Guanxi Master

How the West overlooks the positive requirements for constructive critique

In a recent blog at The China Beat, the Association of Asian Studies’ annual conference in Philadelphia expressed dismay that Beijing had prevented its Chinese featured speaker Cui Weiping (崔卫平) from attending. Ms. Cui had been scheduled to participate in the conference’s round table discussion “Against Amnesia: History, Memory, and the Role of Public Intellectuals in 21st Century China,” and while her work commitments were cited as the reason for refusing her exit from China, the title of the session itself may have been enough to raise concerns in Beijing. Control of an intellectual who may potentially be critical of China has a long historical precedent.

In China, artists and intellectuals have been fostered in an atmosphere of an almost religious awe for authority that must be scrupulously maintained in order to keep harmony and prevent dissent from breaking out into social unrest and chaos. When it comes to pointing out flaws in the ruling system, class, or person, the Chinese have a saying:

In the West, we consider this behavior immature, dishonest, and hypocritical. We expect openness, admission of mistakes, and transparency from authority structures. But in China, authority is a sacred and infallible entity, the only thing that stands between order and anarchy, prosperity and destruction. That is why individual criticism, no matter how accurate or rich in common sense, timeliness, validity, and truth, is feared in the public arena. A wall of silence and opacity must be maintained between the rulers and the ruled in order to safeguard the leaders’ inerrancy and put the people at ease to trust its edicts completely.

The Chinese people themselves expect that they will have complete confidence in the government as it fulfills its responsibilities – something we in the West do not really foresee. We are fundamentally suspicious of authority. In China, however, it is feared that once doubt and skepticism are given an open voice, the poison is in the system, and the game is over. Transparency is not seen as an asset, but as a liability, a sign of weakness. The drama in the recent Stern Hu trial has demonstrated this to the West and especially Australia.

The Chinese word for “critique” is fengci (讽刺). However, its use has a far broader meaning than critique alone. Another article from The China Beat by Sean MacDonald introduces us to the modern manifestation of fengci in Chinese literature and art:

The etymology of the word fengci (讽刺) is related to the Chinese pronunciation of a much older word also pronounced “fengci” (疯词), but meaning “crazy speech”. The usage is somewhat similar to the West’s tradition of absurd exaggeration when dealing in satire, as in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in referring to the British colonial policy toward the Irish.

All right, so far so good. There is no real difference between this definition and artistic or literary satire of leaders in our own system. However, the modern Chinese version of fengci was defined, or rather, redefined by Mao Zedong:

The foreign and domestic policies upon which some of our politicians have built their careers have been similarly guarded from overt criticism through an appeal to unity, harmony, and solidarity, i.e., in a time of crisis. But this usually only lasts for as long as the emergency is pressing. Behavior of leaders in a time of crisis is fair game to later open scrutiny and criticism.

Irony and satire, while being effective tools for outrage, take away the seriousness of a tradition or an institution and trivializes its genuine human achievements. Irony is “A description of what happens when the artist arrogates to himself supreme intellectual authority. In such a case, says Hegel, ‘nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego” (Carl Rapp, Fleeing the Universal). Even an idealist and revolutionary like Hegel distrusted the positive use of irony and satire as a literary tool for political reform. “Hegel’s dislike of humor is that it turns everything into grist for itself. It rakes up material from the four corners of the earth and every sphere of reality, and it destroys independence of an objective content. In so doing, it offers itself as the highest form of wisdom, absorbing like an amoeba both religion and philosophy.” It may be added that political philosophy too is “absorbed” in a similar manner.

China knows that the inherent danger lies in precisely the “higher“ form of wisdom that irony and satire claim, and its solution is to remind the people that unity is essential because there is always a clear and present danger from the outside. The government is the only potent defense to prevent the menace from wreaking havoc on the people. By criticizing it, especially in a powerfully resonant artistic form, you give ammunition to the threat (“foreign invaders,” or whatever else it may be) and thus tear down the very structure that is designed to protect you:

We have a culture of interpretation in the West where every individual’s opinion is as valid as anyone’s, no matter how unqualified, uninformed, or unsympathetic. In the past, satire and irony had to be qualified by a shrewd knowledge of the situation and the motivations of the people whom it lampooned, while maintaining a profound respect for the institutions that transcended human corruption and foibles. In a culture of skepticism like ours, however, this is a thing of the past, and no authority structure, no matter how benign or beneficial, is immune from the most scathing routine of mockery. In the West, the word reform has lost its initial definition, which usually meant to cleanse, purify, or amend a form or institution already in place. Now it means something quite different. George Santayana gives a diagnosis of what reform had become to mean already in the early 20th century:

In our own literary history, the greatest critics were the most serious-minded about the reform of corrupted institutions through the old definition. John Milton, while at the same time being the chief censor for the king of England, authored the Areopagitica, a seminal document of petition for the establishment of a free press. Dante, whose tract De Monarchia was a defense of monarchy as a check to the unrestrained power of religion, loved both institutions which he thought had legitimate legal basis as well as right to authority, no matter how corrupt the people inside them had become. In the Areopagitica, Milton qualifies the proper loyalty needed for a receptive criticism, “For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity.”

Because we are fundamentally skeptical and disillusioned about the institutions that have safe-guarded our cultures and nations, we have become fatalistic, electing leaders as cynical as ourselves. These, in turn, destroy the very institutions that have done us, our parents and our ancestors, so much good and given us the freedoms that we have so far enjoyed. The Chinese fengci, while still not immune to political highjack, is nevertheless a form of criticism that is not chained down by the pessimism that we so impulsively express. We would do well to learn from it.