Given that sapiens are a single species, genetically speaking at least, there are still so many things we do not know or understand about each other. The social and cultural milieu of our upbringing, environmental factors too, shape us in ways that become profoundly etched into our knowledge of reality and our sense of place.
Almost nothing in terms of our visceral passions and emotions, we now know, is hard-wired. Meanwhile our mindsets are unique to each of us. That is why it is so hard to 'sense' and 'make sense' of the world. Unless we have relevant experiences that give us clues as to what is going on, we remain mostly ignorant and insensitive to events as felt by others. And yet we often pretend to be experts in that very topic.
The day-to-day existence of humanity is shaped by two distinct yet tacit worldviews or belief systems. These provide the basis for our material actuality - the world-systems with which we consciously interact on a daily basis. I have spoken and written about these on many occasions.
The Western worldview, evolving via Occidental cosmology, reinforced by scientific realism and the rational logic of the 18th century European Enlightenment, was disseminated by way of a missionary-like zeal through colonialism, dispossession, genocide, slavery and, more recently, industrial economism. This history is the all-too familiar face of Western power - an 'evangelistic' model that has given rise to a world-system in which the cult of the individual, expressed most deeply in the ideals of neoliberal capitalism, prevails above all else.
The Oriental worldview, in contrast, is more secular and less distinct from nature. Derived from centuries-old Daoism, and laced with Confucian ideals, the resulting world-system aims to maintain a balanced energy in all relationships while protecting the collective and furthering their mutual aspirations.
Every aspect of the relations between China and the West, including external and internal power struggles, must be seen and interpreted in these two contexts. Radical changes are occurring in each of these paradigms as they try to overcome the inherent problems of exercising power in a modern world where emotions lead as cognition plays catchup. While the social infrastructure in the US is unravelling, China is having to cope with economic and social reforms in order to sustain its own illusion of progress. Although both nations appear to be in trouble, China is likely to manage her social software problems far better than the US, which relies on its financial, military, and technological hardware to rebut or enable structural change.
Nevertheless, a sudden wave of new government policies are currently upsetting Chinese life in what state media has characterized as a 'profound transformation' of the country. Officially referred to as President Xi Jinping’s Common Prosperity campaign this project is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory offensive churning the private sector, and a broader effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
If we care to look carefully we can see an ideological thread running through Common Prosperity, the Belt & Road initiative, and even Xi Jinping Thought right back to Jiang Zemin’s signature Three Represents policy and Hu Jintao’s Harmonious Society. This is not surprising given that the principal author in each case was Wang Huning - a member of the seven-man Politburo whose fingerprints are unmistakably on all these ventures.
It is Wang's thinking that especially interests me and has informed my own views of China. Wang argues that the Western concept of national sovereignty is in stark contrast to Chinese conceptions of this principle. Most particularly in the centrality of cultural mores and values software to political stability which, in the West, are secondary to the more corporeal hardware of economics, systems and institutions. It is intriguing to apply this analysis to the current state of both China and the US - one resisting the shame of irrelevance and failure, the other struggling to be reincarnated into a new global moral authority.
During the opening up of China to the world in the era of Deng Xiaoping, China became a country in a state of transformation that emulated the West in all but its ideological spirit. This catapulted China from an economy of production to one of consumption, from a spiritually oriented culture to a more materially slanted one, and from a collectivist culture to an individualistic one. Through the eyes of many in the West this shift looked like China was becoming more liberal and democratised. That was a misconception.
Previously within China, thought leaders like Wang believed that 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' was effectively leaving China without any real cultural direction. There are no core values in China’s most recent structure, he once warned, and this could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion. When certain elements of politics shaped by the Cultural Revolution became decoupled from the impulse and values that gave birth to this culture, the results were brutal and destructive.
Since then, and particularly after 11th December 2001 when it joined the World Trade Organisation, China has applied the Western playbook to expand its trade and influence with the West. Now that is no longer deemed necessary. Growing in confidence, and more certain of its position in the community of nations, China is ready to move away from the classical values of the Western tradition to embrace a set of inherently Chinese tenets. At first the aim was to combine the flexibility of China’s traditional values with the Western spirit of liberalism. But that was about to change. Fast forward to today.
The US is suffering in ways that are both visible and alarming to China - overextended militarily, economically, and culturally. Deindustrialization, rural decay, out of control asset prices, and the rise of a self-perpetuating elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to unravelling at the seams.
Observed from afar, and noted within China, these patterns could produce an overwhelming crisis, amplified by societal contradictions, including between the rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, class privilege and egalitarianism, and individual rights and collective responsibilities.
Of course, many Americans are not blind to these circumstances. They can clearly see that they are faced with intricate social and cultural problems. But they tend to think of these as scientific and technological matters to be solved separately by throwing money at them. The facts are that these problems are inextricably entwined and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
The organising cell of modern US society is now the individual. This has become so for two reasons: the former basic cell of the family unit has disintegrated, and the economy is now best served by individual selfishness and greed. Accompanying that dynamic is the surface allure of commodification, where everything from human sex, politics, knowledge, politics and power to the law, can become easy targets; and objectification, where what it means to be human is reduced to banal transactions, financial exchange, and the accumulation of wealth.
Ultimately these have had a perversive impact on American society, and have led to a number of grave social problems. The US economy has created isolation and loneliness as its signature product, along with immense inequality. As a result, nihilism has become the American way - delivering a potentially fatal shock to cultural development and a telling blow to the original spirit of America.
Commentators like Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris also point out some very serious challenges arising from a new generation of ideational challengers - including woke cultures, political correctness, and tensions between liberal rationalism, and a younger generation that is ignorant of traditional Western values and actively reject their cultural legacy.
When China looks to the US they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired symbol of a better future. Indeed, many are posing an existential question: if the value system should collapse, how can the social system be sustained? In the final analysis, faced with critical social issues like opiate addiction, racism, or homelessness, America’s fragmented, displaced, dispirited and exhausted society may have given itself an insurmountable problem. It may have lost any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any kind of resistance.
All these factors, along with the circumstances that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, have given China much food for thought - serving to underpin and explain the neo-conservatism being exhibited in the country today. Members of the CCP are re-asserting a fundamental argument: China must find ways to resist unfettered global influences if it is to maintain its position as a culturally unified, self-assured nation, immune to what it perceives to be the decay of liberal ideals in the US.
That does not mean the scales are tipped in favour of a resurgent China. Indeed these realities in the US are having a similarly adverse impact in Chinese society. Despite Xi Jinping’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many of the same problems we can see in the US have also surfaced to plague China over the past decade, as the country adopted a more neoliberal capitalist economic model. The greatest fear in the Politburo today is that global undercurrents have encouraged many of the more negative traits observed in the US to have successfully vaulted the Pacific. This has resulted in a paranoid 'pushing back' against anything that is deemed too Western.
To some extent Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has backfired - rapidly converting China into one of the most economically unequal societies on the planet. The job market for an ever-increasing pool of university graduates is now so competitive that 'graduation = unemployment' has become a societal meme. And as young people have flocked to the cities to search for employment, rural regions have been drained of labour and left to decay. Centuries of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving the elderly reliant on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young people have been priced out of the property market by a red-hot asset bubble. The most affluent 1 per cent of the population now holds 31 per cent of the wealth - not far behind the US with 35 per cent. But most people remain relatively poor: some 500 million subsisting on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan, or $155.
Chinese technology giants, and companies like Alibaba, have established monopoly positions. In some cases these are even more robust than their US counterparts, often with market shares approaching 90 per cent.
Office employment frequently features an arduous '996' (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labour among fraught hordes trapped by up-front debts in a vast system of indentured servitude - the modern-day 'gig' economy. According to Alibaba, up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the dubious liberation of such 'self-employment' by 2035.
Meanwhile, contrary to clichéd Western assumptions of an inherently communitarian Chinese culture, social trust has become so acute that it has led to periodic bouts of anguished soul-searching after regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed or mugged.
Alienated and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe their existence as a state of nihilistic despair. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or 'lying flat' in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the bare minimum amount of work needed to live.
It is within this environment that China’s fertility rate has collapsed to 1.3 children per woman - below Japan and above only South Korea as the lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family size restrictions and official attempts to persuade couples to have more children are met with incredulity and ridicule by young people as being totally out of touch with economic and social reality. Those Chinese who can afford to have a family have found pleasure by spending extra cash on luxuries and travel. For this generation there are fewer financial burdens and children are no longer a welfare necessity.
Liberalisation means different things to different people. China is far from being a liberal society in the Western meaning of that term. But if the quintessential justification for liberalism is the freedom of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations and relationships, along with all the material confines of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the consumer, then China has been thoroughly liberalized. In fact what is happening to Chinese society is starting to look far more like that of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification than anything remotely to do with socialism.
This is why the era of tolerance for unconstrained economic and cultural liberalism in China appears to be over. Repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such 'moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution, Xi Jinping and his advisers are taking drastic action in an attempt to head off threats to the social order that (they assume) are being generated by Western-style capitalism and cultural neoliberalism - threats almost identical to those menacing the US.
This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January 2021 that China must absolutely not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider. He also cautioned that achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but a major political issue related to the CCP's governing fundamentals. In other words it is a cultural crusade in all but name.
This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines. It is why forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed local internet and social media companies. It is why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labour conditions, with '996' overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It is why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. And it is why excessively high incomes are to be adjusted in future by placing a cap on personal wealth.
And it is also why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why minors are banned from playing the 'spiritual opium' of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened.
The fear is palpable. And it is directly attributable to the corruption and moral depravity in Chinese society that is also pervasive today in US culture. The purpose of Xi’s profound transformation is to ensure that the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for depravity, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of venerating Western culture.
Some intriguing questions remain - not the least being how to tackle the amount of economic, technological, cultural, and political upheaval the world is currently experiencing. If this phenomenon is endemic to both the US and China, it might point to a common contagion spreading throughout the globe. Whether either of the two empires have sufficient competence to deal adequately with their unique problems is a moot point. The success of any Chinese gambit to engineer new societal values seems highly improbable considering the many failures from history’s other would-be engineers of the soul. On the other side of the Pacific, the US may not be sufficiently cognizant of the role played by cultural 'software' in the mission to avoid societal collapse.
The best simple proxy to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. It seems this is not just about China or the US. For reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate as they have developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating.
Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to pro-natal tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force effort required, it is likely to be China.
Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that is already in progress: Orient and Occident, facing very similar societal problems, have embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.