Democracy in China Will Require Much More Than Political Change : Communism: A lack of individuality and an obsession with Chineseness make reform difficult. A sociocultural revolution is needed.

By Ross Terrill

May 31, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> Ross Terrill is the author of a newly enlarged edition of "Madame Mao," and of "China in Our Time," to be published next month by Simon & Shuster, on which this article is based</i>

BOSTON — The progress of China and its relations with the non-Chinese world have repeatedly been hindered by two blind spots. A lack of individual autonomy has made the Chinese people conformist and vulnerable to collectivist passions. An obsession with Chineseness has made them self-conscious in the face of the foreign world. The two blind spots are linked, for a tribal pride of the Chinese as one huge family lies behind both, obstructing the individual’s search for his own truth, and making give-and-take with the non-Chinese world difficult.

Both the weak sense of individualism and the self-consciousness about the non-Chinese world are ultimately due to the fact that the Chinese nation views itself as a household, a jia .

After 1949, the Communist Party tightened the bonds of the jia by politicizing culture, law, economics and even private life. All members of the Chinese Communist jia are supposed to live by a single set of values--Marxism. The jia is ordered, as families are, by hierarchic authority.

At the height of the pro-democracy demonstrations three years ago this week, a student of computer science in Beijing, seeking to explain why marchers did not raise slogans calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party, wrote in a poster: “You may say that a mother acted wrongfully with good intentions, but you absolutely may not say that your mother is not your mother. Isn’t this so?” In the not too-distant future, the Chinese people will no longer accept dictators in the guise of parents.

Deng Xiaoping’s era sets in motion a line of solution to two fundamental issues in 20th-Century Chinese history: Is the Chinese past a heap of dust or a usable tradition? Will the quest for prosperity and efficiency infect China with Western values? There is no objective, prescribed-from-above answer to the question of “what to do” with Chinese tradition, or to the gulf in values between China and the West. Yet the new economic forces unleashed by Deng began to soften these hard choices. Young people came to be far more relaxed about both dichotomies than their elders.

But Deng could not allow--as the tanks of Tian An Men showed in 1989--his own line of solution to go on to its natural conclusion, because his own grip on political power is threatened by the rise of civil society, the individuation of the urban population and the growing demand for democracy. It is absurd to say that Western culture is a threat to Chinese culture--Chinese culture is not so weak or lacking in appeal!--but it is true that Western ideas are a threat to the Communist grip on Chinese culture.

In a China that is free, Chinese culture and influences from foreign countries will be able to interact in a natural way, as occurs among various cultures within the societies of Europe and America. The Goddess of Democracy, which the students erected in Tian An Men Square just three years ago this week, will not threaten China’s identity any more than the Chinatowns of Los Angeles and New York threaten America’s identity.

A free system, in other words, will transcend the self-consciousness of the China-West gulf. Only as free individuals emerge and make their own choices will the issue of rejecting or adapting Chinese tradition, and that of rejecting or accepting some Western influence, be capable of resolution.

Today’s Chinese youth are the first generation of individualists and cosmopolitans in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Deng’s policies of economic reform and the open door helped produce them. But his political repression has driven hundreds of thousands of them to leave China for Hong Kong and the West, sadly concluding they can find fulfillment only outside the suffocating jia of communist paternalism.

The power of nature is great in China, and the thinking of rural people in particular encapsulates it. This power derives from the crucial role of harvests, the capacity of rivers’ tantrums to adjudicate life and death, the sheer size of China and the long corridor of time down which peasant wisdom has evolved in dialogue with the natural order.

In most of the villages, Beijing generally seems far away, although not entirely to be disregarded, while the rivers and mountains and storms are immediate, if not always benevolent. Peasant China has twisted many an incoming ideology into a cozier shape.

Rural China is a place where food is life and the overriding imperative is to survive, and that explains the naturalistic worldview of the farmer. Nature’s power makes for fatalism, and it leads to what city people see as timidity and apoliticism.

Rural society has its own sedate dynamic, evolved over millenia, and Beijing politics seldom cuts its flow. A portent from heaven such as a meteorite is just as likely as a People’s Daily editorial from Beijing to convince farmers of a political point or shift.

During the Deng era, Beijing’s grip on the countryside loosened and the natural order and the religions and philosophies flavored by it reasserted themselves. Chinese communism lost its credibility in the villages years before it lost it in Tian An Men Square.

The students in 1989 learned the painful lesson that China’s center of gravity lies not in its cities but in the countryside. “Next time we will go the villages,” a graduate student of history said to me in Beijing on the morrow of the massacre. “We will seek the farmers as allies.” Not an easy task, and yet China cannot really change unless the farmers are involved in the movement for change.

Rural China, with its orientation to nature, remains the stronghold of the two blind spots that hold the restless, modernizing fringe of China back from many of its aspirations. Fatalism is the opposite of individual initiative. The attachment to place is an obstacle to cosmopolitanism.

None of this means that democracy will not one day be attained in China, but it suggests the magnitude of the task and the likely complications of the process. There will never be fundamental political change in China without an accompanying sociocultural change. This means a revolution in the communal psychology of the Chinese, the rise of a civic culture, a greater social individualism and an end to politics as the paternalism of the jia .

The dynasty of communism is probably drawing to an end, and at 50 years or so it will be a relatively short dynasty. But whether communist rule will give way to a freer, still united China--following the more hopeful examples in Eastern Europe--rather than a long period of struggle, disunity, or even civil war is far from certain.