​[Source: jpost.com]

“A ghostly scene at China’s top of power: Xi Jinping’s predecessor is taken away. The ‘new emperor’ is reaching for absolute power. What are the consequences for the world?” This is the title and the introduction of the newspaper Die Weltwoche to a German-language article by the British historian Francis Pike, in which he writes: “Hu’s media-fueled removal takes on the appearance of a political drama reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s brutal purges of party members in the 1950s.” He is referring to a video from the Chinese Party Congress showing former party leader Hu Jintao allegedly being “forcefully taken away.”
​
“The removal of Hu from the hall occurred mere minutes after foreign media were allowed into the Great Hall,” Pike adds. This immediately raises the question of why Xi Jinping should wait to “remove” Hu Jintao until Western media are on the scene, having only waited for such an opportunity to pillory the “cruel and inhumane dictator Ji Jinping”?

​Ex-Chinese President Hu Jintao being removed from Communist Party Congress on October 22, 2022. [Source: nypost.com]

​[Source: biz-at-it.blogspot.com]

The same media did not mention that the frail 80-year-old man, who left a somewhat bewildered impression, had been escorted to and from the convention for several days during the Party Congress and before the “forced removal” hyped by the Western media on the last day of the Congress.

Here, for example, you can see Xi Jinping taking care of him as a friendly usher.
​
Cutting away an important part of the message and changing perceptions with misleading text is manipulation and is—rightly!—castigated by the same media when it is done by China.

That Hu Jintao has a health problem was first noticed by China observers at the 2019 National Day parade, when he was seen on the Tiananmen Balcony in Beijing with his hands shaking badly.
​
Immediately prior to the incident at the Party Congress, Hu Jintao participated in the election as the second eligible voter, just after Xi Jinping, who cast his vote at the ballot box. In a society that is much more Confucianist than Communist, this symbolic placement in the vote signifies great respect for the elder statesman. The Western media also blanked this out of the overall picture. This made it easier for them to construct a coup, a purge and a humiliation of the former president.

​On the Chinese evening news (in the video starting at 5:21), Hu Jintao was shown casting his vote after Xi Jinping had cast his vote at the ballot box and just before Hu was “removed.” [Source: cctv.com]

If Hu had really been purged during the day, as Western media claimed, it is highly unlikely that Chinese television would have shown him in its report in the evening.
​
According to George Soros, Xi is the “most dangerous man in the world.”

Little was heard from the official Chinese side about the incident, apart from a tweet from Xinhua News Agency saying Hu “did not feel well” during the meeting.

A report by Singaporean TV station CNA added an important detail that Western media representatives who were in the room seemed to have deliberately ignored: Hu had been looking at some documents on the table in front of him and apparently had a disagreement with the current chairman of China’s legislature, Li Zhanshu, who was sitting to his left, who took the documents out of his hand.
​
And when Li Zhanshu tried to get up to help Hu stand, Li was briefly dragged back to his seat by Wang Huning, a party ideologue and former professor of international politics to his left, making matters even more confusing. Xi stopped this disruption to the choreographed party meeting and summoned a staffer, who then tried to get Hu to leave, and who then escorted him out of the room. The video also shows that Hu, after standing up, first hovered in place, then took a few slow steps, then stopped and turned to Xi, who nodded briefly but continued to look at the assembled delegates.

If it had been a dispute, the incident would have been extraordinary, because in communist parties, which are not known for their transparency, disagreements are settled behind closed doors, and in any case not in front of running cameras from the whole world. So one would need to know what is in the documents. A former Chinese insider told the BBC, “Why would the party put a document on Hu’s desk if he wasn’t allowed to see it?”
​
Bill Bishop of the China newsletter Sinocism stated that the “purge claimed by the media doesn’t make sense that way.” Hu Haifeng, Hu Jintao’s son and party secretary of Lishui, Zhejiang, also sat in the room. “A purge of one without the other would be unlikely,” Bishop explained.

​Hu Heifeng [Source: taiwannews.com]

A real China insider was interviewed by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. When asked about Xi Jinping’s possible motives for the alleged “forced removal” of Hu Jintao, he replied:

“Xi is certainly not shy about taking drastic action, but his obsession is to restore party discipline through rules and procedures. He has never gone the way of Stalin or North Korea of just making his enemies disappear. Even with his bitterest foes—such as Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, and Guo Boxiong, people who, in fact, plotted a coup against him—Xi took them down, but did everything according to the procedures.

He is a stern but not an arbitrary ruler. His books and speeches have more citations from China’s Legalism school than anything else. Legalism (a bad translation) stresses the importance of rules and regulations over arbitrary power.

If anyone wants to challenge Xi, it would be incredible for them to do so on the last day of the party congress, which is mainly for formal endorsement and communication. The debate and negotiations happened behind the scene MONTHS beforehand. There were plenty of opportunities for the two to argue if they didn’t agree with each other. This was simply not the case.”

Why have some Western media platforms gone wild with speculation, including suggesting it was a purge, the interviewer asked:

“This is the problem I have with the Western media and those ‘experts.’ You can be critical of the Chinese system, and you may dislike it intensely, but you at least need to understand what you are criticizing. Their imagination of China is just a plus-size North Korea, a modern-day Stalinist state, or the new Nazis. In fact, many Western media just borrow the same analytical tools they used to analyze the Soviet Union or North Korea or even Nazi Germany and apply it to China.

This is what I call the intellectual Procrustean bed they have forced on everyone studying China. Sometimes it can get really ridiculous. It’s either laziness or dogmatic rigidity or having an agenda—or a combination of all these.

There are many problems in Xi’s system, and so far he and the party have not come up with convincing answers to them. But to imagine it simply as another Soviet Union or North Korea is missing the point. If people start to make decisions based on such skewed views and perceptions, that will lead to real-life consequences. Hong Kong is a living example of it.”

So it is okay to criticize the Chinese system harshly, and pundits and the media may deeply loathe it, but they do so while being quite clueless.
​
Also, contrary to the predictions and speculations of experts and media in the West in the run-up to the Party Congress, the “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was not shortened to Xi Jinping Thought in the Constitution, nor was Xi given new descriptive titles such as “Leader/领袖.”

​[Source: english.yunnan.cn]

There are two other key current things that pundits like John Pike and the mainstream media will not tell you:

1. China has remained essentially Confucian for more than two thousand years. Confucius advocated a government that cares for the people and makes their welfare its primary concern. It should be a meritocracy, in that “those who govern should do so on the basis of merit and not on the basis of inherited status,” he proclaimed, and that it should be enlightened and benevolent (in which the demonstrably most capable people who best serve the people should rise to positions of leadership).
   
   This is in contrast to Western democracies, where even the most incompetent can come to power thanks to empty promises and/or because they were well sponsored, and then have their own interests and those of their patrons in mind rather than the interests of their constituents. In China, civil servants still have to pass exams and prove themselves if they want to keep their jobs. This corresponds to the centuries-old Confucian tradition, according to which anyone, regardless of their social background, could obtain a position in the civil service at the imperial court after passing an entrance examination in various subjects. The fact that 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China over the past 40 years, accounting for more than 75% of global poverty, is no accident, but part of the application of this philosophy.
2. Mainstream media such as Foreign Affairs magazine highlighted the “Collateral Damage in China’s War on Covid,” or Nikkei, the world’s largest financial newspaper, headlined “Self-isolated: China’s lonely zero-COVID battle in spotlight” without ever telling their readers and viewers why the Chinese government took draconian measures against the Covid pandemic: China’s biggest weakness is its health care system. South Korea has 10 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, America has 34, and China has only 4. As a result, the government feared that the health care system would not be able to handle a large influx of seriously ill patients. Most retirees are not vaccinated.

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The reason that modern medicine, including hospitals with intensive care units, lags behind the rest of the world in China is that the Chinese believe in their traditional medicine (acupuncture, herbal medicine, diet, exercise, and manual therapy to correct imbalances in the body and promote mental and physical health) because it has been used for thousands of years and is steeped in tradition, belief, popularity and anecdote. Western remedies are far less popular because the vast majority of Chinese also believe that traditional Chinese medicine has fewer side effects and has a stronger restorative effect on the body.

In contrast to the seemingly completely out-of-touch Western media, East Asian media, which have a far better understanding of China, used less charged language related to Hu Jintao’s escort out of the Party Congress hall. It is also important to note in this context that, unlike Europe, Asian countries do not want to be drawn into the U.S. fight against China at their own expense, as I have detailed here.
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For example, the conservative Korea Herald in Seoul soberly headlined that Hu Jintao was helped off the stage at the Party Congress.

​[Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

It can therefore be assumed that the escorting of Hu Jintao at the Party Congress will not go down in the Korean history books.

On the one hand, everything that comes out of China is hyped up, twisted and used in the West for China-bashing. On the other hand, more important things that would contribute to a better understanding of the country are simply suppressed. Another recent example:

Do you know Dilana Dilixiati? No, of course you don’t. But you certainly know Peng Shuai, the famous Chinese tennis player who, according to Western media reports, accused a retired top politician of rape (the word rape does not appear in her original Chinese text), after the years-long secret love affair with many ups and downs between the two had gone to pieces.

Western politicians and media therefore immediately called for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

​Tennishead magazine wrote (December 6, 2021): “The USA are reportedly set to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games this week in response to the censorship of Peng Shuai and her sexual assault allegations.” This boycott was carried out by the United States and its Western “coalition of the willing.” [Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

The athlete was subsequently often seen in public, laughing and talking to other people. Since she apparently did not disappear into a gulag, as Western politicians and media must have secretly hoped, she soon disappeared again from Western media discourse.

Dr. Pan Wang, a China expert from the University of New South Wales, provided background information and insights into the case on Australian television that were not available elsewhere.

She said it was only natural that Western organizations such as the World Tennis Association interpreted Ms. Peng’s social media post as a complaint of sexual misconduct and were suspicious of Beijing’s response given the lack of detailed information, communication or transparency and censorship on the matter.

However, she dismissed the accusation, saying there is no clear allegation of rape, which is a criminal offense in China, and “sexual harassment” falls under the Civil Code.

Whether the persuasion or coercion of the former vice premier described by Peng Shuai could be called “sexual assault” in the usual sense is subjective, she said.

She added that, while Beijing wants to suppress any controversy about its officials, the Western media are also pursuing their own political agenda regarding China.

“This case is about harassment, power and skepticism, and it occurred in a broader context of growing tensions between China and, for example, Australia, stemming from diplomatic tensions, trade disputes and growing accusations against China’s human rights, democracy and censorship,” she added.

She concluded: “So there’s a media war between China and the West and the Australian media here, too, and that’s reflected in the opposing views of the social media posts.”

Back to Dilana Dilixiati. She, too, is a Chinese sports star. Her team had recently won an unexpected, sensational victory in the semifinals against basketball superpower Australia at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Australian media reported, “They defeated the hosts 61-59 at the Sydney Superdome on Friday night in a thrilling encounter that was decided only in the final seconds.” The dramatic thriller sent shock waves.

​[Source: english.news.cn]

Those who followed the game immediately recognized that Dilana Dilixiati (on the left in the photo above) looked different from her teammates. The journalists must have noticed her. Strangely enough, the Uyghur, who writes her name in Uyghur like this: دىلانا دىلشات, which does not look like Mandarin, did not attract any interest, although she would have been more suitable than any other for a sensational success story inviting clicks.
​
The 1.94-meter (6’ 4-1/2”) center basketball player of the Guangdong Vermilion Birds, who helped the Chinese women’s national team win a silver medal at the World Cup, regularly visits her family in Xinjiang.

​[Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

​A Twitter user found out that a Uyghur woman played on China’s successful national women’s basketball team and that the media did not want to know about it.

The Australian think tank ASPI, funded in particular by the Australian Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and the Western war industry, published the widely cited but refuted pamphlet “Uyghurs for Sale.” The organization was one of the driving forces in spreading the propaganda campaign of “genocide” against the Uyghurs in China, which originated in the United States.
​
The case is clear: Dilana Dilixiati, a Uyghur, and her ability to pursue a career as a top athlete and to travel, contradicts the Western narrative that is ingrained in people’s minds that Uyghurs, who are totally discriminated against, are prisoners and victims of genocide and cannot leave Xinjiang. Their story had to be kept quiet by the media, because consumers would naturally have noticed that there was something wrong with the prevailing narrative, and who likes to be manipulated.

This article was republished from CovertAction Magazine.

For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which—if read in good faith—could have been perceived as reassuring.

Instead, establishment outlets reverted to familiar narratives regarding China’s Covid mitigation strategy and tied these into renewed predictions of a long-prophesied economic disaster—one that would inevitably befall China as a result of its government’s decision to forsake the orthodoxy of open markets.

More than anything else, corporate media fixated on Hu Jintao’s departure from the congress hall, engaging in tabloid-variety speculation around the fate of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 79-year-old predecessor.
​
Invoking the specter of a purge, outlets like the New York Times and CNN pushed the narrative that Xi manipulated events to consolidate his power. However, the “evidence” used by corporate media to suggest that Xi orchestrated Hu’s exit as part of a power grab was far from convincing.

​If establishment outlets covering the congress were on the lookout for substantive developments—rather than additional fodder to comport with their prefabricated narratives—they could have found them.
​
Despite the Biden administration’s belligerent posture vis-à-vis Taiwan, demonstrated by escalations like Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island and Biden’s own promise to deploy US forces in the event of a forced reunification, Xi indicated that China would continue to approach cross-strait relations with restraint.

In addition, Xi’s opening report to the congress placed particular emphasis on the task of combating climate change. The section titled “Pursuing Green Development and Promoting Harmony between Humanity and Nature” presented a four-part framework to guide China’s policy efforts in this area. Even the avidly pro-Western Atlantic Council had to admit that “China is showing its leadership in green development in a number of ways.”

Since China is home to one-fifth of the global population, and is currently the most prolific CO2-emitting country on Earth, its government’s decision to prioritize a comprehensive response to the climate crisis seems like an unambiguously positive development.

The congress even provided some encouraging news for those who claim to care about human rights. In a surprise move, Chen Quanguo, who was hit with US sanctions for his hardline approach as party secretary in both Tibet and Xinjiang, was ousted from the central committee.

But US corporate media generally failed to highlight these developments as positive news. In fact, with the exception of some coverage of Xi’s statements on Taiwan—which largely misrepresented China’s posture as more threatening than a good-faith reading would indicate—US news outlets had remarkably little to say about the substance of any news coming out of the congress.

The article went on to quote Jude Blanchette, a “China expert” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who declared, “There is nothing positive or aspirational about zero Covid.” That CSIS would disseminate such a narrative—with the assistance of the reliably hawkish Times—is unsurprising, since the think tank’s chief patrons share a common interest in vilifying China.

CSIS’s roster of major donors includes military contractors Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as a litany of oil and gas companies—all of whom derive financial benefit from America’s military build-up in the Pacific.

CSIS has also received millions of dollars from the governments of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Sitting on its board of trustees are Phebe Novakovic, chair and CEO of General Dynamics, and Leon Panetta who—as Defense secretary in the Obama administration—helped craft the DOD’s “pivot to Asia.”

While China’s “reform and opening-up” has been immensely profitable for corporations—as evidenced in media coverage (Forbes, 10/24/22; NYT, 11/7/22) of global markets’ uneasiness over Xi’s alleged “return to Marxism”—its impact on Chinese workers has been uneven, to say the least. Living standards have improved generally, but labor conditions remain poor and inequality is growing.

Like the Times, CNN went the think tank route to support its thesis, quoting Craig Singleton—senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD):

Yesterday’s speech confirms what many China watchers have long suspected—Xi has no intention of embracing market liberalization or relaxing China’s zero-Covid policies, at least not anytime soon…. Instead, he intends to double down on policies geared towards security and self-reliance at the expense of China’s long-term economic growth.

Despite the fact that China watchers have, for as long as one can remember, predicted a collapse of China’s economy that has yet to materialize, corporate media keep on returning to that same old well.

For its part, FDD—to which CNN attached the inconspicuous label of “DC-based think tank”—is a neoconservative advocacy group that has an ax to grind with China. The chairman of FDD’s China Program is Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security advisor to Donald Trump.

Early on in the pandemic, a Washington Post profile (4/29/20) of Pottinger stated that he “believes Beijing’s handling of the virus has been ‘catastrophic’ and ‘the whole world is the collateral damage of China’s internal governance problems.’” The article quoted Trump’s second national security advisor, H.R. McMaster—who is also currently employed as a “China expert” at FDD—as calling Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”

If consumers of corporate media only encountered one story about the congress, it probably had something to do with this seemingly innocuous development: During the congress’s closing session, aides escorted Hu Jintao—Xi’s predecessor as China’s paramount leader—out of the Great Hall of the People.

Later that day, Xinhua, China’s state news agency, said that Hu’s departure was health related. This explanation isn’t exactly far-fetched, since the 79-year-old Hu has long been said to be suffering from an illness—as early as 2012, some observers posited that the then-outgoing leader had Parkinson’s disease.
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Since the whole episode was caught on camera, however, corporate media were not satisfied with China’s mundane account of events. Instead, establishment outlets seized the moment and transformed Hu’s departure into a dramatic spectacle, laden with sinister connotations. The speculation that followed was almost obsessive in nature.

In reference to the haloed party figures whose “expressions did not change” as Hu was escorted away, the Times quoted Wu Guoguang, a professor at Canada’s University of Victoria:

Here was Hu Jintao, the former highest leader of your party and a man who had given so many of you political opportunities. And how do you treat him now?… This incident demonstrated the tragic reality of Chinese politics and the fundamental lack of human decency in the Communist Party.

While noting that Wu “said he did not want to speculate about what had unfolded,” the Times evidently did not consider this statement of caution as being at odds with his subsequent use of Hu’s departure to condemn the CCP in the broadest possible terms.

Indeed, the paper of record saw no problem with attributing the failure of Hu’s colleagues to react in a more appropriate manner—whatever that may have been—to “the tragic reality of Chinese politics” and a “fundamental lack of human decency” on the part of the CCP.

Here was a microcosm of corporate media’s contradictory approach to the episode: a professed reluctance to engage in conjecture, persistently negated by an overwhelming eagerness to cast aspersions. In line with this tack, the Times resorted to innuendo by posing a hypothetical question:
​
Was Mr. Hu, 79, suffering from poor health, as Chinese state media would later report? Or was he being purged in a dramatic show by China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, for the world to see?

Rather than asserting outright that Hu was the victim of a purge, the Times advanced this familiar red-scare narrative by including two photographs from the Cultural Revolution—one of which depicts Xi’s father being subjected to humiliation during a struggle session. With these images, the Times coaxed readers into making a spurious connection between Hu’s exit and the political repressions of yesteryear.

Predictably, cable news networks and China watchers also took part in the orgy of speculation. On CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front (10/25/22), international correspondent Selina Wang said this:

Now, I have spoken to experts who think there is more to this than that pure health explanation, including Steve Tsang of [the] SOAS China Institute. He told me that this is humiliation of Hu Jintao. It is a clear message that there is only one leader who matters in China right now and that is Xi Jinping.
She did not mention the fact that Tsang is a fellow at Chatham House, a think tank that derives a substantial proportion of its funding from the US State Department and the governments of Britain and Japan.

The day before, on CNN Newsroom (10/24/22), Wang stated, “Hu Jintao. . . was publicly humiliated at the closing ceremony of the Party Congress.” The only support she offered for this assertion came from Victor Shih, another China watcher from the aforementioned CSIS, who conjectured:

I am not a believer of the pure health explanation. And it seemed like [Hu] sat down in a pretty stable manner. And then suddenly, he was asked to leave. I’m not sure if he whispered something, said something to Xi Jinping.

Half-acknowledging that Shih’s description of events actually said nothing at all, Wang concluded: “Regardless, it was a symbolic moment. Out with Hu and the collective leadership of his era.” For Wang and for corporate media’s treatment of the episode writ large, “regardless” was the operative word—regardless of the fact that they were merely engaged in baseless speculation, they would still inevitably arrive at the most sinister conclusion.

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a small, inland nation; the only landlocked country in southeast Asia. Known as the “crossroads of Indochina,” its geographic position—situated in the middle of the peninsula, bordering Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and China—historically saw the region benefit greatly from the growth of overland trade in ancient times. With the emergence of colonialism, however, Laos was placed in a similar position to that of most other global south nations at the time. Under the French colonial boot, infrastructure and development was limited to only the areas that would be profitable for the colonialists—extraction rather than construction; destruction rather than growth. Today, the Lao PDR stands on the cusp of a golden age of socialist development, not unlike the periods of growth and construction underway in neighboring China and Vietnam.

How did the Lao people get here, what developments are underway, and what might the future hold?
On 23 August 1975, the Lao People’s Liberation Army (LPLA)—also known as the Pathet Lao—entered the city of Vientiane, capital of the then-Kingdom of Laos. In the months that followed, the last King of Laos—Sisavang Vatthana—would formally abdicate, and the Kingdom would officially be replaced by the new People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), with the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) leading the way. The founding of the Lao PDR marked the end of more than a century of struggle; first against the French colonialists, then the Japanese fascists, then the American imperialists. Their struggle-filled history presented the Lao people, and their newly born Democratic Republic, with a dual problem:

First, Laos became, and remains to this day, the most heavily bombed country on the planet. During the war of resistance against imperialism, the US reportedly dropped some 2 million tons of bombs, or roughly 1 ton per person, on Laos despite never formally declaring war. The US has never fully taken responsibility for its crimes, and offers little more than hush-money to solace the victims of its brutality.
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Second, while not all infrastructure was destroyed, infrastructure and productive forces developed in Laos under the colonialists had been oriented exclusively towards extractive industries, rather than national construction. The same problem plagues most—if not all—post-colonial nations, which is also especially evident in Africa. It is due to the little surviving infrastructure that, until recently the most reliable and readily-available form of transportation, at least along the country’s western border, was by boating up and down the Mekong river.

​Mekong River, Luang Prabang, Laos. 2011 Source: Wikimedia

The withdrawal of imperialist forces and establishment of the PDR however did not, in and of itself, solve all of the myriad obstacles standing in the way of further development. Beginning from around 1960 onwards, the Sino-Soviet split marked another great obstacle to the Lao people. Laos and Vietnam sided with the Soviet Union in the split, putting them at direct odds with neighboring China, which also resulted in exacerbating isolation. A mere four years following the establishing of the Lao PDR, tensions between neighboring Vietnam and China would hit a fever pitch. The people of Laos, having maintained the closest of fraternal and Comradely relations with the Vietnamese ever since their common founding in the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930, supported their Vietnamese compatriots without question—even at the cost of further isolation and tenuous relations with China. Likewise, trade relations with the United States did not become normalized until December of 2004.

​Overview of the Pan-Asia Railway Network southeastern routes Source: Bangkok Post

As highlighted by the above (now thankfully outdated) map of regional rail lines, the desperation, sacrifice, and courage of the Lao position in that period becomes apparent: although direct overtures began as early as 1976, relations with Thailand did not begin to fully normalize until the late-80’s, with armed interactions along the border being relatively frequent until around 1988. Relations with China, while never arising to the point of military conflict, would remain fraught until the late-80’s as well. In other words, during this period the only close partner Laos had was Vietnam. For their part, Vietnam reciprocated the Lao view of fraternal solidarity and comradery; however, reciprocation does not assuage material difficulties. Partly as a result of their historic status as colonial nations, and partly as a result of the US dropping millions of tons of bombs along the border, there is not a single rail connection between Laos and Vietnam. There is not, for that matter, a single rail connection between Laos and any other country, period. Or at least there wasn’t until 2015.

On 2 December, 2015, construction officially began on the Vientiane-Boten Railway, a flagship high-speed rail project of the new Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As reported by the Vientiane Times, the first train from the Laos side departed from Vientiane by order of President Sisoulith, with Prime Minister Phankham Viphavanh leading the delegation aboard; simultaneously, President Xi gave the signal for the first train to depart Kunming as well. Not only would Laos finally have a rail network linking some of its most important cities—such as Vientiane and Luang Prabang—but it would also link directly with the Chinese side, and allow seamless travel all the way to Kunming, capital of southern China’s Yunnan province. Six years and one day later, on 3 December, 2021, President Xi Jinping and President Thongloun Sisoulith met via video conference, to officially mark the opening of the historic project. During the meeting, both sides stressed the necessity for mutual cooperation, development, and friendship—that united in the spirit of serving the people, there is nothing that cannot be overcome. As highlighted by People’s Daily, the ultimate goal of the Vientiane-Boten line is to further link with Thai networks, and thereby establish a direct rail network expanding from Beijing to Singapore. Such an achievement, coupled with ongoing developments in Vietnam and Cambodia, would permanently change the socioeconomic fabric of southeast Asia—beginning a new age of hyperconnectivity, integration, and, one hopes, peace, friendship, and common prosperity. Because the railway uses the Chinese standard gauge, traffic—logistics, transport, etc.—can seamlessly cross between China and partner countries without needing to changeover or employ specialized equipment; a problem which has plagued international rail developments for centuries. All told, construction of the line cost an estimated $62.3 billion, of which 70% was paid for by the Chinese side. The Vientiane-Boten line extends some 427.2 kilometers (265.5 miles), and uses electric-powered high speed cars capable of reaching top speeds of 160 km/h (99.4 mph). A journey from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, roughly 310 kilometers (190 miles), would normally take up to six hours by driving. Roughly equal in distance as driving from Baltimore, Maryland to New York City, New York, which in the United States would take around three-and-a-half to four hours. Instead, thanks to the Laos-China railway, the journey takes only around two hours. ​

As highlighted in subsequent reporting by both Chinese and Lao outlets, the Laos-China railway has, in a brief period of time, already achieved great milestones, and made irrevocable contributions to the development of both countries. As of writing, it is reported that total goods transported has exceeded 10 million tonnes (11 million US tons), valued at over 12 billion yuan (1.7 billion USD), and has continued increasing month-by-month since the opening of the line. The value of the Laos-China railway to the Lao people and their continued development can be made no clearer than the fact that the value of goods transported within the past 12 months is, as of writing, identical to the country’s total GDP in the year 2000.

The victory of the People’s Liberation Army all those decades ago was a great triumph of the forces of the working and oppressed masses over the forces of Capitalism and its bastard offspring—colonialism, fascism, and imperialism. In view of the situation following that triumph, the continued existence, development, and success of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic can be described as nothing less than a man-made miracle: an unquestionable triumph of people-centered governance, the strength of the masses, and the great truth of the science of Marxism-Leninism. The Lao people have faced the greatest horrors, and made the greatest sacrifices. Today it seems those long years of struggle and commitment to the great cause of socialist construction are beginning to reap the greatest harvest. As regional developments continue, it appears the crossroads of Indochina are open once again, and the great undertakings of building a community with a shared future for mankind will give way to common prosperity, dignity, and peace.

​At the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping reflected on the history of colonialism—including China’s “century of humiliation”—and the implications this would have for China going forward. “In pursuing modernization,” Xi said, “China will not tread the old path of war, colonization, and plunder taken by some countries. That brutal and blood-stained path of enrichment at the expense of others caused great suffering for the people of developing countries. We will stand firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.”

Chinese officials routinely tell us that their country is not interested in seeking dominance in the world. What China would like to do is to collaborate with other countries to try and solve humanity’s dilemmas. The Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, was launched in 2013 with the purpose of “win-win” cooperation and development and has thus far built much-needed infrastructure with investment and construction contracts totaling $1 trillion in almost 150 countries. China’s interest in tackling the climate catastrophe is evidenced by its planting of a quarter of the world’s new forests over the past decade and in becoming a world leader in renewable energy investment and electric vehicle production. On the public health side, China adopted a COVID-19 policy that prioritizes lives over profit, donated 325 million doses of vaccines, and saved millions of lives as a result of this. As a result of its initiatives in the public health sector, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was 77.93 years in 2020 and reached 78.2 years in 2021, and for the first time, surpassed life expectancy in the United States--77 years in 2020 and 76.1 in 2021—making this drop “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

China’s communists do not see these events without putting them in the context of the long process undertaken by the government toward achieving and ensuring their social development. In 27 years, China will celebrate the centenary of its revolution. In 1997, then-President of China Jiang Zemin spoke about the two centenary goals—the 100-year markers following the founding of the Communist Party (1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1949)—that “underwrite all China’s long-term economic planning programs and contemporary macroeconomic policy agendas.” At that time, the focus was on growth rates. In 2017, Xi Jinping shifted the emphasis of these goals to the “three tough battles”: to defuse major financial risks, to eradicate poverty, and to control pollution. This new congress has gone beyond those “tough battles” to protect Chinese sovereignty and to expand the dignity of the Chinese people.

The general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Xi Jinping submitted a report summarizing the major achievements of China in the past decade and its vision for the future at the 20th National Congress of the CPC in Beijing. Among the main points outlined in the report, Xi Jinping buttressed the inevitability of upholding global peace and development and invited all countries to take part in efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.

Xi’s report to the 20th CPC National Congress reflected the two roads proposed and built by China. The first is the national road, “the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” through which China has built an economy that currently accounts for 18.5% of the world’s GDP in 2021, ranking it as the second largest economy in the world. On this basis, China is likely to become the world’s largest economy during the third decade of the 21st century, which constitutes the country’s objective to “basically achieve socialist modernization by 2035.”
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The economic construction of this road has also permitted China to free more than 770 million rural people from poverty, according to the UN definition, providing employment to around 746.5 million people, significantly increasing the disposable income of its residents, guaranteeing health insurance to more than 1.364 billion people, and establishing the world’s largest social security system. The economic and social development of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics is unprecedented.

​The second is the international road, called “Building a Community of Shared Future for Mankind,” being China’s proposal to the world at the 20th CPC National Congress. The report had some major takeaways which rightly analyzed the historical juncture the world has reached. Our vision for the future should firmly take its roots from the lessons learned from history and addresses the deficiencies of current global affairs management.

China shows that it will continue its active participation to reform and build an inclusive global governance system, adhering to the spirit of multilateralism. It is committed to building a community with a shared future for mankind. To support this vision, China is inviting other countries in the world to work together on the implementation of three initiatives: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative (GDI), and the Global Security Initiative (GSI).

Since its inception, the initiative to build a community with a shared future for mankind has been widely welcomed and discussed in the international community, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Of the 33 countries in this region that maintain diplomatic relations with China, 21 have already signed up to the BRI. This enthusiastic participation makes the initiative one of the most successful programs to realize the concept of a future-sharing community in Latin America and the Caribbean.

​Some regional countries, such as the Republic of Cuba and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, have also pledged their support for the GDI and GSI, as well as expressed their willingness to participate.
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For developing countries, these three initiatives propose new situations that will require not only economic, political and social, but also cultural and academic efforts, to which China has also offered new proposals to the world.

In this sense, on January 12, the Venezuelan Center for China Studies and the Institute for a Community of Shared Future of the Communication University of China jointly launched the China-Venezuela Research Center for a Community with a Shared Future. This new center has been envisaged as a joint academic platform for building research networks between the two countries to facilitate collaborative projects, promote the dialogue of civilizations and initiate global communication on the concept of a community of shared future for mankind. Since then, we have been working closely together to seek the possibilities of cooperation and elevate our engagements to the next level.
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Building a community with a shared future for mankind can prevail across the world and a new era will emerge of prosperity and peace. Latin America and the Caribbean have enormous potential to contribute to global development movements and can aptly help materialize the efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind.

The Western media is waging a systematic and ferocious propaganda war against China. In the court of Western public opinion, China stands accused of an array of terrifying crimes: conducting a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang; wiping out democracy in Hong Kong; militarising the South China Sea; attempting to impose colonial control over Taiwan; carrying out a land grab in Africa; preventing Tibetans and Inner Mongolians from speaking their languages; spying on the good peoples of the democratic world; and more.

Australian scholar Roland Boer has characterised these accusations as “atrocity propaganda – an old anti-communist and indeed anti-anyone-who-does-not-toe-the-Western-line approach that tries to manufacture a certain image for popular consumption.” Boer observes that this propaganda serves to create an impression of China as a brutal authoritarian dystopia which “can only be a fiction for anyone who actually spends some time in China, let alone lives there.”[1]

It’s not difficult to understand why China would be subjected to this sort of elaborate disinformation campaign. This media offensive is part of the imperialist world’s ongoing attempts to reverse the Chinese Revolution, to subvert Chinese socialism, to weaken China, to diminish its role in international affairs and, as a result, to undermine the global trajectory towards multipolarity and a future free from hegemonism. As journalist Chen Weihua has pointed out, “the reasons for the intensifying US propaganda war are obvious: Washington views a fast-rising China as a challenge to its primacy around the world.” Furthermore, “the success of a country with a different political system is unacceptable to politicians in Washington.”[2]

Propaganda wars can also be war propaganda. In this case, the war in question is the escalating US-led New Cold War.[3] The various slanders against China – particularly the most lurid accusations, such as that of genocide in Xinjiang – have much in common with the 2003 allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or the 2011 allegation that the Libyan state under Muammar Gaddafi was preparing a massacre in Benghazi. These narratives are constructed specifically in order to mobilise public opinion in favour of imperialist foreign policy: waging a genocidal war against the people of Iraq; bombing Libya into the Stone Age; and, today, conducting a wide-ranging campaign of economic coercion, political subversion and military threats against the People’s Republic of China.

In his book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanist and first President of Ghana, discusses how “ideological and cultural weapons in the form of intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” were employed by the Western powers during the Cold War in order to undermine the socialist countries and the newly-liberated territories of Africa, Asia and Latin America. “While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news’… A flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom.”[4]

The mechanisms for such “intrigues, manoeuvres and slander campaigns” have changed little since Nkrumah’s day. British media analysts David Cromwell and David Edwards explore the concept of the propaganda blitz – “fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage in minimum time.” These media attacks are “communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage” and, crucially, give the appearance of enjoying consensus support among experts, academics, journalists and politicians.[5] This consensus “generates the impression that everyone knows that the claim is truthful.”[6] Such a consensus is most powerful when it includes not only right-wing ideologues but also prominent leftist commentators. “If even celebrity progressive journalists – people famous for their principled stands, and colourful socks and ties – join the denunciations, then there must be something to the claims. At this point, it becomes difficult to doubt it.”

When it comes to China, many such commentators are only too happy to oblige: British columnist Owen Jones for example, writing for the Guardian, has asserted that “despite the denials of the Chinese regime, the brutal campaign against the Uighurs in the Xinjiang region is real.”[7] Jones backs his assertion up with links to two other Guardian articles, both of which rely on research provided by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – a hawkish anti-China think tank funded by the Australian government, the US government and various multinational arms manufacturers (of which more below). That is, this self-described socialist relies on the same sources as the most extreme China hawks in Washington. Yet his public endorsement of anti-China slander, along with that of NATO-aligned commentators such as Paul Mason,[8] serves to create the impression that such slander is entirely credible, as opposed to being what it in fact is, namely yet another unhinged far-right conspiracy theory.

Although the various anti-China slanders clearly lack evidentiary support, they are nonetheless powerful, persuasive and sophisticated. It requires no great skill to persuade hardened reactionaries and anti-communists to take a hard line against China, but the propaganda war is carefully crafted such that it actively taps in to progressive ideas and sentiments. The accusation of genocide is particularly potent: by accusing China of perpetrating a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, imperialist politicians and journalists are able to mobilise legitimate sympathies with Muslims and national minorities, as well as invoking righteous indignation in relation to genocide. An emotional-intellectual environment is created in which to defend China against accusations of genocide is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier. Solidarity with China thus incurs a hefty psychological, and perhaps material and physical, cost.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media remains an authoritative and indispensable analysis of how the so-called free press works in the capitalist world. In particular, the book explores the connection between the economic interests of the ruling class and the ideas that are communicated via mass media. “The media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”[9]
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Herman and Chomsky develop a propaganda model, in which a set of informal but entrenched ‘filters’ determine what media consumers read, watch and hear. These filters include:

• The ownership structure of the dominant mass-media firms. Media owners are members of the capitalist class, and they consistently privilege the interests of that class.
• Reliance on advertising revenue. Since most media operations can only survive, meet their costs and turn a profit if they carry advertising from large corporations, they must be sensitive to the political views of those corporations.
• Reliance on information “provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”[10] The authors note that the Pentagon, for example, “has a public-information service that involves many thousands of employees, spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year and dwarfing not only the public-information resources of any dissenting individual or group but the aggregate of such groups.”[11]
• A system of ‘flak’, or negative feedback, in response to news stories that don’t conform to the values of those in power. This “may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action.”[12] With the advent of the internet – and particularly social media – methods of ‘flak’ have multiplied, and provide an important means of conditioning what information is consumed by the public.
• The pervasive ideological framework of anticommunism, which serves as “a national religion and control mechanism”. Here the authors are referring specifically to the United States, but the point holds elsewhere in the West.

According to Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, “the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.”[13] The resulting news output serves to “inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state.”[14]
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Western mainstream media coverage of China fits comfortably within this model. Almost without exception the major media operations – from Fox News to the Guardian, from the BBC to the Washington Post – present a narrative consistently hostile to China. For example, in relation to the 2019 protest movement in Hong Kong, the Western press was universal in its one-sided condemnation of the Hong Kong police and authorities, and in its effusive support for ‘pro-democracy’ protestors. Violence by the protestors – storming the parliament building, attacking buses, throwing petrol bombs, vandalising buildings and intimidating ordinary citizens – was either totally ignored or written off as the actions of a small minority, whereas the local Hong Kong government was subjected to an extraordinary level of scrutiny and condemnation. A Guardian editorial went so far as to state that “China is crushing any shred of resistance in Hong Kong, in breach of its promises to maintain the region’s freedoms”[15] – unironically citing Chris Patten, the last (unelected like all his predecessors) British governor of Hong Kong, in support of its claim. It apparently didn’t occur to the author to contrast the Hong Kong police’s incredibly restrained response to the protests with the US police’s shockingly violent repression of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, which saw several fatalities at the hands of the US police, compared to precisely zero at the hands of their Hong Kong counterparts.[16]

No major Western news outlet seriously explored the violence of the protestors; nor did they mention the protest leaders’ extensive links with some of the most reactionary US politicians;[17] nor did they choose to investigate the role of the National Endowment for Democracy in providing financial support to the movement.[18] Meanwhile they shamelessly ignored the millions of Hong Kong residents who didn’t support the protests, who saw that “rioters and mobs were everywhere destroying public facilities, paralysing railway systems and so on but they were called ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Western countries.”[19]
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Conversely, what should be positive stories about China – for example in relation to poverty alleviation,[20] or its progress in the field of renewable energy,[21] or suppressing the Covid-19 pandemic[22] – are either ignored or magically transformed into anti-China stories. The announcement that China had succeeded in its goal of eliminating extreme poverty was “delivered with much bombast but few details”, and the whole program was written off as part of a cunning strategy by Xi Jinping “to cement his position as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong”.[23] Literally millions of lives have been saved as a result of China’s dynamic Zero Covid strategy, and yet according to the New York Times, the CPC is simply trying to “use China’s success in containing the virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior to that of liberal democracies”. While acknowledging that a policy of saving millions of lives unsurprisingly “still enjoys strong public support”, this is put down to a familiar trope that Chinese people have “limited access to information and no tools to hold the authority accountable”.[24]
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Veteran political scientist Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds about the absurdity of Western propaganda against the socialist world during the Cold War, and how refraction through the lens of anti-communism could “transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.” He notes:

Parenti’s observation certainly resonates with the contemporary media consensus against China. For such a media consensus to be coincidental would be a statistical impossibility. It represents precisely the current political agenda of the “privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (that is, the imperialist ruling classes); it aims precisely to manufacture consent for the New Cold War on China.

Nowhere is the propaganda model more visible than in relation to the mainstream media coverage of Xinjiang. The accusation that China is committing a genocide (or “cultural genocide”) in Xinjiang has been repeated so frequently as to become almost an accepted truth in large parts of the West. Although the accusation is backed up with precious little evidence, the story has become a global media sensation and has led to the introduction of an escalating program of sanctions, plus a “diplomatic boycott” by various imperialist countries of the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022.[26] Furthermore, it has filtered into popular consciousness, fuelled by sophisticated social media campaigns. It has become the quintessential example of a propaganda blitz. As noted above, and consistent with Edwards and Cromwell’s description, this propaganda blitz is consistent across the corporate media’s conservative-liberal spectrum, from Fox News[27] to the New York Times,[28] from the Daily Mail[29] to the Guardian.[30]

Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model explains how such a story picks up steam:

The mass media is supplemented by much of the radical left in the imperialist heartlands. Popular progressive news outlet Democracy Now has parroted every lurid accusation against China in relation to Xinjiang.[32] Jacobin in 2021 gave a sympathetic interview to Sean R Roberts, author of The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims, in which he claims that “what we see right now in the Uyghur region is a lot like the process of cultural genocide elsewhere in the world from a century ago, but benefitting from high-tech forms of repression that are available now in the twenty-first century”.[33] Meanwhile Britain’s Socialist Worker claims that “up to one million Uyghurs are locked up in internment camps.”[34] Somewhat ironically, Noam Chomsky himself is not immune to the imperialist propaganda model, stating in a 2021 podcast episode that China’s actions in Xinjiang are “terrible” and “highly repressive”, and repeating the assertion (discussed at length below) that “there are a million people who have gone through reeducation camps.”[35]
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Meanwhile in the sphere of parliamentary politics, right and left have formed an unholy alliance in pursuit of the New Cold War on China. Besides right-wing fundamentalists such as Mike Pompeo, progressive Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been hawkish regarding Xinjiang, calling on US businesses to study an Australian Strategic Policy Initiative (ASPI) report condemning China and ensure that their companies are not connected to Uyghur forced labour. Omar said: “No American company should be profiting from the use of gulag labor, or from Uyghur prisoners who are transferred for work after their time in Xinjiang’s concentration camps.”[36]

Of all the claims that are made in relation to China’s treatment of Uyghur people, the most serious is that it is perpetrating a genocide. One of the last acts of Trump’s State Department was, in January 2021, to declare that the Chinese government is “committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilisation.”[37] The Biden administration doubled down on this slander, claiming in its 2021 annual human rights report that “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang”, and that the components of this genocide included “the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians; forced sterilisation, coerced abortions, and more restrictive application of China’s birth control policies; rape; torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained; forced labor; and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.”[38]

Canada’s House of Commons quickly followed suit,[39] as did the French National Assembly.[40] The European Parliament adopted a somewhat less adventurist resolution claiming that Muslims in Xinjiang were at “serious risk of genocide.”[41]
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Genocide has a detailed definition under international law, which can be summarised as the purposeful destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.[42] It is rightly considered to be one of the gravest crimes against humanity. As such, it is not the sort of accusation that should be thrown around carelessly and without evidence. And yet imperialist ideologues routinely do exactly that. As Herman and Chomsky pointed out decades ago, “genocide is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimisation in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimisation by the United States itself or allied regimes.”[43]

Prominent scholar and economist Jeffrey Sachs has written in relation to the Biden administration’s accusations of genocide that “it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge.” Continuing, Sachs writes that the charge of genocide should never be made lightly. “Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behoves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here.”[44]

What is the nature of the actual genocide charge? A 2021 report by a highly dubious Washington think-tank, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy,[45] claims that the Chinese government has implemented “comprehensive state policy and practice” with “the intent to destroy the Uyghurs as a group.” The report doesn’t claim that Uyghurs are directly being killed, but that coercive birth control measures are being selectively applied such that the Uyghur population slowly dies off.

However, there is no credible data to support these claims. It is the case that the birth rate has been trending downwards in Xinjiang, but the same is true for every Chinese province. Meanwhile, the Uyghur population from 2010 to 2018 increased from 10.2 million to 12.7 million, an increase of 25 percent. During the same period, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang increased by just 2 percent.[46] Reflecting on the reasons for the marginal downturn in Uyghur birthrate, Pakistani-Canadian peace activist Omar Latif noted that the causes are “the same as elsewhere; more women acquiring higher education and participating in the workforce; less necessity for parents to have more children to take care of them in old age; urbanisation; lessening of patriarchal controls over women; increased freedom for women to practice birth control.”[47]

China’s one-child policy was first implemented in 1978, at a time when China was relatively insecure about its ability to feed a large population (China has 18 percent of the global population but only around 12 percent of the world’s arable land, along with chronic water scarcity).[48] The policy was in place until 2015, and largely serves to explain the long-term decline in the birth rate in China. However, national minorities – including Uyghurs – were exempt from the policy. Indeed the Uyghur population doubled during the period the one-child policy was in force. This pattern is replicated throughout China – according to the latest census data, the population of minority groups increased over the last decade by 10.26 percent (to 125 million), while that of Han Chinese grew at by 4.93 percent (to 1.3 billion) – less than half the rate.

Another data point that tends to belie the claims of a genocide in Xinjiang is that average life expectancy in the region has increased from 30 years in 1949 to 75 years today.[49]

One question that the various anti-China think tanks have not addressed is: if there were a genocide taking place in Xinjiang – including the ‘slow genocide’ of discriminatory coercive birth control – would this not lead to a refugee crisis? There is certainly no evidence of such a crisis; no camps along the border with Pakistan or Kazakhstan, and so on. Repression, war, poverty and climate change have combined to produce numerous current refugee crises in Africa, Asia and the Middle East; it is highly implausible that a full-blown genocide in Western China would not lead to any such issue. A Time article in 2021 confirmed that, in spite of both the Trump and Biden administrations’ outspoken criticisms of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the US had not admitted a single Uyghur refugee in the preceding 12 months.[50] Given that, in the same time period, Biden offered a refuge to people “fleeing Hong Kong crackdown”,[51] it’s unimaginable that the US would not offer refugee status to thousands of Xinjiang Uyghurs fleeing persecution – if they existed.

Lamenting the fact that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ‘Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’, issued in August 2022, fails to even mention the charge of genocide, Yale Law School academic Nicholas Bequelin lets slip that there simply is not a credible evidentiary basis for such a charge. “For the crime of genocide, you need to have several elements. One of the elements is intent. You need to be able to demonstrate, and to demonstrate convincingly, before a court, that the state had the intent of committing genocide. That’s the first thing. The second is that you have a number of elements for the crime of genocide – which is that it has to be a systematic, widespread extermination, or attempted extermination, of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. There are elements that are present in the Chinese case, but it’s not clear that the intent is to lead to the extermination of a particular ethnic group.”[52]

The handful of reports on which the genocide charge is based do not provide anything like compelling evidence. What they put forward are some highly selective birth rate statistics, and the testimony of a small number of Uyghur exiles who claim to have been subjected to abuse. Working on the basis of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, China can by no means be considered as guilty of genocide.
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An aside: at the time of writing, the total number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in Xinjiang is three.[53] It is very difficult to believe that state forces conducting a genocide against a given ethnic group would fail to take advantage of a pandemic in support of their project; indeed that the regional health authorities would go to significant lengths to prevent the people of this group dying from Covid-19.

A somewhat more sophisticated accusation against the Chinese government is that is perpetrating a cultural genocide in Xinjiang – not wiping out the Uyghur population as such but the Uyghur identity, Uyghur traditions, Uyghur beliefs. Although cultural genocide is not defined under international law, it apparently refers to “the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites.”[54]

While the accusation seems less extreme than the accusation of physical genocide, the claims of cultural genocide are nonetheless similarly lacking in evidentiary basis. For example, all schools in Xinjiang teach both Standard Chinese and one minority language, most often Uyghur.[55] Chinese banknotes have five languages on them: Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang.[56] Thousands of books, newspapers and magazines are printed in the Uyghur language. What’s more, there are over 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang – three times the number there were in 1980, and one of the highest number of mosques per capita in the world (almost ten times as many as in the United States).[57]

Turkish scholar Adnan Akfirat observes that the Quran and numerous other key Islamic texts are readily available and have been translated into the Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. Further, “the Xinjiang Islamic Institute, headquartered in Urumqi, has eight branches in other cities such as Kashgar, Hotan and Ili, and there are ten theological schools in the region, including a Xinjiang Islamic School. These schools enrol 3,000 new students each year.”[58] Akfirat states that Muslims in Xinjiang freely engage in their religious rituals, including prayer, fasting, pilgrimages, and celebrating Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

These details have been confirmed by a steady stream of diplomats, officials and journalists that have visited Xinjiang in recent years. A diplomatic delegation in March 2021 included Pakistani Ambassador to China, Moin ul Haque, who explicitly rejected the accusations of religious persecution: “The notable and important thing is that there’s freedom of religion in China and it’s enshrined in the Constitution of China, which is a very important part… People in Xinjiang are enjoying their lives, their culture, their deep traditions, and most importantly, their religion.”[59]

Fariz Mehdawi, Palestinian Ambassador to China, commented that there were a huge number of mosques and one could see there was respect for religious and ethnic traditions, saying: “You know, the number of mosques, if you have to calculate it all, it’s something like 2,000 inhabitants for one mosque. This ratio we don’t have it in our country. It’s not available anywhere.” It was put to Mehdawi that he could simply have been shown a Potemkin village. He replied: “Are we diplomats so naive that we could be manoeuvred to believe anything … Or are we part of a conspiracy, that we would justify something against what we had seen? I think this is not respectful… There is no conspiracy here, there is facts. And the fact of the matter is that China is rising and developing everywhere, including Xinjiang. Since some people are not happy about that, they would like to stop the rise of China by any means.”[60]

Looking at different countries’ voting records at the UN in relation to human rights in China, it’s striking that the only Muslim-majority country that consistently votes in support of US-led slanders is NATO member Albania. During the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in 2022, members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation overwhelmingly co-sponsored the statement supporting China’s position (by 37 to 1). This pattern is mirrored in Africa (33 to 2) and Asia (20 to 2).[61] It is very difficult to believe that the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries, and countries of the Global South, would stay silent in the face of a cultural genocide committed against Uyghur Muslims in China.

Given the lack of evidence for a cultural genocide; the data and reports concerning the protection of minority cultures in China; the large number of diplomatic missions to Xinjiang; and the near-consensus voice of Muslim-majority countries defending China against slander; the accusations of cultural genocide appear to be wholly insupportable.

The specific charge most frequently levelled against the authorities in Xinjiang is that they operate prison camps where Uyghur Muslims are locked up in huge numbers – the most oft-mentioned figure is one million, out of a population of 13 million.[62] The alleged purpose of these prison camps is to eradicate Uyghur Muslim culture and to brainwash people into supporting the government – to “breed vengeful feelings and erase Uyghur identity”.[63]

The “million Uyghurs in concentration camps” story is a quintessential propaganda blitz. Through sheer repetition across the Western media, along with support from the US State Department, this startling headline has acquired the force of a widely-accepted truth. And yet the sources for this “news” are so spurious as to be laughable.

A 2018 China File article attempting to locate the source of this one million figure identifies four key pieces of research, by the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz; Washington DC-based non-profit Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD); the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI); and US-based media outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA). A new player entered the game in 2021: the Newlines Institute, a think tank based at the Fairfax University of America, which issued the “first independent report” to authoritatively determine that the Chinese government has violated the UN convention on genocide. It is worthwhile considering whether these individuals and organisations most responsible for these high-profile accusations against China have any vested interests or ulterior motives.

Adrian Zenz was the first person to claim that a million Uyghurs were being held in concentration camps.[64] He is also something of a trailblazer in relation to allegations of forced labour and forced sterilisation. His relentless work slandering China has received an appreciative audience at CNN,[65] the Guardian,[66] Democracy Now,[67] and elsewhere. It is difficult to find a news report about China’s alleged use of concentration camps that does not reference Zenz’s work.

A hagiographic report in the Wall Street Journal highlights the outsized role of this one individual in the construction of a global anti-China slander machine: “Research by a born-again Christian anthropologist working alone from a cramped desk … thrust China and the West into one of their biggest clashes over human rights in decades. Doggedly hunting down data in obscure corners of the Chinese internet, Adrian Zenz revealed a security buildup in China’s remote Xinjiang region and illuminated the mass detention and policing of Turkic Muslims that followed. His research showed how China spent billions of dollars building internment camps and high-tech surveillance networks in Xinjiang, and recruited police officers to run them.”[68]
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Casually hinting at Zenz’s ideological orientation, the article notes that “his faith pushes him forward” and that his previous intellectual activity includes co-authoring “a book re-examining biblical end-times.”[69] He “feels very clearly led by God” to issue anti-China slanders. In other words, Zenz is not simply a politically-neutral data scientist with a passion for human rights. Rather he’s a hardened anti-communist and Christian end-timer; he is employed as the Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,[70] an arch-conservative organisation set up by the United States Congress in 1993 in order to memorialise “the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial holocaust” such that “so evil a tyranny” as state socialism would ever again be able to “terrorise the world.”[71] His book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation, he urges the subjection of unruly children to “scriptural spanking” and describes homosexuality as “one of the four empires of the beast.”[72]

Given Zenz’s ideological affiliations and intellectual record, it would not be unreasonable to demand that his research be subjected to serious scrutiny. In reality, however, his evaluations regarding Xinjiang have been uncritically accepted and widely amplified by the Western media and political machine.

Another organisation lending its support to the accusation that “more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’” is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).[73] ASPI is a think-tank set up by the Australian government, and has become highly influential in terms of moulding the Australian public‘s attitude towards China. Its reports about Xinjiang are among the most-cited sources on the topic.

ASPI describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan think tank”, but its core funding comes from the Australian government, with substantial contributions from the US Department of Defense and State Department (earmarked specifically for “Xinjiang human rights” work), as well as the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and others.[74] In summary, ASPI is knee-deep in the business of Cold War and the militarisation of the Pacific, and there is a clear conflict of interest when it comes to discussing human rights in China.

The most recent “non-partisan think tank” to amplify anti-China propaganda in relation to Xinjiang is the Newlines Institute, described by Jeffrey Sachs as “a project of a tiny Virginia-based university with 153 students, eight full-time faculty, and an apparently conservative policy agenda.”[75] The Newlines report – “the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China”[76] – received extensive coverage in the Western media as the smoking gun proving China’s culpability in relation to concentration camps, forced labour and cultural genocide. The report was put together by the institute’s Uyghur Scholars Working Group, an illustrious group led by none other than Adrian Zenz. Canadian journalist Ajit Singh, in a detailed investigation for The Grayzone, points out that “the leadership of Newlines Institute includes former US State Department officials, US military advisors, intelligence professionals who previously worked for the ‘shadow CIA’ private spying firm, Stratfor, and a collection of interventionist ideologues.” Further, the institute’s founder and president is Ahmed Alwani, otherwise best known for having served on the advisory board for the US military’s Africa Command.[77]

The BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others all treated the Newlines report as if it represented the very pinnacle of academic rigour, without mentioning even in passing its connection with the US military-industrial complex.

It is abundantly clear that the popular narrative about Xinjiang prison camps rests on highly dubious sources. The evidence offered up by Zenz, ASPI and the like is a handful of individual testimonies along with a small selection of photographs and satellite pictures purporting to show prison camps. These pictures do appear to prove that some prisons exist, but this is not a terribly interesting or unusual phenomenon. China has some prisons, although its incarceration rate – 121 per 100,000 people – is less than 20 percent that of the US.[78]

Several commentators have pointed out that it is not easy to hide a million prisoners – approximately the population of Dallas. As Omar Latif comments: “Imagine the number of buildings and the infrastructure required to house and service that number of prisoners! With satellite cameras able to read a vehicle license plate, one would think the US would be able to show those prisons and prisoners in great detail.”[79]
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Perhaps the most iconic image purporting to show a Xinjiang prison camp is that of a group of men in a prison yard wearing blue boiler suits. This turns out to be a picture of a talk given at Luopu County Reform and Correction Centre, in April 2017.[80] The Luopu Centre is an ordinary prison, with ordinary criminals, but it has been “fallaciously used to prove, show, or insinuate either concentration camps or slave labor of Xinjiang people”.[81]

The Chinese authorities claim that what Western human rights groups are calling concentration camps are in fact vocational education centres designed to address the problem of religious extremism and violent separatism. They combine classes on sociology and ethics – focused on trying to undermine ideas of religious hatred – with classes providing marketable skills such that the attendees can find jobs and improve their standard of living. The basic idea is to improve people’s life prospects so that they are less likely to be radicalised by fundamentalist sectarian groups.

The threat from such groups is real enough. The biggest among them is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which up until October 2020 was classified by the US State Department as a terrorist group.[82] It has sent thousands of its militia to fight alongside Daesh and assorted al-Qaeda groups in Syria and Afghanistan.[83]

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2010s, there was a sequence of terrorist attacks in China carried out by Uyghur separatist outfits – in shopping centres, train stations and bus stations as well as Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of civilians. This corresponds with an increase in terrorism across Middle East and Central Asia, in no small measure related to the West’s proxy wars against progressive or nationalist states in the region. Like any population, the Chinese people demand the right to safety and security; as such, terrorism is not a problem China’s government can simply ignore.

The vocational centres were therefore set up as part of a holistic anti-terrorism campaign aimed at increasing educational attainment and economic prosperity, thereby addressing the disaffection that is known to breed radicalisation. Educational methods have been combined with a focus on improving living conditions: in the five years from 2014 to 2019, per capita disposable income increased by an average annual rate of 9.1 percent.[84]

China’s approach to tackling terrorism is based on the measures advocated in United Nations’ Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, which “calls for a comprehensive approach encompassing not only essential security-based counter-terrorism measures but also systematic preventive steps to address the underlying conditions that drive individuals to radicalise and join violent extremist groups.”[85] Thus China is actively attempting to operate within the framework of international law and best practices. This approach compares rather favourably with, for example, the US’s operation of a torture camp for suspected terrorists, not to mention innocent victims snatched more or less at random, in Guantánamo Bay – itself an illegally-occupied area of Cuba.[86]

Without conducting extensive investigations on the ground, it is obviously not possible to verify the Chinese authorities’ claims about how the vocational education centres run. What we can say with certainty is that the accusations about genocide, cultural genocide, religious oppression and concentration camps are not backed by anything approximating sufficient proof. Meanwhile the most prominent accusers all, without exception, have a known axe to grind against China.

None of the foregoing is meant to deny that there are any problems in Xinjiang; that Uyghur people are never mistreated or ethnically profiled by the police; or that there has never been any coercion involved in the deradicalisation program. But these problems – which are well-understood in China and which the government is actively addressing – are in no way unique to China. Certainly any discrimination against Uyghurs pales in comparison with, for example, the treatment of African-Americans and indigenous peoples in the United States, or the treatment of Dalits, Adivasis and numerous other minorities in India.

The perverse propaganda campaign around Xinjiang serves multiple purposes. It is a component of the US-led New Cold War – a project of hybrid warfare designed to slow down China’s rise, to maintain US hegemony and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.[87] It also connects to a century-old pattern of vicious anti-communism that aims to disrupt the natural solidarity the working classes in the capitalist countries, and oppressed people generally, might otherwise feel towards the socialist world. Lastly, Xinjiang’s geostrategic importance means that it has a special role in any overall strategy of weakening China. Bordering Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Xinjiang constitutes a key point along the major east-west land routes of the Belt and Road Initiative. It connects China to Central Asia and therefore also to the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Europe. Xinjiang is China’s largest natural gas-producing region, is the centre of China’s solar and wind power generation, and is crucially important for China’s security.

British political scientist Jude Woodward noted that Xinjiang’s location puts it at the heart of China’s blossoming trade relationship with Central Asia – “part of the world where the confrontation between China’s win-win geo-economics and the US’s old style geopolitics are playing themselves out with the starkest contrast… China has proposed that Central Asia should be at the crossroads of a reimagined Eurasia connected by oil and gas pipelines, high speed trains and continuous carriageways, with stability underpinned by growth and fuelled by trade. China offers a vision of a world turned on its axis, placing not the ‘middle kingdom’ but the entire Asian continent at the centre of the next phase of human development.”[88]

In order to disrupt this progress, the US has resorted to destabilisation and demonisation. The maximum goal is to lay the ground for a pseudo-independent Xinjiang which would in reality be a US client state and a powerful foothold for further aggression against China and other states in the region. The minimum, and far more likely, goal is to disrupt the value chains connecting China to the Eurasian land mass, thereby slowing down the Belt and Road Initiative and damaging China’s trade relationships with Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

As an aside, the West’s stoking of instability in Xinjiang and its imposition of sanctions expose the shallowness of its commitment to the fight against climate breakdown. In 2021, Xinjiang generated 2.48 trillion kilowatts of electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar and wind) – nearly 30 percent of China’s total electricity consumption.[89] Around half of the world’s supply of polysilicon, an essential component in solar panels, comes from Xinjiang.[90]
​
If the US and its allies were serious about pursuing carbon neutrality and preventing an ecological catastrophe, they would be working closely with China to develop supply chains and transmission capacity for renewable energy. China’s investment in solar and wind power technology has already led to a dramatic reduction of prices around the world.[91] Instead, they are imposing blanket sanctions on China and attempting to cut Xinjiang out of clean energy supply chains.[92] This indicates rather clearly that the imperialist ruling classes are prioritising their anti-China propaganda war over preventing climate breakdown. It seems the slogan “better dead than red” lives on in the 21st century.

Malcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader and revolutionary, famously said that “if you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”[93]

China is rising. Its life expectancy has now overtaken that of the US.[94] Extreme poverty is a thing of the past, and people increasingly live well. China has established itself as a leading force in the fight against climate breakdown; in the fight to save humanity from pandemics; and in the movement towards a more democratic, multipolar system of international relations. It is “now the standard-bearer of the global socialist movement,” in the words of Xi Jinping.[95]

The US and its allies are pursuing a New Cold War with the aim of weakening China, limiting its rise, and ultimately overturning the Chinese Revolution and ending the rule of the Communist Party. The barrage of anti-China propaganda provides the marketing for this New Cold War. The Western ruling classes want Chinese socialism to be associated with discrimination, authoritarianism and prison camps; not with ending poverty and saving the planet. Readers in the imperialist countries should consider whether they want to have their consent manufactured in this way; whether they share the foreign policy objectives of their ruling classes.

What would the likely repercussions be if the US and its allies were successful in their aims and the People’s Republic of China suffered the same fate as the Soviet Union?

For one thing, the consequences in terms of the climate crisis would potentially be catastrophic. A capitalist government in China would have neither the will nor the resources to continue the projects of renewable energy, afforestation and conservation at the level they are currently being pursued. A pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 would be utterly devastating, resulting in several million – rather than a few thousand – Chinese deaths. Meanwhile malaria, cholera and other diseases could all be expected to make a comeback, given the perfect storm of poverty, overcrowding, rising temperatures and sea levels – ‘Goldilocks conditions’ for pathogens.

Poverty alleviation and common prosperity would be relegated to history. Hundreds of millions would be pushed into destitution by a ruling class that had no reason to prioritise their interests. Homelessness, violent crime and drug addiction would once again become commonplace, as they did in Russia following the Soviet collapse. Furthermore a capitalist China, desperate to earn the friendship and protection of the US, would end its international role promoting multipolarity and opposing imperialism.
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We must resolutely oppose and expose anti-China slander, which aims to break the bonds of solidarity within the global working class and all those opposed to imperialism; which seeks to malign and undermine socialism; and which serves to perpetuate a moribund capitalist system that everyday generates more poverty, more misery, more oppression, more violence, more environmental destruction, and that increasingly threatens the very survival of humanity.

[1]  Boer, Roland. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners. Singapore: Springer, 2021, p11
[2] Chen, W 2021, US should correct wrongs by ending propaganda war against China, China Daily, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202110/15/WS6168b867a310cdd39bc6f0b4.html>.
[3] Discussed in detail in Martinez, C 2021, The left must resolutely oppose the US-led New Cold War on China, Invent the Future, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://invent-the-future.org/2021/06/the-left-must-resolutely-oppose-the-us-led-new-cold-war-on-china/>.
[4] Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Reprinted. London: Panaf, 2004.
[5] Edwards, David, and David Cromwell. Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality. London: Pluto Press, 2018, p1
[6] ibid, p8
[7] Jones, O 2021, The right condemns China over its Uighur abuses. The left must do so too, The Guardian, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/21/right-condemns-china-over-its-uighur-abuses-left-must-do>.
[8] Martinez, C 2020, Socialists should oppose the new cold war against China – a reply to Paul Mason, Morning Star, accessed 27 August 2022, <https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/socialists-should-oppose-new-cold-war-against-china-%E2%80%93-reply-paul-mason>.
[9] Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: Vintage Digital, 2010, p12
[10] ibid, p78
[11] ibid, p101
[12]  ibid, p111
[13] ibid, p78
[14] ibid, p490
[15] The Guardian view on Hong Kong’s crackdown: an assault on political opposition (2021), The Guardian, accessed 28 August 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/the-guardian-view-on-hong-kongs-crackdown-an-assault-on-political-opposition>.
[16] See for example Barker, K; Baker, M; Watkins, A 2021, In City After City, Police Mishandled Black Lives Matter Protests, New York Times, accessed 28 August 2022, <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/protests-policing-george-floyd.html>.
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To extend a population’s life expectancy at birth (LEB) requires capabilities that are scarce in the United States. The U.S. LEB has fallen in the recent period, quite abruptly. Meanwhile, life expectancy in China and Cuba continues its long-term rise. To understand why we should explore nations’ varying capabilities to achieve social change and promote social gains.

Medical and sociological causes of death that relate to life expectancy and are specific to the United States will not be explored here. A subsequent report will cover that ground.
​
The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics on Aug. 31 set U.S. LEB for 2021 at 76.1 years, the same figure as in 1996. The decline from 77.0 years in 2020 and from 78.8 in 2019 was the greatest continuous U.S. fall in LEB in 100 years. Life expectancy for men in 2021, 73.2 years, represented an unprecedented male-female gap of almost six years (increased male mortality is routine).

Policies put in place following the two countries’ socialist revolutions led to wide-ranging social initiatives that are protective of all people’s lives and, incidentally, crucial for long life expectancy. Capitalist governments, less oriented to social change, are prone to tolerating gaps in social development.

The two socialist countries pursued particular objectives to achieve social gains. Specifically, they have endeavored to establish working-class political power, promote decent and healthy lives for all working people, eradicate major economic inequalities, and build unity.

Some capitalist countries have also attempted to fulfill a few of these objectives when under left-wing governance, with mixed success. A look at how well they may have succeeded, and at some of the consequences when they have not, may shed light on the failings of capitalist states to support the lives of their people, particularly the U.S.’ failure to sustain a LEB that in 2020 was already lower than that of 53 other countries.

The subject of providing social support is, of course, vast. On that account, the discussion here pays more attention to health care and less to other areas. It draws on the insights of Vicente Navarro, professor of public health and public policy at universities in Baltimore and Barcelona.

As regards working-class political power, Navarro maintains that “countries with strong labor movements, with social democratic and socialist parties…have developed stronger redistribution policies and inequality-reducing measures…. These worker-friendly countries consequently have better health indicators [including LEB] than those countries where labor movements are very weak, as is the case in the United States.”

Navarro blames the lack of universal health care in the United States, unique among industrialized nations, on the lack there of a strong labor movement and/or a labor or socialist party. Political power exerted by the organized working class in industrialized nations may vary, but it almost always exceeds workers’ power in the United States, where statistical markers of health outcome are decidedly less favorable.

The political weakness of the organized workers’ movement in the United States is clear. “The working class,” Navarro writes in 2021, does not appear anywhere in the Cabinet nor the Senate, and only appears in the House with an extremely limited representation of 1.3 percent.” Most “members of these institutions belong to the corporate class, closely followed by upper-middle class.” He condemns the “privatization of the electoral process,” in which “there is no limit to how much money can go to the Democratic or Republican party or their candidates.”

Decent and healthy lives are far from routine in capitalist countries, where poor health is associated with low social-economic status. Navarro reports that, in the United States, the “blue-collar worker has a mortality rate from heart conditions double that of the professional class. Mortality differentials by social class are much larger in the United States than in Western Europe.”

He notes that “top level British civil servants live considerably longer than do lower level ones,” and that “members of the [Spanish] bourgeoisie…live an average of two years longer than the petit bourgeoisie…who live two years longer than the middle class, who live two years longer than the skilled working class, who live two years longer than members of the unskilled working class, who live two years longer than the unskilled [and unemployed] working class.”

Alienation under capitalism exacerbates health problems. According to Navarro, “the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life.” The social isolation he describes adds to challenges faced by social support systems and detracts from the usefulness of interventions.

Attempts by capitalist countries to remove wealth inequalities, especially in the health care arena, show mixed success. As commercialization of healthcare advances, difficulties mount. As the result of profit-taking in that sector, society-wide inequalities are aggravated, and working people lose equal access to quality care.

And yet some form of public overview of, or support for, health care sectors is more or less routine in the various capitalist countries. In many, public authorities operate and pay for hospitals, nursing homes, staffing, drugs, equipment, and training. But the infiltration of market prerogatives and privatization in the health care systems of richer countries now threatens long established goals of accessible health care for all.

In Europe, austerity campaigns under neoliberal auspices have led to cutbacks in publicly provided care. Privatization inroads blunted the institutional response in Europe to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investor groups have been eyeing the hospital and nursing home sectors as profit-making opportunities. According to the Lancet medical journal, privatization within the British National Health Service contributed to an increase in preventable deaths from all causes between 2013 and 2020.

The United States is the poster child of war in defense of privilege. There are stories, from health care:

In 2020 salary and benefits for William J. Caron, Jr., CEO of MaineHealth, a major care provider in the author’s locality, were $1,992,044; for Richard W. Petersen, Maine Medical Center CEO, they were $1,822,185. A commentator notes that “Hospital CEOs are compensated primarily for the volume of patients that pass through their doors—so-called “heads in beds.” Average annual income for U.S. primary care physicians was $260,000 in 2021; for specialists, $368,000.

According to bain.com, “Medtech companies are among the most profitable in the healthcare industry, with margins averaging 22%…profit pools [will] grow to $72 billion in 2024.” And “HME (home medical equipment) retail companies average 45 percent gross profit margin (GPM).”

Researchers found that between 2000 and 2018, the “median annual gross profit margin” (gross profit is revenue minus costs) of 35 pharmaceutical companies was 39.1% higher than that of 357 non-pharmaceutical companies. The CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies” increased their wealth by “a total of $90 million” in 2018. As for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers: “Moderna’s and BioNTech’s 2021 net profit margins reached 66% and 54%, respectively.”

The matter of creating unity to establish socialism and arrange for the common good needs little comment. Unity within society is a near impossibility under capitalism, inasmuch as divisions there are inherent to a world of greed and individualism. Meanwhile, China, opting in favor of life, put on a magnificent display of socialist unity as its people grappled with the pandemic.

The government imposed strong preventative measures and accepted the inevitability of economic disruption and loss. China’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 1.07 deaths per 100,000 persons. Its U.S. counterpart never seemed to choose and, that way protected economic growth. The U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate is 319.59 deaths per 100,000 persons.

It is important, finally, to lay to rest any suggestion that the riches of the United States and other capitalist nations automatically enable them to offer long life expectancies. Individualized entitlement to wealth is basic to how they operate, and that’s a contradiction and an obstacle.

A society aiming to pursue social initiatives that are comprehensive and directed to all population groups equally is a society that has to redistribute wealth. Wealth redistribution is the necessary adjunct to the objectives already discussed. The message here is that capitalist-inspired measures don’t make the grade and that socialist programs, as in Cuba and China, do work and do offer the promise of decent and secure lives to entire populations.
​
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

​The following speech was given by Xi Jinping at the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee on November 23, 2015.

Today, we are holding the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau, and our focus is on the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy. The aim of this study session is to strengthen our understanding of the basic principles of Marxism. We have previously held sessions on subjects related to historical materialism and dialectical materialism. On this occasion, we will deepen our understanding and grasp of the laws underlying economic development by reviewing Marxist political economy so that we can become more competent and proficient at leading the nation’s economic development.

I would now like to discuss some of my thoughts.

Marxist political economy is an important component of Marxism and required learning for our efforts to uphold and develop Marxism. Marx and Engels carried forward historic achievements made in the field of economics, especially British classical political economy, through a process of critical examination based on the worldview and methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. After intensive study of human economic activities, they founded Marxist political economy, which drew back the curtain on the laws underlying the economic workings of human society and capitalist society in particular. Engels said that the whole theory of a proletarian party was derived from the study of political economy, while Lenin regarded political economy as the most profound, most comprehensive, and most detailed proof and application of Marxist theory. Though there is now a rich diversity of economic theories, our study of political economy must be based on Marxist political economy and not any other economic theory.

There are people who believe Marxist political economy and Das Kapital are obsolete, but this is an arbitrary and erroneous judgment. Setting aside more distant events and looking at just the period since the global financial crisis, we can see that many capitalist countries have remained in an economic slump, with serious unemployment problems, intensifying polarization, and deepening social divides. The facts tell us that the contradictions between the socialization of production and the private possession of the means of production still exist, but they are manifested in ways and show characteristics that are somewhat different. After the global financial crisis, many Western scholars began studying Marxist political economy and Das Kapital again for the purpose of reflecting on the deficiencies of capitalism.

Last year, the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French scholar Thomas Piketty aroused broad discussion in international academic circles. Using accurate and abundant data, Piketty shows that levels of inequality are as high or higher than they have ever been in the U.S. and other Western countries. He argues that unconstrained capitalism has aggravated phenomena such as wealth inequality, and that the situation will continue to get worse. His analysis is mainly conducted from the perspective of distribution and does not touch significantly upon more fundamental questions of ownership, but the conclusions he reaches are nonetheless well worth our consideration.

​Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978, our Party has integrated the basic principles of Marxist political economy with the practice of reform and opening up, and made constant efforts to enrich and develop Marxist political economy. After the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Reform of the Economic Structure” was passed in October 1984, Deng Xiaoping commented that this represented a “first draft” of political economy that fused the basic principles of Marxism with the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics. As reform and opening up has constantly pushed deeper in the more than three decades that have passed since then, we have brought about many important theoretical achievements in the Marxist political economy of contemporary China. Some examples are the theory on the essence of socialism; the theory on the basic economic system for the primary stage of socialism; the theory on establishing and implementing the philosophy of innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development; the theory on developing the socialist market economy and making the market play the decisive role in resource allocation while ensuring that the government better plays its role; the theory on China’s entrance into a new normal of economic development; the theory on coordinating the processes of new industrialization, digitalization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization; the theory on the nature of ownership rights, contract rights, and usage rights for contracted farmland; the theory on making effective use of domestic and international markets and resources; and the theory on promoting social equity and justice and bringing about common prosperity for everyone. These theoretical achievements were never discussed by the authors of the Marxist classics, and before reform and opening up we had no experience or understanding of the issues with which they are concerned. Instead, they form a body of knowledge about political economy that has been molded by the conditions of contemporary China and the nature of the times. This has not only provided firm guidance for China’s endeavors in economic development, but also opened up new frontiers for Marxist political economy.

In the volatile and unpredictable tide of the world economy today, a major test of our Party is whether or not we can effectively steer the great ship of China’s economy. With an extremely complex economic landscape both at home and abroad and an overwhelming profusion of economic phenomena to contend with, studying the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy can help us master sound means of economic analysis, understand the processes through which the economy runs, build a grasp of the laws underlying social and economic development, and become more competent at keeping the socialist market economy on course. This will enable us to address theoretical and practical challenges in our nation’s economic development more effectively.

The purpose of studying Marxist political economy is to better lead China’s economic development. While we must ensure that we uphold its basic principles and methodology, it is even more important that we integrate Marxist political economy with the realities of our nation’s economic development, and constantly strive toward new theoretical achievements in the process.

First, we must uphold a people-centered approach to development. Development is for the people; this is the fundamental position of Marxist political economy. Marx and Engels stated that “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority,” and that in future societies, production would be “calculated for the wealth of all.” Deng Xiaoping said that emancipating and developing productive forces and eliminating exploitation and polarization in order to ultimately bring about common prosperity represents the essence of socialism. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in October 2015 clearly emphasized the need to uphold a people-centered approach to development, and to make improving the people’s well-being, promoting their all-around development, and pursuing steady progress toward common prosperity the immutable aims of economic development. This is something that we must never lose sight of. When planning economic work, formulating economic policies, and promoting economic development, we must always adhere firmly to this fundamental position.

Sixth, we must uphold the fundamental national policy of opening up. According to Marxist political economy, human society will ultimately witness the transcendence of history from the level of individual nations to the global scale. Today, the degree of our country’s connection with the world is unprecedented, as is our economy’s impact on the world economy and vice versa. With globalization advancing deeper, we could not possibly pursue development by closing ourselves off. Instead, we must be adept at keeping an eye on the landscape both at home and abroad and making good use of domestic and international markets and resources. Conforming to the trend of our economy’s deep integration into the world economy, we must develop a more open economy, actively participate in global economic governance, and push the global economic order in a more just, equitable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial direction. At the same time, we must firmly safeguard our nation’s development interests, forestall risks of all kinds, and ensure our economic security. In carrying out these tasks, there are many theoretical and practical questions that we must explore further.

To conclude, our commitment to upholding the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy does not imply rejection of the rational components of the economic theories of other countries. Western economic knowledge on topics such as finance, prices, currency, markets, competition, trade, exchange rates, industries, enterprises, growth, and management do reflect one side of the general laws underpinning socialized production and market economics and should therefore be used as reference. At the same time, however, we must cast a discerning eye on the economic theories of other countries, particularly those of the West, making sure that we separate the wheat from the chaff. Putting our own interests first while using the strengths of others to our advantage, we must ensure that we do not mechanically copy the aspects of these theories that reflect the nature and values of the capitalist system or that are colored by Western ideology. Although the discipline of economics is devoted to the study of economic issues, it does not exist in a vacuum, and therefore cannot be separated from social and political issues. Therefore, when our educators teach economics, they must not advocate the indiscriminate absorption of foreign concepts. They must discuss Marxist political economy and the socialist political economy of contemporary China thoroughly and at length so to prevent their marginalization.

For Marxist political economy to remain vital, it must evolve with the times. Practice is the source of theory. In the space of mere decades, we have completed a process of development that took centuries for developed countries. Behind all our incredible progress and achievements in economic development have been the tremendous momentum, vigor, and potential of theoretical innovation. Today, our economy and the world economy are facing many major new challenges, and these need to be addressed by sound theories. Grounded in China’s national conditions and our experiences in development, we must thoroughly look into new issues and circumstances faced by the domestic and global economies, bringing new patterns and characteristics to light. We must review and refine the achievements we have made in recognizing underlying laws through the process of economic development and elevate our practical experience to the level of systematized economic theories. By doing so, we will constantly open up new frontiers for Marxist political economy in contemporary China and contribute Chinese wisdom to the discipline’s innovation and development.

Originally appeared in Qiushi Journal, Chinese edition, No. 16, 2020.

​The Communist Party of China (CPC) was formed in July 1921. From that time up to the present day, it has led the Chinese Revolution – a revolution to eliminate feudalism, to regain China’s national sovereignty, to end foreign domination of China, to build socialism, to create a better life for the Chinese people, and to contribute to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

Some of these goals have already been achieved; others are ongoing. Thus the Chinese Revolution is a continuing process, and its basic political orientation remains the same.

Feudalism was dismantled in CPC-controlled territories from the early 1930s onwards, and throughout the country in the period immediately following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Similarly, warlord rule was ended and a unified China essentially established in 1949; Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and Macao in 1999. Only Taiwan continues to be governed separately and to serve foreign interests. And yet in a world system still principally defined by US hegemony, the imperialist threat remains – and is intensifying with the development of a US-led hybrid war against China. Therefore the project of protecting China’s sovereignty and resisting imperialism continues. Similarly, the path to socialism is constantly evolving.

In the course of trying to build socialism in a vast semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, mistakes have certainly been made. The collected works of Marx and Lenin bubble over with profound ideas, but they contain no templates or formulae. Chinese Marxists have had to continuously engage in “concrete analysis of concrete conditions”,1 applying and developing socialist theory, creatively adapting it to an ever-changing material reality. In their foreword to Agnes Smedley’s biography of Zhu De, The Great Road, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote that the Chinese communists, “in the midst of their struggle for survival … have proceeded to evolve a more flexible and sophisticated theory which enriched Marxism by reflecting and absorbing the stubborn realities of the Chinese scene.”2

As Liu Shaoqi, a prominent CPC leader until his denunciation during the Cultural Revolution, explained: “because of the distinctive peculiarities in China’s social and historical development and her backwardness in science, it is a unique and difficult task to apply Marxism systematically to China and to transform it from its European form into a Chinese form… Many of these problems have never been solved or raised by the world’s Marxists, for here in China the main section of the masses are not workers but peasants, and the fight is directed against foreign imperialist oppression and medieval survivals, and not against domestic capitalism.”3

This article argues that, while the Chinese Revolution has taken numerous twists and turns, and while the CPC leadership has adopted different strategies at different times, there is a common thread running through modern Chinese history: of the CPC dedicating itself to navigating a path to socialism, development and independence, improving the lot of the Chinese people, and contributing to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

​The CPC was formed in response to a clear need for revolutionary leadership. The 1911 bourgeois revolution that had finally overthrown the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China had come to a dead end, owing to the manoeuvring of the imperialist powers and their comprador agents. Most of the country was run by warlords. The feudal economy remained in place and the bulk of the population remained permanently on the brink of starvation, indebted to landlords. The various imperialist powers maintained their footholds, with Britain, the US, Japan and Germany competing for control of China’s land and resources.

Young people in particular were searching for a path forward. “Youth organisations and study circles sprang up in great profusion”, writes Israel Epstein,4 including the New People’s Study Society in Hunan, led by a certain Mao Zedong. A turning point came on 4 May 1919, when the students of Beijing marched on the government buildings in protest at the Treaty of Versailles, which legalised the Japanese seizure of Shandong province and rejected China’s demands for the abolition of foreign spheres of influence and the withdrawal of foreign troops. The demonstrations caught the imagination of students, workers and radical intellectuals throughout the country. “The May 4 Movement was a climactic point of the Chinese revolution. It took place after, and was one of the results of, the October Revolution in Russia.”5 Han Suyin described the May 4 Movement as “a leap of consciousness, a radicalisation, which would determine the course of history.”6

The CPC, formed two years later, was the first organisation to put forward the slogan ‘Down with imperialism’, recognising that China’s weakness and backwardness were inherently bound up with foreign domination. Some relatively forward-thinking elements of the emerging capitalist class had hoped that the US or Japan might help China to establish itself as a modern capitalist power, but the communists recognised that this reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of imperialism. The major capitalist powers were compelled by the nature of their economic system to compete for control of China – a country offering an abundance of land, people, natural resources, and geostrategic advantage. Japan, the US, Britain, Germany and others wouldn’t hesitate to support feudal warlords where it suited their interests; nor would they hesitate to suppress the Chinese people’s desire for independence and progress. The CPC’s anti-imperialist position quickly won it the support of a significant section of the population.

Soon after its formation, at its Third Congress in 1923, the CPC pushed for a united front with the Guomindang (GMD)7, a revolutionary nationalist party set up by Sun Yat-sen in 1912 (the veteran politician and doctor Sun was elected as provisional president of the Republic of China following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty). The idea of the united front was to construct an anti-imperialist alliance incorporating workers, peasants, intellectuals and the patriotic elements of the capitalist class, with a view to decisively ending feudalism, uniting the country under a single central government, and driving out the imperialist powers. Denied recognition or support by the West, the GMD was in the process of orienting towards the recently-formed Soviet Union, which had already demonstrated itself to be a supporter of Chinese sovereignty (the Bolsheviks had indicated their support for Sun Yat-sen as early as 19128 and, once in power, renounced all privileges in China granted to the tsarist regime). Recognising that the CPC would be more effective in mobilising the masses of the working class and peasantry, the GMD agreed to the CPC’s proposal, and the CPC leadership took joint membership of both organisations.

This first united front started to fracture after the death in 1925 of Sun Yat-sen. The GMD’s right wing gained the ascendancy under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek (who would later go on to become the highly authoritarian leader of Taiwan from 1949 until his death in 1975). Chiang “believed that communism was inhuman and that, unless defeated, it would mean oppression for the Chinese people and the destruction of their traditional culture.”9 Fearing that the communists were gaining too much popular support, Chiang orchestrated a coup against them, in collaboration with the various foreign powers that had recognised in Chiang a potential partner in the pursuit of an ‘acceptable’ political conjuncture in China.

When, in April 1927, Shanghai was liberated from warlord control as the result of an insurrection of the local working class (led primarily by CPC forces), Chiang’s forces won control of the city by means of a massacre of its liberators, killing an estimated 5,000 people. This marked the start of a several-year campaign of mass killings by Chiang’s forces against communists and progressive workers. With CPC members formally ejected from the GMD and the united front dismantled, Chiang Kai-shek set up a new regime in Nanjing, under which “communism became a crime punishable by death.”10 The government focused its efforts not on resisting imperialism or uniting the country but on suppressing communists. Facing something close to physical annihilation, the membership of the CPC fell from 58,000 at the start of 1927 to 10,000 by the end of the year.

These disastrous events led the communists to a strategic reorientation. It was clear that a united front policy focused on the major urban centres was no longer a viable option. Meanwhile, “as every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China’s population are peasants,”11 and, as William Hinton writes in the preface to his classic account Fanshen, “without understanding the land question one cannot understand the Revolution in China.”12 The CPC was moving towards the development of a rural-based revolutionary movement.

Following a failed uprising in his native Hunan, Mao Zedong fled with his forces into the Jinggang mountains, in the border region of Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. This became the birthplace of the Chinese Red Army and the site of the first liberated territory. The Jiangxi Soviet expanded over the course of several years to incorporate parts of seven counties and a population of more than half a million.

Han Suyin notes that Mao Zedong “was the first in the party who abandoned the city orientation and devised a major strategy born from China’s reality.” The working class were a growing force, but constituted less than one percent of the population. “Mao saw that setting up rural bases, dedicated to the liberation of the peasantry from the oppression of landlordism, was the only way in which revolution would succeed.”13 Not only was the mass of the peasantry against feudal exploitation, but it could also understand the connection between foreign domination and domestic poverty. The period of foreign aggression from 1840 had led to wars and instability, much of the burden of which fell on the peasantry, which was expected to provide soldiers and sustenance. Any agricultural surplus from good harvest years was redirected to the state (or local warlord), leaving grain reserves empty and thus contributing to vast famines.

The CPC and Red Army grew in strength and experience during this time. Chiang Kai-shek’s obsessive focus on eliminating communism led Mao and his comrades to develop a theory of guerrilla warfare that would prove decisive in the CPC’s rise to power. However, China was rendered vulnerable to attack by Chiang’s pacification programme. Even when the Japanese occupied Manchuria in September 1931, siphoning Manchukuo off as an ‘independent’ puppet state a year later, Chiang’s clearly stated policy was: “Internal pacification first, before external resistance”.

Between 1929 and 1934, Chiang’s forces led a series of brutal encirclement campaigns in an attempt to bury the Jiangxi Soviet. After suffering a series of defeats at the hands of a highly motivated and skilled Red Army, the Guomindang mobilised warlord armies from around the country, organising a force of more than a million troops. The communists had no choice but to abandon the liberated territory and break the siege. This process became the Long March: the extraordinary year-long retreat to the North-West, covering over 9,000 kilometres and ending with the establishment of a revolutionary base area in Shaanxi. This area would serve as the centre of the CPC’s operations until shortly before the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In the liberated territories, the communists led the creation of a new political economy in the countryside that – along with their determined struggle against Japanese militarism – would earn them the support of the broad masses of the peasantry. In his classic account Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow paints a vivid picture of life in the red base areas: “Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened. Collective enterprise was established on a wide scale… Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilised soviets. In some counties the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.”14

Opium production was ended and replaced by food agriculture. Antiquated feudal practices such as foot-binding, infanticide and the keeping of slave girls were prohibited. Peng Dehuai, one of the top Red Army leaders and later the Defence Minister of the PRC, commented on the decisive importance of the CPC’s progressive and popular policies in the liberated areas:

> “Only by implanting itself deeply in the hearts of the people, only by fulfilling the demands of the masses, only by consolidating a base in the peasant soviets, and only by sheltering in the shadow of the masses, can partisan warfare bring revolutionary victory… Tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us.”15

By the mid 1930s, the Japanese armed forces were consolidating and expanding their occupation of Northeast China, aided and abetted by the Western powers, who were motivated by the idea of cooperating with Japan to attack the Soviet Union. Chiang Kai-shek’s position was becoming untenable. He granted concession after concession to the Japanese, but he could no longer justify his refusal to defend China’s national sovereignty. In July 1937, Japanese forces marched out of their puppet state of Manchukuo, going on to occupy Beijing and Shanghai.

In this context, more progressive elements within the GMD took the initiative, detaining Chiang in the northwestern city of Xi’an and forcing him to agree to cooperate with the CPC against Japanese occupation. Thus was formed the Second United Front. The red base at Yan’an (Shaanxi) was recognised as a provincial government and the CPC was legalised; the Red Army was re-designated as the Eighth Route Army.

​In the period of the Second United Front, the CPC won enormous prestige for its leadership of the national defence efforts and for its commitment to improving the lives of the population in the territories under its control. Yan’an became a pole of attraction for revolutionary and progressive youth throughout the country. British academic Graham Hutchings writes that “Yan’an seemed to stand for a new type of society. Visitors, foreign and Chinese, found it brimming with purpose, equality and hope. Many students and intellectuals chose to leave areas under the control of a central government they felt lacked a sense of justice, as well as the will to confront the national enemy, for life in the border regions and the communist or ‘progressive’ camp.”16

It was increasingly clear that the communists were the most cohesive, committed and competent political force in China; the only political party with the potential to restore China’s sovereignty, unity and dignity. Mao and the CPC leadership took the time to theorise the type of society they were trying to build; what the substance of their revolution was. The results of these debates and discussions are synthesised in Mao’s 1940 pamphlet On New Democracy, which describes the Chinese Revolution as necessarily having two stages: “first of New Democracy and then of socialism.”17

New Democracy was not to be a socialist society, but a “democratic republic under the joint dictatorship of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal people led by the proletariat.” Extending a friendly hand to patriotic non-communist forces, Mao invoked the spirit of Sun Yat-sen, calling for “a republic of the genuinely revolutionary new Three People’s Principles with their Three Great Policies.” (The Three People’s Principles were – approximately – nationalism, people’s government, and social welfare; the Three Great Policies were alliance with the Soviet Union, alliance with the CPC, and support for the workers and peasants).

The key elements of this stage of the revolution were to defeat imperialism and to establish independence, as an essential step on the road to the longer-term goal of building socialism. How long would this stage last? It would “need quite a long time and cannot be accomplished overnight. We are not utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.”18

Such a society would not be a dictatorship of the proletariat; that is, the working class would not exercise exclusive political control. Rather, political power would be shared by all the anti-imperialist classes: the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie (ie those elements of the capitalist class that stood against foreign domination).

In economic terms, New Democracy would include elements of both socialism and capitalism. “The state enterprises will be of a socialist character and will constitute the leading force in the whole national economy, but the republic will neither confiscate capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of such capitalist production as does not ‘dominate the livelihood of the people’, for China’s economy is still very backward.” Land reform would be carried out, and the activities of private capital would be subjected to heavy regulation.

In conversation with Edgar Snow, Mao envisaged China taking its place within an ever-more globalised world – perhaps anticipating the ‘opening up’ of four decades later: “When China really wins her independence, then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450 million people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world.”19

Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, the CPC and GMD attempted to negotiate a post-war government alliance. However, the agreement forged in Chongqing in October 1945 fell apart as Chiang’s forces continued their military attacks on the CPC-controlled areas. A bitter four-year civil war ensued, resulting in the communists’ victory, Chiang Kai-shek’s flight to Taiwan, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The newly-installed government, led by the CPC, attempted to build the type of society described in On New Democracy. Its governance was based on the Common Programme – an interim constitution drawn up by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (a united front body created by the CPC), with 662 delegates representing 45 different organisations. The Common Programme did not call for the immediate establishment of a socialist society, and it promised to encourage private business. As Mao had written earlier in the year, “our present policy is to regulate capitalism and not to destroy it.”20 Patriotic capitalists were invited to participate in government.

The most important immediate economic change was the comprehensive dismantling of feudalism: the abolition of the rural class system and the distribution of land to the peasantry (a process already well underway in the areas under CPC control). Land reform resulted in a large agricultural surplus which, along with Soviet support, created the conditions for a rapid state-led industrialisation. Hutchings notes that “dramatic improvements in life expectancy and literacy rates and increases in living standards accompanied the appearance of factories, roads, railways and bridges across the country.”21 Along with this came an unprecedented shift in the status of women, who had suffered every oppression and indignity under feudalism. Via a system of “barefoot doctors”, basic medical care was made available to the peasantry. “As a consequence, fertility rose, infant mortality declined, life expectancy began to climb, and the population stabilised and then grew for the first time since the Japanese invasion of 1937.”22

The New Democracy period only lasted a few years. By 1954, the government was promoting collectivisation in the countryside and shifting private production into state hands. By the time of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, there was no more talk of a slow and cautious road to socialism; the plan now was to “surpass Britain and catch up to America” within 15 years.

The reasons for moving on from New Democracy are complex and contested, and reflect a shifting global political environment. The CPC had envisaged – or at least hoped for – mutually beneficial relations with the West, as is hinted at in the quote above that “legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before”. However, by the time of the founding of the PRC, the Cold War was already in full swing. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, and with the outbreak of civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the US came down on the side of the latter, on the basis that Chiang understood the civil war to be “an integral part of the worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism”23 and was resolutely on the side of capitalism.

The US made its hostility to the People’s Republic manifestly clear from early on. The US involvement in the Korean War, starting in June 1950, was to no small degree connected to “the West’s determination … to ‘contain’ revolutionary China.”24 The genocidal force directed against the Korean people – including the repeated threat of nuclear warfare – was also a warning to China’s communists (although the warning was returned with interest, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers joined hands with their Korean brothers and sisters, rapidly pushing the US-led troops back to the 38th parallel and forcing an effective stalemate). Soon after the arrival of US troops in Korea, US President Truman announced that his government would act to prevent Taiwan’s incorporation into the PRC, since this would constitute “a threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area.”25 Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy into the Taiwan Strait in order to prevent China from occupying it (such, incidentally, are the imperialist origins of the notion of Taiwanese independence). Along with these acts of physical aggression, the US imposed a total embargo on China, depriving the country of various important materials required for reconstruction.

The dangerously hostile external environment made New Democracy less viable. There are parallels here with the Soviet abandonment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1929. Much like New Democracy, the NEP had consisted of a mixed economy, with private business encouraged in order to increase production and enhance productivity. Introduced in 1921, the NEP proved highly successful, allowing the Soviet Union to recover economically from war whilst minimising internal class conflict. By the end of the decade, however, new external dangers were emerging and it became clear to the Soviet leadership that the imperialist powers were starting to mobilise for war. From 1929 the Soviet economy shifted to something like a wartime basis, with near-total centralisation, total state ownership of industry, collectivisation of agriculture, and a major focus on heavy industry and military production.

Similarly in China in the mid-1950s, the shifting regional situation contributed to an economic and political shift. Beyond that, there was undoubtedly a subjective factor of the CPC leadership wanting to accelerate the journey to socialism – to “accomplish socialist industrialisation and socialist transformation in fifteen years or a little longer”, as Mao put it in 1953.26 With the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the gradual deterioration of relations between the CPC and the new Soviet leadership under Nikita Khrushchev, the Chinese came to feel that the Soviets were abandoning the path of revolutionary struggle and that responsibility for blazing a trail in the construction of socialism had fallen to China. To move from a position of economic and scientific backwardness to becoming an advanced socialist power would require nothing less than a great leap.

​To this day, the most popular method for casually denigrating the People’s Republic of China and the record of the CPC is to cite the alleged crimes of Mao Zedong who, from the early 1930s until his death in 1976, was generally recognised as the top leader of the Chinese Revolution. If the CPC was so dedicated to improving the lot of the Chinese people, why did it engage in such disastrous campaigns as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?

The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, was an ambitious programme designed to achieve rapid industrialisation and collectivisation; to fast-track the construction of socialism and allow China to make a final break with centuries-old underdevelopment and poverty; in Mao’s words, to “close the gap between China and the US within five years, and to ultimately surpass the US within seven years”.27 In its economic strategy, it represented “a rejection of plodding Soviet-style urban industrialisation,”28 reflecting the early stages of the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese were worried that the Khrushchev leadership in Moscow was narrowly focused on the avoidance of conflict with the imperialist powers, and that its support to China and the other socialist countries would be sacrificed at the altar of ‘peaceful coexistence’. Hence China would have to rely on its own resources.

For all its shortcomings, the core of the GLF was pithily described by Indian Marxist Vijay Prashad as an “attempt to bring small-scale industry to rural areas.”29 Mao considered the countryside would once again become the “true source for revolutionary social transformation” and “the main arena where the struggle to achieve socialism and communism will be determined.”30 Agricultural collectivisation was fast-tracked, and there was a broad appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the masses. Ji Chaozhu (at the time an interpreter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later China’s ambassador to the UK (1987-91)) notes in his memoirs: “The peasants were left with small plots of their own, for subsistence farming only. All other activity was for the communal good, to be shared equally. Cadres were to join the peasants in the fields, factories, and construction sites. Even Mao made an appearance at a dam-building project to have his picture taken with a shovel in hand.”31

The GLF was not overall a success. Liu Mingfu writes that “the Great Leap Forward did not realise the goal of surpassing the UK and US. It actually brought China’s economy to a standstill and then recession. It caused a large number of unnatural deaths and pushed China’s global share of GDP from 5.46% in 1957 to 4.01% in 1962, lower than its share of 4.59% in 1950.”32

The disruption to the basic economic structure of society combined with the sudden withdrawal of Soviet experts in 1960 and a series of terrible droughts and floods to produce poor harvests. Meanwhile, with millions of peasants drafted into the cities to work in factories, “no one was available to reap and to thresh.”33 The historian Alexander Pantsov writes that the “battle for steel had diverted the Chinese leadership’s attention from the grain problem, and the task of harvesting rice and other grain had fallen on the shoulders of women, old men, and children… A shortage of grain developed, and Mao gave the command to decrease the pace of the Great Leap.”34 Ji Chaozhu observes that “malnutrition leading to edema was common in many areas, and deaths among the rural population increased.”35

Certain of the GLF’s goals were achieved – most notably the irrigation of arable land. However, it didn’t achieve its overall objective, and the disruption it caused contributed to a deepening of poverty and malnutrition. It was called off in 1962. It remains a highly controversial topic in Chinese history. For anticommunists, the GLF provides incontrovertible proof of the monstrous, murderous nature of the CPC – and Mao Zedong in particular. Western bourgeois historians seem to have settled on a figure of 30 million for the estimated number of lives lost in famine resulting from the Great Leap. On the basis of a rigorous statistical analysis, Indian economist Utsa Patnaik concludes that China’s death rate rose from 12 per thousand in 1958 (a historically low figure resulting from land reform and the extension of basic medical services throughout the country) to a peak of 25.4 per thousand in 1960. “If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’”36

Patnaik observes that even the peak death rate in 1960 “was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year, which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism.” This is an important point. Malnutrition was at that time a scourge throughout the developing world (sadly it remains so in some parts of the planet). China’s history is rife with terrible famines, including in 1907, 1928 and 1942. It is only in the modern era, under the leadership of precisely that ‘monstrous’ CPC, that malnutrition has become a thing of the past in China.

In other words, the failure of the GLF has been cynically manipulated by bourgeois academics to denigrate the entire history of the Chinese Revolution. The GLF was not some outrageous crime against humanity; it was a legitimate attempt to accelerate the building of a prosperous and advanced socialist society. It turned out not to be successful and was therefore dropped.

In the aftermath of the GLF, Mao’s more radical wing of the CPC leadership became somewhat marginalised, and the initiative fell to those wanting to prioritise social stability and economic growth over ongoing class struggle. Principal among these were Liu Shaoqi (head of state of the PRC, widely considered to be Mao’s successor) and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. Liu, Deng, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai put forward the concept of the Four Modernisations (in agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology) which would come to constitute a cornerstone of post-Mao economic policy.

In the years that followed, Mao and a group of his close comrades began to worry that the deprioritisation of class struggle reflected an anti-revolutionary ‘revisionist’ trend that could ultimately lead to capitalist restoration. As Mao saw it, revisionist elements were able to rely on the support of the intelligentsia – particularly teachers and academics – who, themselves coming largely from non-working class backgrounds, were promoting capitalist and feudal values among young people. It was necessary to “exterminate the roots of revisionism” and “struggle against those in power in the party who were taking the capitalist road.”37

The Cultural Revolution started in 1966 as a mass movement of university and school students, incited and encouraged by Mao and others on the left of the leadership. Student groups formed in Beijing calling themselves Red Guards and taking up Mao’s call to “thoroughly criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art”.38 The students produced ‘big-character posters’ (dazibao) setting out their analysis against, and making their demands of, anti-revolutionary bourgeois elements in authority. Mao was enthusiastic, writing the students in support of their initiative: “I will give enthusiastic support to all who take an attitude similar to yours in the Cultural Revolution movement.”39 He produced his own dazibao calling on the revolutionary masses to “Bombard the Headquarters” – that is, to rise up against the reformers and “bourgeois elements” in the party.

These developments were synthesised by the CPC Central Committee, which in August 1966 adopted its Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticise and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”40

Thus the aims of the Cultural Revolution were to stimulate a mass struggle against the supposedly revisionist and capitalist restorationist elements in the party; to put a stop to the hegemony of bourgeois ideas in the realms of education and culture; and to entrench a new culture – socialist, collectivist, modern. The Cultural Revolution also marked a further escalation of the Sino-Soviet split, as the revisionist illness was considered to have a Soviet etiology (Liu Shaoqi, previously considered as Mao’s successor and now the principal target of the radicals, was labelled China’s Khrushchev). Li Mingjiang notes that, “throughout the Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union was systematically demonised. Sino-Soviet hostilities reached an unprecedented level, as exemplified by Mao’s designation of Moscow as China’s primary enemy.”41

Han Suyin describes the chaotic atmosphere of the early days of the Cultural Revolution: “Extensive democracy. Great criticism. Wall posters everywhere. Absolute freedom to travel. Freedom to form revolutionary exchanges. These were the rights and freedoms given to the Red Guards, and no wonder it went to their heads and very soon became total licence.” In August 1966, “the simmering Cultural Revolution exploded in a maelstrom of violence… Mao had not reckoned that he would lose control of the havoc he had launched.”42

There was widespread disruption. Universities were closed. “Red Guards occupied and ransacked the Foreign Ministry, while most ambassadors were recalled to Beijing for political education. The British embassy was attacked, and the Soviet embassy was laid under siege by youthful Maoists for several months.”43

Many of those accused by the Cultural Revolution Group (CRG, a body of the CPC initially reporting to the Politburo Standing Committee but becoming the de facto centre of power) suffered horrible fates. Posters appeared with the slogan “Down with Liu Shaoqi! Down with Deng Xiaoping! Hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong Thought.” Liu’s books were burned in Tiananmen Square – “they were declared to be poisonous weeds, yet they had been a mainstay of the theoretical construct which in Yen’an in 1945-47 had brought Mao to power.”44 He was expelled from all positions and arrested. “Liu had been repeatedly tortured and interrogated, confined to an unheated cell, and denied medical care. He died in November 1969, his remains surreptitiously cremated under a false name. His death was kept from his wife for three years, and from the public for a decade.”45

Peng Dehuai, former Defence Minister and the leader of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s operations in the Korean War, had been forced into retirement in 1959 after criticising the Great Leap Forward. Jiang Qing – Mao’s wife, and a leading figure in the CRG – sent Red Guards to Sichuan, where Peng was living. “A band of thugs burst into his house, seized him, and brought him to the capital, where he was thrown into prison. Peng was tortured and beaten more than a hundred times, his ribs were broken, his face maimed, and his lungs damaged. He was repeatedly dragged to criticism and struggle meetings.”46 He died in a prison hospital in 1974.

Even Premier Zhou Enlai, unfailingly loyal in spite of his quiet horror at the CRG’s extremism, didn’t escape unscathed: in November 1966, according to Han Suyin, he had a heart attack after 22 hours of being surrounded and shouted at by Red Guards.

Although Mao had only intended it to last for a few months, the Cultural Revolution only came to its conclusion shortly before Mao’s death in 1976, albeit with varying intensity – realising that the situation was getting out of control, in 1967 Mao called on the army to help establish order and re-organise production. However, the Cultural Revolution flared up again with the ascendancy of the ‘Gang of Four’ from 1972.

Historians in the capitalist countries tend to present the Cultural Revolution in the most facile and vacuous terms. To them, it was simply the quintessential example of Mao’s obsessive love of violence and power; just another episode in the long story of communist authoritarianism. But psychopathology is rarely the principal driving force of history. In reality, the Cultural Revolution was a radical mass movement; millions of young people were inspired by the idea of moving faster towards socialism, of putting an end to feudal traditions, of creating a more egalitarian society, of fighting bureaucracy, of preventing the emergence of a capitalist class, of empowering workers and peasants, of making their contribution to a global socialist revolution, of building a proud socialist culture unfettered by thousands of years of Confucian tradition. They wanted a fast track to a socialist future. They were inspired by Mao and his allies, who were in turn inspired by them.

Such a movement can get out of control easily enough, and it did. Mao can’t be considered culpable for every excess, every act of violence, every absurd statement (indeed he intervened at several points to rein it in), but he was broadly supportive of the movement and ultimately did the most to further its aims. Mao had enormous personal influence – not solely powers granted by the party or state constitutions, but an authority that came from being the chief architect of a revolutionary process that had transformed hundreds of millions of people’s lives for the better. He was as Lenin was to the Soviet people, as Fidel Castro remains to the Cuban people. Even when he made mistakes, these mistakes were liable to be embraced by millions of people. Han Suyin comments that “Mao was prone to making contradictory remarks, but each remark had the force of an edict.”47

The Cultural Revolution is now widely understood in China to have been misguided. It was “the most severe setback … suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”48 The political assumptions of the movement – that the party was becoming dominated by counter-revolutionaries and capitalist-roaders; that the capitalist-roaders in the party would have to be overthrown by the masses; that continuous revolution would be required in order to stay on the road to socialism – were explicitly rejected by the post-Mao leadership of the CPC, which pointed out that “the ‘capitalist-roaders’ overthrown … were leading cadres of Party and government organisations at all levels, who formed the core force of the socialist cause.”49 Historian Rebecca Karl posits that this post-Mao leadership in fact benefitted from the Cultural Revolution, in the sense that it became “the saviour of China from chaos.”50

Unquestionably the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution impeded the country’s development and brought awful tragedy to a significant number of people. What so many historians operating in a capitalist framework fail to understand is why, in spite of the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution, Mao is still revered in China. For the Chinese people, the bottom line is that his errors were “the errors of a great proletarian revolutionary.”51

It was the CPC, led by Mao and on the basis of a political strategy principally devised by him, that China was liberated from foreign rule; that the country was unified; that feudalism was dismantled; that land was distributed to the peasants; that the country was industrialised; that a path to women’s liberation was forged. British academic John Ross points out that, “in the 27 years between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, life expectancy in China increased by 31 years – or over a year per chronological year… China’s rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.”52

The excesses and errors associated with the last years of Mao’s life have to contextualised within this overall picture of unprecedented, transformative progress for the Chinese people. The pre-revolution literacy rate in China was less than 20 percent. By the time Mao died, it was around 93 percent. China’s population had remained stagnant between 400 and 500 million for a hundred years or so up to 1949. By the time Mao died, it had reached 900 million. A thriving culture of literature, music, theatre and art grew up that was accessible to the masses of the people. Land was irrigated. Famine became a thing of the past. Universal healthcare was established. China – after a century of foreign domination – maintained its sovereignty and developed the means to defend itself from imperialist attack.

Hence the Mao as monster narrative has little resonance in China. As Deng Xiaoping himself put it, “without Mao’s outstanding leadership, the Chinese revolution would still not have triumphed even today. In that case, the people of all our nationalities would still be suffering under the reactionary rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.”53 Furthermore, even the mistakes were not the product of the deranged imagination of a tyrant but, rather, creative attempts to respond to an incredibly complex and evolving set of circumstances. They were errors carried out in the cause of exploring a path to socialism – a historically novel process inevitably involving risk and experimentation.

​From 1978, the post-Mao Chinese leadership embarked on a process of ‘reform and opening up’ – gradually introducing market mechanisms to the economy, allowing elements of private property, and encouraging investment from the capitalist world. This programme of socialism with Chinese characteristics posited that, while China had established a socialist society, it would remain for some time in the primary stage of socialism, during which period it was necessary to develop a socialist market economy – combining planning, the development of a mixed economy and the profit motive – with a view to maximising the development of the productive forces.

Deng Xiaoping, who had been one of the most prominent targets of the Cultural Revolution and who had risen to become de facto leader of the CPC from 1978, theorised reform and opening up in the following terms: “Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces… [The advance towards communism] calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system. As they develop, the people’s material and cultural life will constantly improve… Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism.”54

Was this the moment the CPC gave up on its commitment to Marxism? Such is the belief of many. For supporters of capitalism, the idea that China ‘ascended’ to capitalism from 1978 onwards is a validation of their own ideology; China was socialist and poor, and then became capitalist and rich. This view is near-universal among mainstream economists. Even the well-known Keynesian Jeffrey Sachs, who is both politically progressive and friendly towards China, considers that the key turning point in Chinese history was not 1949 but 1978: “After nearly 140 years of economic and social strife, marked by foreign incursions, domestic rebellions, civil wars, and internal policy blunders of historic dimensions, China settled down after 1978 to stable, open, market-based production and trade.”55

On the other hand, for many on the left (particularly in the West), 1978 marked a turning point in the wrong direction – away from socialism, away from the cause of the working class and peasantry. The introduction of private profit, the decollectivisation of agriculture, the appearance of multinational companies and the rise of Western influence: these added up to a historic betrayal and an end to the Chinese Revolution.

The consensus view within the CPC is that socialism with Chinese characteristics is a strategy aimed at strengthening socialism, improving the lives of the Chinese people, and consolidating China’s sovereignty. Although China had taken incredible steps forward since 1949, China in 1978 remained backward in many ways. The bulk of the population lived a very precarious existence, many without access to modern energy and safe water. China’s per capita income was $210. Food production, and consequently average food consumption, was insufficient. “An estimated 30 percent of rural residents, about 250 million, lived below the poverty line, relying on small loans for production and state grants for food.”56 The low per capita income figure is deceptive in the sense that the poor in China had secure access to land and housing – by which measure they were doing much better than most of their counterparts in the developing world; nonetheless the vast majority were genuinely poor.

Meanwhile the capitalist world was making major advances in science and technology, and the gap in living standards between China and its neighbours was growing sufficiently wide as to threaten the legitimacy of the CPC government. Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin notes that, at the time of the founding of the PRC, there was only a relatively small per capita income gap between China and its East Asian neighbours. “But by 1978 Japan had basically caught up with the United States, and South Korea and Taiwan, China, had narrowed the income gap with developed countries. China, although boasting a complete industrial system, an atomic bomb, and a man-made satellite, had a standard of living a far cry from that of the developed world.”57

In Guangdong, the southern province bordering Hong Kong, many were fleeing because, in the words of Hua Guofeng (Mao’s chosen successor as head of the CPC), “Hong Kong and Macao were wealthy and the PRC was poor.” The leadership simply decided to “change the situation and make the PRC wealthy.”58

Opening up to foreign capital, learning from foreign technology, and integrating into the global market would allow for a faster development of the productive forces. Export manufacturing would allow China to build up sufficient hard currency to acquire technology from rich countries and improve productivity. Foreign capital would be attracted by China’s virtually limitless pool of literate and diligent workers.

All this was highly unorthodox compared to the experience of the socialist world up to that point (with some partial exceptions, such as Yugoslavia and Hungary). Deng Xiaoping’s strong belief was that, unless the government delivered on a significant improvement in people’s standard of living, the entire socialist project would lose its legitimacy and therefore be in peril. Assessing that China was around 20 years behind the advanced countries in science and technology, he stated: “When a backward country is trying to build socialism, it is natural that during the long initial period its productive forces will not be up to the level of those in developed capitalist countries and that it will not be able to eliminate poverty completely. Accordingly, in building socialism we must do all we can to develop the productive forces and gradually eliminate poverty, constantly raising the people’s living standards… If we don’t do everything possible to increase production, how can we expand the economy? How can we demonstrate the superiority of socialism and communism? We have been making revolution for several decades and have been building socialism for more than three. Nevertheless, by 1978 the average monthly salary for our workers was still only 45 yuan, and most of our rural areas were still mired in poverty. Can this be called the superiority of socialism?”59

Interestingly, this sentiment contains echoes of Mao in 1949: “If we are ignorant in production, cannot grasp production work quickly … so as to improve the livelihood of workers first and then that of other ordinary people, we shall certainly not be able to maintain our political power: we shall lose our position and we shall fail.”60

Marx wrote in volume 3 of Capital that “the development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production.”61 The vision of the CPC leadership was to replace “unwittingly” with “purposefully”: using capital, within strict limits and under heavy regulation, to bring China into the modern world.

Rather than selling out to capitalism, reform and opening up is better understood as a return to the policies of the New Democracy period. The CPC has always been adamant that what China is building is socialism, not capitalism – “it is for the realisation of communism that we have struggled for so many years… It was for the realisation of this ideal that countless people laid down their lives.”62 The basic guiding ideology of the CPC has not changed in its century of existence, as was summed up succinctly by Xi Jinping: “Both history and reality have shown us that only socialism can save China and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can bring development to China.”63

In borrowing certain techniques and mechanisms from capitalism, China is following a logic devised by the Bolsheviks during the New Economic Policy, using markets and investment to stimulate economic activity, whilst maintaining Communist Party rule and refusing to allow the capitalist class to dominate political power. As Lenin put it in 1921: “We must not be afraid of the growth of the petty bourgeoisie and small capital. What we must fear is protracted starvation, want and food shortage, which create the danger that the working class will be utterly exhausted and will give way to petty-bourgeois vacillation and despair. This is a much more terrible prospect.”64

Modern China has gone much further than the NEP, in the sense that private property is not limited to “the petty bourgeoisie and small capital”; there are some extremely wealthy individuals and companies controlling vast sums of capital. And yet their political status is essentially the same as it was in the early days of the PRC; their existence as a class is predicated on their acceptance of the overall socialist programme and trajectory of the country. As long as they are helping China to develop, they are tolerated. Even in 1957, with socialist construction in full swing, Mao considered that “the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people… In the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.”65

The reform strategy has been undeniably successful in terms of alleviating poverty and modernising the country. Economist Arthur Kroeber notes that workers’ wages have increased continuously, pointing out that, in 1994, a Chinese factory worker could expect to earn a quarter of what their counterpart in Thailand was earning; just 14 years later, the Chinese worker was earning 25 percent more than the Thai worker.66 Jude Woodward writes that per capita income in China doubled in the decade from 1980, “whereas it took Britain six decades to achieve the same after the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century and America five decades after the Civil War.”67

The combination of planning and ever-rising productivity has created a vast surplus, which has been used partly to “orchestrate a massive, sustained programme of infrastructure construction, including roads, railways, ports, airports, dams, electricity generation and distribution facilities, telecommunications, water and sewage systems, and housing, on a proportional scale far exceeding that of comparable developing countries, such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.”68

The fundamental difference between the Chinese system and capitalism is that, with capital in control, it would not be possible to prioritise the needs of the working class and peasantry; China would not have been able to achieve the largest-scale poverty alleviation in history. Deng understood this: “Ours is an economically backward country with a population of one billion. If we took the capitalist road, a small number of people in certain areas would quickly grow rich, and a new bourgeoisie would emerge along with a number of millionaires — all of these people amounting to less than one per cent of the population — while the overwhelming majority of the people would remain in poverty, scarcely able to feed and clothe themselves. Only the socialist system can eradicate poverty.”69

In adapting its strategy in accordance with new realities and a sober assessment of the past, the CPC was following the same principle it had always stood for: to seek truth from facts and to develop a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice. In Mao’s words, “the only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people.”70 The CPC’s experience in practice was that “having a totally planned economy hampers the development of the productive forces to a certain extent.”71 Its leaders therefore conjectured that a combination of planning and markets would “liberate the productive forces and speed up economic growth.” This hypothesis has been proven correct by material reality. As John Ross puts it, “China’s extraordinary success during reform and opening up was based on adherence to Marxist theory and is the largest possible scale vindication of the Marxism in the framework of which reform and opening up was developed.”72

Reform and opening up wasn’t purely a correction of earlier mistakes; it was also a response to changing objective circumstances; specifically, a more favourable international environment resulting from the restoration of China’s seat at the United Nations (1971) and the rapprochement between China and the US. Thomas Orlik, chief economist at Bloomberg Economics, correctly observes that, “when Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening process, friendly relations with the United States provided the crucial underpinning. The path for Chinese goods to enter global markets was open.”73 So too was the door for foreign capital, technology, and expertise to enter China – first from Hong Kong and Japan, then the West. Zhou Enlai reportedly commented at the time of then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s historic visit to Beijing in 1971 that “only America can help China to modernise.”74 Even allowing for Zhou’s legendary diplomatic eloquence, this statement nevertheless contains an important kernel of truth.

Mao and Zhou had seen engagement with the US as a way to break China’s isolation. The US leadership saw engagement with China as a way to perpetuate and exacerbate the division between China and the Soviet Union. (Everyone was triangulating; for its part, the Soviet leadership was hoping to work with the US to undermine and destabilise China.75) Regardless of the complex set of intentions, one key outcome of the US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s was that a favourable external environment was created in which a policy of ‘opening up’ could feasibly be pursued.

Deng was also not the first to recognise that the productive forces were undergoing historic changes in the West and that China would have to catch up. Zhou Enlai noted that “new developments in science are bringing humanity to a new technological and industrial revolution… we must conquer these new heights in science to reach advanced world standards.”76 Indeed it was Zhou that first conceptualised the Four Modernisations that Deng made the cornerstone of his strategy. Zhou talked in January 1975 – during his last major speech – of the urgent need to take advantage of the more peaceful and stable international context and “accomplish the comprehensive modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world.”77

The economic take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period”, in the words of the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin.78 Even with the disruption caused by the Cultural Revolution, the early period of socialist construction achieved “progress on a scale which old China could not achieve in hundreds or even thousands of years.”79 This is widely understood within China. Prominent economist Hu Angang writes that, by 1978, all children received an education, adult illiteracy had fallen from 80 percent to 33 percent, and basic healthcare was available to everyone. Industry had been built up from almost nothing. Meanwhile, “China succeeded in feeding one-fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land and 6.5 percent of its water. China’s pre-1978 social and economic development cannot be underestimated.”80 This can be usefully compared with the same time period in India, which following independence from the British Empire in 1947 was in a similarly parlous state, with a life expectancy of 32. At the end of the pre-reform period in China, ie 1978, India’s life expectancy had increased to 55, while China’s had increased to 67. As John Ross elucidates, “this sharply growing difference was not because India had a bad record – as an increase of 22 years in life expectancy over a 31-year period graphically shows. It is simply that China’s performance was sensational – life expectancy increasing by 32 years in a 29-year chronological period.”81

Xi Jinping has observed that, although the two major phases of the People’s Republic of China are different in many ways, “they are by no means separated from or opposed to each other. We should neither negate the pre-reform phase in comparison with the post-reform phase, nor the converse.”82

The two major phases are both consistent with the CPC’s guiding philosophy and raison d’être. Both have played an invaluable role in China’s continuing transformation from a divided, war-torn, backward and phenomenally poor country in which “approximately one of every three children died within the first year of birth”83 to a unified, peaceful, advanced and increasingly prosperous country which is blazing a trail towards a more developed socialism.

In each stage of its existence, the CPC has sought to creatively apply and develop Marxism according to the prevailing concrete circumstances; always seeking to safeguard China’s sovereignty, maintain peace, and build prosperity for the masses of the people. Through many twists and turns, this has been a constant of a hundred years of Chinese Revolution.

​After finishing their previous discussions of Chinese philosophy, [check blog archive] Karl and Fred were ready to look at the philosophy of Laozi. Karl, who knew more about Chinese philosophy than Fred, began by asking Fred what he knew about Laozi.
    
“The philosophy of Laozi is called Daoism, do you know much about it Fred?”
    
“I have read a little. Karl. I know that the philosophy of Laozi is contained in a book called the “Daode Jing” or “The Way and its Virtue”.  Also that not much is really known about him. The Chinese think he lived around the time of Confucius, maybe twenty or so years before him. It is unlikely they ever met.  It is also possible that he really lived hundreds of years after Confucius. Legend has it that he got tired of all the hassles in China and departed for the West riding on the back of an ox, but was stopped by the gatekeeper of the Western Pass and not allowed to proceed unless he wrote down his thoughts. That is how the “Daode Jing” came about. Having complied, he disappeared over the mountains heading for India--or so they say.”
    
“Pretty good introduction seeing as we don’t even know if he was a real person or a mythical one!  Well, you have the book, Chan’s translation, let’s see if we can figure out what it means.” [A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy by Wing-Tsit Chan]
    
Fred picked up the book and began to read. “I, that’s Chapter One, of eighty six,--’The Dao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Dao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things. Therefore let there always be non-being so we may see their subtlety, And let there always be being so we may see their outcome.’ Now what is that all about?”
    
“This is a mystical book. Daoism is a tradition at odds with what will develop out of the Analects. The DAO is incapable of being pinned down by human language. If someone thinks they know what it is you can be sure they are wrong because it will be even more than that. You know, Maimonides in his “Guide for the Perplexed” says that God is undefinable so that we really can’t say anything about it correctly--in just this sense is the DAO nameless.”
    
“OK, here is 2: ‘When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, there arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, there arises the recognition of evil. Therefore: Being and non-being produce each other; Difficult and easy complete each other; Long and short contrast each other; high and low distinguish each other; Sound and voice harmonize with each other; Front and back follow each other. Therefore the sage manages affairs without action (wu-wei) And spreads doctrines without words.’ “
    
“The term for ‘non-action’, i.e.,  wu-wei, means no action contrary to nature. I think Chan points this out. In general, we see here a dialectical approach to reality. Everything has its opposite and complements that opposite. Until we know what the ‘good’ is we don’t know ‘evil.’ It looks like we have to use a lot of ‘names’ after all since ‘good.’ ‘evil,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘ugliness,’ etc., are all names. Thus while the DAO, as ground of the world' is ‘nameless’ the things in the world are known by names. This seems not to contradict Confucius's views about the Rectification of Names--remember Rule Two from a previous discussion? [Cf. Confucius reference above. Rule Two- Language must be in accord with truth]. Also, note that Confucius did not allow himself to be drawn into discussions about the ultimate metaphysical basis of the world so he too seems not to be in disagreement with the view of the DAO as nameless. The part about spreading doctrines without words may mean that it is by EXAMPLE that influence is spread, and I don’t think Confucius would disagree with this.”
    
“I thought you said Daoism was in conflict with Confucianism. It looks like they agree on everything!”
    
“What can I say? We have only looked at the first two chapters. I’m sure the big differences will soon manifest themselves.”
    
“3: ‘Do not display objects of desire, so that the people’s hearts shall not be disturbed. Therefore in the government of the sage He keeps their hearts [peaceful and pure] (xu), Fills their bellies, Weakens their ambitions, And strengthens their bones, He always causes his people to be without knowledge (cunning) or desire, And the crafty to be afraid to act.’”
  
“I really don’t know what to make of this! The sage ruler evidently keeps his wealth under lock and key so the masses won’t see the class differences in the state. He provides bread and circuses as a Roman emperor so that the people remain content and don’t mess with the government. This is obviously the product of a feudal mentality.”
    
“5: ‘Heaven and Earth are not humane (ren). They regard all things as straw dogs. The sage is not humane. He regards all people as straw dogs.’ That doesn’t sound very good to me Karl.”
    
“Well let’s not read too much into it. I remember Chan on this selection saying that it means that Nature and the Sage are really IMPARTIAL and not playing favorites unjustly. Heaven and Earth are just following Dao, as we would say, ‘the laws of nature’, and as you know the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike. The Sage too has to be impartial and examine things according to their merits. The Prime Directive! [Cf. Confucius discussion. The Prime Directive of philosophy is ‘Always seek the truth by means of logic and reason without appeals to faith and emotion.’]
 
    
“7: ‘Heaven is eternal and Earth everlasting. They can be eternal and everlasting because they do not exist for themselves. And for this reason can exist forever. Therefore the sage places himself in the background but finds himself in the foreground’.”
    
“Now I understand the last part. Don’t toot your own horn and all that, lead by example, but the first part is just mystical excess as far as I can tell. Heaven and Earth not existing for themselves what can that mean? Perhaps he means they are manifestations of Dao, but this passage is all too mystical for me.”
 
“I like the following from 9: ‘To be proud with honor and wealth Is to cause one’s own downfall. Withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven’s Way.’”
    
 
“Yes, don’t overstay your welcome. At least this counteracts the view that Daoists are recluses. You have a job or function to perform and you should stick with it until its done--but then leave!”  
    
“Chapter Eleven is a little mysterious. ‘Doors and windows are cut out to make a room but it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.’”
    
“I think Lao is saying that the room is ‘empty’ hence ‘non-being’ and because it is empty it can be used for something--a dining room, bedroom, study, etc. The ‘being’ would be the material of the room from which the doors and windows were cut.”
    
“And what can this mean? 12:’Goods that are hard to get injure one’s activities. For this reason, the sage is concerned with the belly and not the eyes, Therefore he rejects the one but accepts the other.’”
    
“Your guess is as good as mine Fred. But look at it this way. It is easy to get a bowl of rice to eat, all the simple fare required, really, for a Daoist sage, but you can see palaces and treasures and things of that sort which others have and will never be yours so it is better to avoid that kind of ‘concern’ and stick to your proper activities.”
    
“Sounds good to me Karl. Here is 13: ‘If I have no body, what trouble could I have? Therefore he who values the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.’”
    
“I remember this. Chan says something about it doesn’t he?”
    
“Here is his comment on page 145 of his “Source Book”: ‘On the basis of this attitude toward the body, it is difficult to accept the theory that Yang Chu who would preserve one’s own life under any circumstances, was an early Daoist, as some have maintained.’ Remember Yang Chu was a character we ran into when we discussed Mencius.”
    
“OK, and....”
    
“And Chan is, I think, wrong. This passage from Lao is not putting down the body. He says we value it and even love it --otherwise there is trouble. Since this is the case the person who loves the world just as much as himself, since he will love himself, will be the best ruler. If Yang Chu thought as much of the world as he did of himself, he would be a good ruler. He was, however, an egotist. Yang may not have been an admirable Daoist, a sage, but his being an early Daoist hasn’t been proven wrong by this comment by Lao.”
    
“14: ‘We look at it and do not see it; Its name is the Invisible. We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is the Inaudible. We touch it and do not find it; its name is the Subtle (formless). These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence merge into one.’”
    
“A typical mystical statement. The hidden ground of the universe is not available to our knowledge, at least not to our sense knowledge so we will have no direct empirical knowledge of it. “
   
“Chan says this view of the non-detectability of ultimate reality--the ‘formless’ is in contradistinction to the Confucian view that reality is ‘manifest.’ He also points out that as Chinese philosophy developed under the influence of Buddhism, centuries later, the so called Neo-Confucianists made a synthesis and he quotes a Neo-Confucianist Cheng Yi who wrote ‘there is no distinction between the manifest and the hidden.’”
    
“That is a very Hegelian type of synthesis. Hegel did not have a high regard for Chinese thought, perhaps because of limited access to it in his day. But Hegel taught that ‘Thought’ advances by developing concepts that engender counter concepts that then result in a synthesis of the two into a new ‘higher’ concept that combines what was the one-sidedness of the original concepts. This is really quite a simplification, but from what you just read from Chan, I’m sure Cheng YI’s unification of these two concepts the ‘hidden’ and the ‘manifest’--’there is no distinction’ would meet with Hegel’s approval.”
    
“I notice here a reference to pu in 15 and ’uncarved wood’? What is that image about?”

​“That, Fred, is one of the most famous Taoist images. A sage is like an ‘uncarved block of wood.’ I see it as meaning we are all ‘potential’. An uncarved block could become anything under the hands of an artist--a horse, a figure of a man, or anything at all. But once carved that's it--the carved horse can’t later be a carved man.  Also, Lao calls the uncarved block ‘genuine.’ So there is something artificial about the carved block. This somehow implies that human actions are not fully natural, they contrast to the Dao. This is, I think, incorrect on Lao’s part! Everything is comprehended under the Dao so humans are too and the uncarved block and the carved block originate from the same universal process. There is an unresolved contradiction at the heart of Daoism which we will have to see played out. Sartre, in his Existentialism, would say humans have to live in the world even when trying not to interfere with it--they are committed to some ‘project’ or other so even being an ‘uncarved block’ is a form of being ‘carved’. For now, I’ll leave this as an unresolved ‘Hegelian’ contradiction.”
    
“18: ‘When the great Dao declined, the doctrines of humanity (ren) and righteousness (yi) arose. When knowledge and wisdom appeared, there appeared great hypocrisy. When the six family relationships [father, son, elder and younger brother, husband and wife--Chan] are not in harmony, there will be the advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children. When a country is in disorder, there will be praise of loyal ministers.’”
    
“Pretty obvious. All of these things are a reflection that there are problems and imperfections, a sign that Dao is not working properly--the Dao of human affairs that is, the Dao of Nature is something else it seems. Look at our example.  We like to think we care about the environment and other people--but look at the reality. It is just because we degrade both the environment and our fellow beings that we have to have so many laws to protect them. Big corporations such as GE, Exxon-Mobil, etc., spend millions in ad campaigns telling us how corporate America is environmentally conscious--but the fact that we need anti-pollution laws and regulations aimed at these very companies shows that what they claim they are and what they are vastly different. Do you think that if there were freedom and equality in the United States, we would need civil rights laws? And why did they pass a law in Texas against having sex with sheep? This is the message of Laozi. “
    
“Lao goes on in 19: ‘Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom; then the people will benefit a hundredfold. Abandon humanity and discard righteousness; Then the people will return to filial piety and deep love. Abandon skill and discard profit; Then there will be no thieves or robbers. However these three things are ornament (wen) and not adequate. Therefore let people hold on to these: Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires.’”
    
“Its too late for this Daoist program, I fear. Civilization was even so far advanced in Lao’s time that a program such as this, a going back to ‘nature’ program as it were, was not realistic. Daoism is reactionary--it reacts to the problems of the times by harking back to a mythical past when the Dao was not in decline and we didn’t need all the regulations and rules that have evolved along with our social development. Nevertheless, the four rules he gives at the end are not so bad--just on utilitarian grounds--if we all practiced them many of the negative aspects of our technological world system would be mitigated. I’m sure you can see how their application would bring this about.”
    
“Now this is really important Karl--Chapter 21, Chan says it’s the most important in the entire book--philosophically that is.”
    
“Well, let’s hear it then!”
    
“OK, here goes, ‘The all-embracing quality of the great virtue (de) follows alone from the Dao. The thing that is called Dao is eluding and vague. Vague and eluding, there is in it the form. Eluding and vague, in it are things. Deep and obscure, in it is the essence [intelligence, spirit, life-force]. The essence is very real; in it are evidences. From the time of old until now, its name (manifestations) ever remains, by which we may see the beginning of all things. How do I know the beginnings of all things are so? Through this (Dao).’”
    
“In itself this passage is too vague. What do we learn from saying ‘the Tao is all encompassing and is the ultimate explanation for everything?’ Not much. Chan thinks it so important because it is similar to passages in the Book of Changes [of which more later] which were utilized in Neo-Confucianist metaphysics.”
    
“Here is 22, some more ‘mysticism’--’To have plenty is to be perplexed. Therefore the sage embraces the one and becomes the model of the world. He does not show himself; therefore he is luminous. He does not justify himself; therefore he becomes prominent. He does not boast of himself; therefore he is given credit. He does not brag; therefore he can endure for long.’”
    
“Next!”
    
“23: ‘Nature says few words. For the same reason a whirlwind does not last a whole morning, Nor does a rainstorm last a whole day. What causes them? It is Heaven and Earth (Nature). If Heaven and Earth cannot make them last long, How much less can man? Therefore he who follows Dao is identified with Dao.’”
    
“Very interesting. He seems to be saying don’t mess with Nature. You have heard of the ‘Three Gorges” dam project in China?”
    
“It’s supposed to be the world’s largest dam project--displacing thousands of people and completely changing the face of the land.”
    
“And you know that projects like this, and many other man-made attempts to change the environment have ended in disasters. Think of the problems in the Everglades since we have monkeyed around with the water levels in Florida--and the extinction of many species throughout the world due to the destruction of habitats. I think those in power could learn a thing or two from this passage in Lao. Work with Nature, don’t try to completely rearrange the natural processes that have developed on the planet--that is following Dao.”
    
“This chapter, 25, reminds me of the opening: ‘There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before heaven and earth. Soundless, and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Dao. If forced to give it a name; I call it great...Being far-reaching means returning to the original point. Therefore Dao is great.’”
    
“As Chan says, this passage is representative of the Chinese view that history and nature operate cyclically. [Of course, now that they are Marxists they are not supposed to believe this.] Whereas we in the West more or less think in terms of progress and continual betterment, the Chinese in classical times thought in terms of cycles rather than progress.”
    
“26: ‘The tranquil is the ruler of the hasty. Therefore the sage travels all day Without leaving his baggage.... How is it that a lord with ten thousand chariots Should behave lightheartedly in his empire? If he is lighthearted, the minister will be destroyed. If he is hasty, the ruler is lost.’”
    
“Not really a Daoist paradox. The ruler is secure and tranquil being lighthearted is a sign of assuredness. On the other hand, the function of the minister is to carry out his duties--lightheartedness ill behooves him.”
 
“This next chapter is interesting and I don’t think it really needs any explication--27: ‘A well-tied knot needs no rope and yet none can untie it. Therefore the sage is always good at saving men and consequently no man is rejected. He is always good in saving things and consequently nothing is rejected. This is called following the light (of Nature) Therefore the good man is the teacher of the bad, And the bad is the material from which the good may learn. He who does not value the teacher, Or greatly care for the material, Is greatly deluded although he may be learned. Such is the essential mystery.’”
    
“A lot of faith in the salvation power of the sage! Confucius wants to enlighten people, this is a form of salvation but a bit more limited than Lao here. Remember the ‘square’--if you don’t get the other three sides from the one Confucius gives to you, you get dropped!” [Cf. the Confucius dialogue]
    
“I remember. Here is something about the ‘sage’--28: ‘He will be proficient in eternal virtue and returns to the state of simplicity (uncarved wood). When the uncarved wood is broken up, it is turned into concrete things (as Dao transformed into the myriad things). But when the sage uses it, he becomes the leading official. Therefore the great ruler does not cut up’”
    
“The Daoist Sage is using and not using the uncarved block it would seem. This is because he prefers things to remain in their original state of simplicity--he rules by not ruling. This is all very fine if you have a well-ordered state in the first place but what if you come along in a ‘time of troubles’ and forceful action is needed? Would this Daoist minimalism work in that case, or must the Daoist wait for a natural cyclical return to simplicity? I don’t think Lao has an answer to this problem.”
    
“Well, we may find one later on in the book. This is chapter 29, it has relevance to your questions: ‘When one desires to take over the empire and act on it (interfere with it), I see that he will not succeed. The empire is a spiritual thing and should not be acted on.’ He then says, ‘...the sage discards the extremes, the extravagant, and the excessive.’”
    
“That last part is like Aristotle’s ‘mean’--you know, virtue is a mean between two extremes--e.g., ‘courage’ is a mean between ‘foolhardiness’ and ‘cowardice.’”
    
“But what about the other part, about not ‘acting’? What if the ‘empire’ needs some ‘action’--such as tax reform or an agricultural reform or something like that? I’m beginning to agree with what you just said a few minutes ago. This might be a real problem with Lao’s views.”
    
“I’m glad you agree. What is next?”
    
“Something our gun toting friends in the NRA will appreciate. 31: ‘Fine weapons are instruments of evil. They are hated by men. Therefore those who possess Dao turn away from them.’”
     
“I remember this chapter. Forget the NRA, read some more and then try to reconcile Lao’s ideas with our government’s or any government’s obsession with military spending. This quote goes well beyond the NRA!”
    
“’Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle. Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral ceremonies.’”
    
“This shows real understanding of the horrors of war on Lao’s part. Something we have yet to understand, it seems. Yet he admits the ruler may not be able to avoid the use of weapons--think of trying to stop Hitler without them. Nevertheless, even when defeating Hitler, it was wrong to celebrate with a Roman triumph. The fact that we did so shows how far we are from the real spirit of the Dao.”
    
“I wonder what Lao would think about our current and past warlike activities in the Balkans and Iraq.”
    
“We have not very good rulers, I fear.”
    
“In 33 he says, ‘He who dies but does not really perish enjoys long life.’ Is he talking about the immortality of the soul?”

“I don’t think so. If you read on you will find that Chan points out that the Chinese think of immortality not in terms of individual survival but in terms of an immortality of reputation--your writings and your deeds. Look at it this way--some older person helps a child, say by sending her to school, she grows up to be a doctor and saves the life of someone who later becomes a ruler, etc. etc., a causal sequence extending over a thousand years--these people in the sequence, their deeds have never really perished.”
    
“OK, now I’ll read parts of 34; ‘The Great Dao flows everywhere....It clothes and feeds all things but does not claim to be master over them. Always without desires, it may be called The Small. All things come to it and it does not master them; it may be called The Great. Therefore (the sage) never strives himself for the great, and thereby the great is achieved.’”
    
“I can’t help but think of this in Western terms! It means, to my mind, that there is some universal ‘law’ or ‘power’ which is responsible for all that happens--but the expression ‘does not claim to be master’ allows for freedom of action at least on the part of self-conscious beings as ourselves, so Lao is not a Calvinist or Augustinian predestinationist. I admit, however, that this is a Western interpretation and may or may not coincide with what Lao had in mind.”
    
“Just when you think Lao isn’t so bad, he comes up with a recommendation that is just awful and shows how out of line his views are to democratic thinkers today.”
   
“What are you talking about?”
    
“Listen to this from 36: ‘Fish should not be taken away from water. And sharp weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people.’”
    
“I see what you mean, but his advice is generally followed even today by so called democratic governments, although I don’t consider governments that practice this really democratic at all in the true sense of the term.”
    
“Now what are you talking about?”
    
“You know, all this stuff you read about in the papers about the FBI and the CIA how they run all kinds of secret operations without any seeming control trying to assassinate people they deem a threat to their power--or the really terrible secret weapons systems the military creates such as the poison gases and germ warfare toxins they have made--not to mention the nuclear weapons they have and now all this information coming out about depleted uranium weapons or the training of terrorists at the School of the Americas run by the military (even if they changed the name to further conceal what goes on there). Don’t you think all this falls under Lao’s dictum that sharp weapons shouldn’t be displayed to the people?”
    
“Its all very confusing to me. I would have thought that Lao would be against ‘sharp weapons’ and things like you described. He says in the same chapter ‘The weak and the tender overcome the hard and the strong’ so he should be against ‘sharp weapons’--the state should get what it wants by being ‘weak and tender’ that is by education and treating people as people and following the Dao.”
    
“So there seems to be a contradiction in his teachings, just look back at 31 when he attacks ‘fine weapons’ and says they go against the Dao!  I’ll admit there can be a lot to argue about here.”
    
“And Chan points out that this doctrine of ‘deceit’ really upset the Confucianists. I guess Confucius would want the people to be educated and know what is going on in their state. After all, he thought government was for the benefit of the people and ultimately had to be extended to the whole world so people who are not displaying their ‘sharp weapons’ must be up to no good!”
    
“So noted! What’s next?”
    
“I’ll read part of 38: ‘The man of superior virtue is (not conscious of) his virtue, and in this way he really possesses virtue. The man of inferior virtue never loses (sight of) his virtue, and in this way he loses his virtue. The man of superior virtue takes no action, but has no ulterior motive to do so. The man of inferior virtue takes action, and has an ulterior motive to do so. The man of superior humanity takes action, but has no ulterior motive to do so. The man of superior righteousness takes action, and has an ulterior motive to do so. The man of superior propriety takes action, and when people do not respond to it, he will stretch his arms and force it on them. Therefore, only when Dao is lost does the doctrine of virtue arise...propriety is a superficial expression of loyalty and faithfulness, and the beginning of disorder...the great man...dwells in the fruit (reality), and does not rest with the flower (appearance). Therefore he rejects the one, and accepts the other.’”
    
“This is a passage which again puts forth the view that the simple and natural are best, closest to the Dao. This is almost like Rousseau in the rejection of the artificialities of civilization.”
    
“Here in 39 Lao talks about the ‘One’--which I take to be Dao-- he says ‘Heaven obtained the One and became clear.... If heaven had not thus become clear, It would soon crack.’ He makes similar remarks about the efficacy of the One with regard, for example to the earth (without the One ‘It would soon be shaken’) and about kings and barons who became rulers by it and ‘They would soon fall’ without it. But then he says ‘Therefore humble station is the basis of honor. The low is the foundation of the high.’ I just don’t understand the conclusion he draws!”
    
“Well, this isn’t a syllogism after all. If you equate the One with the Dao this implies again the power of the Dao to have the ultimate influence over reality. Lao is being ‘mystical’ not ‘logical’ by referring to the ‘humble’ and the ‘low’--you see he is using the ‘One’ as a symbol for the ‘low’--a low number--and the ‘humble’. The ‘One’ is the beginning but the ‘thousand’, so to speak, is ultimately dependent upon it.”
 
“OK Karl, here is a verse from 40--’All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.’”
    
“Now is the time to bring in some outside assistance,” Karl said as he went to his bookcase and pulled down a book.
    
“What is this book,” Fred asked.
    
“This is “A Short History of Chinese Philosophy” by Fung Yu-Lan, edited by Derk Bodde. It’s really required reading if we are interested in Chinese philosophy. Fung was a major philosopher in his own right and this is based on his great two volume work “History of Chinese Philosophy”. I think it is the best of the histories because it is by one of the most important philosophers in the modern Chinese tradition. It is similar to having “A History of Western Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell, although without some of the major misinterpretations.”
    
“So now we can use Fung as well as Chan for clarification, why didn’t you bring it out earlier?”
    
“Its better to introduce these aids slowly, besides Confucius wasn’t into all this metaphysical speculation but Lao’s work is full of these kinds of statements so where Chan does not give any clarification we can turn to Fung. I remember he had interesting comments to make on this Chapter from Laozi.”
    
“Chapter 40?”
    
“That is correct,” said Karl, flipping through Fung’s book. “Ah, here is the passage I was looking for. Listen to this Fred, it’s on page 96: ‘...the being of all things implies the being of Being. This is the meaning of Laozi saying [40].... The saying of Laozi does not mean that there was a time when there was only Non-being, and that then there came a time when Being came into being from Non-being. It simply means that if we analyze the existence of things, we see there must first be Being before there can be any things. Dao is the unnamable, is Non-Being, and is that by which all things come to be. Therefore, before the being of Being, there must be Non-being, from which Being comes into being. What is here said belongs to ontology, not to cosmology. It has nothing to do with time and actuality. For in time and actuality, there is no Being; there are only beings.’”
    
“And you think that quote is helpful?”
    
“Well, it looked better when I was reading this book as a student. Fung was a metaphysician himself and sometimes requires to be explained even more than what he is explaining!”
    
“So why bring him up.”
    
“Because he brings all the latent issues to the fore.”
    
“Well then, what else is there besides ‘time and actuality’? Are not ‘time and actuality’ circumlocutions for ‘existence’ so that Fung is saying ‘in existence there is no Existence only existents’. And I would say that what is true of ‘cosmology’ is true of ‘ontology.’”
 
“Fred, I wouldn’t disagree with you. This passage from Fung is turning out to be nonsense!  I think Fung should have said ‘Being’ is a logical category that precedes ‘being’ but even that is taking us far and away from the, I think, much more simple meaning of Laozi’s words.”
    
“So, how would you explain 40?”
    
“First, I want to say these digressions are philosophically interesting. Second, I think the best way to look at Lao’s saying is to think of ‘all things come from being’ as meaning ‘whatever exists today comes from previously existing things’. Things just don’t pop up out of nothing. And ‘being comes from non-being’ means there is some principle or cause that is responsible for the state of the existing world as we know it and this is DAO which is not itself the same as the beings of this world which are ultimately dependent upon it and for this reason Lao calls it ‘non-being.’ “
     
“I’m moving on Karl, to Chapter 41.”
     
“OK”
    
“’When the highest type of men hear Dao, They diligently practice it. When the average type of men hear Dao, They half believe in it. When the lowest type of men hear Dao, They laugh heartily at it. If they did not laugh at it, it would not be Dao. Therefore there is the established saying: The Dao which is bright appears to be dark.’”
    
“Two observations about this Fred. How can the three types ‘hear Dao’ since (Chapter One) the Dao that can be spoken of isn’t the Dao. I mean, how would they know they actually knew what they heard was Tao? Second, since this is supposed to be Lao’s book introducing his views how can there be an ‘established view’? Anyway, since I’m not interested in the history of the text but the idea content, I will restrict myself to this idea of the ‘bright’ appearing as the ‘dark’. This view is right out of the species of doctrines that gave rise to Plato’s views of the reception of philosophical ‘Truth” as he expressed it in “The Republic”. I mean this is at one with the Allegory of the Cave. The ultimate ‘Truth’ is the Dao, so if we replace ‘Dao’ with ‘Truth’ in the quote you read we have the exact meaning intended by Lao. We also have a theme which is common to almost all philosophy whether in China, India or Greece at this time and that is that philosophical truth is ultimately esoteric and limited to a few individuals. The great mass of humanity, hoi polloi, are unable, why is the big question, to grasp the truth and so while it is bright for the sage or philosopher it remains dark to them. The average sort of understand it but it really doesn’t motivate them. So we have three groups of people--a small group motivated by the truth (they get into a lot of trouble most of the time), a middle group that is neither motivated nor hostile (too busy living the everyday problems of life) and a ‘low’ group that is hostile and prefers to continue along in a dark and ignorant and unthreatening life style based on unreflective acceptance of common ideas.”
    
“You seem to be giving a Confucian twist to this! Wouldn’t Lao praise the simple unreflective lifestyle as the manifestation of the Dao? In fact, once you have the ‘highest type of men’ and the ‘lowest type’ of men, hasn’t the Dao already been lost?”
     
“You know, you are right Fred. This is a bit of a contradiction. But the fact is the Dao has been lost from the point of view of Lao--and a long time ago too. So we must make do with the world we live in. “
    
“Does Fung cast any light on this?”
    
“Actually he does and his comment is based on part of Chapter 40 you didn’t quote a few minutes ago.”
    
“What was that?”
    
“Go back and read the first line.”
    
“’Reversion is the action of Dao.’”
     
“Fung points out that this sums up Lao’s views on what we would call dialectics. He says ‘The idea is that if anything develops certain extreme qualities, those qualities invariability revert to become their opposites. This constitutes a law of nature.’”
    
“Sounds like Hegel or Marx.”
    
“In a way, but Lao’s ‘law’ is more mechanical than really dialectical in the Hegelian sense.”
    
“How so?”
    
“Well, in Lao the ‘hard’ becomes the ‘soft’ and then the ‘soft’ becomes the ‘hard’ or the ‘weak’ overcomes the ‘strong’ and then the ‘strong’ becomes the ‘weak’ etc. There appears to be just alteration going on but no advance. When Hegel or Marx and Engels say something like ‘things transform into their opposites’ they don’t intend by this mere alteration back and forth ad infinitum but an advance to a higher level or if you object to ‘higher’ a radically different level. An imaginative but simple example is Lao would give opposites as water-ice, ice-water whereas Hegel might say something like ‘hydrogen is the “opposite” of oxygen, but the two opposites transform into water’ (and other things as well). Fung says this ‘law’ is so paradoxical that hoi polloi can’t grasp it and that is why they laugh at it. Anything really ‘true’ about the world is like that--if hoi polloi grasps it, it can’t be true! Of course, Marxists would like it to be the other way around.”
    
“You know, Karl, for all his praise of the simple, he is really a snob. This view of the ‘low’ never understanding anything, along with ‘hiding the sharp weapons of the state’ call into question Lao’s sincerity about the concern he is alleged to express for the ‘common people.’”
    
“A case can be made for this. It is Confucius who wants to educate as many people as possible seeing in education an almost universal panacea.”
    
“Yes, but he won’t show you the other three corners if you can’t get them yourself after he shows you the first.” [Cf. Confucius dialogue]
    
“Why don’t you read the next interesting tidbit?”
   
“This is from 42: ‘Dao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things [i.e. everything] carry the yin and embrace the yang [Chan:’ Yin is the passive, female[!] cosmic principle or force while yang is the active[!] or male principle.’] {You can see males thought this one up!}, and through the blending of the material force (qi) [Chan: ‘Variously translated as matter, matter-energy, vital force, breath, etc.] they achieve harmony.... What others have taught, I teach also: “Violent and fierce people do not die a natural death.” I shall make this the father (basis or starting point) of my teaching.’”
    
“I remember Chan on this passage. He made some good points. Why don’t you read the salient passages?”
    
“His main point is ‘...the natural evolution from the simple to the complex without any act of creation. This theory is common to practically all Chinese philosophical schools.’”
     
“The word ‘creation’ is confusing. In the West, following the developments of Neo-Platonism, the ‘ten thousand’ things also came about by emanation from the One or ‘God’ this is how they were ‘created’. I think Chan has in mind the Western notion of creation ex nihilo which was read back by Christians (and then Jews) into the Genesis creation account and has become a dogma. And out of the blue comes this new starting point--I mean, the comment about fierce people. I think it is better to retain the starting point as the Dao and regard this new passage as the starting point of his ethics or social or moral ideas.”
    
“44:’ Which is worse, gain or loss? Therefore he who has lavish desires will spend extravagantly. He who hoards will lose heavily. He who is contented suffers no disgrace. He who knows when to stop is free from danger. Therefore he can long endure.' There is a string of quotable quotes here which I will just read to give more of a flavor of Daoism in these middle chapters. Go ahead and chime in, Karl, if you think any explication is needed.”
   
  “I will.”
    
“46: ‘When Dao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields with their dung). When Dao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.’”
 
“I guess the fact that we spend so much on the military and have such big budgets dedicated to killing and maiming our fellow human beings all over the world doesn’t say much for the prevalence of the Dao in the current world order.”
    
“47: ‘The further one goes, the less one knows. Therefore the sage knows without going about, Understands without seeing, And accomplishes without any action.’”
    
“That might have been true in the days of yore, Fred, before the development of the scientific method and the realization of the importance of research programs. If Lao thinks that knowledge and understanding come about just through contemplation and intuition, he is wrong, at least by our standards. Darwin would never have come up with his theory of evolution without his ‘going about’ on the HMS Beagle.”
    
“49: ‘The sage has no fixed (personal) ideas. He regards the people’s ideas as his own. I treat those who are good with goodness, And I also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. I am honest to those who are honest, And I am also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.”
    
“I don’t see how this agrees with Chapter 41. The sage follows Dao on a higher level than ‘the people’ who appear to be indifferent if average or if ‘low’ laughing at it. So, it may be that the sage, like the ideal scientist or philosopher, leaves him or herself out of the equation (knowledge being ideally objective) but the ‘people’ is too much of an abstraction nowadays, especially since the Dao is not prevailing, to believe the sage’s ideas are the same as the people’s. The only way this could be the case is if the sage represents the ‘general will’ in Rousseau’s sense, and this might, after all, just be what Laozi actually means.”
    
“51: "Dao produces them (the ten thousand things). Virtue fosters them. Matter gives them physical form. The circumstances and tendencies complete them. Therefore the ten thousand things esteem Dao and honor virtue. Dao is esteemed and virtue honored without anyone’s order. They always come spontaneously. Therefore Dao produces them and virtue fosters them.’”
    
“The word being used for ‘virtue’ is ‘de'--which also means ‘power’. Fung says that Dao is the ‘ground’ and the things come to be by the power manifested in them. Think of Dao as the laws of nature by which material things come to be what they are and manifest their ‘virtue’ or power. It’s as when Aristotle said the virtue of a knife is its ability to cut. In this we see Spinoza’s universe reflected in the ideas of the Chinese sage.”
    
“54: ‘He who has a firm grasp (of Dao) cannot be separated from it.... When one cultivates virtue in the world, it becomes universal.’”
    
“The point of this chapter is that such cultivation begins with the person then extends to the family, then to the community, the country and finally the whole world.”
 
“You get the idea from this next quote of the remoteness of the sage from the concerns of most people. 56: ‘Become one with the dusty world. This is called profound identification. Therefore it is impossible either to be intimate and close to him or to be distant and indifferent to him.’ A little before this quote he says, ‘He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.’”
    
“A real problem since Lao has to ‘speak’ in order to give this bit of information to us!”
    
“57: ‘The more laws and orders are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be. Therefore the sage says: I take no action and the people of themselves are transformed. I love tranquility and the people of themselves become correct. I engage in no activity and the people of themselves become prosperous. I have no desires and the people of themselves become simple.’ Chan says this laissez-faire attitude was also that of Confucius.”
    
“I can’t agree with Chan. How can Confucius say ‘I take no action’ and the people are transformed. This is an attack on Confucius. Confucians seek to take a lot of actions to improve the world and correct and make new laws to govern society.  According to Fung this ‘laissez-faire’ attitude is preceded by the sage ruler first undoing ‘all the causes of trouble in the world’ which is very ‘proactive’--if I may use this pretentious and ridiculous word being currently substituted by the semi-literate for ‘active.’ After the troubles have been eliminated then the sage ruler rules by means of wu-wei--i.e., by non-action [meaning no unnatural action]. Fung says, ‘The Daoists agree with the Confucianists that the ideal state is one which has a sage as its head.’ They both agree with Plato on this. But they are different kinds of sages.
    
“I feel another rule coming on.”
    
“Why not? We can review our rules from the discussion on Confucius when we finish with Laozi but now I am proposing Rule Four-’Always strive to have a philosopher-sage as the chief executive of the state.’”
    
“That's too abstract. What really qualifies a person as a philosopher-sage? Laozi’s ideas on this are different from those of Confucius.”
    
“I know, I know. This is just the framework the rule will have to be further discussed when we evaluate the different philosophies as we go along. I now want to make a comment about the laws being made leading to the conclusion that ‘the more thieves and robbers there will be.’ Of course, there are some minimum laws that any society needs, but when the state begins to make more and more new laws it also makes criminals where there were none before.”
    
“What do you mean?”
 
“During the rise of Capitalism, for example, when the government closed off the commons to the peasants, as in England, many people were forced into criminal activity just to survive. By making new laws about who can use the commons then actions which were legal--grazing you animals on such and such land or hunting-- became illegal and you became a criminal for doing today what yesterday was a right. Prohibition in the United States turned millions of people technically into criminals and also fostered the development of criminal industries which became non-criminal as soon as prohibition was repealed. The criminalization of certain drugs in this country has filled the prisons with non-violent ‘offenders’--recreational pot smokers right along with drug gang lords. This is certainly an exemplification of Laozi’s dictum.”
    
“Here are some more political views--58: ‘When the government is non-discriminative and dull, the people are contented and generous. When the government is searching and discriminative the people are disappointed and contentious.... The people have been deluded for a long time. Therefore the sage is as pointed as a square but does not pierce.... He is as bright as light but does not dazzle.’”
    
“Well, Fred, that’s the way it is when the Dao is not being observed. Even in our world today special interest groups bombard the people with biased self-serving messages. It is so easy to delude the people about what should be done with respect to the environment, fighting diseases such as AIDS or COVID, fighting starvation in the world, or domestic homelessness. ‘Sages’, that is philosophers and scientists, may be able to devise solutions to these problems but with a ‘discriminative’ government catering to special interests rather than the general welfare, how are the deluded people to know what to do to get the Dao of society back on track?”
    
“What do you think of this? 61: ‘A big country may be compared to the lower part of a river. It is the converging point of the world; It is the female of the world. The female always overcomes the male by tranquility, and by tranquility she is underneath. A big state can take over a small state if it places itself below the small state; And the small state can take over a big state if it places itself below the big state. Thus some, by being (naturally) low, take over (other states) ....’”
    
“What is this--the political missionary position? The first part sounds like sexist nonsense, to be expected, I’m afraid, considering the time and place of Laozi. I think big states treat little states in a more canine fashion. This appears to be some more ‘mysticism’ which is impracticable in our day. Yet the recommendation that small states will be better being ‘tranquil’--I mean by humoring and trying to get along with big states--is probably good advice. In our day, however, big states try to get their way by throwing around their ‘bigness’."

​“62: ‘Dao is the storehouse of all things.... Even if a man is bad, when has (Dao) rejected him? Therefore on the occasion of crowning an emperor or installing the three ministers [grand tutor, grand preceptor, and grand protector], Rather than present large pieces of jade preceded by teams of four horses, it is better to kneel and offer this Dao’”
    
“Well, this makes sense. Wisdom, knowledge of the Dao in so far as it is knowable, is to be preferred to the outward show of ceremony. Even Confucius would agree, though he liked the ceremonies.”
     
“The next chapter is interesting both in itself and because of Chan’s comment. 63: ‘Whether it is big or small, many or few, repay hatred with virtue... Difficult undertakings have always started with what is easy, and great undertakings have always started with what is small. Therefore the sage never strives for the great, and thereby the great is achieved... He who takes things too easily will surely encounter much difficulty. For this reason, even the sage regards things as difficult, And therefore he encounters no difficulty.’  “
    
“What does Chan say?”
    
“He says this is the ‘Daoist doctrine of walking the second mile, which was unacceptable to Confucius.’  He means the comment about repaying hatred with virtue. Remember Analects 14:36? “
   
“Yes, Confucius said, repay hatred with uprightness and virtue with virtue. But uprightness is the same as impartially and that is a virtue in itself (most of the time) so this difference between Confucius and Lao doesn’t amount to a whole lot in my opinion.”
    
“Now we go to 64: ‘A journey of a thousand li [ a li = about 1/3 mile] starts from where one stands.’ Hey! I always thought that was from Confucius--’A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step’....”
    
“What’s that from --a fortune cookie?”
    
“Not funny, Karl. Well, live and learn. One of my favorite quotes turns out to come from Laozi instead of Confucius. I shall continue. ‘He who grasps things loses them. For this reason, the sage takes no action and therefore does not fail. He grasps nothing and therefore does not lose anything... If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure. Therefore the sage desires to have no desire... He learns to be unlearned, and returns to what the multitude has missed (Dao). Thus he supports all things in their natural state but does not take any action.’ What do you make of all this?”
    
“Again, that ‘no action’ means no unnatural action. The sage tries to understand Dao--still a dubious prospect from his opening verses! And there is another negative thought about hoi polloi. I’m still pro-Confucius here. We can study the Dao and we should then try to impart it to the multitude. I think Lao doesn’t share this idea fully.”
 
“Karl, the very next chapter bears on this question--Chapter 65 I mean.”
    
“Excellent! Read it because Fung also comments on this chapter.
    
“65: In ancient times those who practiced the Dao well did not seek to enlighten the people, but to make them ignorant. People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge. Therefore he who rules the state through knowledge is a robber of the state: He who rules a state not through knowledge is a blessing to the state.’ There is some more about returning to the natural standard, but what about this keeping the people ignorant?”
    
“A greater contrast to Confucius could not be found. But to understand this in the Chinese context, I’m going to read this passage from Fung. ‘”Ignorant” here is a translation of the Chinese "you", which means ignorance in the sense of simplicity and innocence. The sage not only wants his people to be you, but wants himself to be so too.... In Daoism you is not a vice, but a great virtue’ And Fung goes on to say, however, that the you of the sage is really higher than that of the common people. This means it's not really you at all! ‘The you of the sage is the result of a conscious process of cultivation. It is something higher than knowledge, something more, not less. There is a common Chinese saying: “Great wisdom is like ignorance.” The you of the sage is great wisdom, and not like the you of a child or of ordinary people. The latter kind of you is a gift of nature, while that of the sage is an achievement of the spirit. There is a great difference between the two. But in many cases the Daoists seem to have confused them.’”
    
“I’ll say! Using the same word for the uneducated ignorance of hoi polloi--and calling that a ‘gift of nature’! and the sophisticated understanding of the philosopher is no good. This is a clear case where a Confucian ‘rectification of names’ is needed!”
    
“I couldn’t agree more, Fred. Naturally people become more difficult to govern the more they get away from the ‘gift of nature’ and find out what is really going on. Thinking of all the peasant uprisings in Chinese history, I imagine that the Chinese ruling class must have identified with this passage from Laozi.”
    
“Yet they were officially Confucian and thus believed in education even if not to the extent of Confucius himself.”
    
“That’s right. It only shows how impractical Daoism is in the real world. People are not going to stay ignorant, and you need knowledge and education and Confucian norms to make sure people are not ‘over exploited’ and thus rebel. When we look at more Confucians, we will see this.”
    
“Here is Chapter 66: ‘The great rivers and seas are kings of all mountain streams Because they skillfully stay below them. That is why they can be their kings. Therefore, in order to be the superior of the people, one must, in the use of words, place himself below them. And in order to be ahead of the people, One must, in one’s own person, follow them. Therefore the sage places himself above the people and they do not feel his weight. He places himself in front of them and the people do not harm him. Therefore the world rejoices in praising him without getting tired of it. It is precisely because he does not compete that the world cannot compete with him.’”
    
“If this is interpreted as ‘learn from the people’ it would be acceptable. But with the doctrine of keeping people ignorant it looks more like a plan for simply making the ruler’s life easy. Considering the feudal system in China, I suspect that the latter interpretation may be more on the mark.”
   
“He says something incomprehensible to me in 69: ‘There is no greater disaster than to make light of the enemy. Making light of the enemy will destroy my treasures. Therefore when armies are mobilized and issues joined, The man who is sorry over the fact will win.’ Now how is being ‘sorry’ got anything to do with winning a battle?”
    
“This is mystical (that is, ‘meaningless’) to me, Fred. Unless to ‘win’ refers to some inner state. Anyway, a sage ought not to have ‘enemies’. If things come to blows, the Daoist sage must have screwed up royally!”
    
“70: ‘My doctrines are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, but none in the world can understand or practice them. My doctrines have a source (Nature); my deeds have a master (Dao). Few people know me, and therefore I am highly valued. Therefore the sage wears a coarse cloth on top and carries jade within his bosom.’”
    
“Lao seems to be preoccupied about being ‘highly valued’, but this chapter is expressing a truth that sages need to and do understand.  Most people don’t understand ‘Nature’. That is, they have no conception of science or scientific method--not that Lao did either--and so really don’t understand the workings of the world around them and this is one of the great reasons why many people are not happy and cannot attain their ends. For Lao, I think this notion of ‘Nature’ is more like ‘fatalism’ but this is an advanced concept in itself for his age. The closest thing to understanding in a scientific way is the ‘Dao’ which operates in a law-like manner. The sage tries to live according to ‘Nature’ and understand the ‘Dao’. Thus far what Lao says makes sense. The question is whose Dao, Lao’s or Confucius’s?”
    
“OK Karl, here is 71: ‘To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.’”  And Chan refers us to a part of the Analects we missed! Namely 2:17: ‘Confucius said, “Zilu, shall I teach you [the way to acquire] knowledge? To say when you know that you do know and to say that you do not know when you do not know--that is [the way to acquire] knowledge.”’
    
“Sometimes I think sages are the same the world over! Remember that Socrates' claim to wisdom was that he knew that he did not know.”
    
“And 72 has both a warning for the people and some sage advice or at least a motto for sages. ‘When the people do not have fear of what is dreadful, Then what is greatly dreadful will descend on them.’ The motto goes ‘...the sage knows himself but does not show himself. He loves himself but does not exalt himself.’”
    
“Sage advice indeed, Fred.”
    
“This is interesting, 73: ‘Who knows why Heaven dislikes what it dislikes?...Heaven’s net is indeed vast. Though its meshes are wide, it misses nothing.’ Chan says the idea of Heaven’s net greatly reinforced the Chinese idea about ‘retribution.’”
    
“Sounds like a Daoist version of karma. There is nothing directly related to the concept of karma in this quote, but it is easy to conjecture that after the arrival of Buddhism this concept was read back into Laozi.”
    
“Next we have some good social commentary, actually not at all inconsistent with Confucian notions and must have endeared Lao to many of the more uptight emperors. 75: ‘The people starve because the ruler eats too much tax-grain. Therefore they starve.They are difficult to rule because their ruler does too many things. Therefore they are difficult to rule. The people take death lightly because their ruler strives for life too vigorously. Therefore they take death lightly.’”
     
“Yes, Fred, you’re on the money. It is certainly wrong to think that Daoists, at least of the Laozi stripe, as not being interested in social questions. A Confucian could have easily stated the same ideas expressed in this passage.”
    
“How do you make sense of the following? Its number 76: ‘When man is born, he is tender and weak. At death, he is stiff and hard. All things, the grass as well as trees, are tender and supple while alive. When dead, they are withered and dried. Therefore the stiff and hard are companions of death. The tender and weak are companions of life. Therefore if the army is strong, it will not win. If a tree is stiff it will break. The strong and the great are inferior, while the tender and the weak are superior.’ I get most of it--but what can it mean to say a strong army won’t win?”
    
“I think this is very subtle, but I’ll give an example from Chinese history and you can try to think up examples from other historical periods. In 222 B.C. the first Chinese empire was created when the state of Qin vanquished all the rival petty states that existed at that time. Qin was led by a man called Zheng who was now called Qin Shi Huang or ‘First Emperor.’  He had a very strong army and ran his new empire practically like a ‘fascist’ dictator. He killed all his opponents violent and non-violent alike, and burned all the books by anyone whose philosophy he didn’t like--which was everyone except those who supported without question his government and personal rule. These methods were supposed to assure that his empire would last ten thousand generations. But he so alienated everyone that that after he died in 210 B.C. his whole empire was gone within three years. So much for having a strong army. If he had been more ‘tender’ and not so harsh perhaps his empire would have lasted and not fallen due to internal disintegration. You can perhaps make analogies to what happened to the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ and to the American Army in Vietnam which was defeated by the ‘weak’ because, while ‘strong’ it was harsh and cruel rather than showing a ‘tender’ side to the poor and impoverished peasants. So real ‘strength’ may be just the opposite of what those ignorant of the Dao think it is.”
    
“This makes sense, Karl, and seems reinforced by this from 77: ‘Heaven’s Way is indeed like the bending of a bow. When (the string) is high, bring it down. When it is low raise it up.... The Way of Heaven reduces whatever is excessive and supplements whatever is insufficient. The way of man is different. It reduces the insufficient to offer to the excessive. Who is able to have excess to offer to the world? Only the man of Dao. Therefore the sage acts, but does not rely on his own ability ‘ [i.e. he follows the Dao].”
    
“Absolutely, Fred. First Emperor was not following the Way of Heaven but that of man, that is of the man ignorant of Dao.”
    
“Right, and Lao continues in 78: ‘All the world knows that the weak overcomes the strong and the soft overcomes the hard. But none can practice it. Therefore the sage says: He who suffers disgrace for his country Is called the lord of the land. He who takes upon himself the country’s misfortunes Becomes the king of the empire. Straight words seem to be their opposite.’”
    
“I can only add, ‘in the long run.’”
    
“Now here is 79: ‘To patch up great hatred is surely to leave some hatred behind. How can this be regarded as good? Therefore the sage keeps the left-hand portion (obligation) of a contract And does not blame the other party.’ And he ends this passage with what Chan calls a ‘common ancient proverb’ to wit: ‘The Way of Heaven has no favorites. It is always with the good man.’”
    
“And the ‘good man’ is the one who follows the Dao of things of course.”
    
“Now here is an interesting quote having nothing to do with Daoism, other than Lao’s usual back to nature and down with civilization motif, I mean this from 80: ‘Let the people again knot cords and use them (in place of writing).’ What does that remind you of Karl?”
    
“It reminds me of the Inca.”
    
“That is correct. The Inca did not have a writing system and they kept records and even sent messages by means of knotted cords called quipu. I just find it very interesting that both ancient China and the Inca civilization had these methods of communication. It may even be pre-Inca. Who knows how far back in time this went?” [We can’t read the quipu today.]
    
“Well it can certainly lead to interesting speculation. Are you suggesting some prehistoric contact between the Chinese and the Inca or their predecessors? The Inca were rather late you know, around 1200 AD or so.”
    
“Not really. I just thought it was a strange coincidence.”
    
“You know, Fred, if that quote was from 80 we have come to the end of the “Daode Jing.” It only has 81 chapters.”
    
“Right you are Karl, and here is the last quote I’m going to read: ‘A good man does not argue; He who argues is not a good man. A wise man has no extensive knowledge; he who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man. The sage does not accumulate for himself. The more he uses for others, the more he has himself. The more he gives to others, the more he possesses of his own. The Way of Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.’”
    
“I see an altruistic moral sense at work here, but it contradicts some of the previous passages about keeping the people ignorant, etc., it can’t really benefit the people to be lacking in knowledge....”
    
“Ignorance is bliss.”
    
“When knowledge is folly--but you still need knowledge to be aware of folly. If Laozi had been consistent he would have thought the “Daode Jing” itself was folly and never have written it! And he is just wrong about the relation between the wise man and knowledge. Extensive knowledge of the uses of plants and herbs, etc., in medicine or how to take care of animals, or what foods to grow and how to do it, or how to read the weather signs to be able predict storms or floods, etc., are all examples of being ‘wise’ by accumulating ‘extensive knowledge.’ I can see why the Confucian sages were upset with many of the ideas floated about in this book. But I’m glad we went over it since it is so important in the history of Chinese thought.”
 
“The most important Daoist was actually Zhuangzi (369-286 B.C.) and we won’t understand Daoism without discussing him.”
 
“OK. We will do him next. A Marxist Discussion of Zhuangzi.”

​To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here.
To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. 
​To read the Mozi Dialogue click here.

​“Well, Karl, what do you know about the Legalists and Han Fei in particular?”
 
 
“I remember what Reese [“Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion” by William L. Reese] says.  That he lived in the Third Century B.C., that he was the Prince of Han and committed suicide in 233 B.C. because the King of Qin wouldn’t accept his services. He is the major philosopher in the Legalist School.”
 
 
“Pretty good. Chan calls this school the most radical of the schools for its rejection of Confucianism (morality) and Moism (religion). Remember, the Qin Kingdom conquered the other Chinese Kingdoms and the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.) set up the imperial system, under the First Emperor, that ruled China until 1912. The dubious claim to fame of the Legalists is that they helped set up the ideological framework for the Qin. Han Fei was the most important of a line of Legalist philosophers. He also studied under Xunzi and, unjustly I think, some of his more ‘totalitarian’ tendencies have been read back into his teacher. Legalist predecessors were Kuan Chung (Seventh Century B.C.), Lord Shang, Prime Minister of Qin (Fourth Century B.C.), his contemporary, the Prime Minister of Han, Shen Buhai and Shen Dao (c.350-275 B.C.). Chan notes that his fellow student with Xunzi, Li Si, who died in 208 B.C. was behind the suicide of Han Fei. I can’t believe he killed himself just because he couldn’t get a job with the future First Emperor!”
 
 
“That does seem strange. Here is some more info in Creel [H.G. Creel “Confucius and the Chinese Way”]. It seems Li Si actually turned the King against Han Fei by telling him that he would not support Qin in a war against Han. Han Fei was tossed into prison and forced to kill himself by Li Si. That makes more sense.”
 
 
“It also makes Li Si a fake sage! That type of behavior seems completely against all the teachings of the philosophers we have so far discussed! Xunzi would not have liked that at all. Why did he do it?”
 
 
“His motive makes it even worse. He knew that Han Fei was a better philosopher than he, and he was jealous that the King would prefer him. Li Si was already a minister in Qin when Han Fei came to offer his services.”
 
 
“So, are we ready to look at the “Han Feizi” and see what this new philosophy was all about?”
 
 
“I’m ready, Fred.”
 
 
“Chan says Han Fei is most famous for his synthesis of Legalist views and for his discussion of the Dao which influenced all the Daoists of note. I will begin with Chan’s first selection ‘1. The Synthesis of Legalistic Doctrine.’ Han Fei starts by noting that Confucianism and Moism are the most popular philosophies and attacks them for trying to pretend they represent the wisdom of the old sage kings. Han Fei is against using the past as a model for the present and future. He says, since no one can really tell what the old sage-kings' true teachings were or how to apply them today, then, ‘To be sure of anything without corroborating evidence is stupidity, and to base one’s argument on anything about which one cannot be sure is perjury. Therefore those who openly base their arguments on the authority of the ancient kings and who are dogmatically certain of Yao and Shun are men either of stupidity or perjury.’ “
 
 
“Technically, while Mo may have mentioned Yao and Shun, it was Wen and Tang and Wu and Yu that he appeals to most of the time in the Chan extracts. But in principle Han Fei’s argument is against both Mo and Confucius.”
 
 
“This next quote shows that the Legalists were in favor of a government of laws and not of men! ‘Although there is a naturally straight arrow or a naturally round piece of wood [once in a hundred generations] which does not depend on any straightening or bending, the skilled workman does not value it. Why? Because it is not just one person who wishes to ride and not just one shot that the archer wishes to shoot [so bending and straightening of wood is needed as a skill-tr]. Similarly, the enlightened ruler does not value people who are naturally good and who do not depend on reward and punishment. Why? Because the laws of the state must not be neglected, and government is not for only one man. Therefore the ruler who has the technique does not follow the good that happens by chance but practices the way of necessity ....’ And Chan remarks, ‘In the necessity of straightening and bending, note the similarity to Xunzi. The theory of the originally evil nature of man is a basic assumption of the Legalists.”
 
 
“I still say that Xunzi was not like the Legalists. I pointed this out at the start of our discussion on the Xunzi.”
 
 
“And I said I agreed with you. You will be happy to know that Chan also agrees with you and not with Fung [Fung Yu-lan, “A Short History of Chinese Philosophy”] who holds that Han Fei based his doctrines on those of Xunzi.”
 
 
“Well, I like that! Just what does old Chan have to say about this issue Fred?”
 
 
“He says the bending and straightening in Xunzi meant education and the like, but Han Fei only relied on rewards and punishments. Chan said, ‘Xunzi had a firm faith in man’s moral reform but the Legalists have no such faith.’ And, he adds, ‘It is misleading, at least, to say, as Fung does, that Han Feizi based his doctrines on the teachings of Xunzi.’ This is because they ‘were utterly different in their attitudes toward man as a moral being.’”
 
 
“I’ll buy that. So, let’s go on with some more of the ‘Han Feizi’.”
 
 
“Sure. Han Feizi says the enlightened ruler needs four things to ensure his success. Namely, the ‘timeliness of the seasons,’ the support of the people, ‘skills and talents,’ and finally a position of power. He says, ‘Acting against the sentiment of the people, even Meng Pen and Xia Yu (famous men of great strength) could not make them exhaust their efforts. Therefore with timeliness of the seasons the grains will grow of themselves.’ In fact with all four conditions, then, ‘Like water flowing and like a boat floating, the ruler follows the course of Nature and enforces an infinite number of commands. Therefore he is called an enlightened ruler....’”
 
 
“Sounds like Daoism.”
 
 
“You couldn’t be more right Karl. Chan’s comment on that quote I just gave is, ‘Of all the ideas of the Legalists, perhaps the most philosophical is that of following Nature, which was derived from the Daoists.’ And, although he did not include it in his “Source Book”, Chan says that one of the chapters in the “Han Feizi” is a commentary on the thought of Laozi.”
 
 
“That’s excellent. Does he get more specific about law?”
 
 
“Try this. ‘The important thing for the ruler is either laws or statecraft. A law is that which is enacted into the statute books, kept in government offices, and proclaimed to the people. Statecraft is that which is harbored in the ruler’s own mind so as to fit all situations and control all ministers. Therefore for law there is nothing better than publicity, whereas in statecraft, secrecy is desired....’”
 
 
“Sounds a little like Machiavelli.”
 
 
“He goes on, ‘Ministers are afraid of execution and punishment but look upon congratulations and rewards as advantages. Therefore, if a ruler himself applies punishment and kindness, all ministers will fear his power and turn to the advantages.’”
 
 
“Yes, I remember this. The ‘two handles’ of government--reward and punishment. Machiavelli says a prince is better off being feared than loved, and I see that Han Fei also goes in for the fear factor.”

“Yes he does. A minister gets punished if he does something small after having said he would do something big, but also if he expects to do something small and it turns out to be big. Han Fei says, ‘It is not that the ruler is not pleased with the big accomplishments but he considers the failure of the big accomplishments to correspond to the words worse than the big accomplishments themselves. Therefore he is to be punished....’”
 
 
“That certainly won’t encourage ministers to surpass themselves! That seems counter-productive. I understand being punished for big talk and little deeds, but if you set out to do only a little yet accomplish something big despite yourself, I think it is not wise for the ruler to punish you. Suppose you said you would delay the enemy while the ruler collects his forces and instead you are able to defeat the enemy. What is the sense of being punished?”
 
 
“I agree with you Karl but that is the way Legalists play the game. Here is what Chan says about it. ‘Like practically all ancient Chinese schools, the Legalists emphasized the theory of the correspondence of names and actualities. But while the Confucianists stressed the ethical and social meaning of the theory and the Logicians stressed the logical aspect, the Legalists were interested in it primarily for the purpose of political control. With them the theory is neither ethical nor logical but a technique for regimentation.’”
 
 
“Well that it is, but it will not really work in the interests of the ruler. In fact the Qin Legalist state fell apart shortly after the death of the First Emperor. Don’t forget that Han Fei had to commit suicide, a victim perhaps of his own Machiavellian position.”
 
 
“Here is a big attack on the Confucianists.”
 
 
“This should be good!”
 
 
“This attack is also directed at Mozi so his doctrines were still around. ‘At present Confucianists and Moists all praise ancient kings for their universal love for the whole world, which means that they regarded the people as parents [regard their children].... Now, to hold that rulers and ministers act towards each other like father and son and consequently there will necessarily be orderly government, is to imply that there are no disorderly fathers or sons. According to human nature, none are more affectionate than parents who love all children, and yet not all children are necessarily orderly.’”
 
 
“So here come the ‘two handles’.”
 
 
“It seems to be the case Karl. Han Fei says that you have to have laws against the disorderly people in the state. He makes the point that ‘people are submissive to power and few of them can be influenced by the doctrines of righteousness.’”
 
 
“That’s the case in empirical states that haven’t been designed to conform to Confucian ideals. Why should we limit ourselves to these kinds of state?”
 
 
“Because that is being realistic. Look, Han Fei says, at what happened to Confucius in the real world. In the real world ‘Duke Ai of Lu was an inferior ruler. When he sat on the throne as the sovereign of the state, none within the borders of the state dared refuse to submit. For people are originally submissive to power and it is truly easy to subdue people with power. Therefore Confucius turned out to be a subordinate and Duke Ai, contrary to one’s expectation, became a ruler. Confucius was not influenced by Duke Ai’s righteousness; instead, he submitted to his power. Therefore on the basis of righteousness, Confucius would not submit to Duke Ai, but because of the manipulation of power, Confucius became a subordinate to him. Nowadays in trying to persuade rulers, scholars do not advocate the use of power which is sure to win, but say that if one is devoted to the practice of humanity and righteousness, one will become a true king.’”
 
 
“Just the view of Plato as well as al-Farabi [872-950 A.D, great Islamic Aristotelian]. But you don’t have to tell me that Han Fei thinks that that is bunk.”
 
 
“With a vengeance! It looks to me that he wouldn’t support any of the Confucian policies and would rather see a big military state--Sparta rather than Athens! He says, ‘The state supports scholars and knights-errant in times of peace, but when an emergency arises it has to use soldiers. Thus those who have been benefited by the government cannot be used by it and those used by it have not been benefited.’”
 
 
“It does look like a professional army would fulfill his ideas. But, that type of army is parasitical in times of peace and it makes oppression by the government so much the easier. I presume his reference to ‘knights-errant’ is a swipe at the Moists.”
 
 
“Here are some more of his ideas, ‘If in governmental measures one neglects ordinary affairs of the people and what even the simple folks can understand, but admires the doctrines of the highest wisdom, that would be contrary to the way of orderly government. Therefore subtle and unfathomable doctrines are no business of the people.... Therefore the way of the enlightened ruler is to unify all laws but not to seek for wisemen and firmly to adhere to statecraft but not to admire faithful persons. Thus laws will never fail and no officials will ever commit treachery or deception.’”
 
 
“You know Fred, I don’t think that this is an either/or type of situation. I’m sure the Confucians would also agree that the people should not be left out of consideration. They always advocated education. That doesn’t mean that just because you have the elementary schools you have to abandon the university--which is what Han Fei seems to be saying. His emphasis on ‘statecraft’--the secret machinations of the ruler’s brain seems to conflict with his confidence in the ‘laws’ and introduces arbitrariness into the system. As for officials never committing treachery or deception--look what happened to him. Either Li Si, a Legalist himself, committed treachery or Han Fei was engaged in deception and the future First Emperor was right to imprison him. But the consensus is that Han Fei was innocent. Therefore he was the victim of ‘statecraft’ and in this instance the laws failed. I think it was this contradiction in his system that led to its untenability in the long run and why Confucianism, which is more balanced and nuanced, somewhat succeeded. I would also like to point out that his stress on the ‘common people’ is probably due to the influence of Daoism and this influence is also the reason he failed to integrate popular education and ‘the doctrines of the highest wisdom.’ For him these doctrines didn’t exist in the Confucian or Moist sense.”
 
 
“I think you are right Karl. These next words have a real Daoist flavor. He says, ‘In regard to the words [of traveling scholars], rulers of today like their arguments but do not find out if they correspond to the facts. In regard to the application of these words to practice, they praise their fame but do not demand accomplishment. Therefore there are many in the world whose talks are devoted to argumentation and who are not thorough when it comes to practical utility.... In their deeds scholars struggle for eminence but there is nothing in them that is suitable for real accomplishment. Therefore wise scholars withdraw to caves and decline the offering of positions.’”
 
 
“Very Daoist! Too bad Han Fei did not take his own advice. If he had gone to live in a cave somewhere instead of going off to take a position in Qin, and struggling for eminence with Li Si, he would not have ended up having to commit suicide.”
 
 
“Here is the last quote from this section of Chan. ‘Therefore in the state of the enlightened ruler, there is no literature of books and records but the laws serve as the teaching. There are no sayings of ancient kings but the officials act as teachers. And there are no rash acts of the assassin; instead, courage will be demonstrated by those who decapitate the enemy [in battle]. Consequently, among the people within the borders of the state, whoever talks must follow the law, whoever acts must aim at accomplishment, and whoever shows courage must do so entirely in the army. Thus the state will be rich when at peace and the army will be strong when things happen.’”
 
 
 
“Wow! This is no good. ‘No literature of books’--this will result in a violation of the Prime Directive as the only views available will be Legalist and thus authority rather than reason will end up ruling people’s minds.”

“Chan says, ‘The advocation of prohibiting the propagation of private doctrines eventually led to the Burning of Books in 213 B.C. and in the periodic prohibitions of the propagation of personal doctrines throughout Chinese history.’”
 

“Chan wrote that before the ‘Cultural Revolution’, which was neither ‘cultural’ nor a ‘revolution,’ we can see the bad effects of this doctrine are still alive. Not allowing ‘personal doctrines’ means only state sanctioned ‘truth’ is allowed, a sure condition for ending up as far away from being able to find ‘truth’ as you can imagine. I hate to seem critical of the Chinese government, especially as it has raised the Chinese people out of feudal despair and into the modern world, but they should heed Carl Sagan’s advice that ‘The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.’” I’m not singling out China. Every government in the world could do better in this respect.”
 
 
“Well put Karl, but now I’m going to go over the other section that Chan has in his “Source Book”, namely Han Fei’s discussion of Daoism, which Chan calls ‘one of the most important.’ Chan calls this section ‘Interpretations of Dao.’ Are you ready for this?”
 
 
“Ready!”

 
“OK, here goes, ‘Dao is that by which all things become what they are. It is that with which all principles are commensurable. Principles are patterns (wen) according to which all things come into being, and Dao is the cause of their being. Therefore it is said that Dao puts things in order (li). Things have their respective principles and cannot interfere with each other, therefore principles are controlling factors in things. Everything has its own principle different from that of others, and Dao is commensurate with all of them [as one]. Consequently, everything has to go through the process of transformation. Since everything has to go through the process of transformation, it has no fixed mode of life. As it has no fixed mode of life, its life and death depend on the endowment of material force (qi) [by Dao]. Countless wisdom depends on it for consideration. And the rise and fall of all things is because of it. Heaven obtains it and therefore becomes high. The earth obtains it and therefore can hold everything....’”
 
 
“He seems to be following Laozi fairly closely.”
 
 
“Yes indeed, as the following shows as well. ‘Whatever people use for imagining the real [as the skeleton to image the elephant] is called form (xiang). Although Dao cannot be heard or seen, the sage decides and sees its features on the basis of its effects. Therefore it is called [in the ‘Laozi ] “shape without shape and form without objects.”’”
 
 
“Sort of like ‘Gravity” with Newton. It couldn’t be seen or heard but the effects, as with the falling apple, led Newton to work out its features. The great law that controls everything, like Gravity, that is the Dao.”
 
 
“Han Fei goes on. ‘In all cases principle is that which distinguishes the square from the round, the short from the long, the course from the refined, and the hard from the brittle. Consequently, it is only after principles become definite that Dao can be realized.’”
 
 
“But Dao is the basis of principle! To keep my Newton analogy going, I would have to say that it is only when objects are manifesting their attraction that Gravity can be realized.”
 
 
“It is the ‘eternal’ Dao that Han Fei is interested in. He says, ‘Only that which exists from the very beginning of the universe and neither dies nor declines until heaven and earth disintegrate can be called eternal. What is eternal has neither change nor any definite particular principle itself. Since it has no definite particular principle itself, it is not bound in any particular locality. This is why [it is said in the ‘Laozi’] that it cannot be told. The sage sees its profound vacuity (xu) and utilizes its operation everywhere. He is forced to give it the name Dao. Only then can it be talked about. Therefore it is said, “The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao.”’”
 
 
“Does Chan say why this is ‘most important’?”
 
 
“Yes he does. He goes into this passage with a long comment. ‘This is one of the earliest and most important discussions of Dao. It is of great importance for two reasons. First, principle (li) has been the central concept in Chinese philosophy for the last eight hundred years, and Han Fei was one of the earliest to employ the concept. Secondly, to him Dao is not an undifferentiated continuum in which all distinctions disappear. On the contrary, Dao is the very reason why things are specific and determinate. This is a radical advance and anticipated the growth of Neo-Daoism along this direction in the third and fourth centuries A.D.’”
 
 
“That completes our treatment of Han Fei?”
 
 
“It does. You know, I think we need to discuss Laozi and Daoism as this philosophy is almost equal to Confucianism in Chinese thought. If we want to really understand China today then we must understand the ‘Dao’ of Chinese Communism so we should get a grip on the thought of Laozi.
 
 
O.K., let’s do it next.

​To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here.
To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. 
To read the Mozi Dialogue click here.

​As rich nations stockpile COVID-19 vaccines, China is providing a lifeline to Global South nations spurned by Western pharmaceuticals and excluded by the West’s neocolonial vaccine nationalism. So why is China being smeared for its efforts?

​United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called it “the biggest moral test” facing the world today. World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom warned of a “catastrophic moral failure” whose price would be paid with the lives of those in the world’s poorest countries. 
​   
Such cautionings of inequitable global vaccine distribution have been shunted to the margins; instead, optimistic chatter of “returning to normal” is circulating once again as Global North citizens line up for their long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine. But normal, as ever, is relative: public health advocates warn that some countries may not be able to even begin their vaccination campaigns until 2024.      

Vaccine apartheid is here, and it is revealing once more the ways our world continues to be structured by the geopolitical binaries of colonialism, capitalism, and racism. The People’s Vaccine Alliance reports that rich countries have bought enough doses to vaccinate their populations three times over. Canada alone has ordered enough vaccines to cover each Canadian five times over. Until March, the United States was hoarding tens of millions of AstraZeneca vaccines—not yet approved for domestic use—and refusing to share them with other countries (only under immense pressure did the Biden administration announce it would send doses to Mexico and Canada). Israeli officials, lauded for delivering a first dose to more than half of its citizens, have likened their responsibility to vaccinate Palestinians living under apartheid to Palestinians’ obligation to “take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.” The European Union has extended controversial “ban options” which allow member states to block vaccine exports to non-EU nations. Meanwhile, countries like South Africa and Uganda are paying two to three times more for vaccines than the EU.

As of March 2021, China had shared 48% of domestically-manufactured vaccines with other countries through donations and exports. By contrast, the United States and United Kingdom had shared zero. ​

While the Global North hoards global vaccine stockpiles, China—alongside other much-maligned states such as Russia and Cuba—is modeling a very different practice of vaccine internationalism. As of April 5th, the Foreign Ministry reported that China had donated vaccines to more than 80 countries and exported vaccines to more than 40 countries. Science analytics firm Airfinity reported that as of March 2021, China had shared 48% of domestically-manufactured vaccines with other countries through donations and exports. By contrast, the United States and United Kingdom had shared zero. China has also partnered with more than 10 countries on vaccine research, development, and production, including a joint vaccine in collaboration with Cuba.   
​
Crucially, China’s vaccine sharing has provided a lifeline to low-income Global South nations who have been out-bidded by rich nations racing to stockpile Western-made vaccines. Donations to African nations including Zimbabwe and Republic of Guinea, which both received 200,000 Sinopharm doses in February, have allowed those countries to begin vaccine rollouts for medical workers and the elderly rather than wait months or even years for access to vaccines through other channels. Just a week after Joe Biden ruled out sharing vaccines with Mexico in the short term, the country finalized an order for 22 million doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine to fill critical shortages.

Even more, Chinese vaccine aid has reached countries isolated from global markets by sanctions and embargoes enforced by the United States and its allies. In March, China donated 100,000 vaccines to Palestine, a move praised by the Palestinian health ministry for enabling the inoculation of 50,000 health workers and eldery in Gaza and the West Bank who have been cut off from accessing Israeli vaccine rollouts. Venezuela, with many of its overseas assets frozen by U.S. sanctions, received 500,000 vaccines donated by China in a gesture praised by Nicolás Maduro as a sign of the Chinese people’s “spirit of cooperation and solidarity.” China’s international vaccine policy follows the broad pattern of China’s early pandemic aid, which similarly equipped low-income and sanctions-starved nations with the tools to combat the pandemic at home. 

In the face of a global pandemic that the U.S. alliance has used as a political cudgel against China, China’s vaccine internationalism has been a natural outgrowth of its philosophy of mutual cooperation and solidarity. From rapidly sequencing the viral genome and making it immediately publicly accessible to world researchers, to sending medical delegations to dozens of nations around the world, China’s pandemic response has been guided by a simple axiom of global solidarity. Xi Jinping made China the first nation to commit to making a COVID-19 vaccine a global public good in May 2020, meaning any Chinese vaccine would be produced and distributed on a non-rivalrous, non-excludable basis. In a telling contrast, that commitment came just as President Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze U.S. funding to the World Health Organization in an attempt to punish the organization for daring to work cooperatively with Chinese health officials. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has similarly emphasized vaccine solidarity, urging his colleagues at the United Nations Human Rights Council in February that “solidarity and cooperation is our only option.” Wang chastised countries that he noted are “obsessed with politicizing the virus and stigmatizing other nations” and implored that global vaccine distribution be made “accessible and affordable to developing countries.” China’s record to date shows it is working to follow through on the lofty rhetoric its officials have used to implore global solidarity to defeat the pandemic. ​

Because China’s vaccine internationalism models a form of multilateral cooperation beyond the scope of U.S. hegemony, it has been met with relentless media propaganda designed to cast China’s vaccination efforts as shady, manipulative, and unsafe. In November 2020, the Wall Street Journal gleefully announced that Brazil had suspended trials of the Sinovac vaccine following an “severe adverse event.” Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing Brazilian president and Trump ally, declared it a “victory.” Casual observers would reasonably assume that there were serious safety issues with the Chinese vaccine; only closer reading would fill in the crucial context, that the cause of death of the participant was in fact suicide. A similar ruse was exploited in January, as headlines blasted that a Peruvian volunteer had died in the midst of a Sinopharm vaccine trial. Again, behind the salacious headlines was a crucial detail: the volunteer, who died of COVID-19 complications, had received the placebo rather than the vaccine.  ​

As study after study shows the efficacy of Chinese and Russian vaccines, the media has turned to painting vaccine aid and exports as a dangerous form of “vaccine diplomacy.” Human Rights Watch nonsensically described China’s vaccine aid as a “dangerous game,” citing conspiracies about the research development of Chinese-made vaccines. The New York Times wondered if China had “done too well” against COVID-19, claiming that the government was “over-exporting vaccines made in China in a bid to expand its influence internationally.” Headline after headline bemoaned that China was “winning” at vaccine diplomacy, making clear that Western pundits view the lives of Global South peoples as pawns in a zero-sum game valued only insofar as they further the interests of Western hegemony.   

Some advocates say the bias against Chinese vaccines is based both on geopolitics and racist notions of scientific expertise. Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which coordinates medical access in India, Brazil and South Africa, said “the entire world—not just the West—is incredulous at the idea that you could have useful science in this pandemic come out of places not in the West.” Yet he emphasized the importance of Chinese and Indian vaccines as a “lifeline” to low and middle-income countries, both in addressing vaccine gaps in the developing world and as a “useful cudgel” for negotiations with Western pharmaceuticals. 

Despite mainstream media tropes of Chinese “vaccine diplomacy,” it is the United States—not China—whose pharmaceutical companies are employing exploitative tactics to profit from vaccine sales. Pfizer, for instance, has been accused of “intimidating” Latin American governments in their vaccine sale negotiations, asking countries to put up embassy buildings and military bases as collateral to reimburse any future litigation costs—leading countries like Argentina and Brazil to reject the vaccine outright. One can only imagine the media hysteria which would ensue were Sinopharm to be caught demanding overseas military bases as collateral for its vaccine exports. But because it is a U.S. company, Pfizer’s medical neocolonialism has been absolved and flown under the radar. 

Despite allegations of Chinese vaccine opportunism, it is the United States which has politicized its recent foray into vaccine exports. During his first meeting with leaders of the “Quad,” an anti-China alliance likened to NATO and consisting of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan, Joe Biden announced his intention to use the alliance to produce one billion vaccines for distribution in Asia in an explicit bid to “counter” China. It is telling that while China stresses global cooperation through channels such as COVAX (to which it has donated 10 million doses) the WHO, and the UN peacekeeper’s vaccination program, the United States is pursuing vaccine diplomacy through a highly-politicized military alliance designed to contain China. Likewise, despite the Biden administration’s lofty rhetoric about its leadership over a global “rules-based order,” it is the United States which has violated a UN Security Council resolution demanding a global military ceasefire to facilitate pandemic cooperation with recent airstrikes in Syria.    
​
Perhaps most egregiously, the United States and other rich nations have blocked a proposed World Trade Organization waiver on intellectual property restrictions which would enable Global South countries to manufacture generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines. Proposed by South Africa and India with the backing of China, Russia, and the majority of Global South nations, Global North obstruction of vaccine IP waivers in the WTO makes clear that the status quo of vaccine apartheid is not an accident, but a product of deliberate policy by Western nations to put the profits of their pharmaceutical companies above the lives of the world’s poor.

​Obstruction of vaccine IP waivers in the WTO makes clear that the status quo of vaccine apartheid is not an accident, but a product of deliberate policy by Western nations to put the profits of their pharmaceutical companies above the lives of the world’s poor.

With Global North nations stockpiling vaccines and experts warning that new rounds of vaccinations may be necessary to combat COVID-19 variants, critical vaccine shortages are here to stay. China’s manufacturing power and macroeconomic policy puts it in a position to continue to be the world leader in vaccine production. As of April, China’s Sinovac announced it had reached the capacity to produce a whopping 2 billion doses of CoronaVac per year, thanks in part to Beijing district government efforts to secure the company additional land for vaccine production. China’s vaccine production builds on the successful model of state intervention and coordination through which state-owned enterprises and private companies rallied to construct hospitals, manufacture PPE, and coordinate food supplies during China’s February 2020 outbreak. 

The vaccine policies forwarded by China versus the U.S. and its allies serves as a microcosm for two very different worldviews: where China has insisted on global solidarity to defeat the pandemic, the Western world has refused to ease the pressures of its neocolonial regime. While China supports bids for vaccine equity in the WTO and UN, the Global North is bolstering vaccine apartheid for the sake of corporate profits. These differences alone ought to be enough to put to rest vacuous assertions that render U.S.-China conflict as a matter of “competing imperialisms.”  
​
Xi Jinping stressed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic a commitment to “protect people's lives and health at all costs.” Not when it is profitable, not when it is geopolitically expedient—at all costs. Western obstruction of efforts towards vaccine equity forwarded by China, Cuba, South Africa, and other Global South nations only reveals the very different calculus which governs the West’s continuing neocolonial regime.

​“Good morning Fred Are you ready to begin our discussion of Mozi?”
 
“I certainly am, but he is rather new to me. I mean, everyone has heard of Confucius and Laozi.”
 
“It's true. Mozi is not as well known as the other two. Mozi lived around 479 to 381 B.C.--somewhere in that range. We really don’t know too much about him. We have a 53-chapter book called the “Mozi” which is made up of his writings and those of some of his followers. He lived at the end of the feudal period of the Zhou Dynasty a little after the time of Confucius and was in the ‘warrior class.’  This class somewhat resembled and probably inspired what the Japanese developed as the class of the Samurai. Mo, (the “zi” is an honorific suffix meaning “master”—i.e., “teacher”) thought up a philosophy contrary to the Confucians and which he hoped would solve all the practical problems of humanity. He was the leader of a band of warriors--such bands were quite common in those days--but he would only go into action to try and prevent war or to protect the underdog who was being unjustly attacked. This was not common for those days or any days including our own (with the possible exception of the type of military aid given by the Cubans).”
 
“Well, Karl, I have my copy of Chan [W.T. Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy] which starts with Chapter 15 on ‘Universal Love’. It begins with a question ‘But what are the benefits and harm of the world?’ To which Mozi responds, “Take the present cases of mutual attacks among states, mutual usurpation among families, and mutual injuries among individuals, or the lack of kindness and loyalty between ruler and minister, of parental affection and filial piety between father and son, and of harmony and peace among brothers.’”
 
“OK Fred, that pretty much sums up the ‘harm of the world’ and it is as true of our times as it was in Ancient China even if Mo only makes male references due to his patriarchal culture. We will have to add ‘mothers and daughters’ as well as ‘sisters’ to the mix.”
 
“Mozi next explains why the world is in such sad shape, that is, where did all these problems come from. Mo says “They arise out of want of mutual love. At present feudal lords know only to love their own states and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their states to attack others. Heads of families know only to love their own families and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their families to usurp others. And individuals know only to love their own persons and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their own persons to injure others.’”
 
“So, ‘want of mutual love’ is the source of our woes!”
 
“Exactly, he says ‘Because of want of mutual love, all the calamities, usurpations, hatred, and animosity in the world have arisen. Therefore the man of humanity condemns it.’”
 
“And with what is he going to replace it?”
 
“'It should be replaced by the way of universal love and mutual benefit.’”
 
“Which is?”
 
"'It is to regard other people’s countries as one’s own. Regard other people’s families as one’s own. Regard other people’s person as one’s own. Consequently, when feudal lords love one another, they will not fight in the fields.... Because of universal love, all the calamities, usurpations, hatred, and animosity in the world may be prevented from arising. Therefore the man of humanity praises it.’” [“Universal love” is a traditional translation of the Chinese jiān'ài, 兼愛 which is also rendered “impartial care.”]
 
“You know, many great philosophers and some, but not all, religious leaders have said more or less the same thing. I think all the great humanist thinkers, West or East, would be in general agreement. But they will differ with Mo about the practicality of his proposal and if there should be some distinctions within his concept of ‘universal’. This will be the ‘battle line’. Mo will want absolute universality which he thinks is the only way peace and harmony will come about.”
 
“That is right, Karl, and Mo takes up the challenge as I will now read. Here is the objection: ‘But now gentlemen of the world would say: Yes, it will be good if love becomes universal. Nevertheless, it is something distant and difficult to practice.’ To which Mo responds, ‘This is simply because gentlemen of the world fail to recognize its benefit and understand its reason.’”
 
“I remember Chan’s comment on this passage. That Mo used ‘benefits’ or ‘results’ as the motivation for his doctrines. This is similar to our philosophy of pragmatism. C.S. Peirce had something called the ‘pragmatic maxim’ his own Prime Directive as it were: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ Granted that this is a theory of meaning but we can see its relation to Mo. Mo is saying, the ‘Mohist Maxim’: ‘Consider what benefits we conceive our belief to have. Then, our conception of the benefits is the whole of our conception of the rightness of our belief.’ This is the theory of truth of Mohism.”
 
“I have the Chan comment right here Karl. He doesn’t make the point you do but does contrast the ‘Mohist Maxim’ of yours with Confucianism. The Confucian thinks the ‘inferior’ man is after ‘benefits’. The Confucian is interested in ‘righteousness.’ “
 
“Does he give references?”
 
“He cites the Analects 4:11,16; 15:17; 17:23”
 
“Let me see.” Karl took Chan’s book and looked through it. “The last two are not in here,” he said. He then pulled down a copy of the complete work (the “Analects”) and looked at it.
 
“Well, none of these references are quite on the mark. Confucius is really condemning material goodies and profit. I think the ‘Mohist Maxim’ goes way beyond this limited conception of ‘benefits.’ World peace would be a Mohist ‘benefit’ and that is not the same as ‘profit’. World peace would even be a motivation to action for a Confucianist who could interpret it as ‘righteousness’ to benefit humanity (ren).”
 
“I will continue with the Mo quote. In this passage he explains how universal love even though difficult can be brought about. ‘Formerly Duke Wen [ruled 636 to 628 B.C.] of Jin liked his officers to wear coarse clothing. Therefore all his ministers wore [simple] sheepskin garments, carried their swords in [unadorned] leather girdles, and put on hats of plain cloth. Thus attired, they appeared before the ruler inside and walked around the court outside. What was the reason for this? It was because the ruler liked it and therefore the ministers could do it. Formerly, King Ling of Chu [ruled 530 to 527 B.C.] wanted people to have slender waists. Therefore all his ministers limited themselves to one meal a day. They exhaled before they tied their belts.... What was the reason for this? It was because the ruler liked it and therefore the ministers could do it.”
 
“This looks like ‘revolution from above’!”
 
“Wait! There is more. ‘Therefore Master Mo said: Now to eat little, to wear coarse clothing and to sacrifice one’s life for fame are things all people in the world consider difficult. But if the ruler likes them, the multitude can do them.... What difficulty is there in this (universal love)? Only the ruler does not make it his governmental measure and officers do not make it their conduct.’”
 
“This is definitely ‘revolution from above’! The Ruler only has to desire that a policy be carried out and voilà! He also mixes up the ‘ministers’ with the ‘multitude’. It's one thing to order the ministers to implement a policy, it's really quite another to think that the people will just obey and carry out the directions because ‘the ruler liked it.’
 
“Chan has a comment about this too Karl. He says “Universal love is promoted by Mohism because of its beneficial results. There is no conviction that it is dictated by the inherently good nature of man or by the inherent goodness of the act. Although Confucianism teaches love with distinctions, it also teaches love for all, but it does so on the grounds of moral necessity and of the innate goodness of man.’”
 
“Well that’s interesting. There seems some confusion in what Chan says, however. I can agree that the Mohist Maxim is at work here and not a belief in the innate goodness of humans but I must demur concerning Chan’s comment about the ‘inherent goodness of the act.’ That comment makes no sense to a Mohist because the ‘inherent goodness’ of an act just is the ‘benefits’ that result from it. The real question revolves around the nature of man, which is the basis for the Confucian critique. 
 
“Mo thinks that there are historical examples of the practice of his philosophy. To the objection that his theory is impracticable, and that universal love and mutual benefit cannot be put into action he replies, “Ancient sage kings did practice them. How do we know this to be the case? In ancient times, when Yu [first ruler of the Xia Dynasty, he ruled c. 2183-2175 BC] was ruling the empire, he dug the West and the Yu-tou rivers in the west to release the water from the Chu-sun-huang River [he did similar works in the east, north and south]...in order to benefit the peoples of Ching, Chu, Kan, and Yueh and the barbarians of the south. This is the story of Yu’s accomplishments. This shows that my doctrine of universal love has been practiced.’” 
 
“Weak!”
 
“Chan finds another contrast with the Confucians here. ‘While Confucianists cited historical examples for inspiration and as models, Mozi cited them to show that his teachings had been demonstrated. The difference between the idealistic and practical approach is clear.’”
 
“For whatever reason it seems like a common practice to refer to tradition for authority even if your ideas are new. This is not a uniquely Chinese practice.”
 
“Here is another of Mo’s arguments: ‘In ancient times, when King Wen [first ruler of the Zhou Dynasty who ruled c. 1751-1739 BC] ruled the Western Land, he shone like the sun and the moon all over the four quarters as well as the Western Land. He did not permit a big state to oppress a small state, or the multitude to oppress the widow or widower, or the ruthless and powerful to rob people’s grains or livestock. Heaven recognized his deeds and visited him with blessings. Consequently, the old and childless were well adjusted and enjoyed their full life span, the lonely had opportunity to fulfill their work among mankind, and the orphaned had the support to grow up....It shows that my doctrine of universal love has been practiced.’”
 
“I need to make two comments here. ‘Heaven recognized his deeds, etc...’ seems too anthropomorphic for Chinese thought at least on the ‘sage’ level....”
 
“Wait up, Karl, the next section is all about ‘The Will of Heaven.”
 
“OK, then. My second comment is that it seems that universal love is just the construction of a welfare state. There is obviously more to it than that or the Confucians would not be so upset with Mo.”
 
“OK Karl, before turning to ‘The Will of Heaven”, Chapter 26 of the Mozi, I’ll let Mo have the last word on ‘Universal Love’: ‘If rulers of the world today really want the empire to be wealthy and hate to have it poor, want it to be orderly and hate to have it chaotic, they should practice universal love and mutual benefit. This is the way of the sage-kings and the principle of governing the empire, and it should not be neglected.’”
 
“Even today Mo’s words are worth listening to. The ‘rulers of the world today’ have no concern for these ideas. Instead, with their aggressive military plans, their failure to help the poor and starving throughout the world, their do nothing environmental and AIDS policies, they seem to be just like the rulers of Mo’s day, only out to aggrandize their own selfish interests (Cuba excepted since its history of extension of medical aid and moral support to oppressed people everywhere is well known).
 
“Here is what Mo has to say about ‘righteousness’ and ‘heaven’. ‘Now what does heaven want and what does heaven dislike? Heaven wants righteousness and dislikes unrighteousness. Therefore, in leading the people of the world to engage in practicing righteousness, I should be doing what heaven wants.’”
 
“We must, Fred, keep in mind that, ‘righteousness’, for Mo means his doctrine of Universal Love. This is not the same meaning that Confucius gave to the term. As Fung points out [Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy], the term for Confucius was a ‘categorical imperative’ (although this is not the correct term). Confucius just meant there are unalterable moral duties which must be done out of duty regardless of consequences. Of course, other considerations, as long as they are moral, can override what may seem to be, at first glance, a particular duty. Notice also Mo’s appeal to ‘heaven’. This is similar to claims made by Western religious leaders, usually when reason is not on their side.”
 
“Mo continues: ‘I say: With righteousness the world lives and without righteousness the world dies, with it the world becomes orderly and without it the world becomes chaotic. Now, Heaven wants to have the world live and dislikes to have it die, wants to have it rich and dislikes to have it poor, wants to have it orderly and dislikes to have it chaotic. Therefore I know Heaven wants righteousness and dislikes unrighteousness.’”
 
“This expresses Mo’s view all right, but is not a very good argument despite the ‘therefore.’ How do you know Heaven wants righteousness? Because righteousness makes the world live and Heaven wants the world to live, ergo. This is R=L, H=L | H=R. Something like Nazis like their mothers, so do communists, therefore communists like Nazis. So, besides being a poor argument, even were it a good argument it just pushes the problem back a step--i.e., how do you know Heaven wants the world to live (as opposed to being indifferent). Because Heaven likes righteousness? And Heaven likes righteousness because it wants the world to live? He is running around in a circle here. His argument for Universal Love will have to stand on its own merits which right now means an appeal to the benefits it will bring the world. Despite Mo’s plans there is no ‘divine’ or ‘heavenly’ sanction for the Mohist Maxim.”

​“And Chan makes the following observation: ‘Even the will of Heaven and righteousness are explained in terms of practical results.’”
 
“Yes, but I think it important to look at the logic involved as well.”
 
“Now he says, ‘Moreover, righteousness is the standard. It is not to be given by the subordinate to the superior but be given from the superior to the subordinate. Therefore the common people should attend to their work with all their might, and should not forthwith set up the standard themselves.’”
 
“I am afraid we are about to discover the feudal limitations to Mo’s views.”
 
“Well Karl, he says, ‘Gentlemen of the world of course clearly understand that the emperor gives the standard to the three ministers, the several feudal lords, the minor officials, and the common people, but the common people of the world do not clearly understand that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor. Therefore the ancient sage-kings of the Three Dynasties [Xia, Shang, and Zhou]. Yu, Tang, and Wu, desiring to make it clear to the common people that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor, all fed oxen and sheep with grass and dogs and pigs with grain, and cleanly prepared pastry and wine to sacrifice to the Lord on High and spiritual beings and pray to Heaven for blessing. But I have not heard of Heaven praying to the emperor for blessing. I therefore know that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor. Thus the emperor is the most honorable in the world and the richest in the world. Therefore those who desire honor and wealth cannot but obey the will of Heaven.’”
 
“I don’t know about feeding grain to dogs, but this sounds like an accurate view of the feudal mentality at this time in China and even right up until a hundred or so years ago. At this time the Greeks already were experimenting with democracy and letting the common people [hoi polloi] have their say. The Chinese are thinking more along the lines of the Persians. I think this shows the advantages of the city state or polis over larger territorial entities. Meanwhile notice all this ‘Heaven’ and ‘spiritual beings’ talk. Unlike Confucius, Mo is trying to give an aura of popular religion, quite foreign to the sentiments of most educated Chinese, to his philosophy. This is a real violation of the Prime Directive of Philosophy [only use Reason].”
 
“The Mozi goes on: ‘Well, how did Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu obtain rewards? Mozi said: On the highest level they honored Heaven, on the middle level they served spiritual beings, and on the lower level they loved the people. Therefore the will of Heaven proclaimed, “They love universally those whom I love. They benefit universally those whom I benefit. Such love of people is really universal and such benefit to people is really substantial.” Therefore Heaven caused them to have the honor of being Sons of Heaven and possess the wealth of the whole empire.’”
 
“More religious coloring.”
 
“Even more coming up because now we see what happens to bad rulers! ‘Well how did Jie [last of the Xia dynasty], Zhou, Yu [R. 781-771 BC], and Li [R. 878-842 BC] incur punishment? Mozi said: On the highest level they blasphemed against Heaven, on the middle level they blasphemed against spiritual beings, and on the lower level they injured the people. Therefore the will of Heaven proclaimed, “They set themselves apart from those whom I love and hated them. They injure all those whom I benefit. Such hatred of people is really universal and such injury to people is really substantial.” Therefore Heaven caused them not to live out their life-span or to survive their generation.’”
 
“And what conclusions can be drawn from all this?”
 
“It's as Mo says--the ruler must follow righteousness i.e., practice universal love. Not doing so means that one has to rule by means of violence against the people! This leads to your undoing. Therefore following Mo’s philosophy ‘is beneficial to Heaven on the highest level, beneficial to spiritual beings on the middle level, and beneficial to man on the lower level. Being beneficial to these three means being beneficial to all. Therefore the whole world gives them a good name and calls them sage-kings.’ As for those bad rulers that go against Heaven, spiritual beings, and the people, ‘Not being beneficial to these three means not being beneficial to all. Therefore the whole world gives them a bad name and calls them wicked kings.’”
 
“I can’t think of any other Chinese philosopher who made such a pitch to religion. Mo was obviously trying to spread his ideas to the common people, not the educated elite!”
 
“Chan would agree with you Karl. His comment on all this is as follows: ‘In teaching obedience to the will of Heaven, Mozi was the most religious of ancient Chinese philosophers’”
 
“Unless he was a hypocrite.”
 
“A hypocrite? Why would you say that?”
 
“Listen to what Fung says about this. ‘Mozi’s proof of the existence of spirits is done primarily in order that he may introduce a religious sanction for his doctrine of all-embracing love, rather than because of any real interest in supernatural matters.’ He then quotes a passage not found in Chan’s book. This is from Chapter 31 of the Mozi: ‘If now all the people of the world could be made to believe that the spirits can reward the good and punish the bad, would the world then be in chaos?’ On the basis of this Fung concludes that Mo’s ‘doctrine of the Will of God and the existence of spirits is only to induce people to believe that they will be rewarded if they practice all-embracing love, and punished if they do not. Such a belief among the people was something useful; hence Mozi wanted it.’”
 
“That is highly speculative. Fung can’t know what Mo really thought. Are we not bound to respect the text, everything else being equal?”
 
“Oh, I think so. The Prime Directive and the text are all we have to go on. But it would not be, if Fung is right anyway, the only instance of a philosopher, or religious leader, telling one thing to hoi polloi while having another doctrine--the ‘real’ doctrine--for his followers.”
 
“The next selection in Chan is from Chapter 35 and he calls it ‘Attack on Fatalism. Pt. 1’. “
 
“This is the Chinese word “ming” which we translate as fate. “
 
“Yes, and Mozi used it to describe people both he and we would call ‘fatalists.’ Why do anything since Fate has already determined everything that will happen?”
 
“Those people are like those who think that since God is all powerful everything that happens happens according to His will. Some Marxists are like that too. Since ‘socialism’ is inevitable all we have to do is sit back and wait for it to happen. Another word we could use is ‘determinism.’ Everything is determined by the laws of nature and the previous state of the universe so we really can’t do anything except what has been predestined or predetermined. That, Fred, pretty much catches what Mo means by ming.”
 
“Well Mo does not approve of them. He says, ‘With this doctrine they tried to persuade the kings, dukes, and great officials above and to prevent the common people from doing their work. Therefore the fatalists are not men of humanity. Their doctrine must be clearly examined.’”
 
“I remember this. Mo puts forth a scientific procedure for looking at knowledge claims. Very advanced for his time.”
 
“That it is. He says that in order to examine a doctrine or knowledge claim some ‘standard’ must be adopted. Actually, he will have three standards. ‘For any doctrine some standard must be adopted. To expound a doctrine without a standard is like determining the directions of sunrise and sunset on a revolving potter’s wheel. In this way the distinction of right and wrong and benefit and harm cannot be clearly known. Therefore for any doctrine there must be the three standards. What are the three standards? Mozi said: [1] There must be a basis or foundation. [2] There must be an examination. [3] And there must be practical application. [1] Where to find the basis? Find it in the [will of Heaven and the spirits] the experiences of the ancient sage-kings above. [2] How is it to be examined? It is to be examined by inquiring into the actual experience of the eyes and ears of the people below. [3] How to apply it? Put it into law and governmental measures and see if they bring about benefits to the state and the people. These are called the three standards.’”
 
“This is a very good passage Fred. It could be updated to apply to the Chinese government today .”
 
“How so?”
 
“Well, [1] would be replaced by the experiences of the international communist and worker’s movements as well as what happens when you join the World Bank and the IMF. [2] This means that there should be more democratic procedures by which the masses of the Chinese people can get their opinions taken into consideration. I’m not saying the Party has to back off, but that it should be more inclusive and democratic. [3] This can stand as it is!”
 
“Chan agrees with this procedure. I think he calls it ‘pragmatic’. You can see the Mohist Maxim at work in [3] and his religious views in [1]. I can see why the Chinese government of today would have to change that. Chan actually says this is a ‘surprisingly scientific procedure: basis, examination, and application.’”
 
“Does he say anything else about fatalism, Fred?”
 
“He ends the discussion by reiterating the dangers of the idea and that human action is not all that important. He really opposes the “que será,será” attitude. ‘If the doctrine of the fatalist is put into practice, the ruler above would not attend to government, and the people below would not attend to their work.’ He is also upset because he says the religious duties won’t be carried out either. Why bother if you are a fatalist? ‘Therefore on the higher level fatalism is not beneficial to heaven, on the middle level it is not beneficial to spiritual beings, and on the lower level it is not beneficial to men. The unreasoning adherence to this doctrine is the source of evil ideas and the way of the wicked man. Therefore Mozi said: If the gentlemen of the world today really want the world to be rich and dislike it to be poor, and want the world to be orderly and dislike it to be chaotic, they must condemn the doctrine of fatalism. It is a great harm to the world.’”
 
“I can tell you that if you were a contemporary Mohist you would think the gentlemen of today in our new century do not really want the world to be rich rather than poor, nor do they dislike its being chaotic.”
 
“How so, Karl?”
 
“Because our so-called leaders don’t apply the Mohist Maxim to the problems confronting mankind today. Take the position of universal love for example. We have to think of all peoples and nations the same way--try to show love and understanding to everyone. This would mean in our own country that Blacks and Hispanics as well as whites, Amerindians, and others would all be the same--really not in just theory. Yet our leaders are still playing games with affirmative action, equal access to jobs and education. This shows they prefer evil ideas to universal love. There would also have to be an end to all the nonsense about ‘illegal aliens’ and hunting poor people down on the borders and trying to deport them. That doesn’t show any kind of universal love. The leaders would have to provide medical care and medicines, and housing, and education, and decent food for everyone without worrying that this might conflict with the so-called ‘rights’ of certain people or corporations to make money at the expense of these services not being available to everyone on an ‘as needed’ basis. This is all demanded in the name of ‘universal love.’ The military would have to go too. We have to share all the world's goodies with all the people of the world--love demands nothing less. That means the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East have to start loving each other--and it is up to the leaders to set the example for the people to follow. The land has to be shared and in fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, as well as Buddhists and others have to get together on one religion for everyone.”
 
“Oh Boy!”
 
“What can I say. Anything that divides the people and causes hatred and violence contradicts universal love and must go. Different religions do just that. Remember the Mohist Maxim. ‘Consider what benefits we conceive our belief to have., etc.’ If the gentlemen of today really want a peaceful and caring world they have to get together and start practicing universal love. But I think you would agree that they really only care about their own nations and groups and within their own groups and the rich and powerful only want to perpetuate their own selfish interests. Therefore a contemporary Mohist would be most upset with the gentlemen of today.”
 
“Did you say ‘Mohist’ or ‘Maoist’?”
 
“I know. But I said ‘Mohist.’ We will discuss Mao some other time and see if your snide comment is justified.”
 
“Now there are six more points which Chan thinks are important for a good understanding of Mohism.”
 
“So let’s get on with it. What is the first?”
 
“We discussed his ‘utilitarianism’ or ‘pragmatism’ before, but we should note these additional quotes. ‘Mozi said: Any word or action that is beneficial to Heaven, spiritual beings, and the people is to be undertaken.... Any doctrine that can elevate conduct should be perpetuated....In issuing orders, promoting any undertaking, employing the people, or expending wealth, the sage-kings in their administration never do anything that is not useful. Therefore re- sources are not wasted and the people can be freed from being overworked, and many benefits will be promoted....’”
 
“Again, this shows the Chinese penchant of trying to justify the ideas of the present by an appeal to the way things were done in the past. This is not just a Chinese trait! I think this quote agrees with my views about contemporary Mohism expressed a little while ago. What is the second point?”
 
“The second point is his condemnation of war. Mo hated war even though he was in the professional mercenary class! He would only fight defensive wars. As far as war is concerned, He wrote: ‘The multitude are injured and oppressed and the people are scattered.... Does it mean to benefit the people? The benefit to the people from killing the people of Heaven is slight indeed! And calculate the cost! This is the root of destruction of life. It exhausts the people to an immeasurable degree. Thus... no benefit to the people can be attained.’”

“Mo may have been the most concerned for the welfare of the common people, at least in this respect, than any of the ancient philosophers--east or west! What is the third point?”
 
“This is his condemnation of music. He talks about music, but you could extend his critique to art as such, all forms of art. Again he sounds like Mao. That’s why I asked you ‘Mo or Mao’?”
 
“Ok, Ok! What’s the passage?”
 
“’The reason why Mozi condemns music is not because the sounds of the big bells, resounding drums, harps and pipes are not delightful.... But set against the past it is not in accord with the deeds of the sage-kings and checked with the present it is not in accord with the benefits of the people. Therefore Mozi said: To engage in music is wrong.... To levy heavy taxes on the people in order to produce the sounds of big bells, resounding drums, harps, and pipes does not help the promotion of benefits and the removal of harms in the world.... Now kings, dukes, and great officials engage in music. To strike musical instruments they loot the people’s resources for food and clothing to such an extent.... Now kings, dukes, and great officials love music and listen to it, they certainly cannot go to court early and retire late in order to listen to litigations and administer the government. Therefore the country is in chaos and the state in danger.... Therefore Mozi said: To engage in music is wrong.’”
 
“Well, Fred, the condemnation is not against music per se. I can see no objection to folk music or the music the peasants might be playing in the villages. He is attacking the exploitation of the people by the court in order to support the official music [and art] productions of the state. This even sounds a little Daoist. Under appropriate non-exploitative social arrangements, even Mo would approve of music as ‘delightful’. This is the Mohist Maxim again. If we could create a society where music was beneficial and not based on exploitation of the people, I can’t see why a modern Mohist would object. As far as your reference to Mao, this was the original intention of Mao, however it may have turned out.”
 
“The fourth point is the condemnation of elaborate funerals. ‘Now the gentlemen of the world still doubt whether elaborate funerals and extended mourning are right or wrong, beneficial or harmful. Therefore Mozi said: I have inquired into the matter.... So, much wealth is buried in elaborate funerals and long periods of work are suspended in extended mourning. Wealth that is already produced is carried to be buried and wealth yet to be produced is long delayed. To seek wealth in this way is like seeking a harvest by stopping farming....’”
 
“This is very much in tune with his condemnation of music. Archaeologists won’t like this point! What’s the fifth point?”
 
“This is a point about who should be getting government positions. ‘How do we know elevating the worthy is the foundation of government? The answer is: When the honorable and the wise run the government, the ignorant and the humble remain orderly, but when the ignorant and the humble run the government, the honorable and the wise become rebellious. Therefore we know that elevating the worthy is the foundation of government.’”
 
“Very good, Fred. But who are the ‘honorable and wise’?”
 
“Who? I’ll tell you. They are the practitioners of universal love. That is, they should be. They should be true sages and philosophers. So Mo is saying just what Plato said. Philosophers should be the ones running the show! And of course the Confucians would be in agreement with Mo. Only instead of Mohist sages, Confucian sages would be in charge.”
 
“But who would be the true sages?”
 
“I’ll let you decide. We have covered some Confucians: Kongzi (Confucius) himself, Mengzi (Mencius) and he attacked Mo’s views on universal love, and we have discussed Xunzi to see whose arguments appear the better.”
 
“Well, Karl, here is our sixth and last point. Chan calls it ‘Agreement with the Superior.’ I’m not sure Mo looks too good in this section.”
 
“Let’s get with it!”
 
“He says: ‘Now, the frequent arrival of hurricanes and torrents are the punishment from Heaven upon the people for their failure to agree with Heaven....’”
 
“Yes, that is very bad, very superstitious. Like blaming God for the Lisbon earthquake in Voltaire’s day. This is retrograde compared to Confucius and Xunzi. This really calls in question Fung’s apologetics concerning Mo’s belief in the supernatural.”
 
“Now we get an answer to the question ‘How do we know that the principle of agreement with the superior can be used to govern the empire?’ This principle is important to Mo who after all was the supremo of a band of warriors and who definitely thought in terms of military obedience to the ‘superior.’ We get this answer from a consideration of Mo’s theory of the beginning of government.”
 
“This should be interesting!”
 
“Mo thinks that originally people did not have rulers. Everybody had their own way of doing things and their own moral and ethical system. ‘All of them considered their own concepts of right as correct and other people’s concepts as wrong. And there was strife among the strong and quarrels among the weak. Thereupon Heaven wished to unify all concepts of right in the world. The worthy were therefore selected and made emperor.’ The emperor then selected the ministers who then divided up the land and created the feudal lords all in the furtherance of better government since the emperor could not do everything by himself.”
 
“This sounds like the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ in so far as it appears that ‘Heaven’ somehow chose the emperor and while all other authority is delegated from him, his rests on that original choice. The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ is due to the desire of ‘Heaven’--Mo’s anthropomorphic god concept-- to have only one universal standard of ‘right’ prevail. Just like the Christians and others following Augustine’s views that there is a universal standard ‘God’s Will’.
 
“Muslims and Jews too, Karl.”
 
“Everybody gets into the act. At least Mo appeals to his utilitarian principles of benefit so that the sages have to figure out Heaven’s will. He doesn’t maintain that ‘Heaven” or its representatives came down and told him what its will was.”
 
“Yes, but if the sage gets it wrong there is Zeus with his thunderbolt!”
 
“Finish the passage.”
 
“’The feudal lords, realizing their inadequate wisdom and ability to govern the lands within the four borders by themselves, selected the next best in virtue.... Therefore, in appointing the three ministers, the feudal lords, the great officers, the prime minister, the village elders, and the heads of households, the emperor of old did not select them because of their wealth, high position, or leisure, but employed them to assist in bringing political order and administering the government.... When order prevails in the empire, the emperor further unifies all concepts of right as one in the empire and makes it agree with [the will of] Heaven. Therefore the principle of agreement with the superior can be applied by the emperor to govern the empire, by the feudal lords to govern the state, and the heads of households to govern the family....’”
 
“I remember Chan’s saying that many thought this smacked of absolutism. It reminds me of the Führerprinzip in a way, only it’s Heaven rather than a plebiscite that determines the ruler--but then vox populi, vox dei.”
 
“I thought you liked Mo’s views.”
 
“I like some of them. This Führerprinzip is not one of them. But, I suppose that it derives from the ideal of a sage king who understands the will of Heaven. This could also reflect back negatively on Plato’s philosopher kings.”
 
“Listen, Karl, Chan plays down the absolutism. After all, that's a concern of modern times not ancient China with its emperor system. Although I can see how some people might think of Mao again--with the will of the Party rather than the will of Heaven. Or was Mao’s will the will of the Party rather than the other way around?”
 
“Well, I suppose the saving grace here is that it is not a subjective will which is at stake. Philosophy is called in to determine what is the best thing to do to promote the general good (by definition the will of Heaven) and this is to be objectively determined by the sage or philosopher king. So it’s really not absolutism in the sense of the personal will of the ruler. So Mo, Mao and Plato may be off the hook!”
 
“Well, that's it for the Mozi selections in Chan. Who's next?”
 
“I think we should look at Daoism and discuss Laozi.”
 
“Fine. Let's do him next"

​To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here.
To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here.