China’s Missing Models

“Imagine that you arrive late at a party. Everyone is already there, sitting at a big round table...in what appears to be some kind of a game. The host tells you to sit down and join in. Let’s say that you quite like playing poker, and you get excited at the prospect of participating, but you quickly realize that this is not poker...You turn around to consult the host, but he seems to have disappeared. You take a deep breath and keep quiet, not wanting to reveal your ignorance.., and you quietly continue to observe… you probably cannot work out the meaning of this game until you have seen a sufficient number of cards. But you start to ask yourself,...what is the main point of this activity? If it is a game, how do you win it, and if it’s not a game, what is the point of it?”

Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality

The original story, told by Italo Calvino, used the card game as the metaphor for life - that in life no one knows the truth, and given the signals we observed, we can only build models that approximate the truth. Since realities are infinitely complicated, by necessity models must be simple enough to live in our head. There is also no way to prove that a model is correct. We used to believe that all swans are white until the discovery of black swans in Australia. Since it’s only possible to prove a model wrong than right, all models are inherently speculative. Newton’s laws were correct until the speed of light was proved constant. Einstein’s theory can explain both but doesn’t apply to particles, that has to wait until quantum mechanics. Now we are onto the string theory and more...

Spurred by the scientific discoveries since the Renaissance, philosophy and social science also provide alternatives to Monotheism as the foundations of human morality. From Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Hume, Wittgenstein, Marx,... we went from God’s words to common sense, passion, game theory, rationality, until the latest behavioral economics researches proved that humans are predictably irrational, and our inquiry into the origin of human morality continues.

So why do we bother with models if they lack such staying power? Why don’t we simply act and react to the environment, and let the nature select the outcome, just like the rest of the species do? The simple answer is models make us human. Of all the species on earth, we are probably the only specie that build models consciously, and adjust our behaviour accordingly, even though we know they are imperfect. Civilization advances not just by new inventions, but also by the search for new models. Periodic table was a speculation that predicts real elements, irrelevant math theory SU(3) predicts the layout of quarks. Google was built on a model called PageRank, Internet was the accidental byproduct of CERN, whose goal was to provide insights to fundamental physics models, and the list goes on and on...

2200 years ago, China used to have many models, until 220 BC when the first emperor united China (think Hitler united Europe). He killed all philosophy schools and only kept Legalism that suit his purpose. Subsequent emperors replaced Legalism with Confucianism, but still banned all other schools. For the last 2000 years, Confucianism was the only state sanctioned model (Buddhism and Taoism were tolerated but routinely persecuted). Confucianism dismissed all religion as superstitions and based its teachings on the founding myth that all ancient kings are sage, therefore we must obey the emperor. Confucians also insist on ingratiating themselves with the regime, unlike Mohism which built its own NGO to advance social good (and were persecuted to extinction because the state considered it a rivalry). Chinese people became heavily dependent on their government instead of NGOs/churches, and were reluctant to embrace religions or other philosophies. (Fewer than 20% Chinese are religious, as opposed to ~80% American)

The intolerance for multiple models explains the "The Needham Question", why China had been overtaken by the West in despite its earlier successes. “Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the three most important inventions facilitating the West’s transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China". Had China not banned its 100 schools of philosophies, just Mohism alone, which advocates science and compassion, could have started the Renaissance when Europe was still in the dark age.

The state monopoly of model resulted in serial state failures and society breakdowns that continued to this day. The 1911 revolution created the first democracy in Asia, but the new era’s motto “Traditions as core, western technology as utility” resulted in two decades of civil war because no factions wanted to share power. In 1949, Marxism became the new state model, until it went bankrupt in 1989. Since 1989 China had embraced the market capitalism and the motto: “Crossing the river by feeling the stone”, but no one knows what the other side is. The 2008 world financial crisis proved the market does not always work, and decades of single minded pursuit of GDP had lead to rampant corruptions and environmental degradations. The latest model “China Dream”, according to Evan Osnos, is about “a state and its citizens bursting with aspiration toward an undefined goal”.

The search for working models has been the central issue of Chinese modernization effort since 17th century, and it has been hampered by state interferences and deep culture reluctance to embrace religions, philosophy, or pretty much anything that is not rational. But rationality is just a mean, not an end to itself. The objective of models cannot be just numbers since many important things in life are not even  measurable. America was founded based on “..Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Self-evident truths? Unalienable rights? Creator? Happiness? All men are equal? This entire statement is irrational, except Life, yet it addresses the most central question: “Why we live?” If you think America’s founders are hopelessly romantic, Kahneman and Tversky proved we are predictably irrational, humans have so many cognitive biases and pitfalls that believing in human rationality is like worshiping our 3 billion neurons as God, and China had been down this path before.

In the 12th century, after seeing enough despotic rulers to finally give up on the myth of the sage kings, Neo-Confucian scholars tried to reset human morality on the ‘firm’ ground of rationality(理學) instead of the Great Teacher’s fairy tales. “Humans were as big as heaven and earth, it’s just that we belittle ourselves”. Elevating one’s own rationality to deity, Confucian elites became narcissists who think they are entitled to their own success. One of the most important Neo Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi, persecuted Buddhists as a high official, and even tortured a prostitute who refused to incriminate his political opponent. This goes to show Confucian rationality has nothing to do with conscience or compassion. Like the alpha males of a chimp colony, the Neo-Confucian elite became ignorant of the sufferings of others, and the society became fragile and unable to meet environmental or external challenges. The legacy of rational entitlement still lives today: China/HK/Taiwan now have the same number of billionaires as US, yet only one Taiwanese billionaire signed Bill Gate’s Giving Pledge, as opposed to hundreds in US. Recently one of the richest Taiwanese billionaires died and left nothing to charity, and let his four wives and dozen children suing each other over his hidden overseas assets. Will a society without compassion last? Can the invisible hand come to the rescue in time of crisis?

Even Adam Smith wasn’t so optimistic. “Each one of us, being totally selfish, can paradoxically contributed to our overall well-beings”, yet Smith also held the professorship of moral philosophy, and he’s prouder of his other work “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”. The great depression of 1929 and 2008 proved that invisible hand still requires bailout from the common people. Picketty’s latest book shows that a rational market is not sustainable even when it works, because in the long run the return of capital will outstrip all others. Without the irrational wealth redistribution by the government through progressive tax and welfare, or donations to charities, a market based society simply will not last. Mariner Eccles, a mormon Republican banker from Utah who became the federal reserve chairman under Roosevelt, concluded that The Great Depression was like a poker game in which the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and the game stopped when most players had to leave the table. He campaigned for increased public spending to create jobs to end the depression, but eventually it was Hitler who did the job by starting WWII that employed everyone. Eccles’s descendants are still one of the largest charity donors in Utah today. When driving in Salt Lake City, one cannot help but noticing numerous Eccles sport stadiums, science centers, libraries, olympic park, performance center, etc.. It is totally irrational to make all these billions only to give them away, yet hundreds of US billionaires pledge to give away majority of their wealth, so their society, and democracy, can last.

The search for modern China is the search for the missing models, some will be new, some will be old (Mohism is amazingly modern), and the responsibility must lie with each individual, not the state. Some objectives of these models will be irrational, like compassion, happiness and faiths. Some will seek the truths that are never attainable, like why do the world exist, why we live, etc. Whatever they are, they must incorporate all human experiences and tolerate our differences. In this age of globalization, to build models based on a failed state-sponsored philosophy, and 2000 years of censored history which concerns mostly despotic rulers instead of the common people, is like building a prediction model for global market based on a bankrupt luxury good company. That model had failed and will fail again. After all, all human beings are the children of the same African mother only 150,000 years ago, our common mother would probably think we are really not that different, neither should our models be.

How China Squanders

"I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situa­tion determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, will­ingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically."

         

Georges Bataille - The Accursed Share

Like entropy in a closed system, all the excess profits must be squandered irrationally, like “coffee thrown into the sea”, and our only choice is whether to squander “gloriously or catastrophically”. If the idea of compulsory squander bothers you, try ask yourself a series of questions: the reason I want A is because of B, the reason I want B is because of C, pretty soon you will realize the last thing you want has no reason or logic, except it makes you happy (admit it, you are squandering after all!).

For individuals, the act of squandering can be conspicuous consumptions, i.e. buying things we don’t need, or spending less time at work and more on leisures. For companies, squandering takes the forms of uncertain R&D and unprofitable investments. For example, Google tries to squander the $50 billion accumulated profits in projects like Google Glass, self-driving cars, Google Fiber, etc. However, if any of these becomes future profit makers just like the past squanders (i.e. AdSense, Android), then Google would have more billions to squander! Eventually, Google will have to return profits to the shareholders if it runs out of ideas of squandering.

For economies or the planet as a whole, the need to squander is even more acute since we can not pay dividends to Martians, and historically each society squanders in its own ways. Aztec had daily human sacrifices and constant wars with its neighbors. Europeans started WWI and WWII. Squanders can also come in the forms of conservations: Tibetans send their (excess) children to monasteries and support large population of monks to avoid overpopulation and over-exploitation of their environments. Countries set aside huge swath of lands for national parks or ban developments in some area. Arts and leisure are alternative forms of squandering - until the recent century, we used to work 12 hours a day and 7 days a week. Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes had predicted in 1930 that as our productivities rise, by 2000 we only need to work 4 hours a day and spend the rest in leisures.

There are glorious squanders too, like the grand churches, religions and clergies, philanthropies, international aids, universal health care (which will never make money), scientific researches, art and music, etc.. None of which are rational investments or have any practical purposes. Ironically, some irrational squanders can turn into great investments, like the effort to build particle accelerators (in the words of the physicist Robert Wilson: “has nothing to do with defending our country, except to make it worth defending for”), ultimately lead to CERN and the invention of World Wide Web. Philanthropies may not achieve their intended goals, but they redistributed the chips and make the economy more sustainable. Religions may not deliver eternal life, but strengthen the communities. Meditations, the most useless human activity, can make you smarter and more successful. Democracies, borne out of the Christian faith that all men are created equal, was deemed less efficient than Fascism, yet in the long run prove to be more prosperous because open societies folster better innovations.

Because of its culture, China tends to squander catastrophically. Confucians dismissed religions as superstitions, and place filial piety and individual virtues as the core values in society. Lacking transcendent values as the escape valves, the ‘rational’ Confucian society kept reinvesting the excess profits into growth and reproduction, until overpopulation ran into the environmental limits, resulting in cycles of catastrophic squanders of wars, famines and diseases.

Even worse, unlike Mohists and other religions who built their own organizations to advance their social agenda, Confucians seek to ingratiate themselves with the regime, and their founding myths of ancient sage-kings demanded a strict chain of obediences of sons to father, wives to husband and subjects to ruler. “The sage-king stands alone, unchallenged and unchecked except by self-imposed restraints”. This blind faith in human rationality caused Confucians to accrue all their faith and profits to the supreme ruler, who is only human and had no problem squandering them in corruptions, wars and slaughtering of his own people.

The 1911 Chinese revolution intended to build a modern society by adopting western technology only, without changing the traditional values. This became a complete disaster and resulted in two decades of civil wars. The 1949 Communist revolution continued the catastrophic squanders by waging wars in Korea and Vietnam, and massacres and famines that culminated in the Culture Revolution which squandered a decade of Chinese lives.

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and massacre of Tiananmen Square in 1989, Chinese has adopted capitalism to replace the bankrupt communism. Although capitalism has raised the economic throughput, it has no core values and still offers no solutions to how China should squander its new wealth. As a result, China continues the catastrophic squanders by keeping the largest standing military in the world, and an even larger ‘public security’ force to watch over its own people. It continues the exploitations of its environment instead of conservations, and continues to perpetuate the low trusts society with rampant corruption and lack of NGOs. When it couldn’t squander all by itself, it exports the saving glut to the rest of the world, which squandered them in the 2007 financial crisis.

Some Chinese now begin to identify the lack of transcendent values as the core problem of the society. In order to squander gloriously instead of catastrophically, China needs to rise above its traditional utilitarian values and stop seeking purposes in everything it does. Whether it’s in arts that have no practical use, in democracy that lack efficiencies, in philanthropies with no payoffs, in faiths that reward the next life instead of this one, in social security and universal health care that will never turn profits, and most importantly, in trusting each other and respect each other’s dreams, which may not make this life richer, but will make it worth living.

The Last Confucian Empire

Since 200 BC, the Confucian philosophy had been adopted by the Chinese political system as the moral foundation of it governance. It was integrated so deeply into every aspects of the Chinese culture, that until the most recent century it was impossible to separate the Chinse culture from the Confucian teachings, in much the same way as the western cultures from Christianity. “The Great Teacher” was truly the un-crowned emperor.

The Confucian moral foundation was build on the five principle relationships: emperor and his subjects, father and children, husband and wives, older brother and younger brothers, teacher and students. In these relationships absolute obedience is required. For example, children should obey their father, wives should obey their husband, and everyone obeys the emperor. Life’s sole purpose is to fulfill the expectations of these roles. The five relationships are also omnipotent, in that they are the only things in this universe that matter. Confucius said: “I don’t know about life and why should I care about after-death?”. There was no interests in where we came from, where we are going, or anything that’s non-human. Everything in the universe exists to serve the humans, and as long as we maintain harmonious relationships amongst ourselves, the universe will conspire to serve us. This is contrary to the Greek philosophies which seek the meaning of life by trying to understand the truth in all realms, including those we do not understand yet. There is no such thing as seeking truth for its own sake. This ignorant altitude had not only stalled China’s progress for centuries, but also contributed to the destruction of its environments and habitats.

When China first began its modernization efforts in 1850, both the government and the society initially thought they could simply adapt the modern technology without changing its values. There was no urge to “derive its power from the consent of the governed”, for example. This ‘mal-adaptation’ had lead to such disasters, that by 1930, the effort to defend Confucian culture had been abandoned and replaced by culture reforms that still continued to this day.

Why had the Confucian values lasted for so long? To answer this question, we need to trace its root to back where it all began. When agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, there were many arable land and few people, therefore the early farmers were highly mobile and retained their paleolithic values and flat hierarchies. In early Chinese history, there were many records about clans migrated away from despotic rulers, and one of Confucian’s most admired emperors was Yu, who was basically a hydraulic expert that developed arable lands in order to attract subjects. At around 1000 BC, Chinese population had saturated the available lands and migrations were no longer possible. This created the conditions for the rulers to become tyrants. Facing the Malthusian challenges, Confucianism was the right idea at the right time for the right people, namely the rulers. Its main design principle was stability, not enlightenment. It gave the rulers the mandate to govern, with no need for the blessing from higher authorities like God, and with few guarantees for the people. For over 2000 years, the Confucian model mostly worked, except for the periodic collapses of corrupt regimes due to the lack of accountability. As China moved away from the agriculture and into the industrial age, Confucianism and its Neolithic values simply became irrelevant.

The regime in China today is really the last incarnation of the Confucian empire. Absent of a living emperor, the ‘elite’ bureaucrats govern the people not by their consent, but by their self-imposed mandate. However, the empire had been doomed since the end of the neolithic age, and subsequent attempts to sustain it only drove more Chinese away from the country, if not from the culture and language altogether. In the modern world where each new generation becomes more enlightened, the static view of Confucianism has relegates itself to a footnote in history. The Last Confucian Empire will follow too.

The Pursuit of Chinese Happiness

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them”

- Michael Jordan

According to Chinese historian Te-Kong Tong, the Chinese modernization movement began after the Opium War in 1842 and culminated in the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China, the first democracy in Asia. It was later replaced in 1949 by the communist People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government we know today.

Parallel to the political movements, a series of culture reforms also took place - The reforms included the May Fourth Movement in 1919 , the Four Modernizations movement in 1963, the economic reform in 1978, the Fifth modernization (democracy) in 1978, and the Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989.

According to Tong, these political and social movements are the continuation of the modernization effort that began in 1842. The main driver is simple: Chinese people no longer wish to live in their traditional ways. The 1919 May Fourth Movement called for “total westernization” (later changed to “total modernization”) and rejected every aspect of traditional Chinese customs and values. The movement had a spectacular success that Chinese people in the 21th century today would certainly be considered “westerners” by the 19th century standards - Chinese men no longer practice polygamy, Chinese women no longer bound their feet or accept arranged marriages and there are few ancestor-worships. There is now nothing truly “Chinese” about modern Chinese way of living, except the food culture and and language.

Unlike the other aspects of the Chinese modernization, the political modernizations was comprised of a series of failures. The 1911 democracy degenerated into warlord-ism. The 1949 socialist government brought three decades of disasters that killed more than 70 million people (Great Leap Forward 1958-1961, Culture Revolution 1966-1976) . In Tong’s view, the 1911 democrats and the 1949 socialists were doomed to fail because it was impossible to build a modern government out of the 19th century Chinese men. Most of the founding fathers of the 1911 republic were polygamists. The first democratically elected president of China in 1912 declared himself the emperor 3 years later. Most of the 1911 and 1949 founders were either assassinated or had ordered the assassination of others. Tong believed the failure in the political reforms mean that the culture transformation is still incomplete, and culture transformations could take a long time. For example, Japan’s modernization efforts took almost 100 years (it began in 1853 when Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and ended in 1945 when MacArthur built a new democracy). European modernization took a few centuries, from the Renaissance period in 14th century to the modern parliamentary system beginning in the 18th century. Tong speculated that China’s modernization movement would take 200 years. As the movement started around 1840, according to Tong it should culminate in 2040 when China become truly democratic.

Then is the Chinese modernization on track? Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has been following the Singapore model - in exchange for economic progress, people have come to accept living under an authoritarian regime. Two decades of spectacular economic growth has raised 300 million Chinese to the middle class. Yet every coin has two sides. The economic boom has belied the rampant corruptions and the drastic inequalities. In spite of the successful democratic transformation in Taiwan and the more limited one in Hong Kong, Chinese people do not fervently pursue democracy. Why is this so?

In the hindsight, the Chinese modernization movement that began in 1850 had never answered a critical question but rushed to its conclusions, and the omission of critical reflection has been the root of all its problems every since. The critical question is: What does it mean to be (modern) Chinese?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776 first defined what being an American means: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”. Only after the definition did the Declaration proceed to lay out its expectations of government, that it should “...secure these rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”. The Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776, followed by the Constitution in 1787. In other words, Americans first decided what they wanted to be like before they decided what their government should be like.

By the time China’s 1911 revolution took place, those founding fathers must have been aware of the 1776 Declaration in the U.S. They neglected the definition process and only focused on nation building because most of them clung to Chinese traditions and wanted to keep “Chinese learning as the essence, western learning as a utility” (中学为体, 西学为用). The slogan of the 1911 revolution was “Get rid of the Manchus, establish China, build a people’s republic, and equally distribute land properties”. The 1949 revolution slogan was “The Chinese people have stood up!”. But how do we define Chinese people? Adding to the confusions, the word “rights(权利)” and “power(权力)” have the same pronunciation in the Chinese language.The China Constitution stated that “All powers belong to the people (一切权力属于人民)” but made no mention about individual rights(权利). Mao himself was famous for the confusion about “rights” and “power” in his statement “... no such thing as God-given power (read: rights), since power can only be given by the people”.

150 years into the modernization movement, now it’s still not too late for Chinese people to answer the question about their identity. Today’s China is no longer hindered by foreign aggressions or poverty. It has the biggest middle class in Asia, if not in the world. Nothing stands between Chinese people and who they want to be. The only question is: do they know what it means to be Chinese? The answers to this question will hold the key to China’s final (and hopefully, peaceful) transformation to democracy.