“Is a reformed Confucian state the answer to the 21st-century crisis?”
I’m just back from China. It is always instructive, and often challenging, to contemplate our world from what the great Sinologist Simon Leys called “the other pole of the human experiment”, and especially so in the era of Trump, Brexit and global wobbles of liberal democracy. Listening to China is the new necessity for political and economic thinkers, but also historians.
In Shanghai, I spent a morning with scholar diplomat Zhang Weiwei: one-time interpreter for Deng Xiaoping, doyen of Fudan and Geneva universities, National Think Tank member, and bestselling author of books on the New China. Our conversation came round to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.
Fukuyama’s 1992 book was a grand-sweep historical generalisation of a kind beloved of the US intelligentsia, from Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations to recent books predicting a coming clash with China. His book ambitiously aligned with the great generalising philosophers, such as Hegel, who thought human progress would lead to a universal Enlightenment state, and Marx, who predicted communism would replace capitalism. Fukuyama argued that western liberal democracy is the “endpoint of human sociocultural evolution”, the final form of human government.
How fast time moves on! Three factors in particular have since undermined that idea. First, climate change, population growth and environmental degradation. The facts were there in 1992, but the key questions were not asked. Second, since the crash of 2008, is the sudden fragility of western liberal democracy, especially in the age of post-truth social media. The inability to agree on the public good, even when facts are clear, characterised the failure of both sides in the Trump election and also the political paralysis brought about by the Brexit vote. Suddenly progress no longer feels assured.
The third big factor is the rise of China. A while back, Weiwei publicly debated with Fukuyama, robustly defending the China model. Now under president Xi Jinping, confidence in the Chinese way has only grown stronger; a feeling that history is not necessarily tending to the triumph of western liberal democracy.
An authoritarian one party state, China has achieved the greatest lifting out of poverty in human history and – now with major ongoing developments in its legal system, which its critics hope will improve its human rights record – is focusing on environment and climate, committed to the Paris accords. Of course proof of the pudding is in the eating – can they really do it? The ability of a centralised state to get things done gives it an advantage over fractious liberal democracies, however uncomfortable that may be for the rest of us. Could the answer to the 21st-century crisis be a reformed Confucian state, a rationally organised bureaucracy without class distinctions? A socialist-capitalist synthesis?
Gazing over the Shanghai skyline, I put that to Weiwei, whose debate with Fukuyama is now in print. The China model for him is growing in conviction. “China is now the world’s largest laboratory for political, social and economic reforms. My native city Shanghai has now overtaken New York in many ways: infrastructure and transport, hardware and software, life expectancy and infant mortality, even in safety for young women at night.” He smiled: “Frankly speaking the US political system has its roots in the pre-industrial era and urgently needs reform, as much if not more so than China. The separation of powers cannot address the major problems in American society. They need a new system of checks and balances.”
He also had a word for Britain, where most would agree the archaic parliamentary system needs urgent overhaul. “Consultative democracy is the Chinese way we are developing. I recommend it to the UK,” he said with a wry smile. “A plebiscite is too primitive, too blunt an instrument. I would advise against its use in a complex society. But we mustn’t lose historical perspective, whether in China or in Britain!’
The End of History? Not quite yet I think.
Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series and his books include The Story of India (BBC, 2007)