Etiquette Guide to China. Boye Lafayette De Mente
metropolises, and how it is administered in rural villages and small cities.
This emphasis on rule of law has not extended to the decision-making apparatuses of the central and local governments. If anything, the government is less open, less transparent, and more restrictive of press and individual freedom now than at any time since 1989.
The pressing problem for the Communist Party has been how to maintain control over the country in the face of economic reform and openness. The answer was to take steps to strengthen its control over the government and over the Chinese culture and media, and to increase party membership. In 1989, the party had 47 million members. However, by 2015, the party membership had risen to 87.8 million members—an 86% increase, even though the population had only grown by 21%. Now, instead of complaining about corruption, many of the educated elite could take part in it and share the wealth.
Things came to a head in 2012, with the Bo Xilai incident. Bo Xilai was the party secretary for Chongqing in southwestern China, but he had aspirations to become leader of the country. As noted by Carl Minzner of Fordham Law School,
Breaking with long-accepted political norms that emphasized low-key public personas for up-and-coming cadres, [Bo Xilai] aggressively cultivated a charismatic populist image during his tenure from 2007 to 2012. His signature tactics included mass rallies, a revival of Maoist “red” culture, and an intense campaign against “organized crime” that swept up criminal suspects, legitimate businessfolk, and their lawyers alike.
However, the world came apart for Bo when his chief of police fled to the US consulate in Chengdu to escape retribution for investigating Bo’s wife regarding the murder of a British businessman. The chief of police carried with him an extensive dossier on Bo’s activities, and both the chief of police and the dossier fell into the hands of the central government in Beijing. While things become murky at this point, if the stories are to be believed, Bo conspired with the head of state security, Zhou Yongkang, to wiretap the top leaders in the central government in view of gaining leverage to become elevated to the top spot in the government, and possibly even mounting a coup d’état.
Now with Bo’s wife, the chief of police, Bo Xilai, and Zhou Yongkang safely in prison, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has effectively adopted many of the same tactics that Bo Xilai used in Chongqing, but on a national scale. Xi Jinping has amassed more personal power within the Chinese government than any man since Deng Xiaoping, and he is now building a personality cult around himself. Further, the government is promoting Maoism on a scale that has not been seen in a generation, as Xi Jinping seeks to center all of Chinese society around the Communist Party. In this regard, there is a government push to insist that all private companies within China should have Communist Party cells operating within them (as this is not yet a law, it appears that foreign companies may be exempt).
Oddly, Confucianism is now being emphasized by the government, as it seeks to gain greater control over society. In particular, the Confucian concept of filial piety is being promoted. Filial piety is the respect someone should show towards his father or ancestors. In this case, however, the Communist Party has reinterpreted filial piety to mean respect for the government and its leaders.
Finally, Xi Jinping has initiated a seemingly never-ending anti-corruption crusade. Thus far, more than 70,000 high-level party officials have been disciplined for corruption. The government claims that this is all in the name of strengthening the rule of law in China. However, there is a real question as to whether this anti-corruption drive represents “rule of law” or “rule by law”. In a nutshell, does the law apply equally to everyone in the country, or is Xi Jinping just using the law to weed out possible opposition to his rule?
Now that the Chinese economy has started to show signs of slowing, given all of the fissures within Chinese society—between the urban poor and the urban rich, between cities and rural areas, between those working in private companies and those still working directly for the state or in SOEs, between the communist old guard and those who joined the party for personal advancement, etc.—there is a real question as to where the country is heading in the future.
As Minzner sums up,
Uncertainty hangs in the air. Chinese with the most to lose are diversifying against risk—placing their money in Vancouver real estate and their children in U.S. colleges, and maybe even seeking passports from one or another of the small Caribbean nations that is known to put citizenship up for sale.
The events of 1989 did not resolve the core question of China’s political future. Nor did they put it on hold indefinitely. Rather, they launched a cascading set of effects that have swept through China’s politics, economy, and society in the years since. The resulting reverberations have now begun to dislodge core elements of the institutional consensus that has governed China for decades. A new future is slouching toward Beijing to be born.
Chapter 2
The New China
History has shown that cultures generally change slowly, except when life-altering new technology is introduced. Such technology can cause cultures, no matter how hidebound, to change virtually overnight. This is now the case in China, a culture rapidly transforming in response to a wholesale introduction of new technology that is changing the way its people think and live.
The new China can be both startling and awe-inspiring to first-time visitors. Signs of affluence and modernization are every-where, particularly in the eastern cities. In that part of China one has to go to the countryside for more traditional sights.
Perhaps the only thing that has remained constant in China is its mass of people. If you haven’t had the experience of walking in lockstep to avoid treading on the heels of other pedestrians in shopping and entertainment areas you cannot begin to appreciate what being crowded can mean.
However, in the downtown areas of Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese cities it is easy to imagine that you could be in the most upscale shopping areas of Chicago, New York, London, or Paris. The people are well-dressed, many more fashionably so than their foreign counterparts. There are ritzy restaurants as well as familiar fast-food outlets, attractive cafés, and high-end boutiques.
In other words, the externals of much of Chinese civilization in the major urban areas have changed dramatically. (Except for Chinese food, which appears to be eternal.) But what has not changed that much for the vast majority of older Chinese, especially in rural areas, is their internal culture—their etiquette and ethics, the attitudes and behavior that make them Chinese. Despite the modern facade that is spreading throughout China it is this internal traditional culture that attracts—as well as confuses and stresses—many foreign visitors.
Then there are the post–Cultural Revolution urban generations, born after 1976. These generations have had upbringings so different from their parents’ that they qualify as “New Chinese.” They are more individualistic, independent-minded, and spontaneous in their behavior, all attributes that were taboo before the advent of New China and are very familiar to Americans and other Westerners.
This is particularly true of the new breed of entrepreneurs who have become rich and behave in nontraditional ways, either because they never learned traditional behaviors as children or because they have discarded them.
In spite of the cultural changes that have occurred and are still occurring in China, even the New Chinese still retain many characteristics that set them apart from their Western counterparts. For example the Chinese, like most Asians, are programmed to think of time and events as occurring in a circle, not in the straight line that is characteristic of the thought processes of Westerners. The Chinese cultural encoding to think in this holistic way is far too deep for it to disappear in one or two generations.
Another thing that continues to distinguish all Chinese, especially those who are in the mainstream, is a powerful sense of patriotism and nationalism that pervades virtually every thought and action.
Some perspectives have changed, though. The new breed of Chinese no longer believes the old idea that foreigners should not be allowed to learn anything about China—even as the Chinese made extraordinary efforts to learn everything possible about foreigners— or that foreigners who display an intimate knowledge of