The role of the family is to provide security, support and cohesion for its members. In Confucian societies, in other words, government is modelled on an institution whose focus was not on the achievement of external goals but on its own well-being, self-maintenance and self-perpetuation. It is not surprising, therefore, that a powerful feature of these societies has been the stress on unity and stability and on continuity, cohesion and solidarity. Confucian societies, thus, have a rather different conception of government to that which we are familiar with in the West, where the state is viewed as an essentially artificial construct, an external institution that people seek to hold to account, which they view with a certain suspicion, whose powers they constantly seek to define, limit and constrain. For the Chinese — and the same can broadly be said of the other Confucian societies — the state is seen as a natural and intrinsic part of society, as part of the wider common purpose and well-being. The state, like the family, is subject to neither codification nor constraint. The Chinese state has never been regarded in a narrowly political way, but more broadly as a source of meaning, moral behaviour and order. That it should be accorded such a universal role is a consequence of the fact that it is so deeply rooted in the culture that it is seen as part of the natural order of things. [406]
It is difficult for Westerners to appreciate and grasp the nature of Confucian political culture because it is so different from what they are familiar with; moreover, Westerners, accustomed to running the world for so long, are not well versed in understanding and recognizing difference. East Asian polities, as a result, are usually seen only in a very superficial light. Japan is regarded as democratic because it has elections and competing parties; yet the Japanese system works entirely differently from those in the West. Post- 1949 China has been explained overwhelmingly in terms of its Communist government, with a consequent failure to understand the continuity between the Communist regime and the long thread of Chinese history. In fact, we should not be surprised either by the highly idiosyncractic nature of Japanese politics or the umbilical cord that links Communist rule and dynastic rule. Both are examples of the way in which politics is rooted in culture. [407]
Given that East Asian polities operate by very different customs and practices to those of the West, can we draw any conclusions as to their merits and demerits? This is a tricky question, for Westerners, however broad-minded they may be, inevitably tend to apply Western criteria. They are inclined to see dependency as a negative, while East Asians veer towards the opposite view and see it as a positive. Who is right? It is impossible to make a judgement. The downside of East Asian societies might be seen as a tendency, given the strength of dependency and the paternalistic conception of government, towards authoritarianism and one-party government. On the other hand, such paternalistic leadership also has certain strengths. Because government and leaders enjoy a different kind of trust, they are given much more latitude to change direction and policies. They are not hemmed in and constrained in the same manner as Western leaders. In some ways East Asian political leaders are also more accessible and more approachable because they view their accountability to society in a more holistic way and people take a similar attitude towards them. Their greater all-round authority, rooted in the symbiotic relationship between paternalism and dependency, can also enable them to take a longer-term attitude towards society and its needs.
The highly distinctive characteristics of East Asian polities may be rooted in history, but are they declining with modernization? In some ways they are getting stronger. As the ideology of anti-colonialism has weakened, there has, if anything, been a reversion to more traditional familial attitudes. Moreover, while the family itself is changing — in China, it is far less patriarchal than previously — it remains very different to the Western family, especially in terms of values and attitudes: [408] indeed, family customs have been amongst the slowest of all Asian institutions to change. Such is the profundity of the forces that have served to shape East Asian politics that it is impossible to envisage these societies somehow losing their political distinctiveness. [409]
INDIGENOUS MODERNITY
The picture that emerges from these four examples is not the scale of Westernization but, for the most part, its surprisingly restricted extent. The subjects considered, moreover, could hardly be more fundamental, taking us, in contrasting ways, to the very heart of societies. We can draw two general conclusions. First, if the impact of Westernization is limited, then it follows that these societies — and their modernities — remain individual and distinctive, rooted in and shaped by their own histories and cultures. It also follows that their modernization has depended not simply or even mainly upon borrowing from the West, but on their ability to transform and modernize themselves: the taproots of modernization, in other words, are native rather than foreign. Japan, the first example of Asian modernity, is a classic illustration of this. It may have borrowed extensively from the West, but the outcome was and is entirely distinctive, an ineluctably Japanese modernity. Second, if the process of modernization is simply a transplant then it cannot succeed. A people must believe that modernity is theirs in order for it to take root and flourish. The East Asian countries have all borrowed heavily from the West or Japan, usually both. Indeed, an important characteristic of all Asian modernities, including Japan ’s, is their hybrid nature, the combination of different elements, indigenous and foreign. But where the line of demarcation lies between the borrowed and the indigenous is cruciaclass="underline" if a society feels that its modernity is essentially imposed — a foreign transplant — then it will be rejected and fail. [410] This must be a further reason — in addition to the fact that colonial powers deliberately sought to prevent their colonies from competing with their own products — why, during the era of colonialism, no colonial societies succeeded in achieving economic take-off. The problem with colonial status was that by definition the colony belonged to an alien people and culture. The only exceptions were the white-settler colonies, which, sharing the race and ethnicity of the colonizing power, namely Britain, were always treated very differently; and Hong Kong, which, to Britain ’s belated credit, from the late fifties (a full century after its initial colonization), succeeded in becoming the first-ever industrialized colony, with the tacit cooperation of China.
Given China ’s long history and extraordinary distinctiveness, it is self-evident that China ’s modernization could only succeed if it was felt by the people to be a fundamentally Chinese phenomenon. This debate was played out over the century after 1850 in the argument over ‘Chinese essence’ and ‘Western method’ (as it was also in Japan), and it remains a controversial subject in present-day China. The conflict between Chinese tradition and Western modernity in China ’s modernization is well illustrated by a discussion I organized almost a decade ago with four students in their early twenties from Shanghai ’s Fudan University, one of China ’s elite institutions. It is clear from the exchange that maintaining a distinct Chinese core was non-negotiable as far as these students were concerned: the two women, Gao Yi and Huang Yongyi, were shortly off to do doctorates at American universities, while the young men, Wang Jianxiong and Zhang Xiaoming, had landed plum jobs with American firms in Shanghai. [411]They were the crème de la crème, the ultimate beneficiaries of Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy, Chinese winners from globalization.
[406] Interview with Chien Sechin Yung-Xiang, Taipei, March 1999.
[407] There is one sphere in which profound cultural differences are accepted and acknowledged in the West, namely the way in which, for example, the nature of Japanese and Korean firms reflects the cultures of their respective countries; Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars,
[408] See Göran Therborn,
[409] On the contrary, as Lucian Pye suggests, the form of modernization ‘will be significantly different from that produced by western individualism’: Pye,
[410] In philosophical vein, the director and founder of the Shanghai Museum, Ma Chengyuan, puts it like this: ‘ China is now in the preliminary stage of modernization so the whole environment is very open — people have their space to do what they like. During the first stage of openness, many things come from outside. But if they can’t gain their roots in Chinese society, they will fade away.’ Interview with Ma Chengyuan, Shanghai, April 1999.