who are quite different from the offsprings of the old-style Chinese society of the Confucian past.
Nonetheless, this may not be a pessimistic outlook. The amalgamation of foreign ideas and local traditions were successfully immersed throughout the long history of ancient China. For example, Buddhism was imported and integrated with Confucian ethics and Daoist ideas, much like the three branches of a river, becoming intimately tied to spiritual, cultural, and political authorities from one dynasty to another.
The Chinese experiment
Thus, it might be quite possible that the foreign ideas of Marxism-Leninism might be coalesced into a unifying force of Confucianism, by then gradually distancing from socialism with Chinese characteristics, to make China genuinely rooted in the Chinese culture. With his national rejuvenation of the “China Dream” in the New Era of cultural confidence, the ever-powerful President Xi is determined to remake China with its ancient heritage in mind. Beijing has now sent a clear signal to Washington and the world that President Xi’s thought in actions has indeed arrived in a new era of global leadership.
Featured Image Source: Visual Hunt
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