DON'T DISTURB THE ANT TRIBE

One of the facets of studying modern China that fascinates me greatly is the apparent tendency towards exceptionalism in Western Sinology and the backlash from other social science disciplines. Is there something unique and significant about China's developmental story - or is it, in its fundamentals, just a repeat of what has been before?

Throughout the year the evidence of a slowdown in China's GDP growth rates has piled up - although some economists are still predicting this won't happen for a few more years, it now seems likely that China is nearing the limit, if it hasn't already passed it, of the growth rates it can achieve within the parameters of its political and economic systems.

Many commentators have suggested that factors such as China's ageing population lend urgency to China's development, so that, in per capita terms, the choice China faces is rapid growth or no growth, not low or moderate growth. Sustaining the high growth rates of recent decades over the long-term will require numerous structural transformations, the provision of effective public services, and reforms to China's financial sector which would threaten the party-state's capacity to hive off resources for patronage.

Here is how the economist and expert on China's banking system Victor Shih describes the necessity for - and political risks of - financial reform:

"Why does China have an economy that is highly unequal and dominated by the state? Despite economic reforms that liberalized goods markets and the labour market, the state continues to hold a tight grip over most of the financial institutions. The financial sector in essence takes money from foreign exchange earnings and from household savings and channels it to state-owned firms controlled by the central or local government. Having little choice, households in China must deposit money in the state banks, and when there’s inflation as there is today, they earn a negative real interest rate from the banks because the government fixes deposit rates at a level that is below inflation.

Meanwhile, real estate developers with political connections and large state-owned enterprises can borrow money at interest rates that are near zero in real terms. In effect, the Chinese financial system channels wealth from ordinary households to a small handful of connected insiders and state-owned firms. To be sure, other Asian countries have also pursued this state-led financing model. But China has pursued it for the longest period of time."

Put another way, a serious assault on corruption would give the CPC less leeway to buy off potential opponents in the middle and upper classes of Chinese society. As Minxin Pei has observed, China is the only country in history that has combined record growth with a record amount of non-performing loans (NPL).

An influential theory is that revolutions don't necessarily occur when one might intuitively think they would - that is, when conditions are at their worst - but rather when a gulf opens up between the expectations of the ruled and the capacity of the rulers to meet those expectations. This notion is usefully captured in the so-called Davies 'J-curve'.

If the J-curve model is correct, there is one group in China today that might be regarded as especially significant in driving the Party towards systemic reform - the large, and growing, number of unemployed or low-paid graduates eking out a subsistence existence in cramped urban lodgings, who believed that their degree is a ticket into the ascendant middle class.

There is a name for this new category - the ant tribe.

I am starting to think that China's ant tribes may have a significance in the future evolution of Chinese society far beyond their numbers - not in and by themselves, but by acting as a lightning rod for all kinds of other societal complaints and resentments. This is a point I will return to later.

First, I want to consider the reasons why China didn't go through a process of modernisation and democratisation equivalent to that which occurred in much of western Europe, facilitated by a rising and vocal middle class.



NO PROPERTY: NO FAMILY, NO RELIGION

The first comparative study of China's modernisation that I want to examine is Barrington Moore Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (summarised here).

According to the blurb of my Penguin edition, it "defines the course of change from agrarian to industrial state in the major countries of the world and demonstrates how the relationship between lord and peasant can, in various ways, produce parliamentary democracy, fascism or communism."

To most political science students, Moore's name will be synonymous with a pithy precis: "no bourgeoisie, no democracy." In short, Moore's argument is that, unlike in western Europe, Chinese landowners didn't respond to increased taxes by commercialising agriculture because they faced a different set of opportunities and political incentives. Therefore, China didn't develop a landed gentry independent of the centre which could form a legitimate opposition to the state when it resisted modernisation in response to domestic and foreign pressures.

Here are the fruits of Moore's comparative analysis.

 

But the book is also a reminder that the Chinese state resisted democratisation with "divide-and-rule" tactics that kept the masses relatively isolated from eachother, and that late Imperial advances towards liberal democracy can be perceived as having fuelled the tortured, drawn-out fragmentation of China, rather than having acted as a unifying force. 

Barrington Moore Jr.



For Moore, the institution of the family preserved the traditional pattern of life in Imperial China in the following way: families pooled their resources to finance the studies of their most academically able members; the ablest members would then sit examinations in order to acquire a post in the imperial bureaucracy; bureaucrats used their position to extract resources from those who lived under their jurisdiction ("formally illegal but socially accepted corruption"); and they used this wealth to buy up land to repay their relatives, thus closing the circle.

In the absence of primogeniture, this was a way of preserving family fortunes: "Landed wealth came out of the bureaucracy and depended on the bureaucracy for its existence." And landlords tolerated official corruption because they knew they could rely on the forces of the state to suppress rebellious peasants.

Interestingly, Moore argues that changes in a given society's class structure will result in dramatically different outcomes, depending on the timing of such changes and the pattern of incentives they face at the outset of change. It is a classic situation of multiple equilibria - in theory, an identical event can happen in two societies (or in two historical periods in the same society) that, to begin with, differ only very slightly, yet the impact of that event can snowball in different directions and produce two very different societies.

In other words, if China had started to industrialise only a short while earlier, when the authority of the central state was stronger, the emergent bourgeoisie might have placed their bets with the centre and helped to reunify a fraying empire. But, following the Opium Wars, the arrival of industrialisation was oriented towards restless provincial authorities, and so exacerbated a process of political fragmentation already underway:

"The main Chinese push toward industrialisation came from provincial foci of power, with very little input from the Imperial government... Commercial and industrial elements on the make can be expected to turn for protection to whatever political groups have real power. If it is the king, well and good; his power will wax. If it is a local official, the opposite will be true."

Moreover, landowners restricted the expansion of market activity by turning into rentiers, rather than entrepreneurs:

"There was no rapidly growing urban population with at least moderately diffused and increasing prosperity that could act as a stimulus to rationalised production for the market... If his [landowner's] farm were in the neighbourhood of a city, it was much simpler and easier for him to sit back and rent his land to peasant tenants, letting the competition for land drive up his income with very little effort on his part... Economically this process meant the growth of absentee landlordism near the cities. Sociologically it contributed to the partial fusion of sections of the former gentry and the wealthier elements in the cities."

It was because the Imperial bureaucracy remained the main route to attaining prosperity that the Chinese state lacked legitimate official opposition. Moore writes that historically, throughout Europe:

"One may perceive at some point the development of estates, what German historians call Stande, status groups with a substantial degree of corporate identity and publicly recognised immunities that they defended jealously against other groups and especially against the crown... The Chinese landed upper classes did not develop any significant principled opposition to the Imperial system."

A legitimate opposition is something that the Manchu dynasty might have benefited from during the last half-century of its rule, when it confronted a similar dilemma to that which the CPC faces today:

"One the one hand, it needed greater revenue to put down internal rebellion... On the other hand, it could not obtain this revenue without destroying the whole system of gentry privileges.... Raising the government's revenues would have made necessary the introduction of an efficient system of taxation and putting an end to the officials' habit of pocketing the lion's share of what the government took from its subjects. Thus the government would have had to eliminate a major source of the gentry's income and encourage the growth of a social class that inevitably would have competed more and more successfully with the gentry. As long as the government itself rested on the gentry, such a course was most unlikely."

Late Imperial and early Republican China was a society "in which commercial influences were eating away at the peasant proprietorship and concentrating wealth in the hands of a new social formation, a fusion between parts of the old ruling class and new elements rising in the cities." And yet the old ruling class remained a check on the rising elements: "Moneymaking activities represented a dangerous threat to the scholar-officials because it constituted an alternative ladder of prestige and an alternative ground of legitimacy for high social status."

The perceived gulf between rulers and ruled was only exacerbated by the gentry's traditional disdain for manual labour:

"The government and the upper classes performed no function that the peasants regarded as essential for their way of life. Hence the link between rulers and ruled was weak and largely artificial, liable to snap under any severe strain."

By the second half of the nineteenth-century, the only effective link between the peasants and the upper class was the clan, which constituted the bedrock of "peasant conservatism." But the clan, in turn, depended on a decaying system of collective land ownership, which supported examination entrants and provided an informal welfare net for clan members in hard times.

By contrast, villages in traditional China were relatively atomised social groupings: "The Chinese village, the basic cell of rural society in China as elsewhere, evidently lacked cohesiveness." One explanation for this is that there existed an ample supply of landless peasants who could move between villages to assist with labour-intensive rice cultivation, and since they could do it more cheaply, there was no requirement for mutual aid amongst fellow villagers - even if this meant prioritising labour exchanges between kinship groups.

Consequently, "Chinese society was such as to make possible the creation of huge masses of human debris, tinder easily ignited by an insurrectionary spark. [...] The mass basis of the revolution...was a land-short peasantry." But, in a crucial passage, Moore emphasises that deprivation alone is insufficient for explaining regime change - there also needs to be a sense that indefensible deprivation is inseparable from the status quo, a loss of trust in the capacity of the prevailing system to reform itself:

"Massive poverty and exploitation in and by themselves are not enough to provide a revolutionary situation. There must also be felt injustice built into the social structure, that is, either new demands on the victims or some reason for the victims to feel that old demands are no longer justifiable. The decay of the upper classes in China provided this indispensable ingredient. The gentry had lost their raison d'etre and turned into landlord-usurers pure and simple."

The Japanese conquest was the "decisive ingredient" in China's process of regime change, as it drove the old officialdom out of the countryside and into the cities, leaving the peasantry free and undefended - this enabled "the elimination of the old elites and the forging of solidarity among the oppressed."

BREAKING UP AND CLOSING IN

Theda Skocpol is another influential academic who has written about the Chinese revolutions of the twentieth-century in comparative perspective, in her book States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China - which originated as an article.

According to Skocpol, "agrarian bureaucracies" like traditional China were "inherently vulnerable to peasant rebellions", precisely because of the aforementioned blurred distinction between landlords and scholar-officials.

She also follows Moore in recognising that the timing of China's incipient modernisation meant that it fuelled centrifugal social forces already in motion, and that if China's industrialisation had begun a half-century earlier, "officials would never have been allowed to serve in their home provinces, and thus local and regional groups of gentry would have lacked institutional support for concerted opposition against central initiatives." Instead, all the political and administrative reforms of the late Manchu dynasty - including the establishment of provincial assemblies - were converted into new powers for the new gentry class.

Theda Skocpol

The forces that were centrifugal at a national level must also be conceptualised as centripetal forces at the sub-national level. China was breaking up because bureaucratic institutions that had until that time provided "at least the semblance of unified governance" were weakened, and the marketing communities - clusters of towns and villages that were the basic framework of a peasant's social existence - closed in on themselves, casting out landless members. It was a vicious spiral, as more out-migration fed in-migration elsewhere, undercutting of wages, indebtedness, impoverishment, and so on.

In short, it was a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy for trying to restore kinship and clan as meaningful economic units, which only strengthened the atomising pressure of commercialisation:

"Precisely because normal traditional Chinese agrarian-class relations were significantly commercialised, local prosperity depended upon overall administrative stability, and peasants were not cushioned against economic dislocations by kin or village communal ties."

Paradoxically, this made the Communists' task of peasant recruitment both more difficult and more rewarding: it meant that they had to penetrate rural regions much more deeply, right down to the most local social structures, in order to build a following, but it also meant that, once this penetration was achieved, they had a better chance of mobilising these relatively small and cohesive units.

The Communists' most important contribution to the mobilisation of peasant resentments was to shield them from the landlords: "not a sense of grievances, or their ideological articulation, but rather simply protection from traditional social controls".

Here is a summary of Skocpol's comparison of the Chinese, French and Russian revolutions.

The scholar most closely associated with the study of Chinese marketing communities in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century is George William Skinner.

Skinner pioneered the extensive application of 'spatial analysis' to Chinese history, and specifically to the study of Chinese "standard marketing communities" (SMCs).

SMCs were more concentrated along the boundaries between counties and provinces - as shown by the annotated map below.

In an article - which would later become a book, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China - Skinner argues that the key intermediaries between the rural peasantry and the Imperial state operated at the level of the SMC:

"These Janus-faced "brokers" - whether cultural, political, or economic - operated at the level of the standard market town, not the village. It was the SMC that they linked to - or, depending on one's perspective - isolated from the institutions of the larger society... Insofar as the intermediate marketing system is a social community, it is normally one that excludes both peasantry and bureaucratic elite."

In other words, a self-conscious and exclusive stratum of "the gentlemanly elite and the merchants of the market town" mediated communication and influence between the state and the masses, and between rural and urban areas, in late Imperial China.

"The crucial negotations whereby "gentry" capital is invested in the...artisan manufacture and commercial enterprise of the intermediate marketing system and, on the other, the capital of the artisan and tradesman is invested in agricultural land and translated into the coin of social respectability - these dealings are carried on...in the market towns."

The SMC tended to be endogamous for the peasantry. Skinner writes that "Insofar as the Chinese peasant can be said to have lived in a self-contained world, that world is not the village but the SMC."

The book is full of fascinating maps and diagrams that show how different levels of SMCs coexisted and overlapped - and that indicate how the elites depended on these interconnections, as well as their being managed and regulated.

For our present purposes, I think the work of these three academics shows two things. At the general level, they show that - contrary to many mid-twentieth-century modernisation theorists - external conditions (i.e. how far later modernisers are behind the pioneers) matter just as much as internal ones in determining the direction of travel of developing states.

More pertinently, they show how the traditional Chinese gentry retained their power and authority during and after the collapse of the Qing dynasty by keeping Chinese society divided along various dimensions (e.g. rural-urban, intra-rural, intra-urban) and by masquerading as a unifying force at the level of the marketing community. In so doing, they forged a social equilibrium that, according to Moore, could have lasted a lot longer were it not for the exogenous shock of the Japanese invasion.

How does this inform our understanding of contemporary China's predicament? The earlier analysis regarding patronage and financial reform implied that China's one-party state depends on purchasing the allegiance of rising groups in society - and that it must do this without over-taxing the rest of society and threatening the economic growth that keeps replenishing the common pot. It is strikingly similar to how Moore sketched the workings of the late Imperial state:

"The system was highly exploitative in the strictly objective sense of taking more out of the society in resources than it put back in the form of services rendered. On the other hand, because it had to be exploitative in order to work at all, it also had to leave the underlying population very much to its own devices."



A NIMBY 'stroll' through Qingdao to oppose a
substation being located there



Furthermore, we can detect in the writings of Minxin Pei (a consistent critic of China's present-day state-led model - which he calls "crony capitalism with Chinese characteristics - the marriage between unchecked power and illicit wealth") the same close relationship between political position and wealth accumulation that Theda Skocpol insisted made the Imperial state particularly prone to rebellions:

"Democratic transitions in developing countries are often triggered by economic crises blamed on the incompetence and mismanagement of the ancien régime. China hasn’t experienced that crisis yet. Meanwhile, the riches available to the ruling class tend to drown any movement for democratic reform from within the elite. Political power has become more valuable because it can be converted into wealth and privilege unimaginable in the past.

At the moment, China’s economic growth is having a perverse effect on democratization: It makes the ruling elite even more reluctant to part with power. [...] At least for now, the party’s charm campaign is working: The social groups that are normally the forces of democratization have been politically neutralized."

Lian Si: the man who coined the 
term "ant tribes"

The other lesson of history is that timing matters - if China's economy requires exacting structural reforms that will squeeze elite groups whose support the Party needs, it would be better for the Party if it embarked on those reforms while the state is still relatively unified, and it kept the middle classes fighting amongst themselves for access to the (albeit diminished) Party coffers. If it were to postpone reform until the economy had already slowed and latent divisions in society had resurfaced, it might drive the middle classes into the arms of one or another of those dissatisfied groupings and strengthen the forces of opposition.

The latter scenario is made more likely by several things - the power of vested interests in the Chinese state (reflected in CPC factions) to resist reform, the reduction of the Party's ruling ideology to the provision of a comfortable middle class lifestyle for all its people, and the growing presence of the ant tribes as an indication that, insofar as it keeps intervening to shores up the status quo (e.g. state sector-dominated stimulus packages), the Party is erecting systematic barriers to the attainment of even its own narrowly-defined vision for society.

INSECT POLITICS

Haven't we been here before, though? Disgruntled students protesting for democracy (variously defined) against a backdrop of economic difficulties?

Yes and no. I think that here is a crucial difference in the character of the student movements of the late 1980s compared with the pro-democracy currents inside China today, and - I would bet - on any significant bottom-up movement for change that emerges in the near future.

The difference is historical - it is based on the living memory of those who took part in earlier movements. In effect, the protests in the late 1980s took place during what seemed at the time to be a comparatively brief period of social and economic freedom, following decades of political instability and near-totalitarian social control.

This gave the protests a sense of urgency and drama, but it also led the protagonists to issue increasingly unrealistic demands and to  reject any compromise with the authorities. Their spirit was one of aiming as high as possible, not necessarily with any realistic hope of achieving their stated goals, but of making the maximum possible use of the freedom available to them while it lasted - since recent history had shown what the Party giveth, it can just as easily take away.


You get an understanding of this historical dimension in the third and final instalment of the outstanding documentary series China: A Century of Revolution (it's worth watching in full, but the most relevant segment is from 53mins onwards):

 

I think that any substantial student-led democracy movement that emerged today would probably have more realistic and clearly-defined objectives (in this context, it is interesting to note that the exiled activist Wei Jingsheng criticised the Nobel committee's decision to give the Prize to Liu Xiaobo, whose 'Charter '08' Wei deems too tame), due not just to the fact that their strategic context has changed from one of "reform or reversal" to "reform or stagnation", but also because it could add to its ranks the most disillusioned of the ant tribes.

In Imperial China, families made financial sacrifices to put their most gifted sons through the examination system in the hope that they would recoup their losses by having a relative working for the Imperial bureaucracy. In the twenty-first century, Chinese families spend vast sums to send their ablest young men and women to university, but, in an increasing number of cases, the expectation of reciprocity is being revealed to be an illusion.

In the process, a vast amount of human capital is being wasted as the children of rural families find that they are earning less with their academic degrees (with too many graduates, following government policies to expand higher education, and too few graduate-level jobs) than the millions of uneducated rural migrants who have moved to the cities to work in factories and warehouses. Many of them are too ashamed to return home to find work and so they eke out a precarious existence in tightly-packed accomodation in the cities.

For instance, the "capsule hotels" that found popularity with overnight travelling Japanese businessmen in the 1980s have found a new market amongst the ant tribes.

Many of these - such as the "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510" - opened some time earlier, but until recently they were only used to accomodate drunk people who'd missed the last bus home.

Many ants remain optimistic that with enough hard work, they will break into the dream lifestyle of the middle class, and they often exaggerate their career successes to anxious relatives back home (although, in the long run, these high expectations could be just as damaging for the Party as despair, if the J-curve is to be believed).

According to a report on the ant tribe phenomenon in the Huffington Post: "

"The Chinese born after 1980 are among the most privileged generation in China's long history. Living after the communist government gave up the radical politics that tossed their parents and grandparents between chaos and penury, they have known only ever-rising levels of prosperity."

Here is an interesting discussion of the anxieties and aspirations of China's new middle class - and of those trying to join it:

The other thing about the ant tribes is that they are very web-savvy. They use available social media and online forums to try to make sense of the rapidly changing society around them, and of how it relates to their own predicament.

What this means is that China's current political economy, while it has delivered record growth to date, has also fostered a class which, though still numerically small, is defined by the distance between its expectations and actually existing conditions. The ant tribes might be expected to play a significant role in any future protest movement that emerges and publicly challenges the authority of the CPC to enforce "business as usual." As Skocpol observes of revolutions in the modern era: "Radical leadership in social revolutions came specifically from the ranks of skilled and/or university-educated marginal elites oriented to state employments."

If the slowdown in China's growth is so pronounced as to generate a significant opposition movement, perhaps the same "unacceptable" gap between expectations and reality might open up for other segments of society. The ant tribes share concrete material interests with some of these groups; for instance, structural reform of the economy to dampen the speculation in real estate that is pricing them out of decent housing, and liberalisation of the hukou system of restrictions on internal migration, which prevents rural-urban migrants accessing state services. It is the combination of protests across classes or regions that so frightens the CPC - because it might divert middle class protesters from criticising government incompetence to posing fundamental questions about legitimacy.

Writing in Dissent about protests in China, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom make the salient observation that:

"When a protest highlights division within the Chinese nation, it almost always draws swift and harsh retaliation from the government... Popular unrest of many kinds poses a dillemma for the Communist Party because of the story it tells about the first half of the twentieth century."

The story is that the Party was founded after the student-led demonstrations that heralded the 'May Fourth Movement', and that they carried the hopes and dreams of the Movement through the long, dark years of Kuomintang rule to fruition and the unification of a divided nation after 1949. Thus the Party presents its having a monopoly of central governing power as a prerequisite for national unity, and the economic dynamism and international prestige that flows from it.

Perhaps a combination of two things will finally make the Party's efforts to sustain the status quo untenable - a sharp or unsteady downturn in growth, and a widespread belief that the one-party state is detrimental, not conducive, to the idea of "One China." I think that the Party's pursuit of "business as usual" will be irreversibly damaged only when both these remaining sources of its legitimacy are broken - wealth and nationalism. One can imagine a scenario in which slower growth brings simmering societal tensions to the fore, and these are then transformed into collective political movements which, in turn, brings factional disputes within the Party to the surface.

A basic problem faced by one-party states once they permit certain freedoms is that any grassroots opposition to their actions must be, by definition, non-partisan. This makes sense as far as it prevents organised and effective rival claims to legitimacy from emerging, but it also means that any opposition that does arise, and that could be interpreted as being political, does not do so under the kind of self-discipline that party structures impose on their individual members and representatives.

Put differently, parties - at least in theory, if not always in practice - can act as restraints on people wishing to speak underneath their banner, and they can prevent individual members making unrealistic, short-termist or inconsistent promises to the masses, which might come back to haunt the party's collective interests.

In his book Ballot Box China, Kerry Brown quotes a Chinese expert on China's village elections who stresses this point:

"There are no parties. People stand for themselves. So, in some senses, they are too free.... They end up a lot of the time as a total free-for-all. At least political parties would rein people in and discipline them a bit... Accountability is the biggest issue. That is the way you discipline democracy."

Numerous alternative trajectories are of course possible - my point is simply that the ant tribes share something important with the scholar-officials and landlords in China a century earlier, both groups being the potential basis for a new middle class society in their own time. It didn't work that way in the late Qing period because the centre was weak relative to the provinces, so the gentry had the opportunity to preserve traditional patterns of social existence in miniaturised form.

Beijing's authority today, though not without its weaknesses (e.g. in tax collection), is far stronger than China's national powers in the early twentieth-century. It would be much harder for groups like the ant tribes to try to carve out an existence independent of the goals and priorities emanating from the top.

But nor does it seem likely that the Party will be able to continue to purchase the allegiance of all the most highly skilled and aspirational sections of society. In which case, we may see a rupture with more transformational consequences than comparable critical junctures and movements that have gone before.
  
Radical change needn't be revolutionary, nor will it necessary produce a form of liberal democracy that would be instantly recognisable in the West (for instance, China's rulers might adopt something like Daniel A. Bell's model of "Confucian democracy", with one elected chamber and one selected through examinations). Nevertheless, change seems to be unavoidable.

Judging from history, I'd bet that insect politics will be an important part of making that change happen.

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

Sometimes I get an idea for a post from the most unlikely of stories, such as this BBC News report that the video game Call of Duty will be made available to Chinese gamers - absolutely free.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the games maker Activision designed a free online version of the game specifically for the unique conditions of the Chinese market. Searching for these particular "conditions", I stumbled across a startling fact: in the PRC - which produces a large share of the world's games consoles and the rare earth metals that go into them - home video game consoles have been banned for over a decade:

"An article on Chinese news site Sina.com points out, "In June 2000, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice, forbidding any company or individual to produce and sell electronic game equipment and accessories to China."

The ban was the CPC's response to complaints by parents that the next generation would spend all its time hooked on video games, which would stunt its development. As a result, Chinese gamers are only legally permitted to play popular games in alternative formats on their home computer, or at internet cafes, which are hugely popular with Chinese youths.

This explains Activision's buisness strategy in China: make a game free to access, but charge real money for purchasing virtual items and upgrades within the game. Since the structure of China's video games market accentuates the collective, communal aspects of gaming, there is a potentially lucrative market for conspicuous consumption in cyberspace - and the more people playing the game, the stronger the reinforcement effects at work. This demand has in turn helped to fuel the growth of a strange cottage industry to supply it - I will return to this point later.

There are deeper forces underlying the home consoles ban than parents' moral panic. Specifically, the pervasive influence of a Canadian sociologist in the upper echelons of the CPC in the '80s and '90s, and his own brand of technological determinism, which seemed well-suited to explaining China's development.

WHY THE CHINESE DON'T DO BUFFERING

The origins of China's computer industry can be found in the 1956 Twelve-Year Plan for the Development of Sciences and Technology. Initial developments in this field - like China's first operational computer, pictured below in 1959 - relied heavily on Soviet funding and technical expertise.

After the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviets left and China's computing industry, along with various other hi-tech fields, had to find its way through "self-reliance."


DJS-2, one of China's earliest electronic digital computers

 In 1973 a team of U.S. computer scientists visited China as part of a programme of technical exchanges designed to demonstrate warmer relations between the two super-powers. In their travel report, the scientists tell us that computing science in China was isolated from the worst excesses of Cultural Revolution-era anti-intellectualism (similar to China's space program) but its development for the foreseeable future seemed to be threatened by the degradation and politicisation of the universities:


"[O]ur hosts declined to give us any substantive information about present activity in computer science and engineering education, saying that the matter was "being studied." Perhaps the curriculum is in some disarray. It is by now well known that the Cultural Revolution profoundly affected the universities. [...] Under the administration of a Revolutionary Committee...Tsinghua University's admissions policy emphasises maturity in political and social understanding, dedication to the aims of the revolution, and practical experience more than academic achievement."

 

And the downside of official protection from the government was the frequency with which national political priorities intruded into the development of computing; in particular, the U.S. scientists observed that their Chinese counterparts were developing only a narrow range of applications (mainly military purposes and artificial insemination).



They also noted a bias for ever-bigger computers that could solve ever more complex numerical calculations, at the cost of increasingly centralised and restricted flows of inputs and outputs (the smallest computer they reported seeing was "physically the size of a large desk").

By the end of the 1970s the Cultural Revolution was finished and, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China was preparing to undergo another social transformation in Chairman Mao's wake. Mass meetings were held in the universities to determine who ought to be there on academic merit. Here is a picture of one such "recruitment meeting" in 1977:

Reforms were enacted in every sector of the economy in order to dismantle (or at least, dilute) the emphasis on state micro-control of industry, the focus on heavy industry at the expense of other sectors, and the instability engendered by fear of periodic mass political campaigns and purges. All the while, Deng intended that the reforms would more safely secure, not diminish, the Party's monopoly on political power.

Lucian W. Pye

The challenge was stark: how could the same institutions which had, in the name of achieving a communist utopia, led the country into a decade of near-anarchy, reverse course so sharply and expect to be taken seriously, having sacrificed what remained of its credibility?

According to the renowned Sinologist Lucian W. Pye, the answer lies in certain continuities in Chinese political culture. In a fascinating article entitled 'On Chinese Pragmatism in the 1980s', Pye contests the commonplace that the Chinese are, politically, a uniquely pragmatic people who were forced to applaude utopianism under Mao but who, in the post-Mao era, have reverted to their default setting of "exceptional flexibility."

Instead, he argues that both periods of change - after 1949 and after 1978 - were facilitated by a particular kind of "Chinese pragmatism"; his premise is that there is no such thing as value-free, neutral pragmatism in politics, because pragmatic government entails taking the consensual features of a culture as given, including cultural assumptions about politics.

Given the "particularism" and "this-worldliness" of Chinese culture, it follows that what counts as "pragmatic" government to the Chinese will vary according to perceived shifts in the national and international environment: "Government officials can annnounce that new circumstances call for new departures without fear of being criticised for inconsistency."

The forward-looking nature of Chinese political culture makes it easier for Chinese leaders to credibly signal their commitment to long-term plans and to execute sudden changes in direction. But, ironically, this feature of Chinese pragmatism - its "up-beat optimism" - can produce eminently impractical behaviour:

"In Chinese political culture, the imperative to be optimistic about the future discourages reflections on the past, and thus ritualised enthusiasm inhibits pragmatic learning through experience. Few people live as much in the future as people do in China where most individuals are absorbed in the promises of tommorrow and where modest improvements of the day seem to herald unlimited prospects. [...] The power of that optimism can trivialise the abominations of the past and legitimise their replication... [This] can be justified because the future is supposedly so promising."

In sum, what matters is what works - but what works in the present and forseeable future; by itself, the fact that something did or did not work is no guide to current policy. Thus, Pye argues, if China made more successful economic decisions in the 1980s, it had less to do with learning the lessons of past failures than it did with more accurately perceiving the social and technological forces transforming the global economy.

Democracy Wall: pilgrimage site for sceptics

And this meant that the Chinese and their leaders were aware of the permanent possibility that the past would repeat itself:

"Chinese pragmatism will be constantly vulnerable to the intrusion of ideological constraints, not just from its political opponents but even more from its own need to ensure that legitimacy depends not solely upon practical accomplishments. The suppression of the "democracy movement"...should not be read as a sign of the persisting power of "leftist" Maoists. The most pragmatic of the pragmatists knows that authority in China continues to need the support of a substantial dose of ideological faith, and hence there have to be severe limits on scepticism."

"BORN INTO A FUTURE-SHOCKED WORLD"

In 1980, a sociologist named Alvin Toffler wrote a book called The Third Wave, in which he argued that societies at or near the cutting-edge of technology need not fear being haunted by their past failures, because the future was going to be qualitatively different - and it was just around the corner.

Here is a picture of Toffler at the 1939 World's Fair in New York.

Toffler had first garnered widespread attention with his 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. The thrust of its argument is that virtually all the institutions of modern society are unable to cope with the accelerating rate of technological progress: "The thesis of this book is that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb... We may define "future shock" as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes."

Future Shock was widely influential in part because it provided an explanation, from a standpoint of technological determinism, for the air of unease in developed Western societies following the plethora of protest movements of the late 1960s. It diagnosed that unease as an entirely rational feeling that the growth of technology was outpacing humanity's ability to arrive at rational decisions about it; this was not simply a backlash against the misuse of technology, but a sense that those in control of modern technology were - by definition - unaccountable, because they did not really know what they were doing.

This meant that Toffler rejected "technocracy" as a feasible solution to society's ills. As he explained in an interview, any attempt to organise an entire society using a giant centralised computer - as the Soviets had tried to - was doomed to fail, because the very presence of the computer would induce people to change their behaviour, and seek to "game" the system (in his words, it "complexified" reality):

"I'm not sure everybody got the basic argument of Future Shock. We were not only saying that accelerating change is hard to adapt to, but that acceleration itself has effects on the system. The ability to adapt isn't dependent entirely on whether you're going in what you would regard as a happy direction or an unhappy direction. It's the speed itself that compels a change in the rate of decision making, and all decision systems have limits as to how fast they can make complex decisions."

"That takes us to the computer. The early assumptions were that the giant brain was going to solve our problem for us, that it was going to get all this information together and that therefore life would be simplified. What it overlooked was the fact that computers also complexify reality. And of course this was a great disappointment to the Soviets because they were going to centrally plan their thing with a big computer."

Significantly, future-shock was a kind of affliction that Pye argued Chinese culture had built-in safeguards against: "To a significant degree Chinese culture is spared the tensions, which can be psychologically debilitating, that are common in cultures with more universalistic norms and in which behaviour in different situations has to be made to appear consistent with absolute principles."

I have found an utterly weird and wonderful documentary film from 1972 that attempts to reduce the message of Future Shock to its essentials, presented - why not? - by Orson Welles.

The Third Wave picks up where Future Shock left off. The title refers to Toffler's theory that three great "waves", powered by huge leaps forward in technological possibilities, shaped three unique civilisations - these were the transitions from hunter-gatherer to settled agricultural society, from agriculture to industry, and from "industrialism" to an emergent "information society."

Here is Toffler's introduction to a CBWT documentary on The Third Wave from 1983, the year its first Chinese translation appeared (starting at around 2:50):

The Third Wave was a bestseller in the PRC and its "social wave-front analysis" was widely studied and referenced in debates about the direction of post-Mao reform amongst intellectuals and Party elites. In High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China, Jing Wang examines its significance:

"Listed as one of the thirty-three books that changed post-Mao China, Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave...told intellectuals both within and outside the Party apparatus a story of "tremendous hope and prospect." It was Toffler's critique of the pessimism underlying The Limits to Growth that instilled in the Chinese intellectual leadership a renewed sense of "urgency and responsibility" - the urgency to start the new technological revolution depicted in The Third Wave and the responsibility to achieve "socialist modernisation"... [S]ome even credited Toffler for the Party's 'Great Awakening' to the importance of knowledge and intellectuals in the new era."  

Toffler's optimistic message is that computers will render mass assembly-line production and non-renewable energy sources obsolete, and decentralise control over the means of production. Working from home in "electronic cottages", we will be able to reduce the pollution caused by unnecessary mobility and the alienation of rootless communities: 


The Model 757, China's first large vector computer

"The giant centralized computer with its whirring tapes and complex cooling systems--where it still exists--will be supplemented by myriad chips of intelligence, embedded in one form or another in every home, hospital, and hotel, every vehicle, and appliance, virtually every building-brick. The electronic environment will literally converse with us."



Most importantly, The Third Wave spoke to the fears and the hopes of those mapping out China's future. The Party's paramount aim was - and still is - to have growth and modernisation without social instability. This meant managing the pace of change and restricting the flow of people from the countryside to the modern cities, not just to avoid the creation of large urban slums, but also because of the danger that millions of Chinese shifting from first- to second-wave conditions would succumb to future-shock on an unprecedented scale.

This is why Toffler's stadial theory of change caught on in China - since the 1980s it has been a land of extreme contrasts between persistently under-capitalised agriculture and futuristic high-end science (in Toffler's parlance, a country of polarised "wave-ratios"). And the CPC has been intent on avoiding the conventional route to modernisation - mass urbanisation - because it fears that, given China's population density, this would lead to mass dissatisfaction with the status quo and threaten its hold on power (Toffler saw the second-wave as an era of concentration, "the time of the great incarcerations").

Instead, we have seen the partial industrialisation of rural areas and, via Toffler, the promotion of the idea that China's rural population can go directly to the third wave. Bill Brugger has written that The Third Wave was so popular in China because:

"It offers a vision of transition from a "first wave" (rural) society to a "third wave" (information) society without the need of going through all the expensive traumas of "second wave" (industrial) society. [...] A decentralised economy based on the rural areas but integrated by a sophisticated information system. The way is open for a new great leap but this time the pitfalls of preceding ones may be avoided by cybernetics [...] Toffler seems to be demanding the radical restructuring of the relations of production to make way for only one advanced productive force while the other productive forces remain backward."

When Toffler visited China, this is what he counseled its leaders. During a visit in 2001 he defined China's challenge: "Can we use the tools we have in the second or third wave to help people in the first wave?" Foremost amongst the tools that would be used to try and bridge the gap was the computer, which would awaken all sectors of China's population to technological changes underway, and the need to adopt a new road to development:

"Because it can remember and interrelate large numbers of causal forces, the computer can help us cope... It can sift vast masses of data to find subtle patterns. It can help assemble "blips" into larger, more meaningful wholes. Given a set of assumption, it can trace out the consequences of alternative decisions, and do it more systematically and completely than any individual normally could. It can suggest imaginative solutions to problems by identifying novel or hitherto unnoticed relationships."

The proliferation of computers and, subsequently, internet access was not just about levelling skills or personal empowerment - it was itself a means of securing the necessary public support to do this. Following Pye's reasoning, the Party's arch-modernisers wanted to demonstrate to their fellow nationals in a bold way that the world was undergoing this quantum leap - and so the practice of Communism must change also, without any logical inconsistency.

TECHNO-FEVER

The insightfulness of Pye's analysis of "Chinese pragmatism" - his injunction that pragmatic politics and ideological coherence should be thought of as existing in tension but not necessarily opposition - becomes abundantly clear when we examine the fierce struggles within the PRC over ideological reform in the 1980s.

One of the central figures in the modernising "liberal" wing of the CPC frequently used Toffler's books as points of reference in Party debates. He was the Premier, Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao became the patron of reformist elites in China and established think-tanks to give intellectual heft to proposals for modernisation. Writing in 1986, Denis F. Simon saw the overriding priority of Zhao and his acolytes as being to rapidly catch-up to the West:

"Following the line of thinking put forth by Toffler, the Chinese see a qualitative change occurring in the basis of industrial strength and competitiveness. Several leaders have argued that unless China is able to make significant advances in four key areas [biotechnology, micro-electronics, IT, and new materials], the technological gap between China and the West will grow even wider... While China's stated policy is to attain by the year 2000 Western technological levels of the 1970s and 1980s, many in China believe that this goal is too modest."

One of the main propaganda tools of these think-tanks was a Shanghai-based journal called The World Economic Herald. In their detailed article on China's technocratic movement, Li Cheng and Lynn T. White describe the pivotal role played by writers for the Herald:

"[Contributors] emphasised the determining role of technical development in the rise or fall of nations, including China. [...] These discussions...implied an historical necessity for technocratic leaders. [...] Society has now become so complex that only experts can estimate the implications of decisions."

The televised arrest warrant for Fang Lizhi, 1989

It is important to note that, as with Toffler, many of the modernisers in the CPC who spent the 1980s trying to turn China into a virtual technocracy did not see themselves as technocrats per se, but rather as the engineers of a transitional phase that would lead to broader-based self-government (however that was defined). (For example, Christopher Buckley has argued that the famous dissident physicist Fang Lizhi cannot be definitively labelled as either a 'democrat' or a 'technocrat'.)



All the while, China's computing capability was progressing under the aegis of "socialist modernisation." In 1986, three years after China built its first working "supercomputer", the Galaxy I (which could carry out 100 million calculations per second), the government set up the '863 Project', to develop advanced technologies. A year later, Chinese scholars sent the country's first-ever e-mail (pictured below) to a German university - "Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world").



Apple II computer in
 Shanghai, 1985



By the middle of the decade, China's economy was exhibiting symptoms of serious overheating. Those who had argued in favour of opening up the economy to freer flows of trade, within and across borders, in order to close the technological gap, now stood accused by Party conservatives of repeating the errors of the past - of trying to make China's economy run before it could walk.

As inflation spiralled and student protests flared up in major cities, the reformist General Secretary Hu Yaobang was deposed, and in his place Deng anointed Zhao as his chosen successor. In response to this conservative backlash, Zhao tried to find an ideological compromise between them and the liberals - the resulting set of ideas was dubbed the "new authoritarianism" (xin quanweizhuyi), as described here by Michael J. Sullivan.

In an attempt to reconcile the technocrats and the conservatives, the new authoritarianism asserted that China needed a period of "strong man" rule to drive through pro-market reforms against opposition from numerous vested interests, but that, once China was moderately wealthy, it would be safe to begin a top-down change to a more participatory form of government (they disagreed on the specifics, though Zhao preferred a gradual transition to multi-party democracy). As Kalpana Misra has noted, the paradox of arguing for less democracy in order to safeguard the process of democratisation was not lost on Chinese democrats at the time:

"Although many of the economic and technological determinists maintained more than a residual commitment to Marxism, socialist goals and values as commonly understood had ceased to be meaningful guides to social and political action. For the liberal democrats to raise the issue of means and ends and ask the neo-authoritarians how despotism would lead to democracy was ironic indeed, for they themselves had chosen to pass over the question of how widening socio-economic inequality and the re-institution of private property would lead to socialism."



Wang Ruoshui


Another intellectual faction, known as the humanist Marxists, believed that the source of China's protest activity was the Party's "alienation" of its own supporters by its seemingly unprincipled u-turns, and its unconvincing attempt to blame a few individuals for its own catastrophic failings. At a CPC work conference in 1979, Wang Ruoshui, a spokesman for this tendency, argued that, "the fact that the masses dare not criticise the party is very harmful to the party and very dangerous."

Bill Brugger has drawn attention to "similarities between the diagnosis of radicals in China in the mid 1960s and humanist Marxists in the 1980s." Specifically, he argues that the two groups believed that the chief obstacle to achieving their respective visions of an ideal society (an offline and an online version of the Paris Commune) was resistance from an entrenched bureaucratic "New Class":

Hu Yaobang dedication at the
Monument to the People's Heroes

"Is the telos offered by people such as Toffler merely a crude substitute for the lost communist telos of more radical days? One suspects that China's advocates of the computer revolution are as utopian as many of the radicals of the mid 1960s... A decentralised system of mass democracy did not develop out of the movements of the 1960s. The old mixture of first-wave patriarchal bureaucracy plus a bit of second-wave industrialism triumphed... One suspects that the growth of information systems in China will serve the needs of central coercion rather than basic level spontaneity and central coordination. Computerised systems are probably more likely to increase alienation than the opposite. The freedom of information needed to make such a system work is still too subversive."

Whilst the ideological war waged on, the social pressures that had brought about Hu Yaobang's downfall had not gone away, and in 1989 they returned to haunt his successor. The student protest in Tiananmen Square had begun when a memorial service to Hu (who had died in 1987) turned into a collective demand that the Party exonerate him posthumously of all charges of being a "counter-revolutionary."

For weeks, a precarious stalemate ensued in what passed for dialogue between the government and the protesters. The demonstration became a crucial test of will for the rival Party factions - Zhao wrote in his memoirs that "The World Economic Herald honestly and correctly reported the events in Beijing, and was sympathetic to the fate of Yaobang" and, consequently, "On April 26, Shanghai CPC Secretary Jiang Zemin sacked its Chief Editor Qin Benli."

Finally, when it was clear to him that the conservatives would persuade Deng to send in the tanks, Zhao went to address the students in person (accompanied by future Premier Wen Jiabo), to apologise for having failed them and to urge them to leave before it was too late. Sounding a cautionary note from the generation before them, he told them: "We too protested, and we too laid on the tracks without considering the consequences." He was deposed shortly afterwards.

"WILL SLAY OGRES FOR GOLD"

After Tiananmen, Deng's reform program slowed down, and then resumed its pace. The fundamentals of "new authoritarianism" have remained, but it was re-branded as "neo-conservatism", and the Chinese neo-conservatives accused Zhao - now in exile - of having been a closet liberal, just like the "shock therapists" who were accused of producing chaos in the former Soviet Union.

In recent years, China has emerged as a world-leader in supercomputers, which are used in stockbroking, mine prospecting and weather forecasting, among other applications. In 2010 the Chinese National University of Defence Technology briefly stole the accolade of the world's fastest supercomputer from the U.S. with the Tianhe-1A, capable of clocking 2.5trn floating point calculations per second.

One of the more disconcerting consequences of the CPC heeding Toffler's advice to pursue development in distinct stages has been the phenomenon of large-scale urban youth unemployment in China today. Toffler had himself foreseen this as a negative side-effect of the transition to third-wave civilisation. His proposed solution was to use computer technology to blur the divide between home and workplace, and so inculcate the work ethic in young people as early as possible:

The first internet connection in China, 1994

"Integrating young people into work in the electronic cottage may offer the only real solution to the problems of high youth unemployment. This problem will grow increasingly explosive in many countries in the years ahead, with all the attendant evils of juvenile crime, violence, and psychological immiseration, and cannot be solved within the framework of a Second Wave economy."

He envisaged the rise of stricter parenting techniques, more responsibility demanded of children from an early age, and a less child-centred society overall.

The spread of computers into homes across China (see the graph for internet access below) has helped in some small way to diminish the probem of youth unemployment - but not as Toffler had predicted.



Gold farmers

 As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the ban on home games consoles - demanded, and supplied, from the same concerns that Toffler had expressed about the "fitness" of Chinese youths to compete in a fast-changing world - has helped to structure the Chinese gaming community in an especially collective, social form. Combined with the ubiquity of internet cafes on the mainland, it has helped to fuel the growth in China of a fascinating new industry - "gold farming."

"Gold farmers" are workers, predominantly young men, who are usually contracted to work in a micro-enterprise - a "gaming workshop" (youxi gongzuoshi). The work involves playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, in 12-hour shifts for 6-7 days a week and collecting virtual "currency", avatars and other upgrades, which are sold for real money to cash-rich and time-poor gamers, mostly in developed countries.

80% of gold farmers work in China, where they are estimated to number 100,000 (full-time). In 2009 the Chinese government banned the purchase of real items using virtual currency, but it does not apply to trades in the opposite direction.

According to a report in the New York Times, those engaged in gold farming do so at considerable risk:

"The big gaming companies say the factories are violating the terms of use of the games, which forbid players to sell their virtual goods for real money. They have vowed to crack down on those suspected of being small businesses rather than individual gamers... The global gaming companies regularly shut accounts they suspect are engaged in farming. And the government here is cracking down on Internet addiction now, monitoring more closely how much time each player spends online."

Yet they accept the risks because it is a comparatively well-remunerated and comfortable job for semi-skilled youths:

"The operators are mostly young men like Luo Gang, a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father to start an Internet cafe that morphed into a gold farm on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China. Mr. Luo has 23 workers, who each earn about $75 a month. "If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants," he said, "or go back to help their parents farm the land - or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all.""

Here is a talk by the documentary-maker Ge Jin on what he learned about gold farming whilst filming a documentary about it (some previews of which are available on YouTube).

The most important point Ge Jin makes is that, contrary to many of the bold predictions of technological determinists and futurologists, rather than leading to a revolutionary decentralisation of power in society, the new computer technologies seem to have merely replicated the hierarchy of power and control that exists in the real world, and transposed it onto a virtual space.

Richard Heeks, Professor of Development Informatics at the University of Manchester, makes a similar point in his study of gold farming:

"Perception outranks reality in the discourse on gold farming, and - at least in the West - those perceptions have been largely negative, serving to homogenise, alienise, criminalise and moralise about gold farmers. That this has happened despite counter-evidence supports the idea that racial stereotypes and views about immigrant labour are remapped into cyberspace. It also supports the structuralist argument that institutional forces in the real world are reproduced in new, virtual fields like gold farming... [T]his falls short of an argument that technology has transformed social structures and behaviours."

It may yet have the potential to improve society insofar as it holds up a mirror and people can object to what they see. For example, he observes acutely that the torrent of criticism of Chinese gold farmers by other gamers on the grounds that they are contaminating an otherwise idealised "level playing-field" has the potential to become a critique of the very society that will not permit such an idealised space to exist. But just as there are no guarantees that the leap will be made, neither is there any reason to suppose "electronic cottages" make it any more likely.

What if, contrary to the moral outcry that accompanied the home consoles ban in 2000, video games are in fact highly effective tools for preparing young people to make their way in the real world but, contrary to the internet utopians, reality is sustained rather than transformed as a result?